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Knight and Rose Show – Episode 17: Common Muslim Objections to Christianity

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Welcome to episode 17 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss common Muslim objections to Christianity. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode 17:

Episode  Summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss five common objections that Muslims raise against Christianity. We evaluate each objection using historical evidence, evidence from non-Christian New Testament scholars, and claims from the Qur’an itself. We also talk about how these arguments perform in scholarly debates. We recommend several of our favorite resources on the topic. We conclude with a story from Rose about an interaction she had with a Muslim friend when she responded to one of these common objections.

Speaker biographies

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

References:

OBJECTION #1:

Peter J. Williams debates Bart Ehrman on his book “Misquoting Jesus” by Wintery Knight

The Islamic Dilemma

a. The Qur’an affirms the inspiration, authority, and preservation of the Gospels

i. Divine inspiration: Qur’an 3:3-4; 5:47

ii. Ongoing authority: Qur’an 5:47; 5:68 (Note: If the Gospels were reliable in the 7th century, then they’re reliable now because our Gospels are based on manuscripts that pre-date the 7th century)

iii. Perfect preservation: Qur’an 6:115; 18:27

b. But the Qur’an contradicts the Gospels on key issues

i. Deity of Jesus: Qur’an 5:116; 5:72

ii. Death of Jesus: Qur’an 4:157

iii. Resurrection of Jesus

c. So, if the Gospels ARE trustworthy, then the Qur’an is not trustworthy because the Qur’an contradicts the Gospels on key issues.

d. But if the Gospels ARE NOT trustworthy, then the Qur’an is not trustworthy because the Qur’an says the Gospels are trustworthy

e. Either way, the Qur’an is false (and Islam stands or falls on the reliability of the Qur’an)

OBJECTION #2:

Objection comes from Qur’an 5:116; 5:72

Did the early church invent the divinity of Jesus over a long period of time? by Wintery Knight

The Date Of Mark’s Gospel: Insight from the Law in Earliest Christianity by non-Christian New Testament scholar Dr. James Crossley

OBJECTION #3:

What do skeptical ancient historians think of the earliest Christian creed? by Wintery Knight

OBJECTION #4:

Episode #1 of Knight and Rose Show: Easter: Making the Case for the Resurrection of Jesus to Non-Christians

William Lane Craig debates James Crossley on the resurrection of Jesus

Recommended resources:

Introductory:

Intermediate:

Advanced:

Podcast RSS feed:

https://feed.podbean.com/knightandrose/feed.xml

You can use this to subscribe to the podcast from your phone or tablet. I use the open-source AntennaPod app on my Android phone.

Podcast channel pages:

Video channel pages:

Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

News

Democrats closed churches during C0VID, but gay orgies continue during monkeyp0x

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In this post, we’ll start with the latest data on monkeyp0x from the Center for Disease Control. Then, we will look at how the secular left responds when their freedom to engage in Darwinian monkey sex is threatened. Then, we’ll contrast that with how the secular left responded when churches wanted to continue to meet during the the C0VID pandemic.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data finding the monkeyp0x outbreak is concentrated among men who have had sex with several men, and issued more detailed recommendations on how to avoid exposure to the disease.

Among 291 men surveyed, 40% reported that they had two to four partners and 14% reported five to nine partners in the three weeks before developing monkeyp0x , according to the report. About 19% reported 10 or more partners during that period, the CDC said Friday.

And among 86 men who reported information, 28% said they had had group sex, which is defined as sex with more than two people, at a festival, group sex event or sex party, based on the report. The research was conducted from May 17 through July 22.

The article notes that there are now 7,000 known cases in the U.S.

The initial response of the secular left authorities to monkeyp0x was to avoid restricting the behaviors of gay men, lest these restrictions be perceived as disapproval of what they are doing. The secular left said “anyone can get monkeyp0x, so there is no sense making our beloved LGHDTV crowd feel singled out for their truth. Love is love. And we need to love everyone”.

The Federalist notes:

After so much emphasis on the importance of personal sacrifice for the greater good, you would think that a new, highly contagious disease would be treated with more seriousness by the left. Instead, when monkeyp0x crossed over onto America’s shores, the left decided the rules no longer applied to them. Similar to how 1,000 health professionals demanded Black Lives Matter protests were worth the risk during the height of C0vid, LGBT folks decided anonymous sex and fetish parades were more important than public safety.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener, best known for lowering the criminal penalty for knowingly exposing others to HIV and advocating to keep adults as old as 24 from being placed on the sex offender list if they sexually exploit a minor as young as 14, declared, “Lots of sex shaming of gay men around monkeyp0x… Lecturing people not to have sex isn’t a public health strategy…”

The important thing is not to do good for gay men by warning them about the consequences of their choices. The important thing is to let them have “fun”.

The mental health of the secular left cannot be harmed by restricting the gay orgies:

Jack Turban, assistant professor of child psychiatry at UC San Francisco, insisted, “Monkeyp0x has serious physical symptoms, but we also need to focus on the mental health impact for the #queer community. Being gay is a healthy & normal aspect of human diversity. Sex is a healthy normal part of life. Have pride in your community while we combat the virus.”

There was no such concern for the mental health of people who wanted to attend church services during C0VID, thought:

During the C0vid pandemic, everyone was expected to shut down their lives, at great sacrifice to their families and careers, lock down, stay indoors, and wear masks. The police raided Orthodox Jewish homes to stop services and arrested pastors for holding church services, funerals weren’t allowed, and the media, especially LGBT media, mocked people for dying from C0vid. People were accused of being murderers and dangers to society, and Wiener himself berated members of Congress for failing to wear masks.

I think the view of the secular left is that church services are OK to ban, but gay orgies are morally superior, and cannot be banned. You can’t even ask people to avoid attending gay orgies, because gay orgies are so amazingly awesome and important.

I have an atheist friend in Seattle who is a big supporter of same-sex marriage. I wonder if this is what he means by “same-sex marriage”:

As the Daily Caller reported, a popular OnlyFans user, with 98,000 followers on his adult Twitter, put into perspective how far this all can go. In the middle of a growing monkeyp0x outbreak in the gay male community, he decided to attend two orgies in one weekend — sexually engaging with at least 20 and upwards of 40 men — hook up with three additional strangers later that evening, and enjoy a four-way the following day before discovering he had been infected with the disease. If that sounds like an extreme example, keep in mind that the festival promoted by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation was described as “Up Your Alley (aka Dore Alley), where you’ll get your fill of hot hairy daddies, hungry pigs, BDSM babes and kinks of all kinds. Douchie’s got some hot tips for a fun and filthy weekend — free of anxiety.”

Wow, talk about atheist objective morality. In Christianity, you limit your freedom and sacrifice your interests to help others. In atheist morality, it’s… different. In Christian morality, you get married for 50 years and have 4 kids, and 12 grand kids. In atheist morality, it’s… different.

News

Atheist gets her PhD in astronomy and astrophysics and finds evidence for God

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Christian apologist Terrell Clemmons tweeted this testimony by Sarah Salviander, a research scientist in astronomy and astrophysics at the prestigious University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Salviander writes:

I was born in the U.S., but grew up in Canada. My parents were socialists and political activists who thought British Columbia would be a better place for us to live, since it had the only socialist government in North America at the time. My parents were also atheists, though they eschewed that label in favor of “agnostic.” They were kind, loving, and moral, but religion played no part in my life. Instead, my childhood revolved around education, particularly science. I remember how important it was to my parents that my brother and I did well in school.

I just want to point out that I hope that all you Christian parents are taking seriously the obligation to make your kids do well in school, because even if they start out as atheists when they are young, they can still find their way back to God through study, as Sarah did.

She had a bad start, that’s for sure:

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when science fiction was enjoying a renaissance, thanks largely to the popularity of Star Wars. I remember how fascinated I was by the original Star Wars trilogy. It had almost nothing to do with science—it’s more properly characterized as space opera—but it got me thinking about space in a big way. I also loved the original Star Trek, which was more science fiction. The stoic and logical character of Mr. Spock was particularly appealing to me. Popular science was also experiencing a renaissance at that time, which had a lot to do with Carl Sagan’s television show, Cosmos, which I adored. The combination of these influences led to such an intense wonder about outer space and the universe, that by the time I was nine years old I knew I would be a space scientist someday.

Canada was already post-Christian by the 1970s, so I grew up with no religion. In retrospect, it’s amazing that for the first 25 years of my life, I met only three people who identified as Christian. My view of Christianity was negative from an early age, and by the time I was in my twenties, I was actively hostile toward Christianity. Looking back, I realized a lot of this was the unconscious absorption of the general hostility toward Christianity that is common in places like Canada and Europe; my hostility certainly wasn’t based on actually knowing anything about Christianity. I had come to believe that Christianity made people weak and foolish; I thought it was philosophically trivial. I was ignorant not only of the Bible, but also of the deep philosophy of Christianity and the scientific discoveries that shed new light on the origins of the universe and life on Earth.

She documents a phase of following Ayn Rand and embracing “Objectivism”, but eventually she rejects it for failing to answer the big questions of life.

More:

I began to focus all of my energy on my studies, and became very dedicated to my physics and math courses. I joined campus clubs, started to make friends, and, for the first time in my life, I was meeting Christians. They weren’t like Objectivists—they were joyous and content. And, they were smart, too. I was astonished to find that my physics professors, whom I admired, were Christian. Their personal example began to have an influence on me, and I found myself growing less hostile to Christianity.

This is why I think it is so important for Christian parents to raise their children to get advanced degrees… either to become professors themselves, or to finance others (e.g. – our own children) to do advanced degrees. It is so important for university students to see Christian professors on campus. And failing that, it’s important that we bring Christian speakers in to debate non-Christian speakers on the important issues. This will not happen unless we recognize how important it is, and then make a plan to achieve it.

More:

I had joined a group in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS) that was researching evidence for the big bang. The cosmic background radiation—the leftover radiation from the big bang—provides the strongest evidence for the theory, but cosmologists need other, independent lines of evidence to confirm it. My group was studying deuterium abundances in the early universe. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen, and its abundance in the early universe is sensitive to the amount of ordinary mass contained in the entire universe. Believe it or not, this one measurement tells us whether the big bang model is correct.

If anyone is interested in how this works, I’ll describe it, but for now I’ll spare you the gruesome details. Suffice it to say that an amazing convergence of physical properties is necessary in order to study deuterium abundances in the early universe, and yet this convergence is exactly what we get. I remember being astounded by this, blown away, completely and utterly awed. It seemed incredible to me that there was a way to find the answer to this question we had about the universe. In fact, it seems that every question we have about the universe is answerable. There’s no reason it has to be this way, and it made me think of Einstein’s observation that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it’s comprehensible. I started to sense an underlying order to the universe. Without knowing it, I was awakening to what Psalm 19 tells us so clearly, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

That summer, I’d picked up a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and was reading it in my off hours. Previous to this, I’d only known it as an exciting story of revenge, since that’s what the countless movie and TV adaptations always focused on. But it’s more than just a revenge story, it’s a philosophically deep examination of forgiveness and God’s role in giving justice. I was surprised by this, and was starting to realize that the concept of God and religion was not as philosophically trivial as I had thought.

All of this culminated one day, as I was walking across that beautiful La Jolla campus. I stopped in my tracks when it hit me—I believed in God! I was so happy; it was like a weight had been lifted from my heart. I realized that most of the pain I’d experienced in my life was of my own making, but that God had used it to make me wiser and more compassionate. It was a great relief to discover that there was a reason for suffering, and that it was because God was loving and just. God could not be perfectly just unless I—just like everyone else—was made to suffer for the bad things I’d done.

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite, favorite books as well, and had the same impact on me as it did on her.

OK, that’s enough for this post. Go read the rest, and please share it.

I spoke to her recently and she told me that she is working on several projects that are designed to get people more familiar with science and Bible issues. This woman is an expert Christian apologist and her life will have an influence. Are you going to be like her? Will you mentor others to be like her? Will you marry someone like her? Will you raise children who are like her? I think we should all have a plan to study the areas that are important and have an influence for God with what we learn.

Positive arguments for Christian theism