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In this episode Trent, analyzes common arguments for Islam and explains why they aren’t persuasive.
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
In a recent comment on the channel, one viewer asked if I would address more issues related to Islam, and I thought, why not? So today I’m going to give a relatively brief answer to the question why I’m not a Muslim. And for those of you who are new, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic answers apologist and Speaker Trent Horn. Be sure to leave a comment under the episode to let me know about other topics you’d like me to address and definitely subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss all of our content. And if you want to keep the channel going and make sure it does not have to rely on annoying advertising to survive, then please support us at trenthornpodcast.com. All right, so one common tactic among Muslim apologists is to give a variety objections to Christianity and then assume once you can disprove Christianity, then a person should just become a Muslim because Islam apparently has the simplest and most coherent view of God, but Islam is more than just a certain view of God.
It’s also allegiance to the alleged divine authority of the Quran and other teachings of Islam that have come down through various oral traditions called the Hadith. Even if I weren’t a Christian, I still wouldn’t be a Muslim, I’d just be some other kind of religious theist. I would believe in God, I might even be a philosophical theist who believed in an unlimited God of the classical philosophers like Aristotle. That’s because the main reason I’m not a Muslim is because there aren’t any good reasons to think Islam is true. I’ll use this popular video why Islam is the truth as an example of pro-Islam arguments and why they aren’t persuasive. Remember the main points Islam seeks to prove is that Muhammad was a genuine prophet who received a revelation from God and the Quran is divine revelation rather than a merely human writing.
But the Quran can be proved to be from God. It is a book like no other book, a Speech like No Other Speech. And this can be shown in so many ways.
Just because a book is unlike any other does not mean it is divinely inspired. The works of William Shakespeare are unique. There’s nothing else like them, but that doesn’t mean they’re divine. Being unique does not entail being divine.
For example, Allah predicted its preservation from the beginning. More than 1,400 years have passed and Quran remains in its original language completely unchanged. Since Muslims claim Quran is the direct word of God, any changes, even if it was a single letter, would instantly falsify this claim.
This will come up later in regards to fulfilled prophecies, but in order for that kind of argument to work you need a very specific prophecy that can’t be explained by just a lucky prediction. Saying a religion or a book will still exist a thousand years from now is a prediction and the odds of that prediction coming to pass, they may be low, but they aren’t so low as to rule out chance. This is especially true if you have dedicated followers of your book or your religion who commit their lives to spreading it by almost any means necessary. Also, the Quran has changed. As scholars note, there are manuscript variations in it. Shabir Ali is a well-known Muslim apologist and confirms this fact.
This is just simply the Quran, but this is not the only text of the Quran that is read throughout the world. In North Africa, there is a slightly different text that is based on a slightly different reading, mostly corresponding to what we read in the rest of the world, but with some slight variations that do not affect anything that Muslims believe and do not have any major impact on any Muslim practices. And then two, in some parts of Africa there is another reading of the Quran and a matching manuscript that is prevalent. And here too, we find some slight variations.
All right, so let’s take a look at some other reasons to think that the Quran is divinely inspired.
Allah challenges the reader to look for contradictions if they think the Quran is manmade. What we find is that the message is 100% consistent with absolutely no contradictions.
Well, the skeptics annotated Quran has a fair number of alleged contradictions. Now that author also does the same thing for the Bible, but Christians have a reply to those alleged contradictions that Muslims do not have. Christians believe the Bible’s human authors were true authors. They were not mere secretaries writing down God’s dictation. In First Corinthians, St. Paul talks about how he doesn’t remember who he baptized, for example. So many skeptical arguments against the Bible can be explained by God, allowing the human authors to do things like use ancient literary conventions in exact summaries or genealogies, anthropomorphic language or ancient scientific presuppositions the divine author had no need to correct.
The Quran, however is supposed to be just the actual word of God. It is God speaking to us. So this explanation for Bible difficulties doesn’t work for the many difficulties in the Quran like its claim that semen comes from between the backbone and the ribs rather than the testicles. Even if there were no contradictions in the Quran at all, it was completely void of contradictions that would not prove it was divine. You could write a fictional story that has absolutely no contradictions, but that wouldn’t prove that the story is divinely inspired. You would need additional evidence that the error is absent because of divine intervention.
Allah also told us that he would make the Quran easy to learn. Today millions of people around the world have the Quran stored in memory. Every single generation since the Quran was revealed, has had memorizers making it the only book in history to have passed down in both human memory and written form. If all books were to just disappear, the only one that would be back in a day is the Quran.
So what? There are many beliefs that are passed down in written and unwritten forms that people share all over the world, but that does not mean they’re divine. Even if this were only true of the Quran, being unique is a common property of things in the natural world that doesn’t mean they’re divine. Also, the Bible is easier to learn than the Quran because Christians never say the Bible can only be truly understood in one language. The Quran on the other hand, is only truly understood, Muslims say, when it is read in its original Arabic text. In fact, Muslims recognize that there are many people who can recite the Quran but don’t understand what they’re reciting. One Muslim website says there are these people who keep telling you to memorize the Quran and speak about the much reward you gain through memorization. There are so many hafiz out there who memorize the Quran and do not even understand what it means. So once again, we do not have evidence for a divinely inspired text. It may be a very unique text, but being unique does not entail being divine.
Amazingly, Allah told us that when people listen to the Quran being recited, they are impacted and you see them start to cry. Thanks to YouTube, we can see this happening with our own eyes. You see people who aren’t even Muslim and don’t even understand the language breaking down into tears. Even those who recite, occasionally cry. What other speech can do this?
People have emotional reactions to Latin being chanted in a high mass or many beautiful secular songs in poetry. You can find reaction videos online of people crying to all kinds of stuff. What man hasn’t teared up when he watched that scene from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air where will gets abandoned by his father again? Or here’s a guy crying because he saw a double rainbow.
Oh my God. What does it mean? Oh, man.
Lots of things that are human or natural in origin can move people to have strong emotions. It does not mean that they’re divinely inspired So far, this is probably the weakest reason to think the Quran is divinely inspired, but the next ones are hardly any better.
Linguistically speaking, the Quran remains the best Arabic literature to date. Since Arabic is arguably the most eloquent language to ever exist, this makes the Quran the most eloquent speech in the most eloquent language in history. The language of the Quran alone is enough to prove that it could not have come from man.
Even if something were the most eloquent example of human speech that would not prove it is divine speech. Among human beings, there are people who are the fastest or the strongest or the smartest, but that doesn’t mean their success has a divine origin. Everything in creation is going to exist on a gradient or a scale. So something inevitably is going to be at the top of the scale, but it doesn’t mean that it is there at that location because of God’s direct intervention.
So even if some of human creation is the most eloquent, which is subjective and so impossible to prove, but even if it were, that wouldn’t prove its eloquence required a divine cause. But of course the narrator is assuming the Quran is the most eloquent form of human speech. He hasn’t proven that fact. If it were so eloquent, millions of non-Muslims would read the Quran or simply listen to it even if they couldn’t understand it because they appreciate its eloquence and how it sounds, but they don’t do that.
Millions of non non-Christians do quote eloquent and moving passages of the Bible, probably more so than non-Muslims quote the Quran. But once again, this is a totally subjective criteria that does not prove anything. The Lord of the Rings is one of the bestselling books of all time and many people consider its fictional Elvish language to be quite beautiful, but that does not prove Frodo and Gandalf really existed. Just as I would not make this an argument for the truth of the Bible because of how weak it is, I cannot accept it as an argument for the truth of the Quran.
Add to this, the Quran is also jam packed full of scientific and historical accuracies that were impossible to have been known 14 centuries ago. From the Big Bang, to the expansion of the universe, and to every living thing being made from water. From the two seas that meet but don’t mix to the accurate description of the human embryo. In fact, there are more than 1000 scientific verses in the book and not a single one of them can be disproved by established science.
This is called the argument from impossible scientific foreknowledge and some people use it to defend the Bible as well, but it’s a bad argument. What ends up happening is you just take something that’s really obscure in the Quran and say it predicts a modern scientific discovery. It’s like people who take the really vague prophecies of the 16th century astrologer Nostradamus and then say, “Oh, see this predicted the future.” When it’s so vague it could have predicted almost anything and the Quran does the same thing. For example, did the Quran describe the Big Bang and that all living things come from water? Surah 21:30 says this, “Do the disbelievers not see that the heavens and the earth were one mass and we tore them apart and we made from water every living thing? Will they not believe?” A medieval person speculating that all matter was once together than separated is not the same as predicting that the universe expanded from an initial state of extremely high density in temperature.
As for the prediction about water, every living thing isn’t made out of water because they have other elements besides H2O like carbon. They contain water, but they’re not literally made of water. People have always known that living things depend on water to survive or that if you grind up living things, moisture will come out of them. So this is not something that only divine inspiration could explain. A human author of the Quran could come up with something like this. As for the two seas that don’t mix, many of the images Muslims show of this are not two seas mixing, it’s water from things like glacial runoff, which is fresh water meeting with saltwater and saltwater has a higher density because of its higher salt content, and so it creates this barrier between them, but there’s still a mixing. The verse in the Quran is probably referring to how freshwater rivers meet with saltwater oceans and they don’t mix together to cause either the freshwater river to become completely salty or the ocean to become completely fresh, which is something everyone in medieval Arabia knew.
Anyways, as for embryology, the Quran relies on incredibly vague references like saying the early embryo exists in three veils of darkness or that it’s like a little leach. The word itself could also mean clot and blood clots usually occur during miscarriages, even if it doesn’t mean that Roman and Greek historians discovered these embryological facts centuries earlier. So the Quran’s extremely vague descriptions are not very compelling. So once again, this is not example of any kind of knowledge that would’ve been impossible for a human being at that time that only God could have given through divine revelation.
Quran, by far is the most popular book in the world that is read billions of times every single day, week in, week out, all year round. For these reasons, Muslims can proudly claim that the Quran is self-evident to be entirely from God.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Bible is the bestselling book of all time, which makes sense because the Bible has been translated into over 700 languages, the New Testament into over 1600. But even if the Quran snagged the honor of being the bestselling book of all time, once again, that would not prove it’s divinely inspired. Next, the video tries to prove that Muhammad was a genuine prophet. Now that’s going to be difficult because the Quran says Muhammad did not perform any miracles. The Quran even describes people objecting to Muhammad because he did not perform miracles to validate his prophetic claims. It says in Surah 10:20, “They ask why has no other sign been sent down to him from his Lord? Say, oh prophet, the knowledge of the unseen is with Allah alone.” So wait, I too am waiting with you. However, Jesus Christ validated his message with miracles.
In John 10:37 through 38, Jesus said, “If I am not doing the works of my father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” And the ultimate proof of Christ’s divinity was his work of rising from the dead, which is a kind of miracle that Islam completely lacks. And since Islam denies the resurrection of Christ, I have to deny Islam because the evidence convinces me that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Now, I’m not going to defend that fact in this episode. You can check out other debates and episodes where I have done that, but even if I were not a Christian, as I said earlier, I still would not be convinced of Islam. Now, Muslim apologists claim Muhammad did perform miracles.
Some claim this based on later oral traditions, people like Sheikh Uthman who say that Muhammad split the moon in two and that this miracle can be known historically. Check out my episode on that in the description link below, but I will add one detail I did not mention in that original episode. So something like that may have happened to Muhammad and other witnesses, but it has a natural explanation. Then you might be thinking, what would cause Muhammad and his companions to think that Muhammad had split the moon in two? Well, on June 18th in the year 1178, 5 monks in Canterbury, England claimed they saw the moon split. They said the upper horn of the moon split in two and a flaming torch spraying up, spewing out over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks.
Scientists today some say that the monks saw an asteroid hit the moon or a meteor explode in the atmosphere at just the right angle so that the moon was also in their line of sight and it appeared that the explosion happened on the moon’s surface. So that may have been what happened to Mohammed and his companions unless the story is just completely made up because it’s a later oral tradition. So, no, Muhammad did not split the moon or perform any other miracles. Most Muslims don’t even rely on that to try to prove he was a prophet. This video certainly doesn’t. Do we have other reasons though to think Muhammad was a genuine prophet even though he didn’t perform any miracles? Let’s see.
His life is so well-documented because of the impact he had on his people. We know things like how he used to eat and even the position he used to sleep. It wouldn’t be far from accurate to say that we know more about him than any other historical figure.
If you think about that claim for more than five seconds, you can see it’s not true at all. The Quran has hardly any information about Muhammad and the first biography about him was not written until about a hundred years after his death. The fact that there are books arguing that Muhammad never existed shows we have less information about him than many other historical figures who no one doubts. Now, I think Muhammad did exist, but the fact is it’s absurd to say we have more information about him than anyone, than any other historical figure. In fact, some Muslim apologists have even adopted a view called Quranism. It’s a kind of Muslim solo scriptura that restricts Muslim beliefs to the Quran alone and rejects the Hadith and later traditions as being unreliable. By the same way, Christians also make this error when they make claims like we have more evidence for Jesus than for anyone else in ancient history, which is not true.
We have more evidence for Roman emperors and well-published philosophers, but it doesn’t matter. We have sufficient evidence to believe that Jesus Christ existed and that he made radical divine claims about himself and that his followers claimed to have seen him alive after his crucifixion. And this evidence is far better than the evidence we have from Muhammad because it at least comes from within the lifetime of Jesus’s followers. The same cannot be said of the sources for Muhammad that sometimes comes centuries later. But look, even if we had a perfect record of Muhammad’s life, that in and of itself would not prove he was a prophet rather than just a unique figure of his own time period because Muhammad never performed any miracles or did anything to show that he was a prophet who had divine authority rather than just a charismatic human leader.
All of this information literally invites us to study his life and make a rational decision to see if he was actually a prophet or not. There are three possibilities for this claim. Either he was lying, or he was mad, or he was telling the truth.
Yes, Lord, liar or lunatic, right? That’s the classic trilema from CS Lewis. In this case, I guess it would be prophet, liar or lunatic, but the trilema, it works for Jesus, but it does not work for Muhammad. Muhammad claimed that God spoke to him. Jesus claimed to be God. It’s not that crazy to think God spoke to you. Lots of sane people think God speaks to them in prayer through their own inner monologue or inner thoughts, but thinking you are God is, as CS Lewis put it, like thinking you were a poached egg. Muhammad could have just been sincerely mistaken. Just as Muslims would have to say the same thing about other sane people throughout history and even up to the present day who think that God revealed something to them through a charismatic prayer or some other religious experience. On a side note, Muslims believe that the Bible is a part of divine revelation, but that it was corrupted.
So they say Jesus, yes, he was miraculously born, but they also say that Jesus never claimed to be God, was not crucified, and did not rise from the dead. Believing that comes from corrupted elements in the New Testament documents, not from the originals that come from God and being a part of divine revelation. Muslims love to quote critical scholars like Bart Airman to try and show that the Bible was corrupted. But they don’t point out that even critical scholars like Bart Airman agree that parts of the original text of the Bible, like the Gospel of John, for example, do teach that Jesus is God, which contradicts Islam of course. So let’s continue with the Muslim trilemma for Muhammad.
The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, received the first revelation from God at the age of 40. This means he lived a completely normal life for 40 years before becoming a prophet. In these 40 years, he built a reputation in his community and they literally nicknamed him the truthful and the trustworthy. He was known to have never told a single lie. Think about it, 40 years of sincerity and then to suddenly come up with a monumental lie like being a prophet doesn’t make any logical sense.
The claim that Muhammad never lied comes from a hadith written 200 years after he died. The Quran itself suggests that some people did accuse Muhammad of lying about God. One translation of Surah 35:4 says, “If they call you a liar, prophet, many messengers before you were also called liars. It is to God that all things will be returned.” One modern commentary says the meaning of the verse is about those who accuse you. Muhammad of having made a false claim to prophethood. Besides lots of other founders of religions led normal well-respected lies before claiming God spoke to them, but Muslims don’t believe their testimonies.
Finally, as I said before, Muhammad could have just been sincerely mistaken about the source of what he thought was divine revelation. Keep in mind that Muhammad did not have an experience where an angel showed him all the contents of the Quran, which is about 77,000 words long, in one sitting. Muhammad progressively recited what he claimed to have received over the course of 23 years to his companions, who wrote that down. That’s more than enough time to convince yourself God is speaking to you and slowly recite what you think God is saying.
The prophet was also known to have so much wisdom and his character was impeccable. People used to race to serve him in any way they could. Muslims and non-Muslims turned to him for advice and he never said no to any requests. These are not qualities of someone that is mad.
First, a lot of this testimony is historically suspect, so it’s not great to build your religion on it. Second, as I said before, you could be sincerely mistaken, not insane, or you could be a high functioning deluded person or you could have some combination of innate wisdom, even if we grant this, and delusions of grandeur. None of this demands a supernatural explanation. Jesus, in contrast, did not act like a prophet or an alleged prophet like Muhammad. He didn’t act like someone who pointed to God as his ultimate authority. Jesus pointed to himself often. Jesus said that he was an ultimate authority because of his radical unique relationship to God.
He said that he was the way, the truth, the life, the one who came into the world, the one who would judge the world. In the parable of the wicked tenets, which most critical scholars believe to be authentic, Jesus identifies not with the servants who symbolize God’s prophets, but the son of the vineyard owner, the son of God. So while Muslims often claim that Jesus was another prophet just like Moses and Muhammad as the final prophet, Jesus certainly did not act like a prophet. He performed miracles on his own authority and claimed not just to be a prophet of God, but to be the unique only-begotten son of God.
Perhaps the biggest proof for me is that the prophet could not read or write, had no educational background, yet was able to bring forth the Quran that remains the best literature the world has seen even after 1400 years. Logically, this is enough to verify his prophethood.
Muhammad didn’t have to be able to read or write if he had heard enough Arabic poetry in his life and other religious texts, including Christian ones, and then be able to recite something of his own. And as I noted before, Muhammad had a long period of time to develop these thoughts. The Quran records that people were skeptical of Muhammad because of that fact, because it took 23 years to recite. Surah 25:32 says this, “The disbelievers say if only the Quran had been sent down to him all at once. We have sent it, as such, in stages, so we may reassure your heart with it and we have revealed it at a deliberate pace.” Sure you have.
This reminds me of how Doctrine and Covenants, one of the holy text of Mormonism explains away a problem related to the Book of Mormon. While Joseph Smith was allegedly translating the golden plates, 116 pages of the translation were lost doctrine and covenant says that God told Joseph not to retranslate those plates because this was allegedly a trap the devil set through Smith’s enemies. It says, “The devil has sought to lay a cunning plan that he may destroy this work for heth put into their hearts to do this, that by lying, they may say they have caught you in the words which you have pretended to translate.” The problem is that if the original 116 pages were found and were compared to Smith’s new translation, it would show that they didn’t exactly line up, and so people would accuse him of not being a prophet, but just someone who is reciting a story. And so because they’re reciting it from memory, it’s going to be a little bit different every time.
So to avoid this, God allegedly told Joseph Smith to translate that part of the Book of Mormon from a different abridged set of golden plates that would tell the same story, but it would sound a little bit different. That would explain that in case the original 116 pages were ever found. Something similar may be going on here in the Quran to explain why Mohammed took so long to recite the Quran to people to explain why this process took place over such a period, whether he was sincerely giving something that he thought was divine revelation or insincerely doing it.
The prophet also told many prophecies that made no sense at the time and have only recently materialized. Listen to this, he said that the poor Arabs of the deserts would compete in building tall buildings.
People have been building tall stuff for ages. Mohammed probably knew about the pyramids in Egypt and the Hagia Sophia was built decades before he was born. Even a desert watchtower could be considered a tall building. There’s nothing special about guessing people will build the kinds of things they’ve been building forever.
He said that interest will spread such that no one can escape the dust of it. He said that power and authority will be given to the wrong people. He said that sexual promiscuity would become rampant and that parents would give birth to their masters. These are only just a few examples from a plethora of authentically graded prophecies.
Like I said, anybody can make prophecies like these. The difference between a lucky prediction and a divine prophecy is that the prophecy is so specific and removed from the event it predicts, that there is no natural explanation for the prediction, but every generation thinks the next generation is ungrateful or will usurp them. Saying things will get worse and being right doesn’t require a divine cause. Literally, one of the prophecies in this section was that power would be given to the wrong people. Wow. How could a human being ever predict something like that might happen? Though, if you wanted to attract conservatives to your faith, you probably should have gone with a different graphic choice. In any case, the predictions in the Quran are what we’d expect from a medieval Arabic author, not from a revelation of God himself.
Amazingly, his greatness is globally recognized even by non-Muslims. For example, Michael Hart, who wrote the famous book of the Top 100 Most Influential People in History, and he places the Prophet Mohamed, Peace be upon him, as number one in his list. Author examples include Dr. Keith Moore, George Bernard Shaw, Gandhi, Thomas Carlisle, la Martin, and the list goes on and on. Can’t we logically and rationally say that he was telling the truth?
Once again, so what Jesus and Confucius also make the top of those lists, but they and other founders of world religions can’t all be telling the truth. Some of them must be wrong either because they were sincerely mistaken or insincerely lying. Finally, you might say that this episode did not present the best arguments for Islam, but I’ve looked at many other Muslim apologists and the arguments are all basically the same because they do not have a specific miracle to rely on as evidence, and so the Quran becomes a subjective living miracle they have to defend. In fact, the arguments from other Muslim apologists are even worse than the ones than in this video. Consider this apologist who says The growth of Islam proves it’s the one true religion.
Prophet, Peace be upon him, kept spreading the message of Islam confidently to the point that Islam spread very rapidly. This is going to bring upon my second point. Islam spread, spread very rapidly in a very short period of time, gaining thousands of followers. It expanded from at an incredible rate, from Mecca to Medina, to Spain, to China, Africa, and here we are in 2022 and it’s the fastest growing religion in every country in the world today, which is my second point. The expansion of Islam is revealed in the Quran and in authentic hadith.
Of course, that doesn’t prove anything since this can be explained by a variety of social factors and the prediction is that not that difficult to make. You could get it right by chance alone, but this fact should serve as a warning. According to the Pew Research Center, over the next 25 years, the percentage of the world’s Christian population will stagnate. The percentage of religiously unaffiliated people will decrease probably because of low birth rates, but the percentage of Muslims will increase. If the trends continue. Islam will probably become the largest religion in the world, so Christians must be prepared to answer the arguments of Islam. All right. I hope that this was helpful for you and I am open to debating the question, is Islam true with a Muslim apologist? I’ve reached out to one, but I didn’t hear back, so hopefully we can find someone else in order to set a debate like that up. In the meantime, thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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