William Lane Craig delivered a one-two punch in a lecture comparing Islam and Christianity. In part 1, I responded to his defense of Christianity against Islam. Surprisingly, this theology scholar doesn’t understand the fundamental concept of the Trinity enough to explain it without committing heresy.

Attacking Islam’s concept of God

With reduced expectations, we move on to WLC’s second point. He says,

What I am going to tell you now is something that you will never hear in the media or from our public officials for they dare not say such things.

Oh Dr. Craig, what big balls you have! How fortunate for us to have WLC give us the hard truth. (I just wish he’d turn some of that tough skepticism onto his own worldview.)

Here’s the truth that WLC isn’t shy about stating: “Islam has a morally deficient concept of God.” This isn’t just a preference for Yahweh over Allah; instead, “The Muslim concept of God is rationally objectionable.”

1. God is loving

Here is his argument. Step 1: “God, as the perfect being, must be all-loving.” But why that attribute for a perfect being? What about others such as being kind, humble, polite, witty, sophisticated, sassy, or snarky? What are the objectively correct attributes of a perfect being, and how does he know? WLC is playing Victor Frankenstein, picking and choosing the attributes for his perfect god.

But let’s ignore that—does WLC’s favorite god meet his own criteria? The Bible itself makes clear that he doesn’t. Yahweh supports slavery and human sacrifice, has crazy attitudes toward marriage, and demands genocide (more here, here, here, and here). He even created evil. God clearly has a not-so-loving side.

WLC doesn’t care about consistency and sifts out Bible verses that support his preconception:

The love of the Heavenly Father is impartial, universal, and unconditional.

Yeah—tell that to the Canaanites. Or the enslaved. Or women. Or Jesus when he said, “Don’t cast pearls before swine.”

2. But Allah isn’t so loving

WLC contrasts the Christian god with the Muslim god in step 2: “According to the Qur’an, God does not love sinners.” He then lists many verses where Allah is said not to love unbelievers, evildoers, the impious and sinners, the proud, and so on. I can accept this point, but Craig seems to imagine that his god is immune to this pettiness. He should read his own Bible:

Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9–10)

God created hell, and sending people to Hell isn’t what you do to people you love. Nevertheless, Jesus makes clear that God made most of his favorite creation so that he could send them to Hell:

Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13–14)

 3. Allah loves only those who deserve it

Step 3: “According to the Qur’an, God’s love [is] reserved only for those who earn it.”

Given the choice between getting into heaven by works or by faith, I’ll pick the former. Christianity’s demand to believe the unbelievable to gain entrance into heaven fails from the start.

WLC should read his Bible. The parable of the sheep and goats in Matthew 25 makes clear that works get you into heaven. And there’s more:

For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done (Matthew 16:27).

[God] will repay each person according to what they have done (Romans 2:6).

The dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works (Revelation 20:12).

Craig’s own Bible makes the case for works, just like the Qur’an.

4. Therefore, Yahweh beats Allah

WLC’s conclusion: “Now don’t you think that this is a morally inadequate conception of God?”

Can he be encouraging us to judge god claims to see if they make sense? I’m all for that, but it’s surprising to hear from WLC. He skeptically judges supernatural claims but then plays the “Who do you think you are to judge God??” card when it’s his god being judged.

To highlight the emptiness of the Muslim concept of God, WLC gives us this thought experiment:

What would you think of a parent who said to his children, “If you measure up to my standards and do as I tell you, then I will love you”?

Tell us, Dr. Craig, what would you would think of a Bible that said this:

[Jesus said:] If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love (John 15:10).

The flip side of that is the Christian hell for people who don’t measure up to God’s standards. WLC is living in a glass house, and he should be more cautious whom he throws stones at.

WLC wraps up:

Therefore, it seems to me that the Islamic conception of God is simply morally defective. Therefore I cannot rationally accept it.

Sure, the Muslim god is morally defective, but so is the Christian god. WLC makes no attempt at an unbiased evaluation. He has no interest in fairly critiquing both sides of the issue.

And what does “I cannot rationally accept it” mean? If there’s a creator of the universe, it may be that he has the properties outlined in the Qur’an. The Gnostics, for example, thought that the creator of this world was imperfect (which would explain a lot). Since we’re going on no hard evidence in each of these cases, who’s to say that it’s not the Muslim or Gnostic creator rather than the Christian one?

Moral imperfections in the Qur’an

WLC sets up his own jihad against Islam by citing its barbarism. But for each Muslim example, Christianity’s own barbaric history has plenty of counterbalancing examples.

• “[In 627,] Muhammad rounded up hundreds of Jewish families in Medina. Seven hundred Jewish men were put to the sword. Muhammad had their wives and children sold into slavery.” (That isn’t much compared to the Canaanite genocide that was ordered by God in Deuteronomy 7:1–5.)
• Mohammed ordered the non-Muslims killed unless they converted. (That sounds like the persecutions of the Cathars, Anabaptists, and Huguenots in Europe. They also could have gotten forgiveness by converting.)
• “Islam is a total way of life. Everything is to be submitted to God. . . . The Western idea of separation of church and state is meaningless in Islam.” (Like Kim Davis performing only those government duties that satisfied her interpretation of Christianity? Like science denial by school boards? Like the many examples of state-supported Christianity? The U.S. has plenty of examples, but can WLC be saying that he wants to fight against this kind of Christian extremism? I’d love to see him on our side, but somehow I think that this is just another example of one standard for his religion and another for the other guy’s.)

William Lane Craig has butchered the Trinity, the organizing principle of his religion. He’s painted a cotton-candy picture of the Christian god based on wishful thinking. But his critique of the Muslim god is on target. If he applied the same skepticism to his own religion, it would dissolve just as readily.

(h/t commenter bryce1012)

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/11/16.)

Image from John Christian Fjellestad, CC license

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World famous apologist William Lane Craig picks up a machete and hacks a path through difficult theology in “The Concept of God in Islam and Christianity.” He doesn’t waste time building bridges with our Muslim neighbors but instead highlights their threadbare theology while he commits collateral damage to Christianity.

Defense of the Trinity (but with defenders like that . . .)

WLC begins by stating that Muslims have misinterpreted basic Christian teaching. Early Christians called Mary the “mother of God,” and Mohammed misinterpreted the Trinity as a king-consort-son arrangement. The Christian Trinity isn’t like this, and WLC says, “It is no wonder that [Mohammed] was revolted by such a ridiculous doctrine.”

I’m not sure that he was revolted, but let’s look instead at this being a “ridiculous doctrine.” I don’t see what’s ridiculous about it (except for the evidence-less supernatural part, which admittedly makes it quite ridiculous). You could find lots of king-consort-son triads in other religions—Zeus, Leto, and their son Apollo from the Greek pantheon or Osiris, Isis, and Horus in Egyptian religion, for example. If any collection of gods could rule the cosmos, I don’t see why it couldn’t be a family Trinity.

And WLC should be careful with that “ridiculous doctrine” crack since he makes clear that he doesn’t even understand his own ridiculous doctrine. Here’s his approach to the Trinity.

[The Trinity] is the doctrine that God is tri-personal. It is not the self-contradictory assertion that three gods are somehow one God. Or that three persons are somehow one person. That is just illogical nonsense.

That is indeed illogical nonsense. Unfortunately, it’s also Christian dogma. The fourth-century Athanasian Creed says in part, “The Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods; but one God.” You can try to get around it by saying that the three part is three persons and the one part is one god, but this is just wordplay.

WLC could argue that the definition of the Trinity is not stated in the Bible. For evidence, he could point out that the early Church needed centuries to reach agreement on it, and if it were obvious, it would’ve been dogma from the start. Illuminating the shaky foundation of this doctrine only undercuts his position further.

Craig continues:

[The Trinity] is the claim that the one entity we call God comprises three persons. That is no more illogical than saying that one geometrical figure which we call a triangle is comprised of three angles. Three angles in one figure. Three persons in one being.

Yes, a triangle is composed of three angles, but no, that is not a parallel to the Trinity. In fact, that commits the heresy called Partialism, the declaration that God is composed of three parts that make a whole. Other popular analogies that are also heretical for the same reason compare God to an egg (shell + white + yolk = egg) or to time (past + present + future = time) or to music (three notes make a chord).

WLC is in good company, and C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity makes the same mistake: “In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.” Six squares are parts of a cube, just like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are parts of God? Be careful—a heresy like that can send a guy to Hell. (More on the Trinity here and here.)

WLC doubles down on his claim that Muslims (or anyone) pushing back against the Trinity is wrong.

Although this doctrine may seem strange to Muslims, once it is properly stated there is nothing illogical about it. It is a logically consistent doctrine, and therefore rationally unobjectionable.

Nothing illogical about it? You can’t even explain it without committing heresy! The most honest explanation that I’ve heard is that it’s simply a mystery, and we fallible humans on this side of heaven won’t ever be able to understand it. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains it as a mystery, for example. That doesn’t make the Trinity any more realistic, but at least Christians who say this acknowledge the difficulty.

God and love

WLC moves on to argue why the Christian concept of God is better than the Muslim version. The Trinitarian nature of the Christian god isn’t an embarrassment to Christians determined to argue that their god is monotheistic, WLC tells us; it’s actually an advantage.

Here’s his argument. First, “God is by definition the greatest conceivable being.” (This is the beginning of the Ontological argument, where apologists imagine that they can think into existence anything they want, but let’s avoid digging into the problems with that argument and move on.)

Point 2: “A perfect being must be a loving being, for love is a moral perfection.” Who says that love is a moral perfection? Where is the list of these perfections?

I agree that love is pretty great, but that’s because evolution has programmed me to think that love is pretty great. I feel this way for no more transcendent or objective reason than that. Why imagine that the feelings we have for each other translate unchanged to God? Christians eager to excuse God’s genocidal demands suppose that we simply can’t understand his thinking. But then if we can’t understand his thinking, don’t pretend to understand how he loves us or what “love” means at his level.

Anyway, “loving” is not on the short list of attributes that an objective observer would give the god of the Old Testament. Richard Dawkins’ famous quote at the end of this post summarizes some of these. The Bible makes clear that God is a lot more than just a cuddly teddy bear.

“Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. “Should you not tremble in my presence?” (Jeremiah 5:22)

(More about God’s unpleasant characteristics here, here, and here.)

Point 3 in WLC’s argument: Love requires a target of that love, and for the current of love to flow before the creation of humanity, God couldn’t have been a single person. (And maybe because self-love puts hair on your palms?) Sorry, Muslims, your mono-monotheism isn’t as good as Christianity’s tri-monotheism. Or something.

Here’s how WLC puts it:

If God is perfectly loving by his very nature then he must be giving himself in love to another. But who is that other? It can’t be any created person since creation is a result of God’s free will, not a result of his nature. It belongs to God’s very essence to love, but it does not belong to his essence to create. God is necessarily loving, but he is not necessarily creating.

Wow—where did all these rules come from? It’s nice to imagine that God is loving, just like us, but how does WLC conclude that this is a binding attribute? And how can God not be necessarily creating since creating the universe must’ve been better than not doing so, and God always does the better thing?

And what kind of love are the three persons of the Trinity sharing? Is this parent/child love? Romantic/erotic love? How is this different from a polygamous same-sex marriage, and how do you know?

What would this love-in even look like? WLC apparently imagines that for the trillions of years God existed before the universe did, the three persons of the Trinity were just loving and loving each other. And then they’d start all over again. Was it nothing but compliments all day long?

“Y’know, those new trousers really work on you”

“Say, have you lost weight? You look great!”

“Oh, no—let me do that for you!”

“Can I get you a beer? You look like you could use one.”

But wait a minute—if this were before our universe was created, it was before time existed. How does love work without time? How can you create the universe, or anything, without time?

WLC would probably say that we just don’t know and that it’s ridiculous to speculate. I like that—let’s just say we don’t know instead of this philosophical masturbation based on nothing.

Concluded in part 2, William Lane Craig Needs to Insult Islam Some More.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/8/16.)

Image from Samuel M. Livingston, CC license
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