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Islam (part 1)

January 01, 2008     Time: 00:25:40
Islam

Summary

Conversation with William Lane Craig

Transcript Islam (Part 1)

 

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, on top of everybody’s mind these days is the subject of Islam. There are a bunch of reasons for that. The atrocities of 9/11, some of the prominence in the world, wars, and so forth. Now more than ever we seem to be more aware of Islam than in recent memory.

Dr. Craig: I think that we should not underestimate what George Bush Sr. called the change in the new world order that took place with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The central geopolitical reality used to be this opposition between the West – the democratic democracies – and then the Soviet bloc countries dominated by Marxism. The dissolution of the Soviet Union really, really did result in a new world order. What has happened in the aftermath of that is that it has resulted in the so-called clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the democratic West. So that, I think, is also a contributing factor along with the obvious terrorist attacks and immigration into Western nations, especially in Europe like France and England and the Netherlands. This has all served to raise the profile of Islam in our day and age in a way that, gosh, just thirty years ago it wasn’t even on the radar screen.

Kevin Harris: It didn’t seem to be. We’ve discussed the New Atheism in some of our broadcasts. A lot of those books that are best-sellers these days are a reaction to the terrorist attacks and to Islam and saying, “This is what religion produces. That is why faith and religion need to be eradicated.”

Dr. Craig: Exactly. That is the difference with the New Atheism by the way. They are not content simply to remove religion from the public square like normal secularists think. But they want it eradicated from society all together. I fear what would happen if these people ever got into power because they would be ruthless in attempting to exterminate religious belief. A lot of this is prompted, as you say, by radical Islam and unfortunately we, as Christians, get lumped into the mix along with radical Muslims as part of the enemy to be exterminated.

Kevin Harris: As I look at the issue, Bill, it seems that there is the theological issue Christians would deal with and that is the difference in the denial of Jesus as who he claimed to be. But then there is also the political ramifications of their very strict enforcement of their laws and their hatred of the West. So we seem to have a two prong attack there. One political and one theological. Let’s deal with both.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, you are absolutely right. On the one hand there are the profound theological differences between our concepts of God as well as our concept of Christ, our doctrines of salvation, our doctrine of sin. All of those are different in Islam and Christianity. But then also on the political front you’ve got, for example, the fact that the U.S. is deeply aligned with the state of Israel and these Muslim nations are committed for the most part to the elimination of Israel or at least to being enemies with Israel. So that political reality has also poisoned relations between Muslims and Westerners.

Kevin Harris: What Westerners often try to do is to be real tolerant here and say, look, we are both worshiping the same God, we are just calling him different names.

Dr. Craig: I am just astonished at that. I remember shortly after the terrorist attacks in New York City, Secretary of State Colin Powell was interviewed and he said no great world religion espouses murder. And I thought, Secretary Powell, have you never read the ninth sura in the Qur’an where it enjoins ambush, attack, lying in wait for the unbelievers and exterminating them. [1] It was evident that for him it was just inconceivable that some great world religion wouldn’t hold to the same values that we hold dear and cherish. The fact is it is not one world. There really are different religions that have vastly different value systems than we in the West hold as a result of the influence of Christianity. [2]

Kevin Harris: The God of the Bible – the God of Jesus – and Allah seem to have different properties. What are some of these?

Dr. Craig: Yeah, and Muslims recognize that as well. A faithful Muslim would be just as offended as a conservative Christian in saying for example that God is the Father of Jesus Christ. I remember in the aftermath of 9/11 at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. one of the ministers began his prayer by saying “God of Abraham, God of Mohammed, Father of Jesus Christ.” And I thought to myself, that offends all the Muslims in the audience as well as Christians because for a Muslim to say that God is the Father of Jesus Christ is blasphemous. This is to commit the most heinous sin possible in Islam which is the sin called shirk which means associating something with God – putting something else on the same level as God. For the Muslim, God is without peer. He is incomparable. Therefore, to say that he has a Son is to demean God’s status as the incomparable, peerless one. So they condemn unequivocally anybody who believes that Jesus is God’s Son.

Kevin Harris: So immediately there is such an emotional resistance when there is a dialogue that takes place between Christians and Muslims. It is hard to overcome. To say that God is triune is so offensive and so radical to their sensibilities that it is difficult for them to hear anything else after you’ve said that.

Dr. Craig: Yes, I think you are right. I think it does touch deep nerves that create anger and resentment. So it is very difficult to dialogue about these things in a civil way.

Kevin Harris: Let me tell you what has been successful in my own experience. I’ll get your comments on it. I usually start out when I talk to some Muslim friends – and this actually keeps the emotional wall from coming up too quickly – I’ll say, “You know both you and I believe that there is one God. I believe it and you believe it. Now, we believe there is something else about God that we call the Trinity but we both believe (and I’ll reiterate) in one God.” That seems to calm things down a little bit and at least give me an opportunity to perhaps explain the Trinity within the oneness of God and so on. But at the same time, I try not to get bogged down on the Trinity. I try to get them to Jesus. But the Trinity is going to come up.

Dr. Craig: Sure. But I think you are right, Kevin – focus on Jesus. He is the stumbling block and he is the one I think that we need to draw them to. And to talk about what the Qur’an says about Jesus. It says that he was a great prophet. It even calls him the Messiah. He was born of a virgin, he did miracles, he’s coming again. So in all of these ways, Islam has an exalted view of Jesus but it doesn’t rise to divinity, obviously. So I think we can focus on Jesus and what we should not do is start attacking Mohammed as a person or calling Muslims terrorists or criticizing the religion in other ways. I think we can be positive and focus upon Jesus and who Jesus was and what he claimed and did. That is really where the whole issue should be – it should be on Christ.

Kevin Harris: Le’s sum that up then. If our Muslim friends ask us about the Trinity, we can give an answer like I just said. Try to establish something that is going to knock down the emotional wall – that we both believe in one God. That should settle some nerves. But then try to get it to Jesus as soon as we can because that will help facilitate later talk about the Trinity once we establish some of Jesus?

Dr. Craig: Yes, I think that is right. We shouldn’t forget that the Holy Spirit is at work here. The Holy Spirit came to glorify Christ and to draw men to him. So when we are talking about Christ, the Holy Spirit is also at work, I think, in drawing people to him. That is his role. So when we focus on Christ, I think we are right at the heart of the Gospel.

Kevin Harris: That is good. There seems to be what we would consider as liberal Muslims who really do want to see some unity among the West and the Islam world.

Dr. Craig: We want to encourage moderate Muslims, who are as you say, frankly, liberals with respect to their religion. People who adopt, I think, a very non-Islamic stance, namely that church and state should be separate – or mosque and state we might say. In orthodox Islam, they know nothing of the separation of church and state. Religion and state are all united under the dominance of the religion. [3] But in many Muslim states today, such as Egypt and Jordan and Turkey, you have a separation in effect of church and state and a government that is secular and the mosque operates independently of it. That is the kind of thing we want to keep encouraging and as you say keep growing. Because that will help to, I think, quell the fanaticism of the orthodox Muslim fundamentalists. But I must say that so long as the United States is aligned with Israel and continues to support Israel, I really am not hopeful that there is going to be an end to this conflict politically. I don’t think the U.S. can back away from Israel. It is a democracy – one of the few democracies in that area. I think we have every reason to continue to support Israel. It has been a great ally. As long as we do that, it is hard to see, frankly, that a whole lot of progress and good will is going to be generated.

Kevin Harris: At reasonablefaith.org, you have some transcripts and some audio of debates with some prominent Muslim scholars. Give us a thumbnail of some of these debates. How have they gone and what are some of the issues that come up?

Dr. Craig: It has been such a tremendous privilege and excitement to be involved in these debates. By way of background, when I was doing my theological doctorate in Munich, I had to pick a couple of side areas on which to be examined. One of the side areas that I picked is Islam because I had been interested in medieval theology and philosophy so naturally I wanted to specialize more in Islamic thought. So I studied Islam extensively and was examined in it. At that time I never dreamt that someday I would be speaking and debating on this subject. But in the aftermath of 9/11, I had the opportunity to debate Muslim apologists like Jamal Badawi [4] and Shabir Ally [5] on Canadian and American university campuses. What I have found is the Muslim student associations on university campuses are extremely active in bringing in these Muslim speakers like Badawi and Ally to do Muslim evangelism and encourage the Muslim students there to hold to the faith. It is interesting. Their reaction or their approach is inevitably very rational. These Muslim apologists are strongly rational and apologetical in their approach to Islam and Christianity. Some of them know the Bible better than most Christians do, frankly. They quote chapter and verse from memory. They are familiar with the Jesus Seminar and other biblical critics and exploit the work of people like this. They will often like to say “even Christian scholars deny that Jesus ever said this” and then they will quote these liberal Jesus Seminar critics and so forth. So I have had the chance to debate these fellows. It has been very exciting to do so because what I find in dealing with them is that in talking with a Muslim it is very much like talking with a radical biblical critic. Because they basically say the same thing – that Jesus never really said these things, that these are later claims that were invented by the Christian church and put back on the lips of Jesus. So you are basically involved in the same apologetic to a Muslim that you are to one of these liberal critics. You want to use the so-called criteria of authenticity to try to show that certain sayings and events attributed to Jesus and the Gospels were in fact really said by him and therefore they cannot be regarded as later corruptions of the oral tradition. These claims were actually made by Jesus. Since the Muslim regards Jesus as a prophet who speaks for God, if he really said these things then they have to believe him. They have to believe what Jesus claimed about himself. So that is why I really like to focus on the claims of Christ and then of course on his resurrection.

Kevin Harris: As I understand, some of these debates have actually turned pretty emotional with the opponent. That just kind of shows that these are some emotional issues from time to time.

Dr. Craig: You know, most of them – almost all of them – were very calm, very civil. Shabir Ally, in particular, is a thorough gentleman. All the Christian apologists I know who have debated Shabir like this guy on a personal level. We call him by his first name – Shabir. He is very friendly. Everybody really, really likes him. He always conducts himself very well in these debates. Though he is slippery as an eel and very sly. He’s very wily. You gotta watch out for him or he’ll pick your pocket so to speak when you are not looking. [6]

But I was in a debate with Jamal Badawi at Texas A&M and to my surprise he just became unhinged. Particularly when I made the remark that – I didn’t think this would get under his skin – I made the remark that in the Qur’an it doesn’t actually say that Abraham sacrificed Ishmael on the altar. Muslims believe it was Ishmael not Isaac that Abraham laid on the altar to sacrifice at God’s command. In fact, when you read the Qur’an, that is not what it says. It says it is Isaac. I thought how odd that Islam believes this about Ishmael when in the Qur’an it says that it was Isaac. So I just happened to mention this in the debate and he just went off the charts. He began interrupting and speaking out of turn and protesting trying to explain this away and so forth. It was obvious that it touched a real nerve. I suppose because it strikes right at the heart of who you are as a Muslim that it is Ishmael that is the promised child and therefore it is they who are really the chosen people. I just had no idea that it would do that. For me, it was just an off the cuff remark but it really got to him.

Kevin Harris: It shows something. It shows how ingrained this is. You are attacking family heritage, you are attacking culture, you are attacking a religion and a way of life. Just like with a Christian, very deeply ingrained. In some ways, maybe Islam is even more of a cultural . . .

Dr. Craig: Absolutely. Because it is a whole way of life. I mean, for orthodox Islam, as I said, there is no separation of church and state. Everything is under the domination of the religion. The government, the banking system, social mores, education, everything has to be brought into submission to Allah. That is what Islam means – submission. A Muslim is one who is in submission in every area of his life. So in one sense Muslims have a lot to teach us as Christians about total submission to God. I think as Christians we are called upon – Romans 12:1-2 – to be totally sold out to God, body and soul laid on his altar as living sacrifices. In that sense we, I think, agree with the Muslim in this notion that we are to be in our lives personally totally submitted to God. But they extend it beyond the personal life to society as a whole. They are submitted to a quite different God. That is the problem.

Kevin Harris: The Christian will often say, “One of the evidences for the truth of Christianity is look how it spread after the crucifixion and resurrection.” The skeptic will come back and ask how you explain the spread of Islam and how popular that has become.

Dr. Craig: Right. And for that reason I don’t think that that is a good argument for Christianity. One could also point out Mormonism which has in the hundred or so years since Joseph Smith lived has spread to become really a new world religion. Mormonism is emerging as a new world religion in addition to Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and so forth. So the fact that Christianity spread quickly in the Mediterranean world and even beyond isn’t a good argument for its truth. I think the germ of truth in that argument is the following – and this is what I’ve used in my own work – what is to be explained about Christianity is not its rapid spread but its very origin. Christianity had its origin in the belief of these earliest disciples that God had raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. Now that is a totally un-Jewish belief, not to say an outlandish belief. How do you explain the origin of that belief on the disciples’ part? I think when you look at the possible explanations – namely, it is a Christian retrojection, or it is from pagan mythology, or it is from Jewish influences – none of those provides a plausible explanation of why the disciples came to believe such an un-Jewish and outlandish thing as that God raised Jesus from the dead. So the very origin of the Christian movement cries out for some sort of an explanation in the fact of the resurrection itself. One could use a similar argument for Islam – given the origin of Islam in the mid-7th century AD, there must have been some historical events that brought it about. I think that is quite true. There must have been a historical Mohammed who probably had some kind of a vision of God, who was offended by polytheism, and began to proclaim that there is only one true God. So that is right. I think it applies in both cases. You have to have a historically adequate cause to explain the sudden origin of a movement that is quite different from anything that preceded it.

Kevin Harris: One of the differences between the spread of Christianity and the spread of Islam seems to be the sword. [7]

Dr. Craig: Well, yeah, that’s true I guess.

Kevin Harris: You want to mention that?

Dr. Craig: Yeah, that’s worth mentioning isn’t it? Christianity during the first three centuries of its existence was this tiny persecuted religion that often was punctuated by horrible martyrdoms. Its growth was watered by the blood of these martyrs. By contrast, Islam was spread by military conquest. Just two years after the death of Mohammed the Arabian forces invaded Persia and brought it into submission. Then Syria fell a year or so later. Then Jerusalem fell. And after that Egypt. Then these Islamic armies swept right across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. So it was by conquest that Islam was spread and this is part of the doctrine of Islam. As I mentioned earlier, in the ninth chapter of the Qur’an, it enjoins violence against pagans in order to bring them into submission and even violence against the so-called people of the book, that is to say Jews and Christians, until they are brought into submission, too. Islam, Kevin, divides the whole world into two camps. One is called the Dar al-Islam and the other is called the Dar al-Harb. That means the House of Submission – those are the lands or nations that are brought into submission to Islam, and the other is called the House of War. Those are the lands that have not yet been brought into submission to Islam. This perception of the world as in these two camps – the House of Submission, the House of War – speaks volumes about the nature of Islam and its command to bring the world by force if necessary into submission to Allah.

Kevin Harris: In summation Dr. Craig, we don’t worship the same God, we don’t agree theologically on the nature of God, but we want to try to get Jesus front and center and his claims when we deal with Islam?

Dr. Craig: That is exactly right. Paul, in preaching the Gospel, said, “I determined to know nothing among you except for Jesus Christ and him crucified.” [8] Just as that was folly to Gentiles and a stumbling block to Jews, it is also the stumbling block for Muslims as well. Therefore, like Paul, we need to point our hearers when they are Muslims to the person of Christ.

Kevin Harris: Our question of the day, Dr. Craig: are Christianity and science compatible?

Dr. Craig: I am persuaded that they are compatible. Certainly there are areas of conflict that do arise from time to time but I think that in the course of time these conflicts will be resolved. So, in various areas that I’ve worked on – such as relativity theory and cosmology – there I think one sees that a religious perspective on these issues can shed real light on science. I think that religion can learn from science and I think that science can learn from religion. So there are a number of ways in which these two interact with each other that can be helpful.

Kevin Harris: Science is not the only way to gain knowledge. Many people think that that is the case.

Dr. Craig: That is a really good point. No, I think that is not science, that is scientism – the view that only through scientific exploration can knowledge be gained. That itself is not a scientific claim. That is a philosophical claim. So it would be self-defeating if it were made. The very claim that you can only know truth through science isn’t a scientifically provable claim. So it would be self-defeating. There are other avenues to truth besides science and there are other types of knowledge besides scientific knowledge such as: mathematical knowledge, logical knowledge, ethical knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, metaphysical knowledge; even many scientific truths cannot be proven scientifically. So while science is one avenue to truth, and perhaps the best way to find out truth about the empirical world, nevertheless there are lots of truth that is not scientifically accessible that we can know by other means.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, there is a fear of science even among people who think that science is the only way to truth. It shows up in science fiction movies. That is that science, or the advance of science and scientific discoveries, can be used against man.

Dr. Craig: This is because science is ethically neutral. You cannot discover moral values in a test tube. So, science is amoral – that is not to say it is immoral, it is amoral. It is simply morally neutral. So the same scientific discovery that can be used to fuel nuclear reactors and light a city can be used to make a bomb that could destroy that city. That is why we must not simply leave science unchecked by ethical considerations. We cannot allow science to just do whatever is scientifically possible. There needs, I think, to be ethical and moral considerations upon what we allow science to do. [9]