Category Archives: Polemics

Polemics

What should Christians bring up when discussing truth with Muslims?

Leave a comment

I have some experience dicussing Islam because my mother’s side of the family is all Muslim. My go-to argument has always been to confront them about the Qur’an’s claim that Jesus did not die of crucifixion. But I noticed a different argument from Laura Powell, who knows far more about this topic than I do. Do you think her approach is the best one?

She writes about it over at her blog, An Affair with Reason:

The crux of the argument is this: The Qur’an affirms the inspiration, authority, and preservation of the New Testament Gospels;[2] yet the Qur’an also contradicts the Gospels on major theological and historical points. Therefore, the Qur’an cannot be reliable.

According to the Qur’an, the Gospel is the trustworthy, reliable revelation of God given as a guidance for mankind (Qur’an 3:3-4). These Scriptures from God were available and trustworthy when the Qur’an was revealed in the 7th century A.D., and those who had access to them were repeatedly told to obey them, judge by them, submit to their teaching, and stand fast upon them. In other words, according to the Qur’an, the Gospels are the inspired and authoritative words of God.

Qur’an 5:47 says, “And let the People of the Gospel judge by what Allah has revealed therein. And whoever does not judge by what Allah has revealed—then it is those who are the defiantly disobedient.”

Furthermore, Qur’an 5:68 states, “Say, ‘O People of the Scripture, you are [standing] on nothing until you uphold [the law of] the Torah, the Gospel, and what has been revealed to you from your Lord’” (see also 6:114; 3:3-4).

What I like about her argument is that she’s just taking the words of the Qur’an seriously, and asking the Muslims who claim to believe it what’s going on here. Why say that the gospels are unreliable today, when the Qur’an said that the gospels were reliable, yesterday.

My argument about the death of Jesus requires us to ask Muslims “where is the non-Muslim historian who thinks that Jesus did not die?” There isn’t one.

But my argument requires that the Muslim know something about historical scholarship, to know what non-Muslim historians think.Laura’s argument has wider appeal, because it doesn’t require that the Muslim have any knowledge about history – only knowledge about what their own holy book says.

She concludes with this:

What we see here is that the Qur’an teaches the inspiration, authority, and preservation of the Gospels. The Qur’an was intended as an Arabic version of the message of truth found in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but this presents a huge problem for Muslims because the Qur’an contradicts the Christian Scriptures on essential doctrines. Most notably, the Qur’an teaches that Jesus was not God incarnate, he did not die on a cross, and he was not raised from the dead (Qur’an 4:157; 5:116).

Here’s the dilemma for Muslims: If the Gospels are not trustworthy, then the Qur’an is false because it teaches that the Gospels are the inspired, perfectly preserved, authoritative words of God. But if the Gospels are trustworthy, then the Qur’an is false because it teaches contradictory, mutually exclusive facts about key issues. Either way, the Qur’an is false.

This, of course, is a huge problem for Muslims. The validity of Islam rests upon the reliability of the Qur’an, just as Christianity rests upon the truth of the divinity, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If the Qur’an is unreliable, then Islam is a false religion.

I like that she’s comfortable having disagreements with people. That’s not very common in the church today, in my experience.

By the way, this is the same Laura who wrote that really good article about how she found a better way to discuss her Christian worldview when she moved on from sharing her testimony. I blogged about it here.

Polemics

Robin Collins lectures on the fine-tuning argument at Pepperdine University

1 Comment

Details:

Dr. Robin Collins is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Messiah College. Collins is the foremost defender of what is known as the teleological argument for the existence of God. He has a background in both physics and philosophy and will be discussing how the specific physical constants and conditions in the universe are finely-tuned for intelligent life and how this “fine-tuning” gives us reason to believe in a Creator.

Here is the video:

Topics:

  • the constants and quantities set at the origin of the universe is fine-tuned for conscious, embodied intelligences like us
  • three kinds of fine-tuning: 1) laws of nature, 2) constants, 3) quantities
  • examples of 1): gravity, electromagnetism, strong force, quantization, Pauli exclusion principle
  • examples of 2): gravitational constant, cosmological constant,
  • examples of 3):  initial distribution of mass-energy
  • in addition to fine-tuning for life, there is also fine-tuning for discoverability
  • Naturalistic response to the evidence: the multiverse hypothesis
  • problems with the multiverse hypothesis
  • additional topics

I put the ones I am ready to speak on in bold. I recommend you learn those as well in order to illustrate the fine-tuning with evidence when you present it. It’s important to understand that if the constants and quantities change, it’s not that you still have life, but just with pointy ears and/or green skin. It’s that you don’t have stars or planets or heavy elements or chemical reactions. Things that are necessary for complex, intelligent life forms of any conceivable kind.

Polemics

Older career woman calls Dennis Prager show to warn young women about marriage

Leave a comment

I used to listen to the Dennis Prager show all the time, and my favorite hour was the male-female hour, which is the second hour every Wednesday. In that hour, you will hear some of the most frank discussion of male and female issues. I was surprised to see Better Bachelor, a men’s rights activist, talk about an article about the male-female hour in his show. I’ll link to the article below.

Prager explains in The Stream:

Every Wednesday, the second hour of my national radio show is the “Male/Female Hour.” A few weeks ago, a woman named Jennifer called in. For reasons of space, I have somewhat shortened her comments. Every young woman should read them. This is precisely what she said:

Dennis, I want to get right to it. I’m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that’s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don’t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.

I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this.

And by the time you have your own household with all your own bills, you can’t get off that track, because now you’ve got to make the money to pay your bills. It’s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It’s not the same as it was in your 20s. You try to do what you can to make your life fulfilling. I have cats and dogs. But it’s lonely when you see your friends having children, going on vacations, planning the lives of their children, and you don’t do anything at night but come home to your cats and dogs. I don’t want other women to do what I have done.

How did this happen to her?

Somebody asked me the other day, “Why did you stay single and never have kids?” There’s answers: Because I was brainwashed by my mother into this. But it’s hard and it’s shameful to tell people, “I don’t know. I ran out of time.”

There’s not a good answer for it except “I was programmed to get into the workforce, compete with men and make money.” Supposedly, that would be a fulfilling life. But I was told that by a feminist mother who was divorced, who hated her husband — my father.

She tried to steer me on what she thought was the right path, but feminism is a lie. That’s what I want women to know.

I didn’t realize this until late in life. I want to tell women: Find someone in your 20s. That’s when you’re still very cute. That’s when you’re still amiable to working out problems with someone. It’s harder in your 50s, when you’ve lived alone, to compromise with someone, to have someone in your home and every little thing about them annoys you because you’re so used to being alone. It’s hard to undo that, so don’t do what I did. Find someone in your 20s.

I don’t want young women to be wasting their teens and 20s like this woman is, choosing men for relationships using criteria that have nothing at all to do with marriage, or what a man does in a marriage.

Look at this weird list of criteria from a dating ad – is any of this related to the actual work that a man does as a husband and father?

This person is looking for domestic violence, not a husband
She’s looking for drama, domestic violence and instability – not for a husband

I see young women going for “bad boy” qualities a lot, but for some reason, they think that the bad boy will turn into a good man. What could cause this? Is it that easy to change a man? I don’t think that men change that easily, which is why you should pick the man you marry based on his ability to do the work.

I think young women should focus their energy on relationships with men who are sober and chaste, and looking to commit and start a family. These men are easy for women to find when the women are in their teens and early 20s, but much harder for women to find if they delay marriage into their 30s and 40s. Although these marriage-minded men may not be “attractive” according to “bad boy” criteria, they should be selected because they are good at marriage, and want to marry sooner, rather than later. Feelings are not the best way to judge a man. Sometimes, you have to look at his academic transcripts, his resume, his bank account, his library.

On the other hand, I would advise successful man to choose a woman who is attracted to his abilities as a husband and father. Choose a woman who respects your ability to be serious, to be self-controlled, to be focused on serving others, and to achieve what you set out to achieve. Men need respect more than they need oxygen. In order to get that respect, a man has to choose a woman who has, from earliest times, preferred men who have good moral character, demonstrated leadership ability, and a proven record of achieving what he set out to achieve by wise decision-making.