by Timothy Bootsveld

Have you ever opened the box of a jigsaw puzzle only to find the pieces in the box are the mixture of ten different puzzles? If not, you should visit my Grandma’s long term care facility so you can enjoy the frustration. The denizens there apparently think that the added difficulty of mixing the pieces between the boxes is part of the fun. But to me, a jumbled box of puzzle pieces isn’t my ideal afternoon. The puzzles never come together.

But, unlike Grandma, if your box has all the puzzle pieces you need, you can fit them together into the whole to form a coherent picture. And in this sense, puzzle pieces are kind of like truth – capital ‘T’ Truth. Truth fits together into a single, consistent, coherent whole. All the propositions of Truth fit together, they all fit to form a single picture. Truth is coherent.

This property of Truth – the property of coherence – allows us to test different worldviews as to whether they are false. This kind of check is called an Internal Critique. Internal critiques check to see if all the propositions of a worldview fit together without contradiction. If all the propositions of the worldview fit together coherently, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the worldview is True. The worldview would still have to correspond to reality to be true. But coherence is, at least, a necessary condition for correspondence. If a worldview fails the coherence test – if it fails an internal critique – then that worldview is necessarily false. It cannot possibly correspond to reality.

That might be a little confusing, so let’s run a real test case through an internal critique. Let’s see if Islam is internally consistent. If it is internally consistent, it then is as least possible that Islam is true. We’d have to take the further step of checking to see if it corresponds to reality. But if Islam is not internally consistent – if it fails an internal critique - then we can know that Islam is necessarily false.

Example of an Internal Critique

So here is the internal critique: There are two propositions that Islam teaches that, when taken together, seem contradictory: The first is a proposition about the Quran, and the second is a proposition taken from the Quran.

The first proposition, which concerns the Quran itself, is very simple: The Quran is the eternal and uncreated speech of Allah, a linguistic revelation of the will of Allah to his creation. Part of this claim is obvious, that the Quran is a work of language. Pick up a copy of the Quran, you’ll see words on a page. But the claim includes the source of the words, that the Quran is the word of Allah. This is a foundational claim in Islam, being taught even to children. The Quran is the linguistic expression of Allah. Easy.

The second proposition is a bit more complicated: It is the doctrine of Tanzih - the transcendence of Allah. There are many examples of where this is taught in the Quran, for example:

Say, “He, God, is One, God the Eternally Sufficient unto Himself.  He begets not; nor was he begotten.  And none is like unto Him.”
Surah 112 [emphasis mine]

This surah is a classic Quranic proof-text of Allah’s transcendence. On the Islamic position, God holds himself so apart from creation –so absolutely different - that the categories of creation are not those of God. God has reserved for Himself his own unique categories of being.

The Quran gives color to this doctrine in a few places, for example:

The originator of the heavens and the earth, He has appointed you mates from among yourselves, and has appointed mates also among cattle.  He multiplies you thereby; naught is like unto him.
Surah 42:11 [emphasis mine]

Again we see that the Quran teaches that Allah is absolutely unique. He has created the world such that created beings have likenesses to each other:  Man has a likeness in woman, his mate.  Cattle have a likeness amongst themselves. Man and cattle have a likeness in that they multiply in the same fashion. Everywhere we look in creation we see beings that, on some level, hold likeness to each other. But Allah is not so. There is nothing in creation that holds a likeness to him. He is alone. He is utterly unique.

The categories that mankind has for thinking and communicating simply do not apply to God, not even as analogy. And if you think that this leaves us with only dark mysteries of who God is, you’re not the first one to think so. Muslims themselves have recognized this. For example, The Study Quran, in the commentary on Surah 112, verse 4, says:

[God] is unique.  As created things can be described by attributes such as living, seeing, and hearing, by which God is also described, the meaning here is that nothing bears any likeness or equality with God’s Essence or Self.

Consider! All the qualities that one is tempted to predicate of Allah that would otherwise apply to a created being:  examples of goodness, wisdom, or beauty can all be found within the created order.  To predicate of Allah goodness, wisdom, or beauty in the sense in which the terms are informed by human experience is to make a similar category error as when saying that blue tastes cold.  Allah cannot be said to be good or wise or beautiful in any sense understood by humans. To say that God is any of these qualities is, in actuality, to say nothing meaningful. God, being utterly unique, is a being of which all predication is empty.  God, as he relates to human experience, is utterly unknowable.  All we have is a blank identity, Allah is Allah. Al Ghazali, the great Muslim philosopher and theologian reached the same conclusion nine hundred years ago:

The end results of the knowledge of the Arifin [those who have knowledge] is their inability to know Him, and their knowledge is, in truth, that they do not know Him and it is absolutely impossible for them to know him.
Al-Ghazali, Quoted in Ghazali’s Unique Unknowable God, by Fadlou Shehadi, pg 37.

The Contradiction at the Heart of Islam

So, now we know what Islam teaches, we can now perform the internal critique. Let’s see if what Islam teaches is internally consistent, in teaching the two propositions, that:

1. God has expressed his will linguistically in the Quran

2. God is utterly unique

If we take proposition 1 seriously, if the Quran is in fact a true revelation of Allah, then God exists in such a way that He can communicate His will linguistically and propositionally.  The Quran, a literary work, is the expression of the will of Allah and the content of which is expressed in the categories of creation and human experience.  Humanity is therefore able to understand this communication.  But a revelation of Allah expressed in the categories of creation is a denial that he has his own unique categories.  If Allah can speak truly of himself in the categories of creation, then there is in fact a very deep continuity between man and God.  This is a denial of Islam’s concept of the transcendence of God. Thus, if we affirm God’s communication, we cannot also affirm God’s utter uniqueness.

If we take proposition 2 seriously, if the Quranic description of Allah existing with no likeness is correct, then there exists no continuity between divine and human thought.  God created mankind to exist in a state of complete ‘otherness’ from God.  Any communication from Allah that would be comprehensible to the human mind would have to use the categories of creation and human experience as the content of communication - content that in no way reflects who or what Allah is in Himself.  Allah leaves man in a state of complete inability to access His true character, thought, or will. God has isolated himself in his own transcendence. Thus, if we affirm God’s utter uniqueness, we cannot also affirm that God has communicated with us.

These two Islamic doctrines are mutually exclusive. You can affirm one or the other: God’s utter uniqueness, or God’s communication to his creation. But you can’t have both. They are inconsistent with one another. They are puzzle pieces that don’t fit together. And because Islam specifically teaches both, Islam is inconsistent on the whole and must be rejected as false. Islam cannot possibly correspond to reality – it cannot possibly be True – if it is inconsistent. In the Quran, we have the will of a God tells us he cannot reveal his will in human language.  Indeed, the Quran is the very speech of a God who is incapable of speaking to his creation.

Islam Can’t Reject Either of the Propositions – But Christians Can

The Muslim might think that this internal critic is a total victory for Christianity because the Trinitarian God of the Bible is transcendent, just as Allah is. But Christianity’s view of transcendence is very different from Islam’s. In contrast to the Islamic view, the Triune God of scripture is not unique at all points. Instead, He has freely chosen to create beings that bear the dignity of having been made ‘in His image’. Indeed; the entire created order has continuities to Him:

According to Trinitarian theology, the world is a derivative reflection of the originality of God.  God is original, while the world is derivative.  So we may say that God is the archetype, the original pattern, while the world is an ectype, derived from and dependant on the archetype. … Man being made in the image of God implies that we are like him.
Vern Poythress, Redeeming Mathematics, pg 31

While the Christian view of transcendence is compatible with God being able to communicate to his creation, the Muslim might respond that this is a repugnant solution: It is a lowly God, they would say, that chains himself to His creation.  But this is not the case. God was free to create a world utterly unlike Himself, just as Islam suggests; there are no constraints on God in that sense.  But the Christian view is that, in creating, God had nothing higher or greater or more beautiful than Himself to use as a type for His creation.  Creation bears a resemblance to the Creator because God thinks so highly of Himself.

The Christian view of God’s transcendence means that the Triune God has purposely made the world in such a way that He is knowable.  God has created mankind as God‘s image, his own being a revelation of God, and capable of true knowledge of his creator.

Conclusion

Muslims are some of the easiest people to converse with about the stuff that matters. Don’t be afraid to bring up the topic of religion with a Muslim, they will likely be more than happy to talk with you! And depending where the conversation goes, you’re going to have multiple opportunities to introduce them to the internal inconsistencies in Islam: 

• If love requires an object, how can a singular God, existing all alone express love? Doesn’t that make God dependent on His creation, in order to show love?  

• How can the uncreated eternal speech of God refer to a created thing such as the Quran? How is it possible for an utterly unique being to communicate with other beings?

So, don’t be afraid to talk with Muslims. But also, don’t be afraid that the Christianity lacks consistency in the same way that Islam does. Christianity has the answers to the inconsistencies that exist in Islam because Christianity is true. Christianity is the only internally consistent worldview because Christianity corresponds to reality as it actually is. So, with gentleness and with kindness, invite your Muslim friends to internally critique their own worldview. Show them that Islam is not internally consistent. Show them that Christianity is internally consistent. And invite them to investigate Christianity, as the only worldview that corresponds to reality.