Presup Applied to Islam

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala. And today we are going to be talking about a very interesting topic pertaining to apologetic methodology and how it is applied to Islam.

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And so I know I've received many, many messages from folks throughout the years. They find the presuppositional approach very powerful against the atheist, the agnostic, the skeptic.

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But what typically comes up is how is this approach used against competing religious perspectives, right?

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We speak of God when we use, say, for example, what we call the transcendental argument that God, the

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God of scripture, provides what we call the preconditions for knowledge, for intelligible experience, right?

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It's one thing when we're talking to the atheist, and yet it is another thing when we're talking to someone who holds to a religious perspective in which at the foundation of their perspective is this absolute

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God. And so it seems that the presuppositional argument can be used by non -Christians, people who hold to differing deities and things like that.

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And so I wanna go and have a discussion with Anthony Rogers, who is a

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Christian apologist. And I'm sure once I invite him on the screen with me, he's gonna share a little bit more about his background.

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But I have to say, I heard of Anthony Rogers quite a bit.

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His name was floating around on the interwebs and the Facebook, but I really didn't get a chance to really hear him and see his ability as an apologist until I saw a video where he interacted with a gentleman by the name of Brandon Tatum, Brandon Tatum.

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And I don't know much about Brandon Tatum, but it is my idea that he has a very big public platform and he was challenging folks to defend the

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Trinity. And so this gentleman, Brandon was a, I suppose he's a modalist of sorts. Maybe Anthony can clarify that when

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I invite him on. But when Anthony got on the show with him and they began to go back and forth,

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I quickly realized, well, perhaps Brandon quickly realized that he was a little bit out of his depth in terms of understanding the

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Trinitarian perspective and really coming to grips with someone who really knew how to defend the

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Trinity. And so that was my first exposure to Anthony Rogers. And on top of that, and then

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I'll invite, I guess Pastor Rogers. I mean, you can't see him, but I can see you.

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Is that okay? Should I call you Pastor Anthony, Pastor Rogers? We'll just, I'll call you Anthony for now.

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But it was really, really interesting that I was actually invited to speak at an apologetics conference in which

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I would be sharing the platform with Anthony Rogers. And so I was like, huh, that's the same guy I saw in the previous video.

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So I really need to connect with him and see if he'd be willing to come onto the show and talk about Islam. And I just so happened to learn that he was a presuppositionalist in his apologetic methodology.

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So I'm looking forward to getting him on and hearing what he has to say in terms of how he got into all that stuff.

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And then we're gonna jump right into the meat and the potatoes. What you'll learn when you look into Anthony Rogers' YouTube stuff and all the content that he has out there, what you will learn is that unlike myself, where I like to speak about the meta apologetics, right?

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The apologetic methodology, right? Anthony Rogers takes all of those things and in his ministry, you see the practical outflow of it.

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So I use the terminology when I teach, presuppositionalism, transcendentals, preconditions.

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But Mr. Rogers here, not that Mr. Rogers, is this Mr. Rogers? Really knows how to just incorporate it organically into his interactions with unbelievers.

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I mean, he has an evangelistic heart and that's where you will see the practical utilization of a presuppositional approach in a very powerful way,

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I think. So all that to say, let me invite Anthony Rogers on the screen with me and he'll introduce himself in more detail in just a moment here.

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All right, how's it going, Anthony? It's going great. Thank you so much for coming on, I really appreciate it.

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Thanks for having me. That's right, now real quick, you do have a YouTube channel, right? Yeah, it's just under my name,

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Anthony Rogers. So fancy name, shows my creative genius. That's right.

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I mean, really, I just signed up one day and it's been there for like a decade. I haven't really tried to build up the channel until I think the end of last year.

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So it was just under my name. Maybe at some point, I'll change it to some name that's -

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Apologetics, okay, very good. Well, I wanna encourage folks right now, if you can multitask right now while you're watching this live stream and open up another window, open up YouTube and subscribe to Anthony Rogers' YouTube channel.

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He's got debates, interactions with Muslims. He's debated Shabbir Ali once or multiple times.

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How many interactions have you had with Shabbir? Twice, in fact, next Saturday, I'm doing two more debates with Shabbir.

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Okay, very good. And so there's a lot of debates on your channel, a lot of teachings. What's very interesting that folks might find is that you go into some great detail in defending the doctrine of the

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Trinity from the Old Testament. And so folks might be interested in taking a listen to that.

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So guys, go to Anthony Rogers' YouTube channel right now and subscribe and then come back here, okay?

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So you definitely won't be disappointed. Anthony, so who are you? Tell us a little bit about who you are and then we'll take it from there.

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Yeah, so I was born and raised in Southern California. I come from a

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Sicilian family and that meant, among other things, that my familial background, religiously, is

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Roman Catholic. However, as I was growing up, my mom was at one point thrown off when asked by the nuns at the local church that she was constantly participating along with in various activities.

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She was once asked to teach a Bible study to women and she thought, wait a minute, I don't know the Bible. And that bothered her because she had been involved in the

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Catholic church for her whole life. And so for that reason, she started seeking out Protestant churches.

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And I didn't become a Christian in all of that, but I was at least brought within the hearing of the gospel.

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And growing up in Southern California at that time, in Southern California, there was an influx of gangs stretching down from Los Angeles down into Riverside, Orange County, and all that sort of thing.

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And I got swept up in all of that. I guess that puts it to innocently. I quickly threw myself in with all of that,

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I guess I should say. And eventually got in a good bit of trouble. And in 1993, when

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I was just turning 18, I had gotten into trouble, legal trouble, and was actually incarcerated.

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While incarcerated, shows you something of the Lord's providence here, but I was put in a cell with a self -professed devil worshiper, and he was trying to tell me certain things about the

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Bible. And I said, I don't think that's true. And he said, well, I'll show you how to get a Bible and I'll prove it to you.

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And so he showed me how to get a Bible. I wrote a kite as they're called, that's how you request something, at least in those days.

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And I got a Bible, he couldn't show me what he thought he could show me. And now I had a bunch of time on my hands and a book to read.

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So I started reading the Bible. It terrified me to no end. I didn't, when

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I read the Bible, I didn't understand the gospel. But one thing that came through loudly and clearly was the fact that the

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God that it was talking about was nobody I wanted to meet in my current condition.

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I read of God wiping out the world in a flood, sparing only eight people, opening up the ground and swallowing whole groups of people, fire coming down from heaven and devouring whole cities.

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And I thought, if I was caught by a human court and found guilty, then if I was gonna stand before this

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God, then there was no hope for me. And so I kept reading, thinking maybe I'll find the answer.

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And I didn't until somebody finally preached the gospel to me and showed me all of this from the

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Bible that somehow I was missing. And I was just immediately overjoyed. I wanted to tell people about Christ.

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I assumed that this good news would be received as such by others and quickly found out that they weren't happy with what

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I was telling them. And people wanted to push back against it. And so it was out of that that my interest in apologetics was born.

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So it's really rooted in a desire to tell people the gospel. It's evangelistic ultimately in its origins.

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And so it's not primarily an academic thing, although I don't deny that there's an academic component there, obviously, but I just wanted to tell people the gospel and that got me involved in apologetics.

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So eventually I went to, after I got out of prison, I had to go back and get a high school diploma because I didn't in school.

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Then I had to go to school and actually went to Christ College in Lynchburg, Virginia. And it's now defunct, but at the time, one of the professors was

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Michael Butler, who was a protege of Dr. Bonson's. And after graduating from there, there was a bit of a period in between, but eventually

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I went to seminary. I went to Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Carolina.

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And after graduating from Greenville Seminary, I passed my ordination exams and was ordained in the

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Presbyterian Church of America. And you'll not find this surprising, but I became the regional director for Metanoia Prison Ministries.

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And so my pastoral activity is actually done in the prison. So I don't pastor a particular church, but I service prisons throughout

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South Carolina and doing a number of things in relation to that. But that's basically why

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I am. That's very interesting. There's always the interesting backstory. I mean, we see people on YouTube and on the internet and we forget there's a whole journey that has preceded what we see there on the screen there.

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And it's awesome to see God's grace being manifested in so many different and unique ways in various people's lives.

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So thank you so much for sharing that. Now, how did you get into presuppositional apologetics?

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That's always an interesting thing. Folks who get into apologetics usually go through the classical and evidential methodology, but what got you into presupp?

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Yeah, so I was converted in 93 and I got out of prison in 1995 and began going to a

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PCA church in Las Vegas, Nevada. Okay. And at that time, a couple, an older couple, their last name is

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Pollard. Still remember their names, even though I'm terrible with names and it's been decades, but I still remember their name.

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Okay. But they were members of a congregation, an OPC congregation in California that was actually pastored by Dr.

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Bonson. And so they moved to the Las Vegas area and they brought some stuff with them.

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And I remember listening, first of all, to the Stein debate and then to a bunch of other stuff.

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And so that was the initial thing. And like most people, I think if your introduction to presuppositionalism is something like the

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Stein debate and you don't necessarily have a background in philosophy, you can probably tell that something powerful is happening here and necessarily put your finger on everything.

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But you know that, you know, I remember, in fact, I think it was David Bonson, one of Bonson's sons, who said he was a young man at the time.

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And he just remembers the people in the crowd going crazy at one point in the debate in particular.

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And it was the point during the cross -examination period when Stein said, you know, are the laws of logic material?

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And, you know, that whole discussion there. And he just remembers, you know, so here's his son, doesn't really understand what's going on, but he knows that something's happening here.

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And so for me, I started studying philosophy at that point. I started reading a lot of science, just all sorts of other things that wouldn't have normally been an interest for me.

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Again, it all goes back to my evangelistic interest. I thought this is the sort of thing that is informing people, influencing people, and so I want to know this stuff so that I can interact with it when the occasion arises.

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And so the more I started studying that material, continuing to listen to Bonson, and then getting into other stuff,

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Bonson wasn't a lone ranger. There were a number of other people. And so that, yeah, that's how it was all born.

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And so I think I've heard almost everything apologetically that Dr. Bonson did, all of his debates, including, and I wish there were more of this sort of thing, but including his debate with a

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Muslim and a Jewish person. Now, unfortunately, the format of that particular debate didn't allow for certain things to take place.

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It was a three -part debate. And so what that meant was, Bonson was going in two different directions with these guys.

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And I think they each got like, let's just say 20 -minute openings. And then

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I think they all got a 10 -minute response. And after that, it was just people asking questions.

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And so you can see in that the very limited format, you don't necessarily get to chase people down and finally show how they've reached the end of their rope and hung themselves with it.

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But with all that said, what he said was powerful and you could see where all of it was going.

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But I always wish, as somebody who started doing Islamic apologetics, that there was more of that sort of thing from somebody who really knew the method.

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Hmm. Very interesting. John, I'm sorry, Jeff Downs puts here, he says,

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Anthony and I are speaking at a conference in October. And so he's saying there's a conference in October, see the schedule, et cetera, on the page of Knox Reform Presbyterian Church.

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So if folks are interested in seeing Anthony and I, and I think Dr. Robert Bowman give some talks on apologetics, you can check out the

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Knox Reform Presbyterian Church Facebook page and take a look at the schedule. We'd love to meet some of the online listeners.

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I just got back from Reform Theological Seminary, visiting Dr. James Anderson up there. And interestingly enough,

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Hank Hanegraaff had an interesting three -hour conversation with Hank at the

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CRI headquarters. But I had just gotten back from RTS and I went to the bookstore and there was the guy who was at the cash register.

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He's like, I know who you are, man. And I follow your YouTube channel. So it's really cool to see just the wide reach that this content, online content really, people are following, people are being encouraged and blessed by.

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And so it's very exciting. So if folks wanna get to that conference, check out that information

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I just shared. We'd love to see you. All right. One thing, if I could just throw in here, one thing I lament about my misspent youth is

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I grew up near Rancho Santa Margarita, California. And that's where CRI used to be based before it moved to North Carolina.

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And I loved Walter Martin when I found Walter Martin stuff, loved his material.

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And so I think, man, all that time I lived right there, I could have benefited and just didn't.

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Well, unfortunately, Hank has taken the turn that he has. I have to say that my three -hour conversation with him was the most enjoyable conversation

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I've had in years. I mean, I went to the studio. He was at the tail end of his broadcast.

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You can kind of see through the recording window. And then he took me into his office and we just sat down and talked about our differences.

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It was excellent. So it was definitely a blessing to get to meet him. Unfortunately, we're on the opposite sides of the spectrum there, but I was grateful for the opportunity.

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He was a really nice guy. So, all right. Well, let's jump right into the topic here. Presupp apply to Islam.

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Now, when we speak of presuppositional methodology, it's important to set up the parameters, especially when we're doing within the context of like teaching here, right?

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I'm not a Muslim. He's not a Muslim. It's not a debate. I mean, we're talking about strategies as to how to employ a method as it pertains to a specific religious perspective, right?

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One of the popular criticisms of presuppositional apologetics is that, sure, yeah, that works against an atheist, but as though presuppositionalists never thought about this.

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What happens when a Muslim comes along? It's like, oh yeah, that's right. I don't know. I guess there's nothing we can do. I have to whip out my classical and evidential methodology there, and that's all

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I've got. Actually, the presuppositionalist is always consistently a presuppositionalist, even when he is using specific biblical arguments, appealing to evidence and things like that.

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And so it's important to set up the parameter. So as Christians, we have a worldview. The Muslim has a worldview.

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The Christian has presuppositions, and it affects how we interpret the data. The Muslim has his set of presuppositions that affects how he interprets the data.

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And so now you have two worldview circles, if you will, that to all intents and purposes, it seems as though it's impossible for us to communicate because everything

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I'm gonna say to the Muslim, he's gonna filter through his Muslim presuppositions, and everything that the Muslim shoots out over on my side,

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I'm going to interpret in light of my Christian commitments, which by the way, that's what should be the case, right?

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When we engage with Muslims, we do so in a way that does not sacrifice our commitment to the

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Lordship of Jesus Christ in all of reasoning. Yet, that does not mean we sit there and just say the

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Muslim's wrong and that's it. What we wanna do is engage, and this is where I wanna kind of ask

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Pastor Rogers to kind of lead off the discussion here. When we internally critique the

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Muslim, right? If we follow, for example, the Proverbs 26 methodology, don't answer the fool according to his folly and then answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

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How do we apply that to the Muslim? Where would one begin to use a presuppositional framework when engaging a

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Muslim? Yeah, so if I could back up a little bit just to fill in some of what you said, but so that they can see this in relation to some of the stuff that they've heard before, if they're familiar with these issues and then for those who haven't perhaps.

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But one of the things that's involved in what you're saying is that the facts don't speak for themselves, right? Everybody has a philosophy of fact.

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Christians have a philosophy of fact, non -Christians have a philosophy of fact, and our contention is the non -Christian philosophy of fact destroys the facts and isn't capable of actually making the facts intelligible.

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And so a lot of people scoff at that sort of thing and they just think that's just absurd, but anybody who's even really,

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I think, at the sophomore level of studying worldviews and how people think and reason can't help but notice this sort of thing.

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And this, again, is the sort of thing that I was looking at and realizing as I was hearing Bonson and then

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I'm reading these philosophical works and so forth. One of the things, so just to give an example, if we're talking about something like the crucifixion and resurrection of the

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Lord Jesus, as you know, the naturalist or the atheist, the agnostic, somebody who doesn't begin with a theistic approach to things, they will, generally speaking, resist any facts or arguments you make for the resurrection of Christ.

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However, their presuppositions are such that they could, in principle, still accept the resurrection, but it wouldn't be the same fact that Christians are talking about, right?

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It's because they have a different philosophy of fact. And so, for example, if they believe that time and chance is ultimate, somebody rising from the dead just means something strange happened from our perspective, right?

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We don't, you know, in a chance universe where whirl is king, to quote an early philosopher, you know, chance, chaos, right?

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Chaos is king. Out of the womb of chance, anything can spring. And so, it's not a fact. It doesn't prove anything, right?

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It's just a strange occurrence in a strange universe. Real quick, if I can interrupt, and that's why classical apologists are not correct when they say, well, if you demonstrate

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Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus believed the Old Testament, and so the whole Bible's true. Well, wait a minute. There's a whole bunch missing there.

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And that's why I like what you just said there, that the resurrection in isolation, issuing from the womb of chance, is an occurrence with no context.

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So, I think that's a great point. But go ahead, I'm sorry I interrupted there. Yeah, no, no. So, that's right in line with what

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I'm saying. And just a couple of quotes here, and maybe you're familiar with, well,

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I'm sure you're probably familiar with Michael Martin since he was somebody that Bonson was going to interact with, and Martin pulled out of the debate, and then

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Bonson did a whole series of stuff critiquing his book, Atheism, A Philosophical Justification. I have

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Martin's book back there, and one of the quotes that stood out to me back then, which I have here, he says, the believer in Jesus' alleged resurrection must give reasons to suppose that it can probably not be explained by any unknown laws of nature.

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Now, there's actually a long quote here that goes along with that, and really just says the same thing.

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But one of the things you notice from a quote like this is what Martin is saying is not that the resurrection occurred, but even if it did occur, he's saying the

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Christian has to prove that it couldn't be explained by some unknown laws of nature. And so, what he is appealing to here, to discount the resurrection meaning, what the

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Christian says it means, being the kind of fact the Christian says it is, is this appeal to the unknown.

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And in fact, later in the same context, he actually gives three arguments. All of these are actually interesting, but I'll just read the final one.

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He says, finally, it might be the case that what we thought were strictly deterministic laws are in fact statistical laws.

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These are compatible with rare occurrences of uncaused events. Thus, the events designated as miracles may be wrongly designated.

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They may be uncaused in the sense of being neither naturally nor supernaturally determined. Advocates of the miracle hypothesis then must show that the existence of miracles is more probable than the existence of some uncaused events.

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It's not inconceivable that on very rare occasions, someone being restored to life has no natural or supernatural cause.

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So, what is it when you say that something has neither a natural nor supernatural cause? Well, that's a chance event.

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And so, notice what Martin is ultimately relying on. It's a chance. And so, again, he's not saying the resurrection happened, but he's saying, even if it did, it's not the resurrection of the crucified incarnate son of God who died for our sins and rose for our justification.

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Right, that's not what Martin means. And anybody who's dealt with just cults, we're not talking about atheists or philosophers here, but everybody seems to realize this when it comes to cults, but don't carry this over into their discussions with other groups like atheist agnostics.

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But we often will say, in fact, Walter Martin, I mentioned him earlier, he actually pointed this out in his book,

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Kingdom of the Cults, where the cults actually have a lot of the same terminology as Christians, but they use the terms differently.

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And so, I forget all the ways he referred to that, term switching, definition juggling, whatever. The idea is they're using the same terminology, but they mean something else.

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And that's basically what I'm talking about here when I mentioned that you have to not only consider the facts, but the philosophy of fact.

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Those two things go together. And in the non -Christian philosophy of fact, it's possible to accept something like a resurrection, but not in the

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Christian sense. And so, no fact can be allowed to speak for Christianity in that kind of a context.

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And so, the idea that you could just prove the resurrection and this person, by virtue of that alone, is going to become a

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Christian is just foolhardy. Now, I grant, I would grant to people that, God is able to change a person's presuppositions.

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He's able to challenge them through our presentation of facts and so forth. But I think there's more going on than the evidentialist often really takes into account.

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Ultimately, as reformed people, we would say that it's the spirit's activity, opening the heart, illuminating the mind, enabling them now to see the facts in a new light, that ultimately is what issues in a person, seeing the facts for what they are and so forth.

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But now, one other thing, and this gets us closer to Islam. One of the things that I learned, because I also used to engage

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Jewish people a lot, and this, in many ways, is similar to Islam, in part, because post -Christian

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Judaism and Islam share a lot of connections.

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But now notice, I'm talking about post -Christian Judaism. People are terribly informed when it comes to Judaism.

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The assumption is that the Judaism of today is the Judaism of the first century and before that, and it just isn't.

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There's just a hundred things wrong with that kind of thing. But post -Christian Judaism followed a certain trajectory, and that trajectory ultimately ends up influencing

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Islam. Muhammad was influenced by a lot of Jewish groups, Talmudic Jews that had migrated into Arabia, and so you even see a lot of this incorporated into the

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Quran. You find Talmudic stories and other Midrashic ideas in the Quran, and there they're mistaken for biblical events and things.

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But in reading Jewish people, if you read, for example,

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Mahmanides, who's perhaps the greatest rabbi in the minds of Orthodox Jews, one of the things that Mahmanides said is, he said that he believes, even though he hated

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Christianity, he believes that God used Christianity for the purpose of preparing the world for the

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Messianic age. So he called this, or it's been called, a Preparatio Messianica, so preparation for the

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Messiah. And what he said is, by virtue of Christianity coming about,

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God was able to spread things like moral monotheism to the Gentiles. Various Jewish ideas now enter into the mainstream of Gentile thinking.

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And so in Mahmanides' idea, there is a sense in which

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Providence is at work here in accounting for the rise of Christianity.

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However, of course, he's not saying that Christianity is true. He's simply saying that God used this toward the end that when the

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Messiah does come, now the world will be, it's like, Christianity is getting the world all suited up for a

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Jewish party, right? When the true Messiah comes and he puts down all rule and subjects everyone to the

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Jews once again, and the Jews have hegemony over the world, that sort of thing, that's all that Christianity is all about.

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But this led later Jewish thinkers like Kaufman Kohler, who is a

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Jewish guy. If you're familiar with Jewish studies, you'd know Kaufman Kohler.

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But he wrote, and I actually have his quote here somewhere if I can find it. But he basically argues the same thing, and he points out that this is the view that was held by a number of other

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Jews as well. He quotes, for example, Zechariah 14, eight, where it says, it'll come to pass on that day that living waters will go out from Jerusalem, half towards the

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Eastern Sea, half toward the Western Sea, and the Lord shall be king over all the earth. In that day, the

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Lord will be one, his name one. And then he says, these prophetic words of Zechariah may be applied to the two great world religions which emanated from Judaism, and one fully half of the human race as it exists at present for the

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God of Abraham. Though they have incorporated many non -Jewish elements in their systems, they have spread the fundamental truths of the

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Jewish faith and Jewish ethics to every part of the earth. Christianity in the West and Islam in the

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East have aided in leading mankind ever nearer to the pure monotheistic truth, consciously or unconsciously both found their guiding motive in the messianic hope of the prophets of Israel and based their moral systems on the ethics of Judaism.

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And then he goes on and he attributes this to divine providence. He's basically tapping into Mahmanides.

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He's saying that this was all part of God's design, not because Christianity is true, but because God is using it to prepare the world for the true

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Messiah. Now, where this leads then is, first of all, you can see now how a

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Jewish person will look at evidence supplied in favor of Christianity and regiment that evidence in terms of their pre -commitments.

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Oh yeah, all that looks great because God was at work, God was doing things, right? And now the specifics of how they apply that to certain things may vary, but at least you have an idea of the kind of framework in terms of which they're going to think as they reason about the evidence that we would present to them as Christians.

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Now, here's an interesting thing. Many Jews, well, I should take that back. So many

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Jews do hold this notion, but this then can show you that it's even possible, and somebody's gonna think

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I'm out of my mind here, it's even possible for a Jewish person to say, I believe

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Jesus rose from the dead and still not be a Christian. Oh, Pinchas Lapid. And that's exactly where I was going,

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Pinchas Lapid, who is a Jewish guy. And see, again,

31:39

I mean, you study presuppositionalism, you're familiar with this sort of thing. In fact, I could have quoted earlier, and I thought about it, but Kai Nielsen, an atheist, in his debate with J .P.

31:49

Moreland, pretty famous debate, it's been published in book form. But he actually said, if there were good evidence for Jesus' resurrection,

32:00

I'd believe it, it wouldn't prove Christianity though. So he was like on the brink of acknowledging, oh, okay, if, you know.

32:06

Sure, sure. Well, I had a debate with online atheist,

32:12

Tom Jump, and he brought up this whole point. He says like, I can grant that Jesus was raised from the dead that doesn't prove that God is omnipotent and all of these other things.

32:23

It wouldn't prove Christianity. Yet you have many apologists focusing so much energy on the evidence for the resurrection, which is fine to a degree, obviously.

32:32

I mean, I wouldn't be against that, but we can't pretend that our arguments prove more than they actually do because a presuppositionally aware unbeliever will regiment their perspective in light of their broader commitments, which

32:45

I think is a brilliant, brilliant observation on your part. Let me just say one thing real quick. Corinth Chandler, thank you so much for that super chat.

32:53

I do appreciate super chats. You can send in questions if you preface your question with a Q or the word question.

32:59

And of course, super chatted, that's a real word, super chatted questions will go to the top and be asked first.

33:05

But thank you so much. Every dollar does support Revealed Apologetics and is greatly appreciated. All right,

33:11

I just wanted to give a quick shout out there. Okay, go ahead. If I was interrupting a stream of thought there, I do apologize. Oh yeah, no problem.

33:18

Yeah, so I was gonna quote Lapid just so people know that, now they know that I'm not the only one out of my mind since you've seconded the motion.

33:27

But now let me quote it so that they know we're not just both out of our mind. Sure. This is

33:32

Pincus Lapid from his book, The Resurrection of Jesus, A Jewish Perspective.

33:38

So it's subtitled Jewish Perspective. He said, as a faithful Jew, I can't explain a historical development which despite many errors and much confusion has carried the central message of Israel from Jerusalem into the world of the nations as the result of blind happenstance or human error or a materialistic determinism.

33:58

So he's saying here, he can't explain that away in such a way. And, but one of the things just to stop here for a second, mid quote, he, it strikes me as, you know, somewhat, not just somewhat, but really problematic for him as a

34:14

Jewish person to say, he's acknowledging that Christianity spread the central message of Israel from Jerusalem into the world of the nations.

34:21

When I read that, it's almost like I'm reading the prophetic statements to this effect, right? Sure. Where it talks about the law of the

34:28

Lord streaming forth from Jerusalem and going out into all the world, you know, Isaiah two and other passages or the nations flocking to Jerusalem to hear the word of the

34:36

Lord. He's claiming that Christianity has done this. And, you know, so as a

34:41

Jew, he has to, he has to suppress even biblical evidence at this point in order to keep up the charade, right?

34:49

He has to suppress what he should be aware of from the prophets regarding Christianity.

34:56

But in any case, he goes on, he says, he can't explain this away as a faithful Jew. And then he goes on, he says, the experience of the resurrection as the foundation act of the church, which has carried the faith in the

35:07

God of Israel into the whole Western world must belong to God's plan of salvation. Now, he doesn't mean that Christianity is the way of salvation.

35:15

He's just saying, like I was talking about before, this sort of thing is what God is doing and ultimately moving history in this direction of what

35:25

Jews think of when they talk about the messianic age or the messianic hope. So there we have an example of a

35:33

Jewish person. So now a religious person, right, who is not presuppositionally neutral, he has certain pre -commitments, certain presuppositions in terms of which he thinks and reasons and by which he evaluates the facts.

35:47

Generally speaking, you know, people will normally resist the idea that Jesus rose from the dead, but in principle, they could accept even that, right?

35:57

But their presuppositions, I mean, it is true that in the main, people are just not going to accept the resurrection given their presuppositions without a change of worldview.

36:08

But again, the point here is that in principle, even that doesn't have to challenge their fundamental assumptions as unbelievers.

36:17

And so this brings us to Islam. And what's interesting here is we actually have to push it back a step in the sense of like, if we're talking about something like the resurrection, because the vast majority of Muslims don't even believe

36:33

Jesus was crucified. And so the resurrection is out of court already, right?

36:39

You can't have Jesus rising from the dead if he didn't die, right? And so no

36:45

Muslim can accept the idea that Jesus rose from the dead unless you can first persuade him that Jesus was crucified.

36:56

But now the problem is, and this should be a natural question at this point, why would a Muslim not think that Jesus died?

37:05

That's how things normally happen. Why is there anything special in the case of Jesus? Now, I do wanna say that not every

37:12

Muslim says this, but it is the norm. And it's because this is how a particular verse of the

37:18

Quran has been interpreted. Surah 4, 157 says in response to the

37:24

Jews, it says, they said in boast, we have killed Christ Jesus, the messenger of God.

37:30

And then it says, but they killed him not nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them.

37:37

And then it says that, they're in doubt concerning the matter, they have no certainty on it.

37:42

And Allah raised Jesus up to himself. So classically, Muslims have interpreted that to mean that Jesus didn't really die by crucifixion.

37:52

Instead, Allah took Jesus apart from death to himself. Now, this in itself is problematic for Muslims because, and many people won't know this, but the

38:04

Muslim view of death doesn't, for Christians we say, at least Orthodox Christians, we say at death, there's a separation between soul and body.

38:13

Your body goes to the ground. The soul goes to God that gave it. In the case of the righteous, we dwell with Christ in heaven.

38:19

In the case of the wicked, they're consigned to Hades until the final judgment, where they're cast into Yana.

38:27

But in the Islamic system, people don't just go to heaven. They go to the grave and they're actually alive in their grave.

38:35

And so Muslims, for example, think Muhammad is currently in his grave alive. And there's an experience that they're having there.

38:42

Yeah, in the ground. And - Time out, time out. I've never, you said that I'm like,

38:48

I've never heard that before ever. So maybe we could slow down there a bit.

38:53

Okay, so let me get this straight. So Muslims believe that Muhammad is alive in the ground somewhere, wherever his body is?

39:01

Yeah, and I'm not gonna pretend to have that all worked out. You know, in terms of, it's not normally a conversation

39:08

I have with Muslims, but they do have this whole eschatology. In Christianity, we distinguish between personal eschatology and general eschatology.

39:17

So personal is what happens to the individual at death. General eschatology is what's going to happen universally for all people in history, right?

39:26

So individual eschatology in the Islamic system, a person dies and they're experiencing, in the case of the wicked, torment in the grave.

39:36

And, you know, they're being questioned in the grave, all sorts of things are happening. What was your religion? Who was your prophet?

39:42

You know, they're being examined to see if they were truly Muslims or not, and whether they're gonna stay in hell forever or not.

39:49

And the belief of Muslims is that generally speaking, even Muslims are going to go to hell for a time until they're eventually released by Allah.

39:59

The only exceptions to that are people like martyrs.

40:06

And in the Islamic system, a martyr doesn't mean somebody who joyfully gave up their life testifying to Christ as their savior and so forth, but somebody who was engaged in battle for the sake of Allah, subjugating people to Islamic Sharia, Islamic law.

40:23

And in the course of that, they die, right? That's a martyr in the Islamic system. And a martyr has greater hope of not going through all of that and going to paradise.

40:36

But so here's the point. The reason Jesus causes a problem in the

40:41

Islamic system is you have Jesus being spared from death and exalted to Allah, whereas not even

40:48

Muhammad. They can't say that about Muhammad. And the other thing is that Jesus is being exalted up to Allah in the

40:58

Islamic system. And this is gonna be important later when we talk about some other things. I'm assuming I'll remember to bring this up, but in the

41:06

Islamic system, you have seven earths and then there are seven heavens above that. And people will go to these different levels of heaven and Allah himself is not in any of them.

41:20

He's above all of them. And so Allah is viewed as transcendent.

41:25

And according to at least some versions of Islamic theology, Akita, Allah can't enter into his creation.

41:32

And so that's where you get this whole activity of angels in their system, doing what they do.

41:38

And, but the point is that if you have Jesus being exalted up to Allah, what you have is, so first of all,

41:46

Jesus, in contrast to Muhammad, who's supposed to be the best, going straight up to Allah without dying.

41:53

And moreover, he goes up to Allah and that's problematic. I mean,

41:58

Allah is in the Islamic system transcendent over the seven heavens, but Jesus is with him.

42:04

And so that seems to go well beyond what a Muslim would ever want to say about Jesus, especially if they think of Muhammad as greater than Jesus.

42:13

But that just, that's one of those things that kind of sticks in there, crawl like they're, what do we do with that kind of thing?

42:21

Sure. And it's a relevant point to push because it is anomalous, right? It's like, where does this fit in the system?

42:28

But anyways, so the point of Surah 4, 157 for most

42:34

Muslims is that it seems to teach that Jesus wasn't really crucified and didn't die by crucifixion.

42:41

And what that means then in principle is that a Muslim could actually accept every fact that you give him, not only for the idea that Jesus was seen alive after his alleged crucifixion, but he could accept every fact you give him that supposedly points to Jesus being crucified.

43:06

Because here's all a Muslim has to say. All a Muslim has to say is, according to Surah 4, 157,

43:13

Allah made it appear to them as if Jesus was crucified. That's what the verse says. Sure.

43:18

On the classical interpretation, right? And so if Allah made it appear to them as if they had crucified him, well then of course the evidence would point to Jesus being crucified.

43:28

That's the way it appeared to them. So all the witnesses would be saying he was crucified and they would all be saying, hey, we saw him alive afterwards because -

43:36

So it would be superfluous in a sense to give evidence for that because the evidence for that is completely consistent with their affirmation that Allah made it appear so.

43:46

Right, right. Yeah, and it's sort of like, you know, Van Til used to say that if you allow the unbeliever his assumption of chance, then he could take every fact you throw at him and throw it behind his back into a bottomless pit of chance and contingency, right?

44:03

It's just chance occurrence. It doesn't mean anything, right? It's as Shakespeare, you know, the line sound and fury signifying nothing.

44:10

It means nothing in a chance universe. Well, in the Islamic system, you know, where Allah is playing cosmic trickster, making people think that this happened when it didn't, all they have to do is say, yeah, one more fact that just sort of proves the case that Allah was incredibly persuasive when he duped and deceived everybody into thinking that Jesus was crucified.

44:32

So, okay, so we've established this idea that facts are interpreted within a context.

44:37

The Jew can interpret the evidence for Jesus within their Jesus denying context, right?

44:44

And the Muslim can, I mean, what you're saying, the Muslim can grant a bunch of things that most traditional apologists argue for, but in many regards, it wouldn't affect their worldview at all.

44:55

A lot of it is actually consistent there. So where would we push then in terms of an internal critique of Islam?

45:03

I mean, how would we bypass that worldview, the presuppositions, right?

45:10

How would we bypass that and begin to press that given their own teaching, here's a problem.

45:17

Here's an internal conflict. And I know that you can go about it in various ways. You could appeal to their scripture or you could even engage in philosophical analysis with respect to the very concept of Allah as taught in Islam.

45:29

So what are some ways we can go about doing that? Yeah, so one thing quickly, just like I gave quotes for atheists and Jews, I could do this for Muslims.

45:40

I just want people to realize I'm not just foisting this on Muslims. This is something that Muslims say.

45:46

I've got quotes from Sami Zaatari, a Muslim who used to debate back in the day, Paul Bilal Williams, other

45:52

Muslims. I mean, this is just par for the course. The people that aren't reading these guys closely enough just miss this sort of thing and think, oh yeah, we're all neutral.

45:59

We can all just exchange evidence and so forth. They're just not really adept with what's being said by atheists, what's being said by Jews, what's being said by Muslims.

46:09

So involved in the Islamic denial of Jesus, and I'm using the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus just because it was such an easy example across all these groups.

46:20

But let me fill this in so that you can see how we might do an internal critique. Involved in their argument against the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as Christians understand them, right?

46:32

Those facts that Christians are pointing to. When we say Jesus was crucified, we mean the incarnate son of God was crucified and it was for our sins.

46:42

Moreover, when we say he was raised, we say he was raised for our justification. His resurrection is our vindication.

46:48

So these facts on the Christian view are not just these bare occurrences.

46:54

They're exactly what I said they are. He was crucified for our sins, risen again for our justification.

47:02

Now, a Muslim pushes back against all of that because it flies in the face of all of his assumptions. One assumption is that Jesus wasn't really crucified.

47:11

Number two is his assumption that a person doesn't need anyone to die for their sins to be forgiven by God.

47:20

Allah can simply forgive a person who repents. Okay, so this now is telling you something more about Islam's theology, its worldview.

47:28

The kind of God they believe in is a God who doesn't require that his justice be satisfied.

47:34

So just start storing these things up, right? These are the sort of things that are going to be involved in doing a critique of Islam.

47:41

Another thing is the whole notion of Jesus being God, because again, we're saying it was the son of God or the

47:49

God, the second person of the Trinity who became incarnate that was crucified. They object to that whole notion, number one, because they don't believe

47:56

God has a son. To them, this is a violation of pure monotheism. Pure monotheism requires that Allah be one person, right?

48:05

Now we ordinarily have to do this when talking to Unitarians of various stripes, but it's also true in the case of Muslims.

48:12

They can't see the difference because there are various things inhibiting this, but they don't recognize the difference between polytheism, which teaches that there are three separable beings who either act independently of each other or are acting in concert with each other.

48:30

Either way, they think that Trinitarianism is that, and it just isn't, right?

48:35

Classical Trinitarianism teaches that the three persons of the Godhead are numerically identical as to their essence, but personally distinct according to their mode of subsistence, their personal distinguishing properties of begetting or being unbegotten, begetting, being begotten and proceeding from a father and son in the case of the spirit.

48:59

We don't think of the persons of the Trinity as separable beings, and so it's not really polytheism, but on their view, that's what we're saying.

49:07

So they have a problem with the notion of God entering into creation. That to them is impossible, number one, and it's also beneath him, number two.

49:17

So it's not the sort of thing that God could do. He couldn't enter into his creation, and it's not the sort of thing he would do because it's beneath him.

49:26

And they'll say things like subhanAllah, which means he's exalted above that, right? Far be it from him to do this sort of thing.

49:34

And you'll even see debates among Muslims. Some Muslims will argue that Allah is everywhere because at least these

49:42

Muslims recognize that it's problematic if you don't acknowledge his omnipresence, but the vast, at least the vocal Muslims, the

49:50

Salafi Muslims will say, no, Allah is not, he's not in his creation, he's not imminent, he's above the seven heavens.

49:58

And I think they got the better end of the stick here when they argue against their co -religionists.

50:03

But they will say things against these other Muslims like it's beneath Allah to be in certain places.

50:12

So for example, what if it's a brothel? Are you saying Allah's in a brothel? What about the bathroom? Are you saying Allah's in the bathroom?

50:19

And that's how Muslims reason. And so if you engage a Muslim, for example, one of the things that really appeals to them on their thinking against the identity of Christ is the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin.

50:34

And so they'll say things like your God came out of a woman and they're sometimes quite crude when they're talking about this.

50:40

And so in their minds, this is just disqualifying, right? This is how they reason. In their worldview, this sort of thing is impossible and it's beneath Allah.

50:47

So now you start putting the picture together. This is the kind of God they believe in. Their God is an undifferentiated unity, right?

50:54

There's no diversity in his being, because if there were, like in the doctrine of the

50:59

Trinity, that has to be polytheism. You can't have a conception of any kind of diversity in God without it being amounting to polytheism.

51:09

Allah, God can't become incarnate. He can't enter into his creation. He can forgive sins without the need for a sacrifice.

51:16

So all of this stuff is at work in Islamic thinking. Okay, now, this allows us to do an internal critique.

51:23

Here's one of my favorite, I think. Which by the way, real quick, all of this data that you're giving, it is the

51:31

Christian's job to A, know a little bit about what Muslims believe by their personal study, and B, drawing these out within the course of a conversation.

51:43

So if we're gonna learn someone's worldview, you need to know how to navigate a conversation and extract that information by asking questions.

51:51

So someone could be listening to you, Anthony, and say, well, man, I mean, there's so much

51:56

I need to learn. And that's true, there's a lot to learn, but there's also very easy ways to extract that information within the context of a conversation so that you could set yourself up for an attempted internal critique of the person's perspective.

52:11

Yeah, everything is a process. I mean, I mentioned I was converted in 93, started evangelizing immediately, became interested in apologetics in 95.

52:22

This is stuff that I've been engaging for a long time. And a lot of people will look at where somebody is at at a particular point, and then they kind of think that's where they need to be at by tomorrow or something like that.

52:34

And so it looks like this colossal task that they could never possibly achieve, and it's just not, right?

52:39

It's all incremental, it's just like saving, it's just like other things. If you look at the end thing and think you've got to do this next week or whatever, and that sort of thing will prevent you from getting started.

52:54

Sometimes when I have to do, like I have to clean up my garage, right? We're gonna be moving soon, I gotta clean up my garage.

52:59

And every once in a while, I realize I've been standing here staring at stuff for 10 minutes, thinking about how much stuff

53:05

I have to do to clean this up and where all this stuff needs to go. And then I think, gosh, I just wasted 10 minutes because I'm so busy looking at all

53:12

I have to do, I haven't gotten started on any of it. And that's just the way it is. If people will start evangelizing, they're gonna start picking up things.

53:21

And over time, all this will accumulate. And besides that, I mean, it's always the case that you're gonna have to find out where a particular person is at, because people, even if they say they're

53:34

Christian, they say they're Muslim, there are nuances there, there are variations, right? There are denominational differences among Christians, there are among Muslims.

53:41

And so you're gonna meet individuals who have different views, they're gonna have different levels of knowledge about Islam, they're gonna have different levels of knowledge about their own book.

53:50

I mean, I meet Muslims all the time who don't know their book, haven't read their book as many times as I have.

53:59

And part of that is because they're taught that it's only the Quran in Arabic, so they have to recite it in Arabic.

54:05

And if they don't know Arabic, they're just muttering words they don't know. And so everything they know about their religion is coming to them from their imam, telling them what it means and all this.

54:14

And so you have something of an advantage in that kind of a scenario. But anyways, yeah.

54:20

So you're always gonna have to try and talk to the person and find out what their view is on things.

54:27

But so one of the things, there are, I think, very simple things that you can do that are faithful with what we've been talking about, these observations about people not being neutral, everybody having a philosophy of fact and all of that.

54:42

And then there are more sophisticated things. One of the things that I think is very simple and easy for people to wrap their heads around and use is simply this.

54:52

So consider what I said a moment ago, that Allah is transcendent and can't become imminent.

54:59

This is the principled argument behind the incarnation. Jesus can't be the incarnate son of God because it entails that God entered into creation.

55:08

That sort of thing is impossible and beneath Allah to do, even if he could do it. Well, Muslims believe this on the basis of what?

55:17

Why do they believe that? What is the foundational authority of Islam? Now, this is a no -brainer, right?

55:24

It's the Quran, right? The Quran is viewed as Allah's revelation. In fact, it's viewed as Allah's direct speech.

55:31

Muslims don't think of the Quran as inspired like we would say with respect to the

55:37

Bible. We believe that holy men wrote or spoke as they were born along by the Holy Spirit.

55:42

The Holy Spirit superintended their writing, causing them to write what he wanted them to write. But at the same time, without destroying their own personalities.

55:51

I mean, there's this involvement of the human author in the whole process. All along the way though, superintended by the spirit so that they wrote exactly what he wanted them to write.

56:02

But in the case of Islam, Muhammad was not part of the process. Muhammad is simply hearing the revelation and he's reciting it to people, okay?

56:11

Now you do have some sections of scripture that are like that. The 10 commandments, for example, were directly spoken by God from Mount Sinai.

56:20

If you read closely Exodus 19 and 20, God actually spoke the 10 commandments to the nation from atop the mountain.

56:28

And then he inscribed the law, right? With his own finger, the idiom there.

56:34

Yeah. And Moses then brings the tablets, right?

56:39

So there you do have an example of God dictating this, right? There are examples of dictation, but that's not the norm.

56:48

Norm, normally what you have is a prophet writing by inspiration. Well, the Quran is not like that.

56:53

It's a verbal revelation from Allah. So now here's the question. If Allah can't enter into his creation, how did

57:02

Muhammad get this revelation? Now, because remember, I mean,

57:07

Allah can't speak to people directly like Christians would claim God did when he spoke to Moses from the burning bush or the nation of Israel from atop

57:16

Mount Sinai, right? That can't be possible on the Islamic scenario. Because remember, now there's a lot of problems with this, even from a

57:24

Quranic perspective. But again, Muslims have a way of coming up with their own philosophy in light of certain things the

57:31

Quran says and then trying to discount other things that the Quran says, just like Jews have to do with respect to the

57:36

Bible. And that's because Muhammad ended up incorporating things haphazardly into his book that end up conflicting with other things that he said.

57:45

But just sticking with this for the moment. Now, I don't know how much background you have in Islam, but I know there are a handful of people here who are sometimes in my channel.

57:58

So I suspect somebody in the comment section could answer this question. What do you think a

58:03

Muslim would say in order to escape this problem? If I say, if Allah can't enter into his creation, then where did

58:11

Muhammad get this revelation from? It's not like Moses hearing from God at the burning bush or from atop

58:19

Mount Sinai. Who is it that gave Muhammad the revelation? Because this is what all Muslims are gonna come back with.

58:26

Now, remember, Allah can't speak directly to his creatures. So how does Muhammad get the revelation?

58:32

So Acts 2 says it and NJ says it. Yeah, several people have said it in the comment section here.

58:38

Through the angel Gabriel. Now, Muslims, I love doing this because I'll present the challenge to Muslims.

58:45

If Allah can't enter into his creation in order to converse with one of his creatures like Muhammad, then how could the

58:51

Quran be a revelation from Allah? And Muslims like their eyes light up, like, oh, this is a no -brainer.

58:56

I've got this easy, right? They'll say, well, it was communicated to him by the angel Gabriel, okay?

59:02

Well now, wait a minute. Remember Islamic presuppositions here. Allah can't enter into his creation to speak to Muhammad, one of his creatures.

59:12

Well, what pray tell is Gabriel? If not a creature who's part of creation.

59:18

And so all you've done is push the question back a step. How does Gabriel get this revelation from Allah?

59:25

This is a very simple argument, but notice it's presuppositional, right? I'm holding a Muslim to his presuppositions.

59:32

If you're going to use the Quran in order to ride roughshod over the evidence or to interpret the evidence in a non -Christian way, well, then you need to justify that revelation.

59:44

It can't be a revelation from the kind of God you're talking about. If that God is transcendent and can't communicate directly to his creatures.

59:52

So this is just a huge problem. And I've never had a Muslim who -

59:57

What do Muslims inform Muslims? What do they, how do they try to wiggle out of that?

01:00:05

Well, usually they don't get, I mean, it's the first step, right? Gabriel gave it to Muhammad. After that, it's usually just, it's usually just them kind of talking around the point, right?

01:00:17

It's, you kind of have to explain it two or three times because, I mean, in their thinking, it just has to be

01:00:24

Allah's revelation. And so it's like, you know, well, yeah, but we have

01:00:30

Allah's word and Allah's word, you know, at this point, what they'll often do is just be viciously circular, right?

01:00:36

There's a difference, as you know, between being a person whose system is self -attesting and a person whose system is self -refuting, right?

01:00:49

It's viciously circular. And at this point, Muslims will just be viciously circular. Allah's word says, you know, this happened.

01:00:55

And that's not what we're doing when we say the Bible is the word of God. We do believe what it says, but we're arguing that it, you know, is self -attesting, self -authenticating and provides the preconditions of intelligibility and that sort of thing.

01:01:09

But what I'm showing is Islam just can't do that. And so Muslims usually just, you know, ramble around the point.

01:01:15

So in essence, when we use, as Christians and presuppositionalists, when we use a transcendental argument for the

01:01:21

Christian worldview, the Muslim is unable to use a transcendental argument. They can try. So people have often asked me, well, you know, when

01:01:28

I use the transcendental argument, people say, well, can't the Muslim use that argument? Sure, he could use it, but he won't be successful because as Dr.

01:01:37

James Anderson says, he says that Christianity actually has the money to pay the philosophical bills.

01:01:44

We could actually make good on the claim that the Christian worldview provides those necessary preconditions for knowledge and things like that.

01:01:51

Whereas you are offering this internal critique that given their own perspective, you have this issue of how is

01:01:57

Allah even revealing himself if he cannot, you know, enter into his creation and communicate these sorts of things.

01:02:03

I think that's an interesting point. Yeah, and so, I mean, that's just one very easy, simple thing that a person can point out.

01:02:10

Now, there are other things here that people will often point out.

01:02:15

It's an excellent, very valid, useful point. I don't always encourage people who don't have any background in this to use this within for Muslim because, not because it's not valid.

01:02:29

Now, let me just explain the issue, but you've heard that the Quran confirms the Bible. It affirms that the

01:02:36

Bible is the word of God, that it came from God, it's authoritative and so forth. The Quran does do that.

01:02:43

The problem is a Muslim is usually going to be more sophisticated here than a

01:02:49

Christian who doesn't know the Islamic sources well. And he'll be able to pull the wool over your eyes, right?

01:02:56

A Muslim will be able to say, oh, you don't understand what that means. You don't understand the Arabic here. You know, they're gonna say stuff like this.

01:03:02

They're gonna say, well, the Quran really says the Bible was corrupted and this sort of thing. So unless a person has studied those arguments and knows how to respond to them, and there's actually a lot of really great stuff, a person can do that.

01:03:13

And I think it's a very easy route to take, right? If you can nail down that argument and show how the Quran affirms the

01:03:19

Bible, it doesn't say that it was corrupted. It does say, and this is because, so from Muhammad's standpoint in seventh century

01:03:29

Arabia, the Bible had not been translated into Arabic. Muhammad's knowledge of the

01:03:35

Bible came to him mostly through the Jewish tribes. And so in this case, primarily the

01:03:40

Old Testament to the extent that it was scripture that he was hearing, but also mixed in with that Jewish Talmudic traditions and legends and so forth.

01:03:49

And Muhammad couldn't tell the difference. And when you read the Islamic sources, you can actually tell that the Muslims are often, or excuse me, the

01:03:56

Jews are often, you know, toying with Muhammad. You know, they're probably laughing it up when they get back to, you know, their villages and so forth, their areas and so forth.

01:04:07

But they're constantly, you know, getting the better of Muhammad in all sorts of things.

01:04:12

I'll give you a quick example of what I mean. One of the things you see in the

01:04:18

Quran is Jesus being called Isa. If you were to ask an

01:04:23

Arab speaking Christian what Jesus' name is, he would say Yazu, because if it comes over into Arabic, that's how it should be.

01:04:31

And so the question is, where does Isa come from? And a lot of people have argued that Muhammad confused the name

01:04:39

Isa with Jesus. And so one of the theories is that this is because the

01:04:45

Jews called Jesus Isa, you know, but in Arabic, and they were making fun of Jesus, and Muhammad didn't know better, right?

01:04:55

So he's calling him Isa. Now, I'm not trying to nail down that issue. That's a whole discussion. But my point is, it shows you the sorts of things, at least it gives you an idea of the kinds of things that Jews might've been doing.

01:05:07

But an example of Jews getting the better of Muhammad and exposing him, Muhammad taught that he was establishing pure monotheism among the

01:05:15

Arabs like the Jews had. And Muhammad at the time, along with his co -religionists, they used to swear, you know, by their aunts, their uncles, their fathers, and this sort of thing, until one day

01:05:29

Muhammad runs into some Jews and the Jews say, Muhammad, you're committing shirk.

01:05:35

Shirk is the name for violating monotheism, right? It's the cardinal sin in Islam. And he says, what do you mean?

01:05:42

And they say, you're swearing by something other than God. And they say, that's shirk, you know, you can't swear by anything other than God, right?

01:05:50

And you know the basis for this. Genesis 22, numerous Old Testament texts speak of God swearing by himself.

01:05:56

And why? Because there's none greater by whom he could swear. So the Jews point out that this is in principle a violation of monotheism, to swear by something other than God, to swear by a created thing.

01:06:08

And so Muhammad was already a prophet at this time, according to Islam, and here he's being corrected by the

01:06:13

Jews on true monotheism. And so Muhammad gets a revelation from Allah at this point, telling his followers no longer to swear in the name of creatures.

01:06:23

Okay, so you have Islamic sources talking about them before this time swearing by creatures, after this time not swearing by creatures anymore.

01:06:31

All of it being during Muhammad's alleged prophethood. So here's the

01:06:36

Jews, you know, informing Muhammad. So they were one step ahead of Muhammad, but two steps ahead of Allah, if you're following along here, right?

01:06:44

Because Muhammad doesn't know what is consistent with true monotheism until the

01:06:50

Jews tell him. And then Allah doesn't give Muhammad a revelation until Muhammad finds out from the Jews.

01:06:56

So he's two steps behind, you know. But anyways, so, but my,

01:07:04

I'm not sure how I got off on all that, but the point here with respect to the scriptures is that the

01:07:10

Quran, oh, so Muhammad is, they're not translated into Arabic. Muhammad's getting this knowledge secondhand from the

01:07:16

Jews in Arabia. And then you have some limited interaction with Christians. A lot of it is concentrated in the last year of his life to his interactions with Christians from Northern Arabia, the

01:07:27

Christians of Najran and so forth. And so there's more interaction then with Christians, but before that, it's primarily

01:07:34

Jews, not exclusively, but primarily. But anyway, so Muhammad during this time thinks that what he's saying is simply the same religion now being revealed to the

01:07:46

Arabs, okay? So he's establishing among the Arabs what was established for Jews from their prophets and what was established for Christians with their prophets.

01:07:56

He thinks of these as kind of like different people groups to whom God is revealing himself. And he gives each one of these kind of their own governing laws, right?

01:08:05

The same religion, but there's some different laws that these religions have to live by. So like the

01:08:10

Jews have their dietary laws and the Christians have some of their own distinctives, you know, but in terms of their theology, you know, he thinks that these things are supposed to be the same, except he thinks the

01:08:21

Jews went wrong by not accepting Jesus and the Christians went wrong, he thinks, later in his life, he thinks when they ascribe to him deity and stuff like that.

01:08:32

But what he says at this point is not that the scriptures were corrupted. He accuses

01:08:37

Jews and Christians of misinterpreting their scriptures, okay? So Muslims will often point people to texts that talk about Jews and Christians twisting the scriptures and try and use those passages to support the idea that Muhammad taught that the scriptures were textually distorted.

01:08:55

And there's a difference between twisting them with your tongues or misinterpreting them, distorting them in that way and distorting them textually.

01:09:04

Muhammad couldn't tell the difference. He couldn't read the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the Greek of the New Testament. And so again, but I'm just saying that that's a legitimate way to argue.

01:09:15

It's a very easy thing to use if you know the passages for that and how to respond to Muslim objections because somebody who doesn't know the material and Muslims just gonna say, oh, you know, yeah, well, in Arabic, this means such and such.

01:09:30

Right, so there's a lot of material on that stuff that they could read though. Online, if you go to answeringislam .org,

01:09:38

there's a whole, there's like hundreds of articles on this topic. I do have a question by way of an internal critique and Islam is not my central focus.

01:09:48

So, I mean, this is a question I'm sure you'll be familiar with. So one of the things that we try to do from a presuppositional perspective is to show,

01:09:56

A, that the opposing viewpoint does not provide the preconditions for intelligible experience and knowledge.

01:10:04

And that would include demonstrating, that would include demonstrating an incoherency within a person's perspective and also trying to demonstrate that if what they're saying is true, they're reduced to an utter skepticism so they can't even know if their position is true or not.

01:10:19

That being said, I have heard that in Islam, Muslims believe that Allah is able to lie.

01:10:28

And for me, as just, I'm not aware, I'm not fully studied in Islam, but for me, thinking presuppositionally,

01:10:34

I'm like, well, wait a minute, philosophically speaking, if Allah is able to lie, that actually has huge epistemological implications.

01:10:42

And so if Islam teaches that Allah can lie, is it, number one, is that true, that that's what they teach?

01:10:48

And number two, is it a valid point to point out that if that's true, you're reduced to skepticism since there's no way to differentiate whether Allah is speaking the truth or not?

01:10:58

Yeah. So one thing I would say just philosophically, and this goes for certain

01:11:03

Muslims, and again, this is, we were talking about this before, there are variations among Muslims, right?

01:11:11

They have their schools of thought and so forth, but the philosophically inclined Muslims who are familiar with their philosophers and certain schools of Islamic creed, will say that Allah has no definite nature.

01:11:30

Okay. He doesn't have this nature to which we can point or whatever.

01:11:36

I mean, they say that Allah is pure will, or what we know about Allah is not his nature, but what he's, his will, or the perceptible effects of his activity in the world.

01:11:57

And so from this perspective, it leads to what's called voluntarism, the idea that Allah could just will anything, right?

01:12:05

Cause he's not acting in accordance with some fixed nature. Nothing can hem Allah in, right? He has no fixed determinate nature, and so he could do anything.

01:12:13

He could say this today, he could say that tomorrow. Well, I have a question then, and you can continue your line of thought.

01:12:19

If he has no fixed nature, then what is Allah? I mean, aren't the necessary preconditions for identity is that something has a nature?

01:12:32

Yeah, yeah. I mean, now I wasn't pretending this makes sense. Okay, I was thinking like, well, maybe that's another point of internal critique there.

01:12:42

If someone were to say he doesn't have a nature. Yeah, so we say, to give a point of comparison, we say that God always acts in accordance with his own nature.

01:12:51

So sometimes people will say, can God do X? And we'll say God can do, when we say

01:12:57

God can do everything, he can do all his holy will, everything that's consistent with his nature. Sure. There's nothing that limits him in terms of some external limiting factor.

01:13:07

I mean, there's nothing external to him that limits him. Rather, God has a definite nature and acts always in accordance with that nature.

01:13:14

So he's always consistent. He makes promises, he keeps them. He can't break his promises. He's a covenant -making, covenant -keeping

01:13:20

God, we say. Now we do believe that God could judicially give people over to a lie, right?

01:13:29

So for example, in 2 Thessalonians, it talks about those who refuse to believe the truth,

01:13:35

God gives them over to a powerful delusion, right? But here, what we're talking about is something judicial, right?

01:13:42

And it's not God lying. It's God handing them over to the lie they love, right? So because man is depraved by nature, loves his sin, has enmity with God, God in his justice consigns them to, he doesn't deliver them from their stupor.

01:14:02

But in Islam, Allah himself is actually portrayed as deceiver. And there's something critical here that I'll mention in a moment.

01:14:09

But as an example, in Surah 354 and Surah 830, a Surah is a chapter of the

01:14:15

Quran. In Surah 354 and Surah 830, Allah is called the best of deceivers.

01:14:21

So he's not just called a deceiver, notice. Other passages call him a deceiver. He's called the best of deceivers.

01:14:28

And contextually, there's no question, and I have to make this comment because Muslim translations are basically imitating

01:14:35

Allah at this point. They're deceiving you. They like to translate these differently than the

01:14:40

Arabic would actually indicate. Normally, they translate it saying he's the best of planners, right?

01:14:46

But if you read the context, I mean, you could read the lexicons, Arabic lexicons, like Lane's lexicons, where other things, it's deceiver.

01:14:56

But in the context, it's often Allah responding to other people like the

01:15:04

Jews, right? It says they deceived, and Allah got the better of them, right?

01:15:11

Allah's the best of deceivers. Some translations will render it they plotted and Allah plotted and Allah's the best of plotters.

01:15:18

But you can even tell from that, that this is not a good thing that's going on here, right? These people are plotting, but Allah's better at it than they are, and he gets the better of them.

01:15:27

But again, the Arabic word means deceiver. He's also charged with guile in the

01:15:33

Quran. Satan says, you beguiled me, I'm gonna beguile them, right? Just like you did to me.

01:15:39

But here is something that's really critical. In Surah 799 of the Quran, it says, no one feels himself safe from Allah's deception except those who are perishing, okay?

01:15:52

What that means is even the Muslim has to fear Allah's deception, okay?

01:15:58

If only those who are perishing don't fear Allah's deception, then to be a

01:16:04

Muslim, you gotta be some, and somebody who's not gonna perish, you have to fear Allah, right? So even a

01:16:10

Muslim has to fear Allah's deception, according to the Quran. So you can't interpret these sorts of things merely as a judicial response, right?

01:16:19

To people doing something. This is how Allah treats his own servants. Now, go back to the issue of the crucifixion of Jesus.

01:16:26

Although that verse is directed at the Jews, where it says, they boasted, they said in boast, we've killed

01:16:33

Christ Jesus, the messenger of Allah, but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them.

01:16:39

It wasn't only made to appear to them, it was made to appear as such to Christ's apostles, his followers, right?

01:16:47

So you have to believe as a Muslim that Allah even deceived the followers of Jesus, whom you believe as a

01:16:53

Muslim is, or was a prophet, right? Now, a Muslim might say, well, we don't believe he deceived

01:16:59

Jesus's true followers. It was the later people that came along that corrupted Christianity. But wait a minute, the

01:17:05

Quran in Surah 61, 12 says that Allah would cause the true followers of Jesus to gain the ascendancy over those that oppose them.

01:17:14

And even if you read the Muslim commentators, they'll say that even though Christianity was opposed in its beginning, it eventually triumphed by the fourth century, until the advent of Islam came along.

01:17:26

And so they even recognize that Christianity triumphed. Well, what triumphed? It was apostolic

01:17:32

Christianity, right? So which was that Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead, right?

01:17:38

So you have to, if you're gonna follow the Quran, believe that Allah deceived the followers of Jesus. But you also have to believe that as a

01:17:45

Muslim, it is your duty to fear Allah's deception. And so you even have,

01:17:51

I mentioned before. So real quick. So to point out that Allah can deceive is an appropriate internal critique to press.

01:18:01

Yeah. Because I think that's a powerful thing to push people into skepticism because then you have to be skeptical with respect to any knowledge claim about anything.

01:18:09

Because if anything's based upon your observation and study, you could be being deceived at the very moment.

01:18:16

Right. I mean, if you think about this, if go back to the first century when

01:18:22

Allah was supposedly deceiving people about Jesus being crucified. If this is the kind of God he is, and he's deceiving people, making them think it happened, what sorts of things would that have involved?

01:18:35

Well, one thing it might've involved was him causing a book to be written that said he was crucified as part of the deception, right?

01:18:44

That would have been part of the package of his master plan of deception, right? Well, now skip to the seventh century and you're reading

01:18:52

Surah 4, 157, and it's telling you about this kind of God. How do you know that you're not at this very moment, the one who's being given a deception, just like they were at that time.

01:19:04

They're given this scripture and it's deceiving them. How do you know you're not the one on the receiving end of the deception at this point, right?

01:19:13

What about these people at that time? How were they supposed to know? How were they supposed to know? And so, in other words, how are you supposed to know now that you're reading this book?

01:19:21

You're in the same predicament they were in. And so if you buy into it, if you're like that, you already, you should begin to see there's a problem here.

01:19:30

If I'm going to use the Quran and its description of this God as my governing presupposition for interpreting the evidence,

01:19:39

I can't be certain that I'm understanding anything correctly. It all might just be a result of -

01:19:44

Well, Acts 2, Pentecostal says, and I'm not sure if this is a correct reference, maybe you know.

01:19:50

He says, even Abu Bakr said that he wouldn't feel safe from Allah's deception, even if he had one foot in paradise.

01:19:56

Are you familiar with that? Yeah, so Abu Bakr was - Wow. Muhammad's father -in -law.

01:20:03

Okay. You might've heard of Aisha. That's the six -year -old girl that Muhammad married when he was in his fifties, right?

01:20:13

He marries this six -year -old girl and beds her before puberty.

01:20:19

And it was her father who's Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr becomes the second rightly guided, so -called rightly guided caliph of Islam.

01:20:28

After Muhammad dies, he becomes the leader of Islam, of the Muslims.

01:20:34

And what's significant here as background info is, I mentioned before that all

01:20:41

Muslims think that they're gonna go to hell. The only people that have any kind of assurance that they're gonna go to heaven are the martyrs who die killing people.

01:20:52

So it's a real struggle for a lot of Muslims because they just don't know what's gonna happen with them.

01:20:58

Well, there were 10 people during Muhammad's lifetime that he promised paradise. 10 people that he said

01:21:04

Allah told him are going to inherit paradise. Abu Bakr was one of the 10.

01:21:11

And so now when you put it in this context, Allah told Muhammad that Abu Bakr is going to make it to paradise.

01:21:21

And so here's Abu Bakr, one of 10 people that Allah promised this, who says, even if I had one foot in paradise,

01:21:30

I still wouldn't consider myself safe from Allah's deception. So he's saying I could have one foot across the line and Allah could change the script and it's all over.

01:21:40

So Allah could just change the name of the game. And so from a Muslim perspective, when they think of things like ethics, for example, ethics are all based on what

01:21:48

Allah wills in any given period or situation. As Christians, we don't believe that morality changes.

01:21:55

Morality is fundamentally one constant. And here we're distinguishing, of course, between things like the 10 commandments or the principles, the underlying principles of those commands and redemptive or restorative laws, like sacrificial laws, festivals, all of those things served a typical purpose.

01:22:22

They were pointing forward to something. They weren't moral norms, right? They were consistent with the morality of the

01:22:27

Bible, but they were pointing forward to what Jesus was going to do in accomplishing redemption. So those aren't moral norms, but moral norms in the

01:22:35

Bible are like, have no other God. Right, that can't change. You can't have another God because there is no other God.

01:22:40

Right, that's why it's fundamentally wrong to do that. You're not to worship God in an idolatrous fashion because there's nothing like him.

01:22:48

He alone is God and he's to be worshiped the way he prescribes. So morality can't change, but in the

01:22:53

Islamic system, it can change and has changed. Allah can simply will one thing tomorrow to be okay that he said was abominable the day before.

01:23:02

Right, so you have a clear example of this in the case of drinking alcohol, for example. If you ask a

01:23:08

Muslim today, it's absolutely prohibited to drink alcohol. However, that wasn't always what

01:23:13

Allah decreed. Allah used to permit it. And then Allah discouraged people from drinking at one point until you finally outlawed it.

01:23:21

So you have this sort of thing in Islam where it's changing because Allah himself either is viewed as not immutable or is viewed as having this, not having a fixed nature.

01:23:35

Right, and it's just whatever he wills. So that's at least what certain

01:23:40

Muslims would say. Okay. Like I said, there are variations in Islamic thought. Now, okay, so you've given a lot to consider in terms of an internal critique, which

01:23:50

I thought was excellent. Now, suppose you have a Muslim who is now picking up on this presuppositional way of thinking and saying like, hey, okay.

01:24:00

And by the way, for folks listening, we want the Muslim and we want the atheist and we want the

01:24:07

Mormon and we want the Jehovah's Witness to be presuppositional in their approach.

01:24:13

It's not a strategy to trick. It's basically to bring the unbeliever to the awareness of the importance of being as Van Til said, epistemologically self -conscious.

01:24:22

I want them to be aware of their foundation and their beliefs to show the tension.

01:24:28

So we want them to be presuppositional, but suppose the Muslim catches on to this line of thinking.

01:24:33

And now the internal critique is turned around. How does the Christian survive the internal critique of the

01:24:43

Muslim? So in answering that question, perhaps you can provide maybe three or four of the most powerful and most common objections against the

01:24:51

Christian worldview that's usually posited from the Muslim as they attempt when rarely when they do an adequate internal critique.

01:25:01

So they're presenting an internal critique, given your view, here are the problems with your position, Mr. Christian.

01:25:07

What would those look like and how would we respond? Yeah, so one of them we were already talking about and I think as soon as I mentioned it, you'll see how we kind of have dealt with it, but one is the incarnation.

01:25:19

That's critical to Christianity, fundamental. The crucifixion and resurrection, none of that means anything like what we say as Christians unless Jesus is incarnate.

01:25:29

And that of course presupposes that God can enter into his creation, which presupposes that God is different, a different kind of being than Muslims think he is.

01:25:39

So you've seen how that one way that looks problematic in Islam and doesn't just look that way, it is problematic.

01:25:45

It destroys the very thing that they claim is true of the Quran. If the Quran is what it claims to be, a revelation from Allah, then

01:25:53

Allah can't be who the Quran says he is, right? And if Allah is who he says he is, the Quran can't be what it says it is, right?

01:25:59

Because you can't have a verbal revelation from this God who can't enter into his creation and communicate to his creatures.

01:26:05

But now remember, this is the sort of thing that's behind the Muslim argument against the incarnation.

01:26:11

Jesus can't be the incarnate son of God because God can't enter into his creation. Well, on the

01:26:16

Christian view, that's not true. We don't say that God can't enter into his creation. In fact,

01:26:22

I mean, that's just part and parcel of Christianity but now let me make a couple observations here about just the logic of Christianity.

01:26:32

One is Jesus in the New Testament made the statement over and over again and you find this also in the apostles in one way or another that understanding what he's saying and doing presupposes a knowledge of what's happened or been said in the past.

01:26:48

Jesus said things like, if you believed Moses, you'd believe me because he wrote about me. So Moses was preparatory to Christ.

01:26:56

And Jesus says, if you don't believe Moses, you're not gonna believe me. These two things go together.

01:27:03

Paul says something similar when he says that the law was a schoolmaster to lead us to Christ, right?

01:27:09

The law is a pedagogue as like in the ancient world where a parent would assign their child to a pedagogue to tutor them, to teach them, to lead them to maturity.

01:27:21

And so that's what the law is. Jesus said to the, in fact, very significant presuppositionally, the rich man and Lazarus when they die, the rich man being an example of a wicked person,

01:27:33

Lazarus a righteous person, the rich man lifts up his eyes in Hades, a place of torment,

01:27:39

Lazarus is in the bosom of Abraham, meaning at his side. And so he's experiencing bliss along with faithful Abraham.

01:27:46

And there's this conversation between them. And the man says, he wants to go back and warn his brother so they won't come there.

01:27:56

And he's told that nobody can leave there, right? And he says, oh yeah, if I can leave here, then they'll believe, if they see me and so forth.

01:28:06

And he says, they wouldn't believe, if they don't believe Moses and the prophets, then they won't believe even if somebody rises from the dead, right?

01:28:12

Because what if the person's like Michael Martin, he'll just say, oh, it's just a chance event, right? What if a person's like Kaufman Kohler or Mahmoud Hadith, he'll just say, ah,

01:28:20

God is just doing this to spread monotheism, right? What if this person is a Muslim? He'll just say, Allah was deceiving people.

01:28:27

It's just a ghost, it's a phantasm or something. I'm delusional, they'll come up with something else. So what this is saying is the

01:28:35

Old Testament is necessary as part of the preparation to understanding and receiving

01:28:44

Christ for who he is. And so when you look in the Old Testament, the question that we're raising here is, can

01:28:51

God enter into his creation? Well, first of all, from the Christian perspective, when

01:28:57

God created the world, there was never a time from that point forward where God was absent from his creation, right?

01:29:03

We believe that God is transcendent, but we also believe that he is imminent without in any way being contained by or confined or restricted by his creation, because we don't think of God as a material being, he's not palpable, he doesn't have extension in space.

01:29:17

So he's able to be present according to the Bible without being confused with the things that are created.

01:29:25

Like sometimes when you tell Muslims this, they're saying, are you saying God is this table? You know, no, we're saying he's upholding the table, right?

01:29:32

Everything is upheld by him. But that's the perspective that's given in the Old Testament.

01:29:37

Psalm 139, you know, David says, where can I flee from your spirit? Where can I go from your presence? If I ascend into heaven, you're there.

01:29:43

If I make my bed in Sheol, you're there. So God is everywhere according to Christianity. But you also have

01:29:49

God revealing himself in particular places in a special way. And we refer to these as theophanies, right?

01:29:58

God appeared to the nation of Israel in the form of a pillar of fire and cloud, right?

01:30:03

He appeared to Moses in the burning bush, to the whole nation. And, you know, at least the mountain is ablaze.

01:30:10

And we're told that Moses and 70 of the elders of Israel go up and, you know, they see a visible appearance of God.

01:30:18

Again, because God is infinite, we're talking about a voluntary condescension here, right?

01:30:26

God qua God is not limited. He fills heaven and earth and even transcends heaven and earth, according to the

01:30:32

Bible. So my point here with this is simply to say that when Jesus comes on the scene, the categories have already been given to the

01:30:41

Jews in terms of which they should be reasoning about this. They shouldn't be making objections like, oh, you can't be

01:30:48

God in the flesh because God can't enter into his creation, right? And they would know better, they should know better because they know that God appeared to Abraham in human form,

01:30:58

Genesis 18, right? God appeared to Jacob in Bethel in Genesis 28. You know, over and over again, scripture says that God appeared to people in a palpable way.

01:31:07

So you already have the categories in the Bible being given in terms of which this sort of thing can be understood.

01:31:15

So at least in terms of Christianity, that's the Christian worldview. In the Christian worldview, the incarnation is not impossible.

01:31:21

And in fact, I'd argue that on the basis of the Old Testament, that's the trajectory. All of this is actually pointing forward to this climactic event when

01:31:28

God will actually become flesh and dwell among us. Moreover, the prophets are predicting this sort of thing, right?

01:31:34

Isaiah 7, 14, the child will be Emmanuel, God with us. Isaiah 9, 6, he'll be mighty God. You know, over and over again, the prophets say that God is coming and is going to be born, conceived and born and so forth.

01:31:47

And now all of this notice is consistent with the idea that God gives revelation. God is able to speak with his creatures.

01:31:54

He's able to converse with his creatures. He's, you know, he appeared and spoke to Moses. He's active by his spirit.

01:32:00

His spirit is present. David says, you know, the spirit of the

01:32:05

Lord spoke by me in 2 Samuel 23, right? So you have this concept of God's spirit being present and active.

01:32:14

You know, the incarnation is not problematic within a Christian context, though it is within a

01:32:19

Muslim context. And this concept doesn't destroy, but is the necessary, you know, assumption for something like a revelation from God.

01:32:30

All right. And so, and, okay, so you taught, you spoke a lot about the incarnation. So one way to survive the internal critique that's put forth by the

01:32:40

Muslim is to, in essence, you need to know your Christian theology. You need to know how to explain it.

01:32:47

That, again, we didn't talk so much about the Trinity, but knowing what the Trinity is, knowing the biblical basis for it, knowing how to demonstrate that it doesn't contradict, you know, it's not an internally contradictory concept.

01:33:00

So you basically didn't need to know the faith once for all delivered in order to defend the faith once for all delivered.

01:33:07

Okay. So we're coming up on the hour and a half, Mark. I do wanna transition to the questions because we do have a bunch of questions here and I do encourage people to keep sending them in.

01:33:17

And of course, greatly appreciate super chats. Gentleman gave a quick shout out there.

01:33:23

Thank you so much. But if you have any questions about what we've been talking about, send them in, preface them with Q or question.

01:33:30

And if you have a completely unrelated question, I'm sure Anthony wouldn't mind taking a stab at it.

01:33:36

If not, we'll just awkwardly skip that one and pretend the person didn't ask it. So, all right. So now let me go all the way to the top.

01:33:44

I do apologize if I miss anyone's questions. So here's a question unrelated, but people get curious.

01:33:53

How many of those books in Pastor Anthony's background do you think he's actually read? You're actually not seeing the half of it.

01:34:01

This is actually just part of my, what I mentioned before about my conversion and all that.

01:34:08

Prior to becoming a Christian, I had read two books in my life. I was 18 and I had read two books, James and the

01:34:14

Giant Peach and The Call of the Wild. And I only read those because I had to at that point in school.

01:34:20

However, I got away each year after reading those books by doing book reports on the books

01:34:28

I read those previous years. So I found a way around all of that. So it was when

01:34:33

I became a Christian, I had an immediate love for learning and I have read every day.

01:34:40

I mean, I'm sure there's been some that I've missed, but there hasn't been a day I haven't read since becoming a Christian. And I used to work in Christian bookstores and a bunch of other stuff just so I could get discounts on books.

01:34:51

And so this just reflects 25 years of reading and buying books. And as far as how many have

01:34:57

I read, I mean, I'd have to go through them and tell you, because I mean, one thing is anybody who owns books knows that some books are there for reference.

01:35:09

So I'm not gonna read a dictionary. I have actually thought about it though. So - Walter Martin did.

01:35:16

He did read a dictionary. I did read the dictionary. I mean, I know people that have done that sort of thing. I mean, I'm not telling people don't do it, but the point is just a dictionary is there for reference.

01:35:29

You look up a word you don't know, or you're maybe trying to add to your vocabulary.

01:35:34

So you poke around in the dictionary and you accumulate words. And then, so I have books like that,

01:35:41

I have dictionaries on the Bible, reference works of other sorts, lexicons, grammatical things that, you look those sorts of things up if you don't know them when you need to know them.

01:35:52

But then I do have other books that aren't intended just to be references. And I would have to confess that in the case of some of them

01:36:00

I haven't read them. And part of it's just because of how I came into possession of some of them.

01:36:05

So there were a couple of times when, I had a friend who died and gave me a bunch of books and I got a bunch of books at once.

01:36:13

And I think some of them just sort of fell through the cracks and got put on the shelves.

01:36:19

But I mean, I always have them there. Like one thing I can tell you, so I mean, not to be misunderstood, I've read most of my books, the ones that were intended to be read and aren't reference works, but I'm sure there's stuff

01:36:29

I haven't read. But one thing I've done with all of my books is I read the table of contents, I make sure

01:36:35

I know what this book is about in case a subject ever comes up and I think, I don't know what

01:36:41

I need to know about this, but I know where I can find that in my library if I have that, if not, I'll try and go get the book.

01:36:47

Are you a digital guy or a physical book guy? I'm a physical book guy. And I kind of wish

01:36:54

I was a digital guy because there are things, some things that are easy about that. Sure. But -

01:37:01

The information sticks better when you're using a physical book. Right, right. Okay. All right, well, here's a comment, which

01:37:08

I think is still a good practical use to address here. Scott says, I'm gonna be honest,

01:37:14

I don't have patience to do apologetics with Muslims. What have you found, Anthony, that has been the most difficult aspect of speaking with a

01:37:21

Muslim and how have you overcome, if in fact you have overcome, the great difficulty that you can have when speaking to Muslim folks?

01:37:29

Well, I will start with saying something I do like about Muslims. And I actually said this to a Muslim imam not long ago where I said, he told me at one point, he says,

01:37:38

I don't wanna debate with you, right? Even though this guy was challenging people to debate him before I spoke with him.

01:37:44

But anyways, this guy, I was like, hey, I said, you're taking away the one thing that I really like about Muslims.

01:37:53

I said, I mean, that's not literally one thing. They're people, they're made in the image of God and so forth, but they are fallen and they've adopted a system that makes them, in some cases, particularly ornery.

01:38:06

But there's any number of different types of Muslims out there, varying range of commitment and all that.

01:38:13

And so I'm not saying they're all alike. But one thing I like about Muslims in contrast to a lot of other people is when

01:38:24

I would go out evangelizing, I was always, if you've been out evangelizing, you're thinking,

01:38:29

I wanna talk to this person and you're kind of thinking through how do I approach them? How do I start the conversation? How do

01:38:34

I open the door to a conversation or something like that? You kind of don't have to worry about that with Muslims.

01:38:40

Muslims usually wanna talk about these things. So I really like that about Muslims. I know if I see a

01:38:45

Muslim, nine times out of 10, I can just walk up to them and start talking and they'll have a conversation with me.

01:38:52

And part of it is because they have this false confidence. The Bible doesn't talk about Islam, right?

01:38:58

Islam didn't exist when the prophets are writing and the apostles are writing. Christianity existed when

01:39:04

Muhammad came along. So he makes comments about Christianity. So Muslims have this false confidence that they know about Christianity and that gives them this impetus to talk with Christians.

01:39:16

Oh, I've got the goods on this guy, right? But that's great to me. I mean, that's great. So let's talk.

01:39:23

But in terms of difficulty, it is difficult when you've got this person who thinks he knows your position and what he knows is wrong when he thinks that this information comes to him from his

01:39:36

God, right? So if you're gonna defend

01:39:42

Christianity, one of the first things, if they have Christianity fundamentally wrong, you first have to correct what they think it is, right?

01:39:49

It makes no sense to defend what they think, to defend Christianity if they think something else in their head, right?

01:39:56

Because that's what they think you're arguing for. So you've got to clarify what it is.

01:40:01

And that could be a bear in itself because Muslims just don't wanna hear your definition of what you believe because their

01:40:10

God has already told them what you believe. Their God has told them that you believe in three gods, right?

01:40:15

No Orthodox Christian on the planet believes that, right? I mean, that's just not what Christians believe.

01:40:22

And nine times out of 10, you're gonna have to argue with a Muslim and say, hey, look,

01:40:28

I kind of think I know what I believe. Maybe you can give me a hearing here, but he knows that if he does that, then he's saying the

01:40:37

Quran is wrong. So he has to fight you on that point. So that is annoying, but it's part of the game.

01:40:45

Scott also has a question here. I did see some questions earlier on, but for some reason, the comments,

01:40:50

I can't go back to the beginning. That's weird. It's only happened a few times before. So I do apologize if I missed your question, but I'm just going in order as I see them.

01:40:58

Scott asked the question, would Pastor Anthony stand in fellowship with a Muslim in protesting an abortion clinic?

01:41:05

Well, I mean, what I'm doing, if I were to be out in front of an abortion clinic and a Muslim were, you know, we might be in the same location, but I wouldn't be doing it in fellowship with him.

01:41:16

Fellowship, according to scripture, I mean, just definitionally fellowship for Christians is between them and other

01:41:22

Christians. They're just, you know, our fellowship is, you know, we're all baptized by one spirit.

01:41:28

We're united to Christ, animated by the same spirit. And that's the fellowship. You know, there just doesn't extend beyond that.

01:41:35

But like, I mean, it's sort of like, you know, if some guy was beating up a girl, right?

01:41:44

And I'm running to tackle him and another Muslim's running at the same time to tackle him, right? And we both end up tackling him and all running into each other or something.

01:41:53

It's not because we're, you know, in fellowship with each other. You know, we just happen to be doing the right thing at the same time.

01:42:02

And, but he's doing it for all the wrong reasons, right? He's not doing it because it's fundamentally wrong to do that.

01:42:09

Although he might think it is, right? Because he's still an image bearer. But it's not really wrong in terms of his system.

01:42:14

In fact, I mean, truth be told, I mean, what if the guy was the man's, the woman's husband, according to the

01:42:20

Quran, a man can beat his wife. So if he's a Muslim doing that, he probably shouldn't have been.

01:42:25

You know, he probably should have found out, well, was that his wife? Because if it was, then he has the right to beat her. David asks the question, why do

01:42:34

Muslims see eating pork as a sin? Yeah, so the, because the

01:42:40

Quran says not to eat pork. And the funny thing here is that Muslims will often try to argue with Christians and say, look, it's in your own

01:42:48

Bible. You can't eat pork, right? And, you know,

01:42:53

Christians will point out that there's a difference between the dietary laws of the Old Testament and the new covenant that Christ ushers in, which, you know, abolishes those laws.

01:43:04

Ephesians 2 says those laws were abolished. Mark 7 says Jesus declared all foods clean. Acts 10,

01:43:09

Peter gets a vision where God says, you know, these things are clean. And there's a whole theology there.

01:43:16

That all means something. But the Bible teaches that all this pointed to something and that purpose was fulfilled.

01:43:23

And once it was fulfilled, that law is put out of gear. Now, Muslims will say, okay, so it's in the law.

01:43:29

And then they'll try and argue that Jesus and the apostles, or at least Jesus, still taught or upheld this law.

01:43:36

And, you know, we have to know our Bibles to be able to show them why that isn't the case and so forth. But here's the inconsistency, among other things.

01:43:46

Muslims will point to the law of Moses and they'll say, oh, look, see, this is what it says in the law of Moses and Jesus upheld Moses's law.

01:43:52

Yeah, but the Old Testament also says not to eat camel, but Muslims eat camels, right? In fact, they drink camel urine.

01:43:59

Well, the law doesn't say you can't drink camel urine, but I would think anybody with some common sense would just not.

01:44:04

But anyways, the law does say not to eat camel meat, along with not eating pig and other things, right?

01:44:11

But Muslims have no problem throwing off that law. So if they can say, Allah said, you no longer have to do this,

01:44:17

Christians can say same thing with eating pork, right? And, you know, as a

01:44:24

Christian, I bask in my new covenant privilege of eating bacon for breakfast if I want to. Yes, amen,

01:44:30

I agree. Owen's asked the question, these brothers hold to a confession, which

01:44:35

I just got here. Is there a specific confession you adhere to? Yeah, so as a Presbyterian minister,

01:44:41

I hold to the Westminster standard. So the Westminster confession of faith and the larger and shorter catechisms. Okay, cool.

01:44:48

I'm a Baptist and my personal theology, I'm in line with the 1689. So look at that.

01:44:54

Okay, very cool. Let's see here, this is a good question. Axe2Pentecostal asks, in Exodus 22, two through three, it says that there is no bloodshed if you kill a man that's breaking into your house before sunrise, but there is bloodshed if you kill him after sunrise.

01:45:10

Why is that? So I actually love this passage for a number of reasons, but I have to say,

01:45:16

I think a lot of people kind of get it wrong here. Ordinarily, and this is what

01:45:22

I think is probably what Axe2 is thinking here. This is how it's ordinarily understood. If somebody breaks into your house, you can kill them.

01:45:29

However, if the sun is up and you've killed the person, that's not okay, right?

01:45:36

That's not, I think, the point here. The principle in the law is that a person has the right to defend himself, right, or his family.

01:45:44

That's the scenario here, right? This person's breaking in and you're killing this person in the process of him breaking in.

01:45:50

However, you don't have the right to take vengeance. You don't have the right to take the law into your own hands. So if you're talking about this, the act itself, where the person is breaking into your home and you kill them, that's permissible according to the law of God.

01:46:03

However, if the sun rises, meaning it's now after the fact, right?

01:46:08

This person broke in, he's gone, the sun has risen, and you now go out and kill this person, now what you've done is taken the law into your own hands and that the law strictly forbids.

01:46:18

And it's the same thing that's actually taught in Romans 12 and 13. If you look at that section without stopping at the chapter breaks, right?

01:46:26

And in Romans 12 at the end, towards the end, it says, don't take vengeance,

01:46:34

Paul says, right? He says, because vengeance is mine, say it the Lord and I'll repay. But how does

01:46:39

Paul go on? Paul goes on to say, he starts talking about the civil magistrate.

01:46:45

And he says that the civil magistrate is the one to whom God has given the authority to execute his vengeance on lawbreakers.

01:46:52

So what Paul is saying there is that you don't have the right to play civil authority, right?

01:46:59

But that doesn't mean that vengeance can't be taken by human beings, it just has to be taken by the right human beings.

01:47:05

And so in the case of vengeance, that's what's proscribed by the law. It's not saying, as long as it's daylight, you can't kill an intruder.

01:47:13

I mean, that's pretty silly if you think about it. Guy comes in toting the gun and it's like, oh, wait a minute, is it sunrise?

01:47:20

Or I mean, you gotta look out the windows and decide if I should kill him or not. No, I mean, the point of the law is if he's in the act and you kill him, well, his blood's on his own head, he shouldn't have come into your house.

01:47:33

That's basically saying, shoot me, here I am. But if it's after the fact and you go play, what's that movie?

01:47:42

I forget, Death Wish. So with Charles Bronson? Charles Bronson, yeah. I mean, we all like those movies, don't we?

01:47:48

Because we still think the criminal deserves it. That's right. It's just not right that the person, but still, anyways.

01:47:56

Wow, those are oldies, man. Oldies but goodies. I think that's, I still have some questions, but I think we lost a bunch of questions in the comments.

01:48:06

I can't go back to the beginning and I don't know why. StreamYard has only done this a few times.

01:48:13

For the most part, I'm able to go right back to the beginning and kind of scan for questions. So I do apologize if while I ask my question and it takes a couple of minutes for Anthony to address it, you can feel free to re -ask your question if you didn't get it answered as we kind of come to a close here.

01:48:31

Okay, so there's another question here. I'll save my question till the end. Some use 1 Chronicles 29 20 to deny the deity of Christ.

01:48:39

They use it to say that prostration isn't only done before God, but can be done for mere men as well.

01:48:46

And so I suppose the context there is, when we try to defend the deity of Christ by appealing to the fact that people seem to worship him, that's really nothing remarkable.

01:48:55

In the Old Testament, you still have some similarities with respect to doing that with people who aren't God. How would you speak to that?

01:49:02

Yeah, what's interesting, and I know most people don't see this distinction in scripture, but it's very interesting.

01:49:11

On the one hand, you do have people prostrating to other individuals, particularly kings.

01:49:20

In the case of 1 Chronicles 29 20, it's not just another person. It is a person, human being, but it's the king that they're prostrating to.

01:49:29

But you also have other acts of prostration where it's just somebody paying deference to somebody else, acknowledging them.

01:49:40

Jacob bows to Esau, that kind of thing. But what's interesting is you never see somebody bowing to an angel where it's accepted.

01:49:53

I mean, it's always rebuffed. If it's a created angel, it's always rebuffed.

01:49:58

For example, in Revelation 19, Revelation 21, when John falls down at the feet of the angel, the angel says, don't do it, get up.

01:50:06

So there is this distinction in scripture where heavenly beings cannot be prostrated to, however, a human being can.

01:50:15

And part of the logic behind that is that, well, first of all, there's a fundamental difference between men and angels.

01:50:22

Men were made in the image of God, angels weren't. But secondly, there is not, generally speaking, going to be this confusion.

01:50:32

As soon as you're involved with heavenly creatures, prostration now takes on religious connotations.

01:50:41

And so it's interesting. And now, why do I bring this up? Because Jesus is portrayed in the book of Revelation, for example, as exalted to heaven.

01:50:52

He's at the father's right hand, and yet he's the object of worship together with the father.

01:50:59

And therefore, number one, it has to be noticed, we're talking about a heavenly person, a heavenly being.

01:51:06

Number two, he's receiving universal worship because it says every creature in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and on the sea.

01:51:16

The author, John, is being comprehensive here. He's receiving universal worship. And it has to be understood as identical to what's rendered to God, because it says they worship

01:51:28

God and the lamb. It's the same worship, right? All these creatures in heaven, and earth, and under the earth. And so the worship that's rendered to Jesus is clearly not the same sort of thing you're seeing in the case of other people being prostrated to.

01:51:41

Even in 1 Chronicles 29 .20, by the way, if you look at the context, there is a clear distinction made between the worship that's given to God and the worship that's given, or the prostration,

01:51:51

I should say, that's given to the king. In the context, the people offer sacrifices to the

01:51:56

Lord, but not to the king, right? And that's part of the whole context there. And God in the law says that you're not to offer sacrifices to anyone other than him.

01:52:07

So this is exclusive to God. Prostrating to people wasn't something that was exclusive. Other kings and men could be prostrated to.

01:52:15

So the exclusive worship that belongs to God is the sacrifices that are offered. And yeah, so.

01:52:23

Okay, very good. Thank you, that's very helpful. Brandon asks, does the doctrine of divine simplicity help in apologetics with Muslims?

01:52:30

Why don't you define what divine simplicity is? But I mean, if that's something you are knowledgeable in and you wanna expound upon, go for it.

01:52:38

If not, I know divine simplicity is ironic because it's not that simple. It can get pretty complicated, but.

01:52:45

You may have seen, and I'd recommend the author two of his books to you. I think it's, and.

01:52:51

Al -Azhal? No, his books are good, of course. All that is in God, those are good. But two books that have become pretty popular, and I think the author's name is

01:53:02

Barrett. And pardon me if I got this wrong because I'm just terrible with names, but he wrote a book called.

01:53:09

Yeah, I think so. Simply Trinity. Matthew Barrett, he wrote God's Word Alone, Divining Sola Scriptura, and Simply Trinity.

01:53:17

I actually might have him on here in September to talk about Simply Trinity. So I'm looking forward to that, he's an excellent scholar.

01:53:24

Yeah, so he also wrote a book on simplicity, relevant simplicity. And it's actually critical to the

01:53:35

Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. Okay. And when people hear what simplicity is, they might think, well, wait a minute, that seems like it's problematic for the

01:53:42

Trinity. But historically, if you know your Trinitarianism, you know this was critical to the early arguments of the

01:53:51

Christians in articulating their faith against the Aryan heresy, and even its later articulation against other errors like Unominism and other things.

01:54:04

Anyways, so the doctrine of divine simplicity is first of all, the idea that God's essence is one and indivisible.

01:54:16

So when it comes to the persons of the Trinity, we don't believe, first of all, we don't believe that the

01:54:21

Father, Son, and Spirit possess merely the same kind of essence, but it's different numerically from the essence of the other persons.

01:54:31

Kind of like, I have human nature, it's the same kind of nature that you have, right? We both have the same kind of nature, but my essence, my possession of humanity is numerically different than yours.

01:54:43

Your body is not my body, right? The rest of you is not what I'm made up of. We are numerically separate, okay?

01:54:50

We're not just distinct personally, right? We're not just distinct hypostases, right?

01:54:56

Instantiations of human nature. We are distinct, right? We're distinct instantiations.

01:55:03

When we say the persons of the Trinity are one in essence, we mean that the essence that belongs to the

01:55:10

Father wholly and entirely also belongs to the Son. It's not a separate, numerically separate essence.

01:55:18

It's the same essence. And it's not merely part of the essence. So it's not like they're a pie, right?

01:55:24

It's cut up into thirds, right? Each person possesses the whole undivided nature in its entirety.

01:55:31

And just to give you a text on that, one example would be Colossians 2 .9, where it says, in Christ dwells all the fullness of deity in bodily form.

01:55:38

There, notice, I mean, Paul piles up the phrases, right? He doesn't just say in Christ dwells deity, which would have been sufficient.

01:55:43

He uses a strong word there for saying he possesses Godhead, right? But he says he possesses the fullness of deity.

01:55:53

And he doesn't just say the fullness. He says all the fullness. He doesn't want you to miss this, right? All the fullness of deity dwells in Christ.

01:56:00

Christ possesses all there is to say about God, which means that he possesses all those things that we say about God's attributes and everything else.

01:56:12

There's everything that could be said about the Father in terms of his essence and being could be said of the Son. So the reason that's critical to Trinitarianism is because it establishes the full deity of the

01:56:24

Son. He's not merely a part of God. And it also holds intact monotheism.

01:56:31

This is why we say Christianity is truly monotheistic. The persons are not distinguished according to their essence, but according to their subsistence, their personal possession of the essence.

01:56:42

The Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Can I ask a question here?

01:56:49

So I've heard folks, and I guess because of how I've studied, I use this language. Would you agree with the definition of the

01:56:56

Trinity? It's a bit philosophical. They'll say something to the effect that the Trinity is the idea that there is one

01:57:02

God with three centers of consciousness, each which have the characteristics of personhood.

01:57:09

Now, would you agree with that definition? Of course, making some appropriate qualifications and definitions.

01:57:17

Well, I wouldn't use that language. There are people that do. I'm not gonna just say that people who say that are just heretics or wrong, but I mean, because there's ways to nuance that that I may not be taking into account.

01:57:30

But the classical way of saying, so one of the results of that would be to say that they have distinct wills, but classically will has been understood as a property of nature.

01:57:39

And so as to their, because the persons of Trinity share the same nature, they have one will, not three wills.

01:57:46

There's one will exercised by the person, right? In accordance with his own distinct personhood, but it's the same divine will, which means they have the same knowledge, the same, you know, there's no division there.

01:58:00

The three persons of Trinity act inseparably, right? Their operations are inseparable.

01:58:07

It's not as if the father's doing something, the son's doing something else. All three persons are always involved in and with the other persons.

01:58:13

There's no separation there. But so, I mean, the way

01:58:19

I would put it is simply classically we say what distinguishes them is their personal properties. The father is unbegotten, the son was begotten, the spirit proceeds.

01:58:28

So the father possesses the incommunicable personal property of paternity, the son, the incommunicable personal property of affiliation and the spirit, spiration.

01:58:37

And so when we speak of the beginning of the son and the procession of the spirit, we mean that the son is of the essence of the father.

01:58:44

So he's not less than the father. He's not separate from the father. It's the same God subsisting personally in a distinct way.

01:58:54

And now I haven't said everything that needs to be said about simplicity. One of the things that we're saying is when we talk about God's attributes is these are not separate parts of God.

01:59:08

It's not like, I have a toe and that's different from my index finger, my big toe and my index finger.

01:59:16

God is not distinct. And you can cut off my finger by the way. And I'd lose part of myself, but I'd still be me, right?

01:59:24

I wouldn't type as fast and other problems would enter into the picture. And if I lost my hands,

01:59:31

I wouldn't be a good Italian because we use our hands to talk. Yeah, that's right. But so we say that God is not made up of parts.

01:59:41

He's not a composite being. And now here is something that is, and I didn't get into it, but I could have.

01:59:48

We could have ramped things up in terms of critiquing Islam. As you know, and this is something

01:59:54

I learned early on that just really blew my mind, fascinated me, was I realized when

02:00:00

I was reading early philosophers that one of the questions that I had, because I knew historically that a lot of things that we all look to today as like these great things were all a result of the

02:00:14

Christian worldview, or at least in many significant ways. So for example, science is a product of Western Christianity, right?

02:00:21

It was generated out of a Christian approach to the world. Outside of Christianity, science didn't arise.

02:00:26

You have people doing things, inventing things, but there really is nothing called science that's taking place in these cultures because their worldviews were inimical to science.

02:00:36

And that goes for Islam, that goes for China, it goes for every other country. So I thought, well, that's interesting.

02:00:42

Christianity generated science. Christianity gave rise to all these different things. And one of the things that I thought was curious was, well, what about philosophy, right?

02:00:55

Philosophy didn't originate in a Christian context. And as I started reading philosophers, one of the thoughts that dawned on me was, well, wait a minute.

02:01:02

The reason it wouldn't have originated in a Christian context is because the sort of things that posed themselves to the

02:01:07

Greeks as problems weren't problems from the Jewish and Christian perspective.

02:01:12

And so the original problem that the Greek philosophers, the pre -Socratics in particular, were trying to grapple with was the problem with the one and the many, right?

02:01:23

So you have Thales coming along and he's trying to account for, you know, there's this incredible diversity, but if it's just diverse, there's no unity to it all, then it's all random and unintelligible, right?

02:01:37

It's unconnected and unrelatable and all of that. So there needs to be some kind of unity that ties it all together.

02:01:43

The problem that the pre -Socratics kept having is they were coming up with a unity that destroyed the diversity, right?

02:01:52

So Thales said all is water. Another philosopher comes along and says all is air, all is earth, all is fire, right?

02:01:58

Different philosophers. Anaximander saying Aperon, right? It's just this undifferentiated thing.

02:02:05

You know, we don't know what, but all these different theories. So they were trying to solve this problem. How do we account for unity and diversity in our experience?

02:02:13

Now think about the Christian worldview, right? And I'm not gonna get into the whole problem here because I don't think we have enough time, but I think you can at least begin to see from a

02:02:22

Christian perspective, do you think that everything is ultimately diverse? Is it ultimately many?

02:02:27

Is it ultimately one? And what is it the foundation of this world that is characterized by both unity and diversity?

02:02:37

Now, Muslims, it's funny because I can quote for you numerous sources from Muslims how they'll say, the remarkable unity in the world points to the truth of monotheism.

02:02:46

And I'm saying, okay, what does the diversity point to? Right, I mean, I'm thinking the world doesn't just show us remarkable unity.

02:02:52

It also shows a remarkable diversity. You need a worldview in terms of which makes sense out of that that doesn't destroy it, right?

02:03:00

That doesn't either reduce everything to a blank unity or to an unrelatable diversity.

02:03:07

And one author I'd recommend for people here if they wanna chase some of this down since we didn't get to it, but it's, gosh, it's been so many years, but -

02:03:18

What's the name of the book? The website, the website is berith .org, berith .org.

02:03:23

So the Hebrew word for covenant, B -E -R -I -T -H .org. And I think his last name is

02:03:29

Smith. And he has written a couple of books, but there's a great deal more on his website.

02:03:37

In fact, I'm looking at it real quick just to see if I see his name, but - And then we'll move to the next question.

02:03:43

We'll do like a rapid fire to get the last few questions here and wrap things up, but you're doing an excellent job. So thank you so much.

02:03:49

It's actually Ralph Smith. Oh, so, but the reason I brought this up is because, so here's the issue, back to simplicity.

02:03:58

We say that God is identical to his attributes. His attributes are not separate things. We distinguish between the persons, but we don't divide the essence.

02:04:07

The essence is one and undivided. That's why we can affirm that the Trinitarian persons are one God, right?

02:04:14

Now, Muslims, remember, they object to that. They don't really understand what that is because if you understood what

02:04:19

I just said, I've explained absolute simplicity. The persons of the Trinity, even if you don't like the idea, you think that's just gobbledygook.

02:04:27

What I've just defined there is monotheism. It's inescapably monotheism. You may not like that kind of monotheism.

02:04:33

You can ridicule that, but you certainly can't say that it's not monotheism. Now, here's the response now to the

02:04:39

Muslim. That kind of unity, that kind of monotheism goes well beyond what Muslims say, because if you talk to a

02:04:47

Muslim, they don't believe historically in the doctrine of divine simplicity. So for example, in the early history of Islam, there were actually, the earliest

02:04:59

Muslims are arguing for just a radical plurality.

02:05:05

I mean, it's just incredible in light of the fact that Muslims don't realize this today, even though it's their theology today, right?

02:05:12

Let me quickly here give you a rundown of the history. So the earliest

02:05:17

Muslims, the traditionists, believe that Allah has attributes. Those attributes are distinguishable from each other and from Allah's essence.

02:05:25

And so here's an example. The Quran, because it's viewed as Allah's speech, remember, Allah is transcendent.

02:05:31

He can't enter into his creation. The Quran then is Allah's speech has to be viewed as eternal.

02:05:37

But the Quran is not Allah. Sure. No Muslim would say the Quran is Allah. So now you have this eternal thing,

02:05:44

Allah's speech, in particular the Quran, that is not Allah, but is eternal.

02:05:51

So you have two eternals. What they say about Allah's speech, they say about all of his attributes.

02:05:57

So all of Allah's attributes are to be thought of along these lines. So you've got this radical plurality introduced into a system that boasts itself as being pure monotheism over against Christianity.

02:06:09

It almost looks like a sort of like, that they would exist in some kind of like platonic form. You have these abstractions that exist alongside

02:06:15

God. Yeah, I mean, it's, and most Muslims don't even, see, one of the difficulties is you've got to rush

02:06:22

Muslims up on some of this because they don't get some of their own thinking. But what happened was eventually in the eighth to 10th centuries, a group of Muslims known as the

02:06:33

Mu'tazili gained the ascendancy and these Muslims were influenced by Greek philosophy.

02:06:38

So they started picking holes in traditional Islam and saying, you guys are advocating something that doesn't make sense.

02:06:45

Your God can't be the God who created everything because your God is a composite being.

02:06:51

And if he's composite, then he himself is, he's just like his creation and everything else.

02:06:58

He couldn't be the origin of everything. And so they started saying

02:07:04

Allah has no attributes, but they ended up dying off, well, first of all, because they're judged heretical, but also because the way they did this ended up reducing

02:07:17

Allah to a blank. When we do this as Christians, and I don't, again, have the time to do all of this, but when we identify

02:07:24

Allah, or excuse me, God, with his attributes, we're not saying that God is this undefinable blank, right?

02:07:31

But that is what ended up being the case in the view of the Mu'tazili. Then they're eventually snuffed out and what came to ascendancy was the

02:07:40

Ash 'ari view, which is essentially like the early traditionist view in the sense that they affirm

02:07:46

Allah has multiple hypostatic attributes, so independently subsisting things that are distinguishable from Allah's essence.

02:07:55

Now, remember, even though we don't distinguish between the properties of the attributes of God, they're identical with his essence, we do distinguish between the persons, but the persons are not distinguished from the essence, but from each other, right?

02:08:10

Muslims are actually distinguishing these attributes from the essence and from each other. So you have a real plurality here, and they're claiming to be pure monotheists.

02:08:19

And this, if we could talk about the, if we took a while to talk about the one and the many problem, it vitiates any kind of philosophy that they could possibly do.

02:08:29

They don't have a solution to the one and many problem any better than the Greeks did. Well, by the way, I would love to have you back on again to just talk about the one and the many problem and all other areas that it touches and why it's an actual problem.

02:08:44

And I've heard people countlessly, they just say, oh, the one and the many problem is not an actual thing, you presuppositionalist made it up because you got your trinity.

02:08:52

I'm just like. Yeah, you know what's funny is, I mean, yeah, but here's part of why that's the case, why that might be the case.

02:09:01

One reason is, well, first you could have people that just aren't really familiar with the history of philosophy.

02:09:07

A second thing is, because the problem was so insoluble, people just started saying, well, we're not even gonna pay attention to that anymore.

02:09:16

I could quote for you, I've got, you know, like Anthony Flew back in, I still remember. Okay, here,

02:09:22

I want you to save that. Okay. Because I'm dead serious, I would love to have you on for that specific topic because I get countless questions on the, what's this whole issue of the one and the many?

02:09:36

Let's save that for a separate episode and tackle like a whole, you know, all the different angles.

02:09:42

I think that'd be excellent for people so that it doesn't get lost in this wonderful discussion. You know, I'll probably have to edit it and take this and make a separate video because it's so important.

02:09:50

So let's schedule a future time in the near future, hopefully, to talk about that specifically.

02:09:58

Well, real quick, I do wanna move quickly like lightning speed through the last set of questions and then we'll wrap things up as we're already at the two hour and 10 minutes, which

02:10:06

I don't mind, but if we go any longer, no one will watch the whole thing. So, okay, so real quick.

02:10:12

So Truth Defenders asks, what are some ways in which presuppositional apologetics is abused or misused by those claiming to be presuppositional?

02:10:19

I don't know if you might wanna. Well, so first of all, there is a number, there are,

02:10:27

I should say, a number of things that are called presuppositional and I'm not claiming that only one group gets the right to call itself presuppositional, but what we're talking about is

02:10:37

Vantillian, right? Vantillian presuppositionalism. But there are other versions and I'm not saying these other versions don't have useful things in them.

02:10:47

You know, I'm just making this observation that you have those who are more

02:10:53

Clarkian in their approach, then you have those that are more Schaeferian in their approach.

02:10:58

There are other things that are called presuppositional and I wouldn't say that they're abusing, because if they're being true to Schaefer, then it's legitimately

02:11:07

Schaeferian presupposition, whatever. But I wouldn't agree with some of those, some of the elements that enter into those differences.

02:11:16

But as far as like the kind of thing I'm talking about, I don't like, one thing I don't like is when people just repeat things like a mantra, like, you know, you can't account for reason, you can't account for reason.

02:11:30

Now, I mean, that is part of what we're saying, but I mean, this idea that you're gonna go out on the streets and just keep saying that to somebody and every time they say something, you say, you can't even account for reason, you can't even account for reason.

02:11:40

To me, I don't think the unbeliever knows what you're talking about unless you first tell them, right? And you explain it to them and you reason through it with them.

02:11:48

And just repeating that sort of thing, I think just makes them leave there thinking, yeah, this guy's just, you know, blowing hot air.

02:11:56

That's one thing, I'm not saying, I mean, some people do that more than others.

02:12:03

I think there are some people who think that presuppositionalism is just saying this is what the

02:12:09

Bible says and therefore it's true. Now, obviously as a Christian, the Bible saying it means it's true to me, I'm a

02:12:14

Christian, but the Bible that's true and tells me these things doesn't tell me to reason like that, right?

02:12:19

It tells me, so yeah, there's any number of ways people could abuse it.

02:12:26

And we don't decry a reason. I mean, someone here has, it says reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has,

02:12:32

Martin Luther. But by the way, we do not denounce reason and I would argue neither did Martin Luther.

02:12:38

There's actually a qualifier with respect to his view of reason. There's a particular kind of reason he's referring to, but often people will throw these quotes around to try and demonstrate maybe kind of an anti -intellectual spirit within the reform tradition.

02:12:53

I actually know truth defenders and you seem to be familiar with Luther's, the background of Luther's thought there too.

02:13:01

And we would both agree with the point that he's making there, reason being a whore. I mean, here

02:13:07

Luther is of course talking about man assuming himself to be autonomous and sort of lording it over God's revelation and dictating to it what.

02:13:20

So, I mean, one of the things that really bothers me just when I see people that are philosophically inclined and engaged in apologetics is that they often try to determine what

02:13:30

Christianity is philosophically and then having determined that, then their defense is shaped to that as opposed to the

02:13:39

Bible being, it used to be said in this, just throughout the Christian tradition that philosophy was theology's handmaiden, right?

02:13:52

Theology is the queen of the sciences and philosophy was to be in the service of theology.

02:13:58

And so I actually like, I'm gonna use a Jehovah's Witness thing here real quick.

02:14:04

They have a book called Reasoning from the Scriptures. I love the title. It actually comes right out of the Bible where it talks about Paul reasoning from the scriptures with people.

02:14:11

However, when you read the book, everything in between that is the exact opposite, right? It's not reasoning from the scriptures, it's reasoning to the scripture.

02:14:18

They determine a priori what is true in many cases and then make the scriptures conform to that.

02:14:24

So for example, if you look at their treatment of John 1 ,1, it'll say something like, it doesn't mean the word was

02:14:30

God. You can't mean that even though it says that because it also says in the same verse, the word was with God.

02:14:35

How could he be God if he was with God? Well, my answer is, well, it says both of those, right? And so what you need to be asking now is what does this mean?

02:14:45

How do I make sense out of all of this? Not which one of these am I gonna accept because I don't see how they both go together, right?

02:14:50

And that's what they do. They jettison one to affirm the other. And I know of only too many people who are philosophically inclined who, for example, they're trying to discover their view of the soul by reading these philosophical works where it's talking about one or another version of dualism or emergentism, right?

02:15:12

Where the soul emerges in some sense from the body, all these different things. I'm thinking, go to the

02:15:17

Bible, find out what the Bible teaches, and then work out in terms of what it says, how you would articulate and defend this sort of thing.

02:15:27

You don't dictate to the Bible what its theology is. And again, I mean, there's another, just one other example real quick.

02:15:33

I know we're trying to be quick. I guess I'm not quick, but I hear people so many times saying things like,

02:15:40

Christians are putting a stumbling block before Muslims. They shouldn't be talking about the Trinity and arguing that this is something that people have to believe.

02:15:49

Just focus on other stuff and so forth. And I'm thinking, okay, what kind of sense does that make? If you're not converting them to Christianity, right?

02:15:57

I mean, if you just start paring down Christianity, so now that it's palatable to the natural man, it's not

02:16:03

Christianity you're giving them. You're giving them something that they can accept without really becoming Christian.

02:16:08

Right, I mean - That's the whole mere Christianity sort of approach. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, and so, I mean, at least

02:16:14

Lewis would affirm the Trinity or something like that. But I mean, it's like, yeah, it's even more than that. Right, I mean, I hear people saying ditch the

02:16:20

Trinity, ditch the incarnation. These things all prevent Muslims from becoming Christian. I'm thinking, well, if you ditch them, they're not gonna become

02:16:26

Christian. They're gonna become this newly defined religion that you've just made, right? And so I just, you know, so with Luther, we would all agree, we would say, you know, that reason presuming itself to dictate to divine revelation, what it says and all that.

02:16:43

And he's also thinking of reason there as, you know, man's thinking process as a fallen sinner, right, all of this is affected.

02:16:53

And he's not talking about logic per se, for one. Now I have one last question.

02:17:00

And this is my question. I just thought about it just now. I thought it would be cool. And by the way, we've been going two hours and 17 minutes is completely fine, by the way, cause

02:17:09

I love to break these up and make shorter videos and people really appreciate the short snippets. Then of course they have the link to watch the rest of this awesome discussion.

02:17:18

I think you've given us a lot to think about and definitely opened up some new avenues to research and to become more familiar with.

02:17:25

So thank you. But my first part of the question is, are you a

02:17:30

Calvinist? Number one. Oh, yes. I didn't know you wanted me to answer that. No, that's number one.

02:17:36

Now, number two, there are people who will equate Calvinistic determinism with the view of determinism that's typically held by Muslims.

02:17:45

What is the difference between, say, a Muslim conception of like divine sovereignty and causation and the reform perspective?

02:17:54

Cause I've actually heard some noted Christians who say, oh, they're practically the same. So perhaps you could differentiate that for us.

02:18:03

Yeah. So this is ignorance twice over. It's ignorance with respect to the Christian position and also with respect to the

02:18:10

Muslim position. A lot of people are just sort of captivated by words.

02:18:17

And so if you have similarities in the case of the verbal expressions that are used for the, oh, they must mean the same thing.

02:18:23

That all goes back to what we're talking about. A system of fact, the philosophy of fact has a whole lot to do with what is meant by the words that one uses, the facts that one talks about.

02:18:33

And in this case, in the Islamic system, when they talk about Qadr or predestination or something like that, one of the differences, and this isn't just me saying this again,

02:18:45

I mean, I've read the Islamic sources. I'm familiar with standard authorities in this subject.

02:18:51

For example, anybody could go read the writings of Samuel Zwamer. Samuel Zwamer was called the apostle to Islam.

02:19:00

He wrote over 50 books on Islam, one year for all 50 years that he spent as a missionary among Muslims.

02:19:07

So we're talking here about somebody that knows his Islamic theology. He lived in a Muslim context for 50 years.

02:19:13

He wrote a book on Islam every year of his missionary labors among them. Other Muslims like Raymond Lowell, they still don't hold the count.

02:19:22

He's significant, but doesn't hold the candle to Zwamer. Zwamer is responsible for more missionary activity among Muslims than anybody else in human history.

02:19:30

So he's a significant figure. He wrote a book called the Muslim Doctrine of God. And I say

02:19:36

Muslim because that's how it's normally translated here, M -O -S -L -E -M whereas Muslims will say

02:19:42

Muslim. But he wrote a book and in there, Zwamer is reformed.

02:19:48

He wrote a whole book on their doctrine of God. And then he also has a contrast with their position on predestination and the

02:19:57

Christian concept of predestination. And if you've read, for example, Lorraine Bettner, there's a good little section in Lorraine Bettner's book where he deals with the difference between Islam's version of this and Calvinism.

02:20:10

And he even quotes Zwamer at certain points in there. Okay. That's his book on predestination, the reformed?

02:20:17

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So one thing is that in the Calvinistic system, we say that God ordains the ends as well as the means.

02:20:26

So we believe in God's ultimate causation. We also believe that he uses secondary agents.

02:20:34

Islam doesn't really have that concept, not in any kind of consistent fashion. So for example, here's the illustration.

02:20:41

And I think I picked this particular one up from Bettner. But Bettner says, imagine you've got a ship and on the ship, you've got a group of people who are

02:20:49

Christians, you've got a group of people who are Muslims and somebody falls overboard. And everybody looks over the edge and they're like, hey, he's over there drowning, you know?

02:21:00

And so somebody yells out, somebody needs to get in there and save him. And the

02:21:05

Muslims all look around, they're like, why? They're like, you know, if Allah ordained that he'd be saved, he'll be saved, right?

02:21:10

Whether we jump in or not. And the Christian says, well, if God ordained that he'd be saved, then he's ordained that somebody jump in there and save him, right?

02:21:18

I mean, God uses means, God uses agents and perhaps I'm that agent, right? And so the

02:21:23

Christian jumps in and saves him, the Muslims all walk. But very simple analogy, but the idea is that in the

02:21:28

Islamic system, the end will happen irrespective of the means, virtually in their thinking.

02:21:34

So there is this kind of, you know, fatalism. There is no secondary agency.

02:21:41

And that's one difference. Another thing is, and this might be a little more sophisticated, but if you, when you think of,

02:21:57

I mean, how does, when we say that God ordains things, we're not saying that he overrides a person's will, meaning they're forced to do something contrary to their desires, their nature, that sort of thing.

02:22:09

So the question is, how does God ordain and bring to pass that these people do what he wants them to do? Because we are saying that he has determined that and he brings it to pass, but we're also saying that they choose these things in accordance with their own desires.

02:22:21

And this is what they wanted to do. This is what they do. This is what they're culpable for and all of that. Well, one of the things that scripture tells us that I think is analogous here is if you think about water, the nature of water is to seek a level.

02:22:34

In scripture, it often speaks of God creating boundaries that the ocean can't overpass.

02:22:39

If God were to remove the boundaries, it would overflow. That's the nature of water. Well, the picture of God in scripture with respect to human beings is that God in his common grace is restraining people from doing all the evil they would do, right?

02:22:52

You have a picture of that, for example, in Romans 1, where it speaks of people who have the truth about God, but are suppressing it.

02:22:59

And as a result of that, God is giving them up more and more to the desires of their sinful heart.

02:23:05

So he gives this person over to a reprobate mind to do unnatural things, right?

02:23:10

Men with men, women with women is what Paul is talking about in the context there. So one of the things we would say is because the human heart is depraved, man would do more evil than he does do.

02:23:21

And he doesn't do as much as he would do because God is restraining him from doing it. All God has to do is to remove some of those restraints and a person will naturally do certain things.

02:23:33

And so within that kind of thinking, you can see how a person is acting freely without it destroying their will, right?

02:23:47

They're acting in accordance with their sinful nature and God is the one who hems them in behind and before and all of that.

02:23:54

That's one aspect of this. I'm not pretending to have given a comprehensive treatment of it all.

02:24:00

But I do think that - But there's a significant difference between what a Calvinist would say and when someone flippantly just says, oh,

02:24:06

Calvinism and Islam are the same in that regard. Yeah. It's just not the case. And by the way, I mean, it's not even appropriate because typically it's non -Calvinists who are saying this, right?

02:24:19

In Christian circles, there are debates between Calvinists, right? There are debates with semi -Pelagians,

02:24:28

Pelagians, Armenians, even evangelical Armenians. There's different kinds of Armenians, right?

02:24:33

And all these, this whole spectrum of things. Islam has that too.

02:24:39

I mean, it's not as if all Muslims would read the Quran in terms of a strict fatalism. I think that's the right view, but I mean, as far as what

02:24:47

Islam teaches, but they have the same thing going on in Islam. So I could just as well turn around and say, hey, you guys are just advocating what

02:24:54

Muslims argue because there are Muslim Armenians out there. There are Muslim semi -Pelagians out there, right?

02:25:00

Yusuf Ali, foremost Muslim, wrote a wildly popular translation and commentary on the

02:25:06

Quran. He constantly talks about man's limited free will, you know, where he talks about man having a measure of free will and all this stuff.

02:25:14

So he's sort of like a semi -Pelagian, you know? So those sorts of arguments just aren't good.

02:25:20

That's super, that's super interesting, actually. Thank you so much, Anthony. This was awesome. I mean, there's just, you're like literally an encyclopedia.

02:25:28

So it's a lot of information going on there and it's super helpful. So I very much appreciate your time.

02:25:35

Would you be willing to come back maybe this weekend, not this week, but maybe we can schedule this week a future date where we can talk more specifically about the one and the many.

02:25:44

Would you be willing to do that? Yeah, definitely willing to come back. We'll have to check schedules here. Sure, absolutely.

02:25:50

And I'm looking forward to speaking with you at the conference there too. So I'll have the opportunity to meet you face -to -face, which is pretty cool.

02:25:58

Well, those who have been listening, thank you so much for sticking along. We still have a pretty decent audience and I appreciate the listeners.

02:26:05

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02:26:13

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02:26:22

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02:26:33

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02:26:40

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