Islam

Islam is one of the controversial topics of our time. Who could forget where they were and what they were doing at the exact moment in time when they found out about the tragic events of 9/11? In the past decade Westerners have become increasingly suspicious of Muslims, and the media has taken full advantage of this and some would say promoted this fear by it's coverage of events such as the Danish Cartoon episode and the Cronulla riots. One Muslim recently responded by posting billboards in Sydney and Adelaide and had civil discussions with Christian leaders on publicchristianity.com and at The City Bible Forum in order to boost and positively influence the public's understanding of his faith.

But ultimately, is there any basis for believing in Islam? This is a question that David Wood seeks to answer- in the negative. Wood is a philosopher and a former atheist who converted to Christianity but then became increasingly interested in Islam as a result of his interactions with Muslim friends. One of his close friends converted to Christianity and then became a ministry partner of Wood's, and so Wood continues his work on Islam.

Go here to download a 90 minute interview with Wood.

The interview covers many topics:

- The Dearborn Arab Festival in the US, in a town where 30% of the population is Arabic, they hold a festival each year. Wood details his exploits and the trouble he's found himself in over the years- semi-interesting but insignificant in the big picture.

- His own background and how he became interested in Islam. Skip the first 20 or 30 mins of the interview- the good stuff comes later.

- Arguments Muslims use for their own position such as the Argument from Literary Excellence which says that the poetry in the Koran is perfect thus it has a perfect source.

- The Koran's claim that the Torah and New Testament predict the coming of Mohammed. Thus, Muslims claim that Deutoronomy 18 and the Gospel of John 14-16 both predict his arrival.

- The idea of abrogation. This is the hermeneutical principle that contradicting ideas are resolved by appealing to a chronological evolution, based on the idea that God would only give a revelation equal to or better than a prior one.

Wood discussed various verses from the Koran-to the effect of "There is no compulsion in religion" and "You have your religion and I will have mine" and contrasts these with later verses on violence and later dictations about the treatment of unbelievers, who were forced to pay a tax or submit to Islam. He argues that the journey of Mohammed's life saw him go from advocating peacefulness when his followers were in the minority, towards negative jihad and then finally towards positive jihad when the numbers allowed it, and that this could help explain why Muslims in the West usually have a more tolerant attitude to unbelievers than do Muslims in Muslim dominated regions. He warns that Muslims may be well meaning and uneducated about their own faith but that the proper use of abrogation (which is funnily enough more popular in Muslim countries, he claims) inevitably will result in negative behaviour towards unbelievers in the long term.

- The need to understand Muslims on their own terms and thus respond appropriately to their arguments with this understanding in mind. He says that no apologetics type books actually do this well enough, and that no apologetics works give the fullest, deepest responses (Although he says Answering Islam by Geisler and Saleeb is the best book answer to Islam that he knows of). He says Answering-Islam.org is the most comprehensive archive or responses to Islam and that it will not fall foul on the charge he levels against the books that are in print.

He gives the example of responding to the Muslim charge that the Bible has been corrupted. He says the first response should be that Surah 6:115 and Surah 18:27 claim that God's word can't be corrupted or changed, that the Koran teaches that the Torah and the Gospel are God's word, and that therefore if God's word cannot be corrupted then the Muslim shouldn't be arguing that the Koran is wrong and that God's word has been corrupted. Then, he says, after making this argument you should go onto make the standard textual criticism type arguments on the basis of manuscript evidence and the like.

CS Lewis- Cosmic Milk Jugs and Comparative Religion

This morning I've found a couple of CS Lewis quotes which are worth posting. I'd seen both of them before, but they both make you stop and do some serious thinking so I'll post them here.

Firstly, from Victor Reppert's Dangerous Idea , he quotes CS Lewis on comparative religions. I won't paste the whole thing here, but I recommend you check it out. Basically Lewis argues that Christianity and Hinduism are the only two religions worth considering, more or less on the basis that they are the only ones which are all encompassing. I'm not sure what I think of the quote, but I always find it interesting hearing about how different people compare religions. The famous Mortimer J Adler, who converted to Catholicism after being somewhat of an agnostic for most of his life, argued for monotheism- he narrowed the field of play down to the three Abrahamic religions, putting them ahead of the Eastern ones. Unlike Lewis, he wrote Hinduism off alongside Buddhism. Sociologist Rodney Stark wrote a book called Discovering God where he argued for Christianity on the basis that it's the most complex revelation. I haven't read any of those books- Adler or Stark- but I've heard about their approaches and find it all very fascinating.

The Lewis quote came from a book titled God in the Dock, so I found that book and started skimming through on Google Books. It's a collection of essays and letters written by Lewis, mostly very short ones of a few pages each. Looks like it'll have to go on my ever increasing list of books to read. As I was scrolling through it and skimming the various essays I came across this quote, which I've seen quoted a multitude of times on various blogs (perhaps that's because a couple of the blogs I visit are written by CS Lewis affectionado's, and scholars of the Argument from Reason. Or perhaps it's just because Lewis seems to get quoted anywhere and everywhere. Nonetheless I digress....). Here it is:


If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents -- the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts -- i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy -- are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.