It must be obvious that Christianity and Islam are in an adversarial relationship towards each other. And it is just philosophically inane for any people pleasing postmodernist to suggest that their differences are not that significant. Oprah and her largely ignorant legions try to convince the world that the differences that exist between religions like Islam and Christianity do not really exist, or are superficial, even cosmetic, differences.
This matter cannot be deferred to mystery either, and the reason surely is that the Qur'an explains God's justice and mercy.
What I find striking about this attitude is the arrogance in it, which of course is ironic since it is meant as a countermeasure to the arrogance of "one truth" religious positions. And the arrogance of Oprah and others who make this argument is much worse, in my estimation. First, she reduces all religious claims to mere matters of taste. But why should we believe that she has the right to do that? Religions claim that their understanding of truth is correct. Surely it is arrogant to suggest that all of these people the world over who think they have discovered the truth about God, the afterlife, morality and the like are merely wrong to think so. How does she know? Why not just think her arrogant for thinking she is right that no one can be right?
Secondly, her arrogance is revealed by the implications of such a statement. She knows what all religions teach, down to the fine details of each world system, and she knows that really everyone believes the same thing, even though all of their best scholars would disagree on this point. No matter. Apparently we should trust Oprah over Muslim and Christian scholars who claim these differences are significant. We must conclude that Oprah has a near divine level of knowledge to be able to supplant the best scholars of the worlds various religions, especially Islam and Christianity.
Thankfully, thinking people don't take Oprah seriously on this point. We simply must recognize that the differences between Christianity and Islam amount to a near complete incompatibility between the two religions. With that factual starting point, let us explore the simple question, why Christianity and not Islam?
I will attempt to organize this by discussing doctrines of the Islamic faith that I believe are at the very least problematic, and thus create serious doubt in the truthfulness of Islam.
Doctrine 1 - Mercy and Justice in Islam
While Christianity can account for the mercy and justice of God, Islam cannot.
There are two angles to take at this point. The first involves the actual transaction when God offers mercy and the other involves the process of "earning" God's mercy.
If Islam is correct, then it is clear that God need not punish his son for our sins or any other human representative for that matter. God needs only to "commute" the sentence, laying aside the guilt and all punishments associated with it. And while at first that seems reasonable--after all, when we forgive someone, it seems a wholly subjective affair, in which we just say, "okay, I forgive you." We don't say that there needs to be some just countermeasure to our actions. We don't go looking for our neighbor's cat to offer sacrifice as payment for the forgiveness we offered him. So while this seems to appeal to our common sense, it is an inadequate understanding of justice and mercy.
For example, if my neighbor has stolen from me and I forgive him, it is not as if penalty has not occurred. I have been punished already, in a sense, for his crimes, but that in itself is not just. Surely God will require fairness in all things, including this exchange. It is simply not right for a man to "get away" with stealing from another simply because he has been forgiven.
In short, for God to forgive men, he will have to stop being just. It is simply unjust for God to allow the universe to absorb the sins of men. The damage is done and cannot be undone. What can be done is a just recompense for these actions. But in Islam, God simple "turns aside" his wrath, or "looks away" from the damage done.
Perhaps a Muslim could answer this by suggesting that in mercy God has allowed a time for people to restore justice by doing what is right to compensate for the sins they have committed. In other words, God establishes a works system that "pays down" the debt owed to him. But taking this to the end, it must be clear that if men have time to overcome their bad deeds by performing sufficient good deeds, then they are merely keeping their end of God's bargain. God would be required, in pure justice, to let them into heaven because they fulfilled the conditions He himself set out for them to fulfill. It seems to be the case that mercy need not fit into the equation, since man is merely doing what he was rightly supposed to do with the time afforded and earning his way back to God. And practically it bears noting that a Muslim probably wouldn't labor under these conditions with any sense of the mercy of God affording him all the necessary time, resources and support to achieve the appropriate good works. He would most likely labor under a crushing burden of fear and uncertainty, with the thought of God's justice rather than any sense of mercy prominent in his mind.
Islam has a pendulum problem here: When concerns about the place of mercy in a works oriented system are raised, the Islamic answer is that God is really forgiving the sins of the past; and when concerns about the justice of merely "laying aside" these sins are raised, the Islamic answer is the justice of a works oriented system. Concerns about God's justice are solved by giving us only a just God while concerns about God's mercy are solved by giving us only a merciful God. And yet among the 99 names of Allah, the Qur'an makes it clear that He is both merciful and just. This is a serious logical problem.
This matter cannot be deferred to mystery either, and the reason surely is that the Qur'an explains God's justice and mercy.
A religious mystery is an area indicated but not fully explained (such as God's role in specific evils, if any). These areas need not be contradictory, and presumably Islam includes some of these.
But that is not what we see in the matter of mercy and justic in God. It is plainly explained that salvation is earned and that prior sins are simply laid aside. But these are clearly logical problems, as has already been explained. It is philosophically irresponsible after these observations are made to seek refuge in the notion of "God's mysteries."
Doctrine 2 - The Derivative Nature of Islamic Doctrine
The best ideas in Islam are borrowed from Judaism and Christianity. If one were to take out of the Qur'an every reference to the Old Testament story, one would find the Qur'an a very thin book indeed. This is so striking that anyone who reads the Qur'an will be amazed at the lack of original material in it. It will almost read like a Jewish cult rather than a separate religious tradition.
The troubling part in the Qur'an is the additional or manipulated material, such as the role of Ismael, the legal changes and the rejection of Jesus as the Son of God. On these grounds Christians must of course reject Islam, but surely there is much the two religions share in common.
Doctrine 3 - Evidentiary Problems with The Islamic Doctrine of Sin
One of the teachings in Islam that is at odds with Christianity and Judaism is the doctrine of sin. Muslims are essentially Pelagian (the Christian heresy that taught we do not inherit a disposition toward sin). In Islam, people are born with a capacity to keep God's law. There is no doctrine of "original sin." A person can, in theory, live a sinless life, provided he or she tries hard enough. This of course is immediately rejected by Christian teaching.
The problem here seems obvious. If we are born with a capacity for sinlessness, why are there not more sinless people in the world? To say that we fall into sin merely because of "peer pressure" is inadequate as an explanation of pervasive sin in the world. If human beings have the ability to do right, then the assumption is that they have knowledge of what is right. And if they have knowledge of what is right, and the capacity to do what is right, it follows that no exposure to what is wrong need deter them from doing what is right. In fact, if anything it would give them more incentive to do right, since there are so many examples of ruined lives all around them.
Does it not seem that the cleanest explanation for our experience--namely, that everyone we know is a sinner--is the Christian doctrine of original sin? G.K. Chesterton said it this way, "The only doctrine for which Christians have ample empirical evidence is the doctrine of original sin." What he meant is that daily we are exposed to evil both in our own lives and in the lives of others. The best explanation for the fact that sin comes so naturally to us is that humanity is messed up. The evidence supports Christian doctrine and not Islamic doctrine.
Doctrine 4 - Islam and Unity and Diversity
There is no love in Allah which he can share with anyone. Of the 99 names for God in Islam, the name love is strangely missing. The reason is clearly that he need not show love because he does not experience love in his own nature. Only a Triune God can experience love. Only when there is a dynamic interaction of wills can there be love. There must be a subject/subject relation in order to have love. When we speak of "loving ourselves," we must surely mean that there is something about us that is worthy of loving. Imagine for a moment that you were the only being in all of existence. Could you love anything then, standing in infinite space, with no other being in the universe with whom to relate? Surely love is meaningless without relationship and relationship is meaningless without another will that can converse with you. What would love mean then if it cannot be given to anyone? In Islam, God is alone, and none can understand or appreciate him. His creation is a feature of His sovereign power and not an expression of love. God is not creating to disclose himself to creation so that they might know and love Him. God creates to ensure the implementation of his unilateral will.
The question is this: If God need not bother about love, then why should anyone else? If God is not winning people by love, then why should his followers be constrained to do anything different? If God exists to enforce a set of directives without love, then his people can surely do the same.
Lewis once said that "monstrous nations have a monstrous conception of God." Is it any wonder most people the world over would not want to live in any consistently Muslim country, including probably most Muslims.
Doctrine 5 - Islamic View of History
It is because of the Islamic conception of God that Islamic history is what it is. Islam spreads by the blood of its enemies; Christianity, by the blood of its founder and His disciples for generations. Surely this by itself tells us something about the practical outworking of the ideas of each system. Islam spreads by conquest. Christianity spreads by martyrdom. Islam conquered the Mediterranean world in a short time using the methods of Alexander, Julius and other conquerors. Christianity conquered the Mediterranean world in a way unseen up until that point or since--by a sacrifice that transformed the heart of Rome. Islam contains and controls foreign ideas; Christianity penetrates and transforms them. People submit to Islam out of fear; they submit to Christianity out of love.
It is true that Christians turned at times to the efficiency of conquest in order to spread its position in the world. Thankfully, Christians now know that those times constitute a bold departure from the gospel of Jesus Christ. They are to be confessed among the Christian community as periods of great internal disease and sinfulness. You will wait a long time before you hear any Muslim scholar admit that the conquests of North Africa, Persia, Spain and Constantinople were sins in Islam.
Doctrine 6 - Islamic View of Salvation
In short, your performance saves you. We have already discussed the logical problem here. If you can perform your way back into God's good graces, then salvation cannot be a matter of mercy. If we can perform so as to overcome our sins, then the granting of salvation is a just recompense for having performed as one ought to perform.
The other dimension to this is the psychological state of the performer. Will he be burdened by fear or freedom in his pursuit of moral excellence? He can never be assured of his salvation until a sufficient number of good deeds compensate for any bad deeds he has committed. What if he runs out of time? What if the quality of his good deeds is not good enough though he has perhaps done many? And what will his lifelong motivations be?
Surely the Muslim operating in this performance mindset will see threat of punishment and promise of reward as his singular motivation in life. He will become an ethical egoist. Life will be about his own comfort in the end. He is not trying to know and love God and enjoy him forever. He can't know or love God since God is unmatched and unknowable. Thus his entire motivation with respect to God is to secure some payoff from him and to stave off any punishments coming from such a powerful being.
The curious thing about this is that even atheistic ethicists recognize the inferiority of ethical egoism. It turns everything in the universe into an excuse to feed self-interest alone. But what if everyone felt this way? What if everyone in my life only cared about me because I was somehow enriching their experience in life? There would be no one who could think of me as a "good" in and of myself. Strangely this attitude is consistent with the Muslim notion of God, who in effect has turned us into things to be used to achieve his purposes rather than subjects to be loved for who we are. But then the Muslim God should not be surprised when they respond to Him in precisely the same fashion, turning Him into a source of personal payoff rather than someone to love for who He is.
Doctrine 7 - Islamic View of Heaven
In keeping with the Islamic notion of God and the performance relationship of his subjects, heaven is merely a sensual reward for those who keep God's laws. There are virgins, succulent foods and serene scenes in God's oasis. In essence, one is given a cleaned up and exaggerated version of the pleasures of earth forever and ever. This of course all fits with an egoist ethic. The problem is that the egoist ethic is dreadful!
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