Collision w/ James White: Andrew Tate vs Christian Scholar

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My name's James White, and today we're going to be talking about some things that the world famous Mr.

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Tate had to say about atheism, Christianity, and Islam. Let's get started.

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All right. What's been your evolution of your faith and where are you at today?

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Yeah, I think Newton's, I think it's third law, equal and opposite force. What you just said there is absolutely true.

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There has to be equal and opposite force to all the evil in the world. And the equal and opposite force to all that evil has to be

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God. And I've talked about this at length, even with atheists. And I try and say that regardless of whether you're an atheist or not, you're thinking of God as a man in the sky.

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But you need to think of God as a concept as a whole. And once you do that, it's impossible to accept that he doesn't exist.

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Right. I said to the atheist, I said, let's say there was two islands, you're shipwrecked. Right. And there's two islands.

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Both of them are full of savages. On one island, you and your friend are shipwrecked.

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On one island, your friend goes and he crashes and they kill him and they eat him. And you go to another island and they want to kill you and eat you, but they don't because it's against their religion.

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Did God save your life? Who cares? Who doesn't know the name of their God? But their God said, don't kill shipwrecked survivors.

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And now you're alive. So their God saved your life. The concept of God in and of itself saved your life. You owe

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God just for the concept of it, the idea of it. So even the idea of opposing evil as a whole is a belief in God.

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So you're either an evil person or you believe in God in some regard. That's actually a concept called dualism.

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When I first heard Mr. Tate starting to talk about his conversion to Islam and his criticisms of Christianity.

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Now, I realize that he's talking about a form of nominal

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Christianity, cultural Christianity. He very clearly has really no knowledge whatsoever of any kind of meaningful biblical expression of the

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Christian faith at all. I've not heard him make any comment that showed an understanding of where Christianity is really coming from.

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But as soon as I started hearing these things and hearing him saying he moved from atheism into some form of theism.

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I recognized that the God he's talking about is not a personal being who has created all things and has revealed himself.

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He's not talking about having a faith where God's glory is ultimate.

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Man is ultimate here. And this idea of an equal and opposite.

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There has to be an equal and opposite to all the evil in the world. Well, again, that's called

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Gnosticism. That's called dualism. That is neither Christianity, nor is it

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Islam. Evil is not the equal to Allah in any kind of meaningful

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Islamic expression either. So I really wonder exactly what kind of instruction this gentleman is receiving, even within the concept of Islamic theology,

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Islamic belief, Islamic practice and things like that. But this whole idea that you can actually refute atheism by saying that there needs to be an equal and opposite to the amount of evil requires that you can define what evil is.

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It's painfully obvious that atheists today would have a completely different definition of what evil is.

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Or they might just simply deny that you can even define evil in any meaningful fashion to begin with.

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So to view this as some kind of overwhelming argument really makes you wonder, has he really tried this with any atheists that he wasn't threatening to beat up in the process?

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With anyone that would really have the opportunity to push back? And how many people, either amongst the

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Christians or amongst the Muslims, would recognize this idea he's presenting as coming from ancient dualism?

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The idea you've got the spirit and you've got the physical and you've got the realm of light, the realm of darkness, and there are these equal opposites that have to balance each other out.

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There's so many assumptions there. And again, none of those assumptions are consistent with either biblical

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Christianity or any kind of orthodox Sunni or Shiite expressions of Islam either.

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Very, very troubling to hear someone presenting that as if it's a sort of a killer argument.

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And then I became, once I understood that there had to be an equal and opposite force, I was raised

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Christian. I live in a Christian nation. Romania is actually, I think, the second or third most

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Christian country on earth. It's a very Christian country. It's churches everywhere. They strongly believe. And that's where I began my journey.

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But I always had a very healthy respect for Islam because I understand that to a degree, to have a religion at all, you have to have an intolerance to a degree.

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Because without an intolerance, you don't have rules. You don't have laws. You don't have any, like you said, you have to earn

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God's respect. If you're a religion which is tolerant of everything, then you don't have to earn God's respect. You can be a bad person and do bad things.

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God loves me. So it's fine. Well, no, it's not. Because that's not the point of the religion. Earning God's respect and having to have some kind of intolerance.

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Well, first of all, he said he grew up Christian, but it's very, very plain to me that he grew up in a culture where there are churches and there is a leftover of some form of religiosity that would talk about Christ, talk about scripture, things like that.

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That doesn't mean growing up Christian. He never makes any comments about a personal faith relationship with Jesus, bowing to the

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Lordship of Christ, understanding the concept of atonement or the enthroned authority of Christ over the world, anything like that.

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Instead, everything he says about the Christianity that he has experienced is of a cultural, nominal, external, you're baptized into it, you don't have any instruction.

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There is no call for discipleship. There's certainly no idea of taking up your cross and dying to sell for any of the things that would actually define the

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Christian faith. So that's the first thing. But secondly, this idea of intolerance, he seems to feel that the fact that Islam has

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Sharia law, has specific behavioral norms.

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Now, if you know anything about Islam, you know that that varies somewhat from from group to group.

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And there is a difference between Islam as it exists in a majority situation.

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And when it exists in a minority situation, Islam is a religio political system or a political religious system, depending on the percentage of people in a society that embrace

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Islam. So when Islam is a small minority, then there is an emphasis upon the religious aspects and less upon the political.

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But once it reaches about maybe 20 to 30 percent, that switches and the emphasis becomes the political aspects rather than the religious aspects.

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They're not you can't separate them out in the same way. You cannot separate

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Sharia law out from a reading of the Quran. Most Muslims don't read the

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Quran. Most Muslims have stories from the Quran recited to them in the weekly messages that they receive in the mosque.

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But there is very little focus upon a personal piety that would come from the study of the

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Quran itself because the Quran cannot really be understood or interpreted from the

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Islamic perspective outside of the context of what's called the Hadith.

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The Hadith are the sayings and actions of Muhammad and his companions that were collected about 300, 350 years after the time of Muhammad.

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And they comprise many, many volumes. The Shiite have their own Hadith different from the

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Sunni Hadith. And you really, you really struggle to be able to interpret the

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Quran outside of the context and the matrix of the

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Hadith, which makes that interpretation and that study a central aspect of Islamic theology as well.

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I don't hear this gentleman quoting much from the

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Hadith or showing a knowledge of these things or anything along those lines. And so there's that there's a lot that seems to be missing.

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But his point seems to be, well, hey, at least they can tell you what right and wrong is.

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It is a tragedy that there could be someone who lives in a nation that calls itself a

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Christian nation. Who could literally say that Christians can't tell you what's right and wrong. But then again, as long as you accept the idea that anyone who claims to be a

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Christian is a Christian, then you can understand we we have a tremendous amount of not only apostasy, but false profession of faith in the world today.

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And yeah, there are all sorts of people who call themselves Christians who believe all sorts of different things.

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The irony is that when you talk about becoming a Muslim, there's a there's a major difference between how

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Christians view becoming a Christian, how Bible believing

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Christians view becoming a Christian and how Muslims view becoming a

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Muslim. To become a Muslim, you simply publicly say the

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Shahada. And you say the Shahada in Arabic. You cannot say it in your in your regular tongue.

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You must you must say it in the Arabic language. And there's about seven things that have to accompany that true faith and things like that.

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But you become a Muslim by saying certain Arabic words that commit you to the worship of Allah.

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Christians don't believe, biblical Christians don't believe that you become a Christian by some kind of external action like this.

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It is the spirit of God that makes a Christian. It's the spirit of God that raises a Christian to spiritual life.

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It's the spirit of God that brings that new birth, that causes a person to cling to Christ and to believe in Christ and to find in Christ their all in all.

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It's a very, very, very different understanding. But most Muslims and nominal former

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Christians see religious commitment as primarily something that man does, whereas biblical

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Christians view Christianity and becoming a Christian as something that God does.

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So it is sad to hear, well, there has to be some level of intolerance.

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If what he means by that is there has to be some positive revelation of God's law, of God's will.

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Well, of course, and biblical Christians and biblical

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Christian churches are intolerant of evil. They have to be.

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And in fact, there is a lot of evil that exists within Islamic context that Christian churches could never accept and never, never abide with.

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So it is fascinating that we have a situation here where you have one religion with their

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Quran that comes after 600 years after the writing of the

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New Testament. And yet the author of the Quran shows next to no knowledge whatsoever of the actual content of the

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New Testament. In fact, the writer of the Quran thought that there were all sorts of things in the

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New Testament that are not. There was confusion on his part. Now, the

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Muslim can't accept that idea because from their perspective, the Quran is the eternal words of Allah and therefore there can be no errors or mistakes in it.

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But it is quite obvious that the person who wrote the Quran had been exposed to both

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Jewish and Christian influences, but had no direct knowledge of the actual text of the of the

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New Testament in particular, and very little knowledge of the text of the old. And so there is your problem.

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If a Muslim had accurate knowledge of the New Testament, they would know that the New Testament does give us a tremendous amount of guidance, a tremendous amount of insight into evil and why we should fight evil and how we should not tolerate evil.

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But here's a gentleman who, raised within a nominal context, does not know his former scriptures well enough to recognize that what he's saying does not make any sense, that a person who follows what the

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Bible teaches will be intolerant of evil. That is just simply the reality that he is not aware of.

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So then you extrapolate that out. And I was sitting and thinking, what's the primary function of a religion? And the primary function of a religion,

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I don't believe, is the religion exists so I can live forever. I mean, that's a that's a nice thought.

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But I think on a macro level, the primary objective of a religion is to restore and contain some degree of traditional value within the society.

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What a fascinating definition of the function and purpose of religion.

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With this man, it is man himself, the creature. That is the the measure of all of these things.

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There is never any kind of thought in his part about the glory of God, God's self -revelation,

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God's activity in this world. To be honest with you, he strikes me as still having a deeply atheistic worldview that he's just slathered some external religion on and not come to understand.

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That if God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, for example, as the claim he should have understood as a

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Christian, but clearly didn't, then this is about God. It's not about us. His entire concept is all about, well, this is for society.

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This is for mankind. This is this. It would seem to me that from his perspective, whether God actually exists or not doesn't matter.

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This is all very utilitarian. It's all very much, well, hey, you know, this it's better to not get eaten by one group of primitives and getting eaten by another group of primitives.

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And if that's what God's about, then great. The concept of God is fine. From a

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Christian perspective, we have to go that that does not show a recognition of God's revelation, which, by the way, from an

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Islamic perspective, he has to believe that the Quran is revelation from God. But the way that the

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Quran was revealed is very, very different than a Christian understanding of God's revelation.

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And the key difference between biblical Christianity and Islam is that Christians believe that God revealed himself by entering into his own creation.

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That is the one thing that Islam says utterly impossible, can't be done.

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God does not have that, doesn't even have that capacity to enter into his own creation.

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Their doctrine of transcendence, transcendence of God, cannot even give any kind of credence to the concept of the incarnation at all.

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And so he wouldn't be hearing that. And so if he is taking his arguments as an atheist, skipping over Christianity because he didn't get properly taught what

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Christianity was, and is now trying to find a way to make this fit in with Islam, that would explain why he makes the kind of statements that he does.

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How do you judge the success of a religion? I don't think you can judge it by the number of people who join it, because there's lots of people who are

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Catholic who don't act Catholic, they don't act in any way particularly Christian. Anyone can say they're something.

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You can walk into a strip club and everyone says you're a Christian, it doesn't mean anything, right? Well, exactly.

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He's exactly right. That doesn't mean anything, which means he should have been aware of the fact that if even he could sense the fundamental contradiction between claiming to be

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Christian and acting as a Christian, then he should have recognized that what he was seeing around him as a self -professed

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Christian in Romania, in a cultural Christian context, was self -contradictory.

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It wasn't a coherent thing. He doesn't seem to catch that. It's so obvious from his perspective that if you're going to be a

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Christian, there is going to be guidelines. But he doesn't then see, oh, then I must have really missed what

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Christianity was all about. Has it even crossed his mind? Did he take the time to do further insight into it?

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I really don't have any way of telling just from this interview, but it is amazing to see the contradiction.

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Hey, what's up, guys? This is Pastor Jeff Durbin. Thank you for watching Collision. We wanted to provide a solid resource to help you to respond to anything coming into collision with the

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Christian worldview. There's more as a response to this video and others at ApologiasAllAccess at ApologiasStudios .com.

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When you partner with Apologia Studios, you make all of our content possible and we give you all kinds of amazing other content to help equip you and to train you and your friends and families in the

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