Various Islamic Arguments Reviewed and Refuted

I'd like to respond to some of the comments that are made by some Islamic apologists online.

One fairly recently, it was actually posted right as I got to London for the debates

I was doing there. And then another that was just pointed out to me in YouTube email that I had not seen, it was posted back in February of 2008.

And each one of these will illustrate, I think, some of the problems we have with the standard

Muslim apologists who are active in the internet, and especially their utilization of information and other people's videos.

I've never quite figured out why you have to take someone's video and sort of play games with it, things like that.

One of the two did that. But also the attempt, it's very odd to me to watch

Muslims borrowing bad Jehovah's Witness arguments. They accept them uncritically, and then it just doesn't really work if you're a

Muslim to use Jehovah's Witness arguments. But I guess it's the best they can find, that's what they're going to throw out there, and hope that something sticks.

They can't possibly believe that someone who actually knows what Jehovah's Witnesses believe and responded to them and debated them is going to be impressed by any of this kind of stuff.

But anyway, sometimes it's difficult for me to understand exactly why some people do what they do if their ultimate standard is not to be absolutely truthful in all things and consistent in all things.

I've never quite figured that out. But then as it may, this first video basically asks the question, how do we deal with the issue of the

Incarnation? And it tries to contrast me with Gary Miller. Now I have been struck in listening to Gary Miller how much of a rationalist he is.

And I guess Islam would work for a mathematician, even though I've heard many Muslims in their questions of him during the audience questions questioning how focused he is upon just factual argumentation rather than actually also dealing with the spiritual side of things.

So I know there are some Muslims that have some problems with the way he approaches things, or approached things, since he's not any longer active.

But be that as it may, many times I've listened to Gary Miller make the argument that, well, you can say

God became man, but what do these words mean? Well, I'm sorry, but Gary Miller's ignorance of what he claims was his former faith is not in and of itself an argument.

Let's look at what this video had to say, and we'll drop in and make comments at various points along the way.

We were told Hosea 11 .9 and Numbers 23 .19 says God is not a man. Of course not. It is not our claim that God has eternally been a man.

It is our claim that the eternal God who created all things entered into his own creation. I want to ask a question of my opponent this evening.

Will you stand before us and say it is beyond the power of Allah to enter into that which he created?

Will you say that? Yes or no? That the incarnation does not involve an admixture of anything.

It does not involve anything that causes the divine to change. God took on human flesh.

And I say to you that if you deny to God the ability to take on human flesh, upon what basis?

The first basis is logic. Hmm. Uh, exactly how does that work?

It's fascinating to me. When I was in London and I was on the radio program with Abdullah Al -Andalusi, he pointed people to an

Islamic rationalist's site. And what is an

Islamic rationalist? How can any supernaturalist be a rationalist?

Hopefully everybody understands you can be a supernaturalist and think rationally, but to be a rationalist is to elevate human predication and human thought to a level that is denied by any supernatural religion

I know of. It certainly would be in accepting the Quran as a supernatural revelation.

How does a rationalist come to that conclusion? Again, I'm looking for that elusive, consistent

Muslim who can remain a Muslim while criticizing my beliefs. The first basis is logic.

So are we being told that there's something illogical in the statement that the creator of all things can join to himself a human nature without changing his essential nature, without ceasing to be

God, and without turning that human nature into deity? Is that what you're saying is illogical?

Why? I've never heard an answer as to why. I've heard all sorts of misrepresentations of it.

I've heard all sorts of bluster, but when it comes to actually doing what you need to do to demonstrate something's illogical, there are certain ways of doing this.

If you've taken a logic class, you know there are certain ways of demonstrating that a statement is illogical.

What is illogical about that statement? Can't tell me. Gary Miller's not going to tell us. We're about to hear

Gary Miller, and Gary Miller's going to talk about taking something that's circular and turning it into a cube.

We're not saying that. We're not saying that God was God and ceased to be God, became man, and then became

God again, or anything of the kind. And I said that in my clip, and it's not disheartening, because I recognize it requires the work of the

Spirit of God in someone's heart to understand these things, but it is a little bit frustrating when

Islamic apologists simply refuse to hear what you're saying, because they reject it.

Since I reject it, I'll refuse to understand why you believe it. That's a problem, and it results in all sorts of, well, wasted bandwidth, to be perfectly honest with you.

Because while you might continue to encourage your own followers, and maybe convert a few confused false

Christians to someone who actually knows their faith, you're not accomplishing anything, and I thought that's why you did apologetics.

That's why I do apologetics, but maybe that's not why everybody does apologetics, and I need to keep that in mind.

So the first base is logic. No, not quite. But next we're going to hear from Gary Miller, and you'll see where we're going with this.

About, what would it be, 500 years ago, there was a Jew in Europe, Spinoza was his name,

Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher, and he wrote a great deal, and he made the same point that people were making 500 years before him.

He was frustrated when the Christians would come to him and say, God became man. He would say, what do you mean?

God became man. See, I know what is God, and I know what is man, and I can imagine that what was

God turned into a man. He's not God anymore. He used to be God. Now he's a man.

I can understand that. That at least makes some sense. When he took on human form, he didn't cease being deity, but he took on a true human nature.

He said, God became man, but he was still God, and that causes a problem.

You see, if I have a ball of clay, and I squeeze it, and I put corners on it, and I make it into a cube,

I can tell you, you see, the ball became a cube. But I can't tell you, don't be fooled, it's still round.

See if it was one thing, it became another thing, it's not that thing anymore. We pointed out that the

Christian perspective is Jesus wasn't just a God or a man, and that to miss the fact of the union that exists in Jesus Christ, that he is the

God -man, is to not really address the issue of Christianity at all. What Muslims need to understand, and obviously what a lot of Christians need to understand as well, is something called the hypostatic union.

Now so far, I must admit, the clips have actually spoken for themselves. They have answered the questions.

They've demonstrated that Gary Miller's presentation was not a presentation that really is sound in any way.

It is ignoring the very distinctions that we make. Distinctions that, by the way, are made in the

New Testament. The term hypostatic union is not a New Testament term, but please try to explain to me the

Philippians chapter 2 without using such terminology. Terminology that accurately represents the biblical categories is itself appropriate terminology.

And so, so far, up to this point, I think that if you listened carefully to what

I said, both in the debate clip first, and then in the video clips that have been inserted since then,

I've demonstrated that Dr. Miller's concerns and his frequently repeated confusion on this subject goes back to a basic ignorance on his part, and that his objections are not sound objections.

So far, so good. Now this particular term, the hypostatic union, might sound a little bit confusing, but it really isn't.

It is simply the statement that the eternal second person of the Trinity, the one who is called

Son, who has eternally been the Son, who never came into existence at a point in time as the

Son, but has always borne the relationship of Son to the Father, even in eternity past, even outside of time itself, the eternal second person of the

Trinity took on humanity, and he was therefore the God -man. They solved that by putting a label on it.

They called it diophysitism. It doesn't prove anything. It means two natures. Diophysitism. That's an old trick.

When you don't know the answer, put a label on it. In ancient Greece, the Greeks, twenty -five centuries ago, came to their scientists with a question.

They'd observed that you eat food, it goes through the system, and some of it comes out. They wanted to know which part of what

I take in is the part that feeds me, because evidently I don't need all of it, you see. Which is the nutritive faculty of the food?

And the scientists didn't know, so they said, the part that feeds you is the nutritive faculty of the food.

It's like saying the part that feeds you is the part that feeds you. That's all. It's a label. It doesn't answer anything.

I think most people would be somewhat amazed that Dr. Miller is known by most Muslims as this very insightful, scholarly lecturer, given that he just gave a complete non -answer.

It is not merely putting a label on something. Anyone who listened to my own explanation knows that I didn't just put a label on something.

I explained the relationship of divine nature and human nature. And I called that the hypostatic union.

And I did not just simply say, well, it is because it is. And I think

Dr. Miller should know that, but given that we can't seem to access him any longer, we can't really find out.

But the fact of the matter is, again, we go to a scripture that comes long before Islam arises, and that scripture says to us that the one who existed eternally, through whom all things came into existence, entered into human flesh.

He did not cease to be God, and yet he took on a human nature. Now you may object to putting a label on that if you don't want to be able to discuss it or talk about it, whatever your reasons might be, but that's not the same thing as doing what the

Greeks did in Mr. Miller's example. And so if the purpose of our

Islamic apologist friend here is to present Miller's material as a rebuttal of my own, he has so far failed completely.

Up to this point, there has been not one bit of logical rebuttal offered. Simply saying, well, he's put a label on it, so he couldn't answer it.

No, his ignorance of the answer does not mean that we don't have an answer. We have given an answer.

I think anyone listening to this video, listening to what I have been quoted as saying, demonstrates that we have.

So, so far, again, no rebuttal has been provided. So far the debate, as provided by our

Muslim friend, is going quite well. He was not half God, half man.

He was not 50 % God and 50 % man. He is the God -man because this is the second person of the

Trinity taking on a human nature. We explained this before when we looked at Philippians chapter 2, or John chapter 1, verse 14.

He takes on that human nature. And that's what makes him the God -man.

So when we talk of Jesus the Christ, we are talking about one person with two natures.

One person with two natures, divine and human. The natures are not intermingled so the divine ceases to be divine, or the human ceases to be human.

They are not mixed together like you would take, for example, two kinds of liquid and place them into a beaker and they mix together and their colors change and now there is a new third type of substance that has never existed before.

No, that is not what we are talking about. There is no intermingling so that either of the natures is changed.

So when you keep this in mind, then you recognize Didot's question was based upon ignorance of this vital

Christian affirmation. Jesus died as the God -man, not merely as a God or merely as a man.

And you see, the importance of this is that union is vital to the doctrine of the atonement.

What happened on the cross was the death of the God -man and that, of course, is what

Ahmed Didot has completely missed in his studies of Christianity. Now notice something that I think is important in this summary that is provided.

A large portion of the definitions that we have worked out over time are in the negative.

We are not saying this, we are not saying this, we are not saying this. And that is a good observation and I congratulate our

Islamic apologist friend on making it. It is, of course, very similar to what

God does. When he says, I am God and not man, I do not lie,

I do not do this, that, and the other thing, he does provide positive assertions about his being the creator of all things, so on and so forth, as evidence of his deity, but definitions require both.

The positive affirmation of Jesus' perfect humanity, the positive affirmation of his perfect deity, but then the negative denial of, for example, the change of deity into something less than deity, or the intermixture so that the human nature becomes something other than a human nature, so on and so forth.

You need both. If you are going to define a border, you have to say it is this and it is not that.

That is the only way a definition, a line, can be drawn in any way, shape, or form. And so, most of the time, the reason

I have to emphasize the negatives, especially in responding to Muslims, is because so many times the

Muslims are misrepresenting the doctrine, partly out of ignorance, partly because their own sacred scriptures misrepresent the doctrine, and therefore they are forced into a position of misrepresentation by the errors of the

Quran and the ignorance of Muhammad. So you have to engage in the negative aspect of saying it is not this, we are not saying this, because of the nature of the situation that we face.

Now notice at this point, our Islamic writer, our Islamic video producer, whatever, just blows a gasket.

All he does is repeat the vacuous, empty words of Gary Miller, doesn't interact with anything

I've said, just demonstrates, you know what, I don't understand that, or I just don't want to hear what you say, and so therefore it's an empty label and that's all you've done.

I didn't hear that. This is not argumentation. This is just throwing your hands up in the air and saying, well, since that's different than what

I believe, it must really be wrong. This isn't argumentation. This is just admitting you don't have any meaningful argumentation to make.

Neither did Gary Miller. And yet if you just say it with enough confidence, then people will believe you.

I'm very thankful that the Muslims are taking these explanations, getting them out there, because people who are given ears to hear and eyes to see will go, wait a minute, they're not even responding to this stuff, they're just, that's not a, just put, to slap the label, label on it, and dismiss it isn't an argument.

Exactly. That's the whole point. And so the end of this video is some odd clip from some

Ahmad Didat debate, and it's interesting because it does roll right into the next video

I want to look at from Islam Studio, or whatever the nick online was, that also has to do with the issue of Ahmad Didat.

So here he's debating someone, and he asks them what the word for God is in Greek, and he gives them the word for God in Hebrew.

He says Elohim instead of Thaos, and the funny thing is, Didat knows that the Greek word is

Thaos, but he couldn't decline it, decline in the original language, of course, means to give it in its various forms, in the cases, in the case of a noun.

He couldn't, I've documented his ignorance of this fact, he could not read the language. And so to hear the people clapping, and to know this person thinks, ah, here's a wonderful example of where a

Muslim demonstrated a Christian was wrong, just illustrates the surface level nature of so much of what passes for Islamic apologetics.

Here's the clip. And now

I pray unto God the Father, and I pray that the

Holy Spirit will manifest His power to convince and create evidence, and I pray that Jesus will be glorified tonight.

I pray in the precious name of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, Amen.

In the Greek language, what is the word for God? Can you help me, sir?

Elohim. No, sir, that's Hebrew. Now, this next video was posted in February of 2008,

I did not see it until today, at least I don't remember seeing it until today. Anyway, it is drawing from a video where I was documenting the errors in Ahmed Didat's presentation on John 1 .1.

And what had happened was, I had put up a video, and I had not even noticed that Didat was as wrong as Didat was.

Didat, I had seen the word tha 'an, and in my mind, just automatically, I put the right article with it, ta 'an tha 'an.

And Didat didn't even have that right. And so, Sam Shamoon had pointed this out to me.

What this video tries to do, in essence, is argue not only, again, borrowing bad

Jehovah's Witness argumentation to come up with a bad translation of John 1 .1,

but even beyond that, it then tries to present, unfortunately, demonstrates gross ignorance of the issue by going to Sam's writings and say, this is where Jesus identifies

Hotheos, and you said about John 1 .1 that it couldn't be Hotheos, because then Hotheos and all the

Logos, and the person obviously has no idea what I was saying, sadly, and he has documented his ignorance on YouTube.

He skips the context of what I was saying, once again, and as a result, presents just a number of errors.

And so, let's take a look at it, and demonstrate where he's missed the context, doesn't understand the language, then he runs off and tries to do something that I really think the

Muslims themselves should be the first ones to tell people, don't go this direction. He tries to go off to the

Coptic, and that's become the big thing over the past year and a half or so, as Jehovah's Witnesses have decided to try to do this, they've come up with this idea of, well, this certain rendering, a certain manuscript, not even all manuscripts, but a certain manuscript, it could be understood as not having a definite article.

This is about as relevant for Muslims as my coming along and saying, oh, here's a translation of the

Arabic Quran 200 years later, and it says this at this point, and that overthrows the original

Arabic, and so you should just believe what the translation says, not what the Arabic says. Yeah, I'm sure that all the

Muslims will accept that, but that's what they want us to do. Double standards and hypocrisy is not the substance of apologetics, my friends.

I must call my Islamic apologist friends to a higher level.

If you're going to try to address this stuff, don't just run off to Google and think that everything you find is going to work.

You folks, many of you folks, there are some of you who don't, a few, but many of you folks, you find it on the

Internet, and it sounds good, so you throw it into the game, even if it completely refutes your own religion, and you don't even seem to think along those lines.

You've so much compartmentalized Christianity over here and Islam over here that you live in two different worlds, and many people, my friends, see that the fact you do that refutes your own truth claims.

Until you recognize that, you're not really going to be in the fight. Not going to be in the fight at all.

Let's take a look at this video. And put it in the proper Greek form. I didn't even criticize him for the main element of his actual error.

Sam Shamoon. Thank you, Sam. A point is out to me. And so now that I see it right now, Sam Shamoon.

Thank you, Sam. A point. Sam Shamoon. Thank you, Sam. A point. Sam Shamoon. Thank you,

Sam. A point. If both had the article or neither had the article, then you'd be making an equation between logos and theos, which would make

John 1 .1 contradictory with itself. It would be saying that all the logos is all of theos.

All of theos is all of the logos. That is not what John is going to be teaching because the logos is going to become flesh,

John 1 .14, and it is not the father who becomes flesh. It is the son who becomes flesh.

Now, note something that the careful viewer would have noted. I'm only talking about those situations where you have an equative situation in the

Greek. That is, you have a copulative verb in John 1 .1c.

And so you're talking about a situation where you have a possibility of a predicate nominative and the subject determining which one is which, how that copulative verb is functioning.

I gave that information, but evidently our reviewer doesn't read the language, and so he's not aware of this.

And so instead of accepting it at face value, he's now going to run off to Sam's website.

And every single example he's going to show you is not parallel in any way, and hence is completely meaningless to the actual situation in John 1 .1.

And so this is a completely bogus argument. I wish I had seen it ten months ago when it was posted.

Completely bogus argument, but here it is from one of our Islamic apologist friends. It's flesh.

Well, it's something you won't return.

Hey, little girl, take me off the shelf. Because it's hard having fun playing with yourself.

Watch you browse through the whole selection. Shake those hips in my direction. A pretty package you never did see.

Take me home and then unwrap me. Shop around, my little darling, I've got to be.

The ladies join. The ladies join. The ladies join.

Hey, little girl, look for a sale. Test drive this

American male. It's going to take cash to fill my tail.

So let's crack open your piggy bank. Or, Islam Studio needs to go back and try

First Year Greek again. Because he just blew it. Every example he used, he even, for example, refers to the

Granville Sharp constructions. You know, I apologize if sometimes I get a little frustrated with these folks.

But when I criticize an

Islamic writer, and they have published on the subject, I'm going to get their books, and I'm going to accurately represent them.

I have written about Granville Sharp's construction, which was found there in 2 Peter 1 .1 and Titus 2 .13, in at least two different books, and on the web.

For years, I've been very clear on these things. And so, to ignore all of that, and just grab this stuff, don't do your homework, don't show any type of respect, not only for the people you're criticizing, but simply for the truth.

Even if you don't like me, even if you don't like Sam Shamoon, fine. Shouldn't just a dedication to the truth keep you from doing this kind of thing?

I would think so. You know, this is not some obscure little issue. This is not some side thing.

I mean, how many videos have I produced explaining this? And then you cut that part out, and then use something else to make this kind of argumentation.

Once again, just so that people understand. What I said in John 1 .1c was that when you have, there it's ein, the imperfect form of I, me.

When you have a copulative verb, so you have the subject, and then in English you'd be like, is, was, okay?

And then you have what's called a predicate nominative. In the original language, if you use an article before both nouns, then it becomes, the sentence becomes an equation, that clause becomes an equation to where the one is being said to be identical to the other.

Or if neither has the article, then the same thing can be true. That's only the case in John 1 .1,

or any other place where you have to use a form of I, me, or something like that.

None of the texts that the gentleman used, and by the way, that music was his. I don't know where these guys get their musical taste.

I'll leave that to you to decide. But anyway, none of the examples were grammatically or syntactically parallel in any way, and therefore the entire presentation from any scholarly basis is completely bogus.

It has no meaning whatsoever. At this point, our video producer goes all text and all music, and again, goes off to some

Jehovah's Witness websites, quotes Murray Harris out of context, ignoring

Murray Harris' actual full discussion of the, he quotes

Murray Harris saying, well, grammatically alone, then you could render it the word was a

God. I just don't know why people do this kind of stuff.

It is so bogus. You are so repelling anyone who knows what they're talking about from your faith when you do this.

You really are. When are you all going to get the clue on this that you might want to step up your arguments a little bit?

Because grammar alone, he then goes on to discuss context and syntax.

Anybody who knows anything about language knows that you can isolate any phrase, for example, in the

Quran, ignore the context, and come up with all sorts of weird things about it. No one translates language by grammar alone.

You do grammar and syntax and context. So this kind of thing, and then, like I said, runs off to a

Coptic manuscript and tries to build a case based on, well, this

Coptic manuscript could be understood as John 1 -1, and since it's like the Alexandrian manuscripts, and the

Alexandrian manuscripts are very good, folks, every single Greek manuscript in the

Alexandrian tradition reads the same as John 1 -1. It doesn't tell you that, because,

I'm sorry, with all due respect to this individual, you don't understand what you're talking about. You're grabbing something from up here, and something from here, and something here, and you're throwing it together, and no meaningful scholar would do that.

And I just have to go, why? Why? Why is, again, anyone who's watched these videos knows, this is about the 12th time

I've addressed this, why is there such a massive difference between the approach that Christians take, that I take, to dealing with Islam, and the approach that Islamic apologists take, in the main,

I'd like to believe that some that I've met and some that I may yet meet in the future, at least those on YouTube anyways, maybe

YouTube's just the, makes people do strange things, I don't know, the difference is, the approach is so different.

Why is that? If you have the truth, you don't need to do these things. The fact is,

I was right in what I said about John 1 -1 -C, Ahmed Didat was wrong.

The fact is, Sam Shamoon was right in what he said, and our video maker here was wrong and misunderstood it.

Each one of these situations has presented to us another example of where the assertions we've been making, coming up on a year now, here on YouTube, have been impervious to meaningful criticism by Islamic apologists.

Think about what that means. Does it have meaning to you? To some

Muslims, it has no meaning at all. They're not even listening to a word that I'm saying, I realize that. But to those of you who really do want to know the truth,

I hope you're hearing this. It will cause you to consider the fact that the faith that was proclaimed for hundreds of years before Muhammad ever came along, the faith that continues to be proclaimed today, is that Jesus Christ is the

Son of God. He is your Creator. And indeed, He is the only one by whom confession of His name, repentance, turning to Him and confession of His name, brings you eternal life.