Again, yes, #Christianity and #Islam DO worship the same God

The question about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God got hashed out pretty well a year or two ago, and I gave my opinion that, whatever their differences (and there are crucial ones), Christians and Muslims do worship the same God.

But I notice Alan Schlemon at Stand to Reason has another post in which he gives another argument against this position. Stand to Reason appears to be a blog engaged in popular apologetics. It says it "trains Christians to think more clearly about their faith." If that is the case, then, on this issue, at least, it seems to have fallen below its own self-stated standards.

It seems to me that there has been enough intelligent Christian defense of the position that, in fact, Christians and Muslims do worship the same God in any meaningful sense that a popular apologetics blog should by now, if not have acknowledged this itself, at least have come to terms with the arguments made by people like Edward Feser, Frank Beckwith, and James Chastek. The second problem is that his arguments on the other side of this issue just aren't very good.

In an earlier post Schlemon says,

Do Christians worship Jesus as God? Yes. Do Muslims worship Jesus as God? No. Therefore, Christians and Muslims don’t worship the same God because they don’t both worship Jesus.

The first problem with this is logical. Here are the two premises:

All Christians worship Jesus as God

No Muslim worships Jesus as God

But logically the only thing you can conclude from this is that "No Muslim is a Christian." The conclusion "Therefore, Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God" quite literally is not an option.

The second problem is that, on the same grounds you would conclude (illogically) from these premises that Muslims don't worship the same God, you would also have to conclude that Jews do not worship the same God as Christians. I don't know if Schlemon believes that, but his logic here would demand it. This was one of Beckwith's telling points. Are we to believe that the God Abraham worshiped is not the God of the New Testament? 

Shlemon then argues on the basis of his distinction between the use of the term "God" as a title and as a person:

It’s helpful to think of it as a public office. The president, for example, is the title of a position, but a unique person occupies that office and fulfills its duties.

In the same way, God is the title of the position or office. Both Christians and Muslims believe in the same what – a God whose duties include things like creating, receiving worship, and judging. They differ on who they believe is the person who occupies that position. Muslims believe that person is Allah and Christians believe it is Yahweh.

Again, this seems to me entirely unconvincing. It is, in fact, a distinction without a difference--at least for purposes of this issue. There can be no separation between the person and the office when you are talking about God. They are one and the same--there is no God (office) who is distinct from God (the person) and vice-versa. The only usefulness of that distinction is within the nature of God himself (the Trinity). For this issue, however, it can serve no purpose.

James Chastek's argument still holds:

Asking whether Muslims and Christians believe in the same God is the same as asking whether geocentrism and heliocentrism are descriptions of the same universe.

... If you’re asking whether contrary theories to explain the same fact are about the same fact, then the answer is (analytically) yes.

In an interesting way, the denial that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is a denial of the denial that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, since, if in the statement "Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God," the term "God" does not refer to the same thing, then Christians and Muslims could not differ in their worship of Him.

If you do not agree on what you disagree about, then you can't disagree about it.

And, again, Schlemon's argument would implicate the Jewish God at the same stroke.

These arguments are from an earlier post. His new post adds this argument:

Claiming that Muslims and Christians worship the same God is an expression of Islamic theology, not Christian theology. But why affirm an Islamic teaching? It’s the Qur’an that claims that the God of Islam is the same God in Christianity (Surah 2:139, 29:46). That means you affirm the Qur’an is correct when you claim Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

If Nazis brush their teeth, should we knock ours out? The assumption here is that whatever Muslims affirm the Christian must deny. That assumption is mistaken on the face of it. But let's also see where it would lead us:

That God is omnipresent is a thing Muslims affirm

All things Muslims affirm Christians must deny

Therefore, All Christians must deny that God is omnipresent

It also assumes that if we affirm anything the Qur'an affirms, we ipso facto affirm the Qur'an. But we affirm many things the Qur'an affirms (God's omnipresence among them). Even Schlemon wouldn't assert that it's wrong at every single point. 

This seems to me to be rather sloppy reasoning all around.

Again, Islam is a Christian heresy. A heresy is a system of believe which deviates from orthodoxy by deducing certain beliefs from it. Islam has deduced the concept of the Trinity from the concept of God. That does not make for a system of belief that is entirely contradictory to Christian, just one that deviates from it in important respects.

In regard to its concept of God, the result is not an entirely different God, just a very flawed one.

A Hierarchy of Religious Truth: Another answer to the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God

As a former student of mine, Laurabeth Long, reminds me, Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher, addresses the question "Aren't all religions the same, deep down?" this way:

Allah, of course, is God—the same God Jews and Christians know and worship. Islam is not only a Western, theistic religion rather than an Oriental, pantheistic religion, but it bases itself explicitly on the historical revelation of the God of the Jews, tracing itself to Ishmael, Isaac's brother, to whom God also promised special blessings, according to Genesis. (Fundamentals of the Faith, p. 85)

This follows on his discussion of the hierarchy of religious truth, which he describes this way:

By Catholic standards, the religions of the world can be ranked by how much truth they teach. Catholicism is first, with Orthodoxy equal except for the one issue of papal authority; then comes Protestantism and any "separated brethren" who keep the Christian essentials found in Scripture; third comes traditional Judaism, which worships the same God but not via Christ; fourth is Islam, greatest of the theistic heresies; fifth, Hinduism, a mystical pantheism; sixth, Buddhism, a pantheism without a theos; seventh, modern Judaism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Modernism, and secular humanism, none of which have either mysticism or supernatural religion but only ethics; eighth, idolatry; and ninth, Satanism. To collapse these nine levels is like thinking the earth is flat. (Fundamentals of the Faith, p. 75)

A rational answer to the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God

Once again James Chastek (who has the advantage over most other people that takes advantage of the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas) nails it on an issue on which a lot of nonsense is being written:

Hypothesis: Asking whether Muslims and Christians believe in the same God is the same as asking whether geocentrism and heliocentrism are descriptions of the same universe.

He explains:

The question is not best seen as followed by an instruction to check the yes or no box. If you’re asking whether contrary theories to explain the same fact are about the same fact, then the answer is (analytically) yes. If you’re asking whether contrary theories to explain the same fact are the same (i.e. not contrary) then the answer is (again, analytically) no. Rather, the question becomes interesting when we ask what relation contrary accounts have to the thing they are accounting for.

My only question here is why we couldn't make the same argument about, say, about Mormonism. It seems to me that Mormonism is a different matter than Islam in this regard. While Islam is a Christian heresy—in that it came out of Christianity and retains enough of the Christian conception of God's essential nature to be considered a wrong belief about the same God, Mormonism seems to deny every essential feature of the Christian God, constituting a conception of God completely alien to the Christian one. 

Of course, this assumes a legitimate distinction between God's essential features and his accidental ones, but I believe that could be done.

In any case, Chastek's post is here.

So what exactly is wrong with what Ben Carson said about Muslims?

The head of an organization that even Saudi Arabia has labeled a terrorist group is calling on Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson to withdraw from the presidential race for making statements "inconsistent with the United States Constitution."

The organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently thinks you are Constitutionally required to agree with Muslims. Maybe their spokesman could direct us to the section of the Constitution that requires this.

All Ben Carson said was that he would not support a Muslim for president unless he swore off Sharia law. What exactly is the problem here? All of us have kinds of people we would not want in the Oval Office. My list includes not only Muslims, but communists, members of ISIS, Wiccans, cannibals, people just released from sanitoriums, anyone who has ever donated to the ACLU, children under 7 years old, editors of the New York Times, Tom Cruise, anyone who watches "The View," and (the most dangerous of all) secular liberals.

So what is the problem with Ben Carson not wanting Muslims who believe in Sharia law to rule this country?

Nihad Awad, the groups spokesperson for he group, talked as if Carson wanted to legally prohibit Muslims from holding the nation's highest office. But that's not what Carson said. He said he would not support it.

Sheeez.

The Secular Liberal Death Wish

On the one hand, secular liberalism practices intolerance toward Christianity—the religion from which it originally got its idea of tolerance. But, on the other hand, it uses the tolerance gotten thereby to countenance equally religious ideologies that oppose tolerance.

It's a weird dance of cultural death and it underscores the suspicion that modern liberal secularism may be congenitally incapable of combating the very things that most threaten it.

When Europe abandoned Christendom in the 19th century, it went into a cultural spiral that resulted in two world wars. The cultural vacuum that allowed German nationalism—and, later, Naziism and Fascism—to capture the minds of so many Europeans has never yet been filled. And secularism will never fill it.

In one sense, secularism is itself a religion—and one as totalitarian as the totalitarian philosophies which it purports to replace. It is what we call an "ideology," a word that simply means a religion without the courage of its convictions. It is a religion without a god.

Modern liberal secularism is the cultural equivalent of a zombie: It has all the normal biological functions, but it has no soul. This is why it is neither good nor evil. Positively good and positively evil things both have a kind of substance. But the ideology that rules the political world today has no real substance, and this is why it is so vulnerable to a religion like Islam.

Secularism is a religion for comfortable people: people who have all the modern conveniences and simply don't want to be bothered, not even by ultimate concerns. It is the religion of Nietzsche's Last Man. All it requires is broad, non-committal sentiments, occasional genuflections toward the popular platitudes, and the repetition of the word "science" in the proper company. And the only creed is that there are no creeds.

Problem is, when faced with the openly radical sentiments and heartfelt devotion of a religion like radical Islam, it stands no chance. Radical Islam thrives on Europe's host, but will eventually take it over and—because of its inherent opposition to the secular liberalism that now controls it—must turn in to something very different. It may not be Shariah law, but it will be something that approximates it.

The dominant liberalism is outwardly comforting, but intrinsically weak and the forces of culture will ultimately force it to give way either to Islam or something equally radical that opposes it.

I don't know where I stand on the debate over whether radical Islam is by nature radical. But it doesn't matter. What matters is the empirical fact that—however radical authentic Islam is or isn't—the impulse that drives its cultural presence in the world is radical. Shia may be a peaceful Muslim sect, but the Shia rulers in Iran are radical. Sunni Islam may be, according to its central doctrines, a religion of peace. But the ones who control Isis are radical.

What average Muslims believe may, in and of itself, be unproblematic. But it isn't average Muslims who are running the show. Even many of the rulers of a country like Saudi Arabia, who on the surface seem docile and untroublesome, are intensely anti-Semitic and prone to supporting groups like Al-Qaeda with their oil money.

Joseph Sobran once pointed out that turning over the board is not a move in chess, and no one who thinks it is should be allowed to play. On today's cultural chessboard, we see people who think that players should be allowed in the game who think that turning over the board is a legitimate move in the cultural game.

Why is it that the world religion that invented our civilization (Christianity) is denigrated and sometimes suppressed, while the religion whose most vocal leaders want to bring it down (radical Islam) somehow warrant the vocal defense of the Prime Minister of Germany?

Sermons on diversity are no match for the commitment of the faithful. The latter wins every time.

One of the most famous Christian churches in the world converted into a mosque?

The government of Turkey is apparently thinking about again turning the Hagia Sophia, one of the most significant Christian sacred structures in the world (it was the seat of the Patriarchate of Constantinople), into a mosque.

I am tempted to wonder what would happen if a Christian government were to even think of converting a historically significant mosque into a Christian church.

I think I will resist the temptation.

U. S. Army boots Franklin Graham from prayer service for saying Islam is a violent religion

Apparently Muslims now have veto power over who gets invited to speak a military prayer events:

WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) -- The U.S. Army on Thursday withdrew an invitation to a Christian evangelist to speak at a Pentagon prayer service next month following an outcry over his references to Islam as a violent religion.

Franklin Graham, the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham, said in a statement he regretted the Army's decision and would keep praying for U.S. troops.

The invitation prompted a harsh reaction, including from a prominent U.S. Muslim group that said Graham's appearance before Pentagon personnel would send the wrong message as the United States fights wars in Muslim countries.

Too bad Christian groups don't have this kind sway with our military. With people like this in charge of our nation's defense, we don't need enemies.

America's new Shariah law

Pamela Geller at the American Thinker:

Shariah law forbids criticism of Islam. And here we are.

We are witnessing an Islamized America. This is well beyond political correctness. We are enforcing Shariah law. We will not insult Islam -- that is Shariah law. We self-censor -- that is Shariah law. We disrespect ourselves and our nation so that we might respect Islam. This is dhimmitude ...

Read the rest here.

More disappointing news for the Hasan denialists

More on the kinder, gentler treatment given radical jihadists in the military from that bastion of right wingnutism, NPR:

Starting in the spring of 2008, key officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences held a series of meetings and conversations, in part about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others last week during a shooting spree at Fort Hood. One of the questions they pondered: Was Hasan psychotic?

"Put it this way," says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole" ...

Read the rest here.

Politically Correct school textbooks redefining "Jihad"

According to the American Textbook Council (ATC), school textbooks have redefined the word "Jihad" in a politically correct attempt not to offend anyone (except, of course, people who care about historical accuracy). According to the New York Examiner, Gilbert Sewall, director of the ATC:

complains the word jihad has gone through an "amazing cultural reorchestration" in textbooks, losing any connotation of violence. He cites Houghton Mifflin's popular middle school text, "Across the Centuries," which has been approved for use in Montgomery County Schools. It defines "jihad" as a struggle "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."

First they Came for Piglet: Mark Steyn on a peculiar form of English coddling of Muslims

The inimitable Mark Steyn on the increasingly disturbing tendency of Europeans (in this case the English) to culturally immolate themselves.