Mohammed Hijab – Is the Trinity Coherent vs Dr. William Lane Craig
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In this video, Dr. William Lane Craig and
Muhammad Hijab discuss their respective views on the
coherence of the Trinity.
This is a very unique opportunity to hear
from two well-known thinkers as they unpack
one of Christianity's most intricate and debated doctrines.
Let me go ahead and pull them up
on the scene here so you guys can
see both of my guests.
Dr. William Lane Craig is a Christian and
a distinguished philosopher and theologian serving as a
research professor at Talbot School of Theology and
professor at Houston Christian University.
Renowned for his work on cosmological and moral
arguments for God's existence, Dr. Craig has engaged
in numerous discussions with both atheists and theists.
He's also participated in interfaith dialogues with Muslim
scholars like Shabir Ali and now with Muhammad
Hijab.
He's also participated—oh, sorry, I've already read that
part—his contribution to One God, Three Persons, Four
Views, a Theological and Philosophical Dialogue edited by
Chad McIntosh highlights his expertise on the Trinity,
making him an ideal guest for today's conversation.
Joining him is Muhammad Hijab, a Muslim philosopher
of religion and co-founder of Sapiens Institute.
Muhammad's discussions representing the Islamic viewpoint philosophically,
politically, and theologically are among the most viewed
globally.
With 1.2 million YouTube subscribers, he is
a significant voice online providing Islamic perspective on
a wide range of topics.
Additionally, Muhammad is pursuing his PhD at the
University of Birmingham where he continues to deepen
his studies in philosophy and theology.
We're talking about the coherence of the Trinity.
Is the concept of One God and Three
Persons logically coherent or does it present fundamental
philosophical challenges?
So to begin, each participant will share their
positions on the Trinity.
They'll each have three minutes for opening remarks,
followed by a discussion period with two-minute
timed responses.
As moderator, I will take a very active
role in ensuring equal speaking time for both
participants.
So let's begin with Dr. Craig's opening remarks.
Thank you, Cameron.
It's a delight to have the invitation to
be part of today's dialogue on the Trinity
with Mr. Hijab.
As you know, ever since doing my doctoral
work in philosophy at the University of Birmingham
on the cosmological argument for God's existence, I've
had a deep interest in Islamic philosophy and
theology.
I was able to resuscitate the ancient cosmological
argument, which is now once again at center
stage.
And as a result, countless Muslims all over
the world are following reasonable faith and are
appreciative of the work that we're doing.
So when I went on to Germany to
do my second doctorate in theology, it was
only natural that I would choose Islam as
my area of specialization.
And it was during that time that I
worked through the entirety of the Qur'an
and studied Islamic theology and history.
And as I read the Qur'an, I
was surprised by the evident misunderstanding of the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity that I found
there.
For example, in Surah 5, verse 116, Allah
is portrayed as saying to Jesus, Jesus, son
of Mary, did you ever say to mankind,
worship me and my mother as gods besides
God?
And Jesus replies, I could never have claimed
such a thing.
Indeed, such a caricature of the Christian doctrine
of the Trinity is a blasphemous monstrosity.
No wonder Muhammad rejected it, if that's what
he thought the Trinity taught.
But I think that the basic doctrine of
the Trinity is actually taught in the pages
of the New Testament itself, and it consists
of just two fundamental tenets.
First, that there is exactly one God, and
second, that there are three persons who are
properly called God, whereby properly I mean literally,
truly, as opposed to metaphorically or hyperbolically.
So that's it, no metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, no
theological hair-splitting, this is a simple and
straightforward doctrine, God is an immaterial, tri-personal
being.
Now standing opposed to the doctrine of the
Trinity is the Islamic concept of God and
the doctrine of Tawhid, or the oneness or
unicity of God.
And this is a doctrine which is very
confusing and very controversial among Islamic theologians.
There are a number of different versions of
Tawhid on which there is no consensus.
For example, the most basic doctrine would state
that there is exactly one God, and that
is a point of humility.
Dr. Craig, would you like to continue your
comments here, just to finish out your thought,
and then we'll give extra time to...
Oh, you say I've used up my time?
Yes.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes, I'll just finish with the thought that
this is a very controversial doctrine, it has
a number of different versions, and so I'm
interested in hearing what is the version of
Tawhid that Mr. Hijab espouses, and how would
he justify that?
All right, so Mohamed, whenever you're ready, feel
free to begin your opening statement, and you
will get another 15 seconds on top.
I want to start off by saying thank
you very much to the organizers and to
Dr. William Lane Craig for this discussion.
To dive straight into it, the last comment
that Dr. William Lane Craig made is absolutely
problematic.
It's erroneous, in fact.
The Muslims have never had a problem discussing
the who-ness of God.
They have had controversies surrounding the what-ness
of God, but that's aside the point.
Today we're talking about the Trinity, and it's
quite astounding that on a topic to do
with the Trinity that Dr. Craig decided to
talk about Tawhid, which is not on the
topic today.
Dr. Craig himself, sorry to say, does not
even represent mainstream Christianity when it comes to
the Trinity.
He attacks Thomas Aquinas, and he can correct
me if I'm wrong, for example.
He corrects Thomas Aquinas on the fact that
he believes in one-self theories, and he
says that, for example, if you take the
is of identification for God, and you believe
that the Father is God and the Son
is God, therefore it follows that the Father
is the Son.
This is his view of Thomas Aquinas.
He also says that the Trinity is against
divine simplicity, which Thomas Aquinas in other places
actually does espouse.
That's his view, and he can correct me
if I'm wrong.
So that's, I mean, Thomas Aquinas, one of
the saints of Catholicism, and we're talking about
a great deal of people who follow that,
obviously 50% of Christians are Catholics.
He doesn't just take aim at Aquinas, he
takes aim at the Church Fathers.
He takes aim at the Church Fathers, Gregory
of Nyssa, Gregory of Nysanzias, Basil.
He clearly states, for example, that they believe
in a kind of polytheism, because if you
take the fact that the Father is God,
the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit
is God, in a full sense, that this
is a kind of polytheism.
So it's what version of Christianity or of
the Trinity is Dr. William Lane Craig representing?
He's representing his own version, ladies and gentlemen.
He's not representing the version of the majority
of Catholics, the majority of Protestants, the majority
of Eastern Orthodox.
And what he said about the Qur'an,
as we've just mentioned, is erroneous.
He said that in chapter 5, verse 116,
that the Qur'an depicts the Trinity in
the wrong way.
The Qur'an doesn't even mention the Trinity
in that verse.
And you don't need to know Arabic language
to understand that, because the Trinity is not
mentioned in chapter 5, verse 116.
It says that, did you say that you
take me and my mum as lords, as
gods beside God?
اتخذوني الهين من دون الله means God's subjects
of worship.
We do believe, like Protestants, as he claims
he is, that Mary is venerated to a
point of worship.
That doesn't mean that she's part of a
Trinity.
So he's got a misreading of that.
And in my next segment, I'm going to
talk about how he opposes practically all of
Christianity with the eternal begotten son doctrine.
But I would like him to correct me
if I'm wrong in so much as I've
represented his views on one self theories and
the is of identification and his views also
on the church fathers and how he openly
aims, takes aim at them, actually, to be
honest with you.
So I think that's my time.
All right, let's turn it over to Dr.
Craig.
You've got two minutes for your first response.
Among Christian Trinitarians, there are two very broad
schools of thought called social Trinitarianism and Latin
Trinitarianism.
Now, Thomas Aquinas is a representative of Latin
Trinitarianism, and Mr. Hijab is quite correct that
I reject Aquinas' doctrine of Latin Trinitarianism because
I don't think it does justice to the
biblical data.
As I say, the biblical data teach that
there are exactly three persons, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit, who are properly called God.
And so those of us who are social
Trinitarians take this very seriously and literally, that
there are three centers of self-consciousness in
God.
God is an immaterial, tripersonal being, and my
claim is that this is the doctrine that
is taught in the New Testament.
And as a Christian who believes that Holy
Scripture is the only inspired source and authoritative
source for Christian faith and practice, I believe
what the New Testament teaches about the doctrine
of the Trinity, and I am less concerned
with conformity to later ecclesiastical developments of that
doctrine.
So I'm taking my stand on what I
call the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, which
I've already stated.
Now, I do think that the Islamic doctrine
of Tawhid is very relevant here because this
is the doctrine that is opposed to the
Trinity, namely that God is absolutely one, and
yet this doctrine comes in so many different
versions.
Does God have physical parts?
Does God have metaphysical parts?
Are all of God's properties identical to one
another?
Is God distinct from his properties?
Is God's essence the same as his existence?
Muslim theologians cannot come to consensus on this
doctrine of the unity or oneness of God.
So, Muhammad, you've got another 10 seconds.
10 seconds, did you say?
Oh, sorry.
Sorry, I meant like two minutes, 10 seconds.
Okay.
So Dr. Craig has said that he represents
social Trinitarianism, but he doesn't actually represent all
of social Trinitarianism.
For example, he takes aim, as I've mentioned,
at the church fathers who represent a type
of social Trinitarianism.
He states the following, given that there are
three hypostases in God, distinguished according to Gregory
in the intra-Trinitarian relations, then there should
be three gods.
The most pressing task of contemporary social Trinitarians
is to find some more convincing answer to
why, on their view, there are not three
gods.
So, in his understanding, William Lane Craig believes
that Gregory of Nyssa, who wrote this book
called Not Three Gods, he believes that this
church father is a polytheist.
This is a social Trinitarian doctrine.
We'll come to Dr. Craig's understanding of the
Trinity as parts of God and his myriological
understanding.
However, the fact remains that he doesn't represent
social Trinitarianism.
He represents his own version of social Trinitarianism,
which, quite frankly, demographically of 100% Christian
population, I would even wager that 1%
follow what he believes in.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is, he's talking about the
Qur'an.
He agrees with the Qur'an because he
believes, William Lane Craig believes, he does not
believe in the eternal generation of the sun,
which is something in the Nyssian creed.
He does not believe in the generation of
the sun because that would make the sun
generated and caused.
And that is staple Islamic reasoning.
The Qur'an says, قُلْ هُوَ اللَّهُ أَحَدٌ
Say he is Allah, one and only.
اللَّهُ الصَّمَدُ The eternally besought of all.
The self-sufficient.
لَمْ يَلَدْ He begets not.
Nor is he begotten وَلَمْ يُولَدْ William Lane
Craig believes the Islamic standard over and above
1500 years of Christian belief because no one
took his belief.
For 1500 years of Christianity, no one took
his belief that the sun was not eternally
begotten.
And the Qur'an does say that because
the Qur'an indicates that being begotten is
an inhibition on the necessity and independence of
God.
So he agrees with the Qur'an and
he rejects Christianity as a whole, Orthodox Christianity.
All right, Dr. Craig, turn it back over
to you, another two minutes.
I want to reiterate that what I am
defending is the biblical doctrine of the Trinity
that is found in the pages of the
New Testament itself.
So, of course, it's a version of social
Trinitarianism.
There are many varieties, and no one takes
the writings of Gregory of Nyssa to be
authoritative for Christian doctrine.
It's just one opinion among many.
And my critique of Gregory was simply that
he didn't do a very good job in
answering the questions about the three persons in
one being or essence.
So I, again, am going to be defending
a very simple version of the doctrine of
the Trinity that then can be elaborated in
a number of different directions.
For example, you can add to my model
the eternal generation of the Son and the
procession of the Spirit.
In the forthcoming book on the Trinity you
referred to, Cameron, William Hasker does exactly that.
Hasker and I see eye to eye on
our model of the Trinity, except Hasker adds
this additional element of the inter-Trinitarian processions,
and that's fine.
The reason I don't espouse it is because
it's not found in the pages of the
New Testament itself.
I am basing my doctrine of the Trinity
on what the New Testament teaches, which is
that there is exactly one God, and there
are exactly three persons who are properly called
God.
What I'll do at this point is I'll
just go back and forth, and I'll say
something if I need to, but otherwise feel
free to just go ahead and take up
your time, Mohamed.
Is it my turn to speak now, or?
Yeah, can you hear us?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Okay.
Just tell me where to start.
Well, feel free to go ahead.
Right now?
Okay.
Yeah, so Dr. William Lane Craig has not
admitted openly to the audience that his view
of the denial of the eternal begotten Son,
which is the second person of the Trinity,
is a view
that has not been held in all of
Christianity until the 17th century.
The first recorded, to my knowledge, the first
person who denied the eternal begotten nature of
the Son was royal in the 17th century.
So we're talking here about a fringe opinion
of a fringe opinion of a fringe opinion.
But what seems to be interesting is William
Lane Craig was attacking the Quran in the
beginning in his first introductory statement.
However, he agrees with the Quran because the
Quran states that being begotten is an inhibition,
is a diminution, is something which inhibits and
detracts from the fact that God is necessary.
God is necessary.
God is independent.
God is self-sufficient.
And William Lane Craig admits this.
So he disagrees with Protestant Christianity.
He disagrees with Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
He disagrees with the Catholic.
And he agrees with who he calls Muhammad.
He agrees with the Quran on this specific
issue.
So this is the first thing he has
not admitted this year.
Why does William Lane Craig not admit to
the audience that his view about the eternal
begotten Son is commensurate with the Quranic discourse
and is incommensurate with Christianity as a whole?
He, in fact, attacks Nicene Creed.
He talks about, well, Grobe of Nyssa is
not an authority.
But the Nicene Creed is an authority according
to Catholics and according to Eastern Orthodox.
In fact, they consider it to be dogma.
The Nicene Creed itself is that.
So he has to now admit to the
audience freely and openly.
Yes, you say, I believe what the Quran
states is more coherent than what Christianity said
for 17 centuries.
Please say that.
So, Dr. Craig, when you're ready, feel free
to respond.
You've got two minutes.
I would like to, if we could, go
to discussing the logical coherence of the Trinity.
It feels like we've been discussing whether or
not Dr. Craig's views are heretical or sort
of unpopular.
Yes, which is not to say that they're
false.
I'm claiming to be defending the New Testament
doctrine of the Trinity.
So I'm not denying, Mr. Hijab, the procession
of the Son and Spirit.
As I said, you can add that to
my model if you want to, but it's
not affirmed in the New Testament, and the
earliest church fathers didn't affirm that doctrine.
People like Ignatius, Clement, and others in the
post-apostolic age.
This doctrine originates in the so-called Logos
Christology of the Greek apologists like Athenagoras and
Justin Martyr and so forth, and I would
follow them if that doctrine were to be
found in the New Testament, but I think
the majority of scholars would say this doctrine
is not a New Testament doctrine, and therefore
no Christian is obligated to believe it unless
he recognizes the conciliar authority of these later
creedal statements that you mentioned, but as a
Protestant, I bring even the creeds before the
bar of Scripture and weigh them by their
conformity with Scripture.
Now in terms of agreeing with what the
Quran says, of course I agree with lots
that the Quran says.
I don't maintain that the Quran is 100
% false.
It has all sorts of truths in it.
For example, that first tenet of the Doctrine
of the Trinity, there is exactly one God.
Islam is a monotheism as is Judaism and
Christianity, so I agree with lots of things
in Islam, but I do not agree with
Tawhid, that God is this undifferentiated unity as
opposed to three persons in one being, a
spiritual, immaterial, tripersonal substance.
All right, and Mohammed, when you're ready.
Okay, so this is what Dr. Craig says.
He says, for although creedally affirmed, the doctrine
of the generation of the Son and the
procession of the Spirit is a relic of
Glogos Christology, which finds virtually no warrant in
the biblical text and introduces a subordinationism into
the Godhead, which anyone who affirms the full
deity of Christ ought to find very troubling.
So it's very clear here that Dr. Craig
has understood what Nicene Christology is, and he's
essentially saying, you've got these Greek philosophers who've
corrupted Christianity and introduced a subordination into it,
and now this is not something found in
the New Testament, that the eternal begotten nature
of the Son.
I'm saying I agree with you, Dr. Craig.
This is what I agree with you on.
But the problem is this, the problem is
no one in Christianity did agree with you
until Hernandez's role in the 17th century.
So the point we're making is, if the
biblical text was so clear for everyone to
see, how could it be that for almost
2,000 years, nobody could detect what you're
talking about?
And all these church fathers from the ordinary
language of the text of the Bible understood
the eternal begotten doctrine in a different way
than the Bible, than for it's an encrypted
text.
It's a text that nobody can access for
17 years until William Lane Craig comes, or
Royal comes, or somebody else comes and tells
us what it's meant to be.
This is preposterous.
This is another problem.
You're adding layers of problems to Christianity.
You're adding layers of issues and complications for
Christianity.
Now, you are talking about, well, we're not
talking about the coherence of the Trinity.
This is at the heart of the coherence
of the Trinity, because most Trinitarian models, as
you know, has inside of it, or embedded
into it, this idea that the Son is
eternally begotten.
You consider that to be a subordinationist position.
And what I'm saying to you is, if
it's a subordinationist position, then the Trinity is
incoherent on many different grounds.
For example, when we talked about Aquinas, I
agree with your assessment of Aquinas.
That is, if you take the is of
identification, that the Father is God and the
Son is God, therefore the Father is the
Son, the logical law of identification, the law
of identification would be contravened.
So I agree with you.
This is at the heart of the coherence
of the Trinity.
So you'd have to say, well, maybe half
of the Christians of the world are believing
in an incoherent Trinitarian doctrine.
No problem.
Me, me and you both agree.
We have to acknowledge that not all Christians
believe in the model of William Lane Craig.
In fact, I think seldomly anyone does.
So this is the reason why I've mentioned
this point.
But we will go to the heart of
Dr. William Lane Craig's model of the Trinity
in what will follow, because I do have
my arguments against that, and I will present
them to Dr. Craig.
And I'm pretty sure he will not be
able to answer them in any coherent fashion,
and he has not done any service to
Christianity.
This is not Christian apologetics.
This is Christian capitulation.
He's capitulated to the Muslim argument.
We've gone almost 50 seconds over.
So we'll go two minutes, 50 seconds for
Dr. Craig and his response.
Well, I'm not capitulating to anyone, Mr. Hijab.
I am defending the doctrine of the Trinity
that is taught in the New Testament, and
I am under no obligation to defend later
doctrines taught in the 13th century by Thomas
Aquinas or others.
I did mention the names of certain church
fathers that held to the New Testament doctrine,
Clement of Alexandria, Clement of Rome, Ignatius, for
example.
So it's simply not true that from the
beginning Christian theologians have affirmed these inter-Trinitarian
processions.
This arises somewhat later in the Logos Christology
of the Greek Apologist, to repeat myself.
Now you have exactly the same sort of
doctrinal evolution within Islam.
You yourself know that as a Sunni you
disagree with Muslims belonging to other schools with
respect to doctrines like Tawhid or the uncreatedness
of the Quran.
Is the Quran a created product, or is
it something that is co-eternal, uncreated, and
necessary alongside God?
These are doctrines that develop later in Islam,
and you are free to affirm or reject
them, and there's great controversy among Islamic theologians
on these doctrines.
So the fact that Christians take a wide
variety of views on the Trinity is unremarkable,
it's insignificant, so long as the doctrine of
the Trinity that is found in the pages
of the New Testament is coherent and is
taught there, and I now await your demonstration
that this is an incoherent doctrine.
All right, Muhammad, when you're ready.
Yeah, so the difference between Muslims and Christians
in this regard is that creedally and theologically
Muslims have disagreed on the what-ness of
God, meaning how is God the way he
is, but Muslims have never disagreed on the
who-ness of God.
Who is God in the first place?
How do we understand who God is?
Is God one, three?
Is it tritheism?
Is it Sebaleanism?
Is it modalism?
These kinds of issues have never arisen in
Islam.
All Muslims, the Mu'tazila, the Asha'ira, the
Hanabila, the Athariya, this one, that one, all
of the Shia, all of them agree that
there's one God.
So this is a failure if you want
to compare the idea that the Father, Son,
and the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit
was only granted co-equal, co-eternal status
in that full sense somewhere in the fourth
century.
There's no equivalent in Islam.
I don't even think there's much equivalent in
many other religions.
This is the first point.
Now, you said you're awaiting my demonstration.
You don't need to await my demonstration.
You have people like Scott Williams who have
already demonstrated this, that you believe that there
are three wills of the Trinity.
You believe that the Father has a will
which is distinct from the Son, and you
believe that the Son has a will which
is distinct from the Holy Spirit, and they
all have wills that are distinct from each
other.
My question to you is just one for
now.
How do you establish, and this is a
question of Scott Williams in the peer-reviewed
academic paper, how do you establish necessary agreement
such that those three persons of the Trinity
can never disagree?
This is my first question to you to
get the ball rolling.
Okay, you've just said it's perfectly reasonable, but
you've offered absolutely zero justification.
So here's my question.
If it's necessary agreement, that is to say,
and you know this, you've written books on
the kalam cosmological arguments, you know the modal
distinctions, okay?
If it's necessary agreement, that means it's impossible
for them not to disagree.
And for you to say it's impossible, well,
as you know, there's logical impossibility and there's
metaphysical impossibility.
My question to you is how do you
establish the impossibility of disagreement?
This is the question of Scott Williams.
It's not just my question.
It's the question that you've been posed in
academic papers.
Richard Swinburne tried to answer this question, and
he said that it's got to do with
the relationships between the father and the son,
yes, and that the father has a love
relationship with the son and this obedience relationship.
These are the lengths that theologians of the
highest eminence and of the top caliber in
Christianity have to reach to try and explain
through the three-wheel model, which is a
heresy, once again, because you've adopted many heretical
positions, it's a heresy, let's be honest and
say, this three-wheel model that you now
have to explain why there is necessary agreement.
So you have yet to demonstrate to the
public how is it impossible for them to
disagree?
This is my question.
Okay, so you said divine perfection.
This is the key term that you've used.
But in other contexts, you've accepted that there
has to be a level of arbitrariness in
God's decision-making.
Otherwise, it would lead to necessitarianism and modal
collapse.
So if it was one divine perfection that
existed within each of the wills, that would
mean to say that all of them really
don't have a choice in the matter, in
which case God doesn't have will.
That's the first argument.
The second argument is the following.
You've made this comparison with God, with Cerebus,
the three-headed dog, and this is, I
mean, if you can see on the camera,
this is exactly what you've written in your
article, that God is like a three-headed
dog.
You've got one, two, three, okay, and just
as it's one body and three heads, you
know, the Trinity is the same thing.
It's one body and three different heads.
That's what you've said.
Now, my question to you is as follows.
If you have Siamese twins, and you've been
asked this once again before by Snyder on
peer-reviewed journals, if you have a conjoined
twin, person A, person B, would you consider
that to be one person or would you
consider that to be two people?
This is my question.
All right.
I certainly think that God has contingent properties
and that what God wills, he wills contingently
in many cases.
For example, the will to create the world
is a free decision by God which is
freely willed, so I'm not maintaining at all
that everything about God is necessary and that
he does nothing contingently.
My claim is simply that given this perichoretic
interpenetration of the persons of the Trinity, they
always act in harmony with one another.
Now, the example I used of Kerberos, Mr.
Hijab, I think has been greatly misunderstood.
That is not intended to be an analogy
to the Trinity.
That was meant to be a springboard for
thinking about what it means to be three
persons in one being.
And so I thought of this mythical dog
in the labors of Hercules guarding the gates
of Hades which has three heads, so presumably
three brains, so three states of consciousness of
what it's like to be a dog.
And then based on that I endowed them
with self-consciousness and personhood, and my position
would be that you have, in that case,
three persons in one being.
And it would be similar with the Siamese
twins or triplets.
You have three brains, three centers of self
-consciousness, and so three persons.
Now, in the case of God, he doesn't
have a physical body, so what I argue
there is that God is an immaterial spiritual
substance or soul who is so richly endowed
with cognitive faculties that he has three sets
of cognitive faculties, each sufficient for personhood, and
therefore there are in God three centers of
self-consciousness, and that would be a model
of what it is to talk of God
as an immaterial tripersonal being.
You say that this is not an analogy,
but that's exactly what you write in your
article.
You say perhaps we can get a start
at this question by means of an analogy.
That's a springboard to thinking about it.
Dr. Craig, let's let Mohammed finish his thought.
I understand, but you denied in your response
there that this was an analogy, and you've
written in your written work that perhaps we
can get a start at this question by
means of an analogy, and then you mentioned
Cerberus as the analogy.
So the point is this.
I know it's difficult.
I know it's very embarrassing.
I'm sorry to say, I mean, comparing God
to a dog anyway, I mean, we wouldn't
compare a prophet to a god, but let's
just for the sake of argument, we're analogizing
God with the dog.
Now, I asked you a question, which is
that if you have a conjoined twin, Siamese
twins, one of them commits murder, we're going
to put both of them in prison.
One of them does something.
This dog here can lick this dog.
This here can bite this dog.
These are three different centers of consciousness.
Why are we considering this to be one
dog only because it has overlapping bodies?
This is a question that was posed to
you in the academic literature.
We've heard your response.
I have to say it's a very insufficient
and unsatisfactory response.
Absolutely unsatisfactory.
This is your model of the Trinity.
I think this could be debunked by children,
with all due respect.
This is your model of the Trinity.
Now, going to the part of, you have
to now maintain that God is made out
of parts.
And you've said this.
You've made, clearly, you have the view that
God is part, that there are parts of
God.
No problem.
My question to you is this.
Who created the universe?
Did the Father create the universe?
Did the Son create the universe?
Or did the Holy Spirit create the universe?
Who is responsible for the creation of the
universe?
Now, in your model, you cannot actually say
that the Father created the universe in a
full sense.
If you do say that, then you can't
say that the Son created the universe in
a full sense.
And if you say that, you can't say
the Holy Spirit.
Because you can't have two subjects operating on
one object and creating it and being responsible
for it in a full sense.
I can't go to the gym and pump
100 kilograms by myself, as well as my
friend over here, or William Lane Craig, doing
the same thing.
It could be shared.
But then if it's shared, then you've got
one third God.
So can you clarify?
Do you believe that the Father is one
third responsible for the creation of the universe?
Or do you believe, in the logical contradiction,
that you have two subjects that are fully
responsible for the creation of the universe?
Which one do you believe?
I gave you an extra 20 seconds for
the interruption.
But Dr. Craig, it's now your turn, two
minutes.
Causal overdetermination is not incoherent, Mr. Hijab.
Imagine a candle being lit by two simultaneous
matches, each of which is sufficient to illuminate
the candle.
In the case of the Trinity, the classical
Christian doctrine is in Latin, opera ad extra
sunt in divisa, that the operations of the
Trinity toward the external world are undivided, and
therefore undertaken by all three persons at once.
Now, I don't agree with that doctrine in
every case.
I think that leads to real problems.
But I think that is very plausible with
respect to the doctrine of creation, that the
three persons act in concert with each other
to create the world.
So they're all responsible for the creation, and
in the New Testament, creation is ascribed both
to the Father and to the Son.
If they're responsible, they can only be responsible
either in a partial sense or in a
full sense.
They can't be responsible both in a partial
sense and a full sense.
You said causal overdetermination.
I'm sorry to say you have not answered
the question.
The question is, can you have two subjects
that are fully, fully responsible, to a degree
of 100%, fully responsible for the creation of
one thing in its entirety?
For example, can you have two mothers that
are fully responsible, fully responsible for the production
of one child?
Fully responsible.
I think even the transgender movement would raise
their eyebrow to this.
The LGBT, they will say, no, Dr. Craig
has lost it.
Sorry to say, no one can say this.
Can there be two authors that are fully
responsible for the writing of one book?
I mean, once again, when you talk about
it, you don't want to say this because
I know it's heresy.
It's heresy to say that the Father is
not the creator of the universe 100%, but
that's what you have to say to avoid
contradiction.
So why don't you say that?
Why don't you say that the Father is
not the creator?
He is a partial creator.
He is a one-third creator.
He's a 33% creator.
The Father is not fully responsible for the
creation of the universe.
Is that correct?
I don't think you understand causal overdetermination, Mr.
Hijab.
When two matches light a flame simultaneously or
light a candle, they don't each contribute 50
% to the lighting of the candle.
They are each 100% sufficient for the
effect, but they act concurrently with each other.
And so in the act of creation, I
see absolutely no problem with saying that there
is a concurrence here of the action of
the three persons of the Trinity to produce
this creative effect.
Okay.
So to respond to this very clearly, your
candle example with causal overdetermination, it's this analogous
to what we are talking about.
Why?
If you have two candles that come together
to light a flame, you will have a
bigger flame.
You see, there's sufficient condition.
You've written this in your book on logic.
You have a fantastic book.
And I recommend it to the people for
children on logic, the difference between necessary and
sufficient conditions.
What is required for the lighting of a
candle?
What is a necessary condition for the lighting
of a candle is not achieved with the
lighting of two candles.
What is required for the creation of the
universe is not achieved with two creators creating
the same universe.
So I'm saying it's this analogous because we're
talking about the flame.
And the flame here is a product of
the two lights that you've talked about, which
is a bigger flame.
I'm saying now each atom, each quark, each
whatever it is in the universe, proton, electron,
how is it conceivable, possible, intelligible that there
can be two subjects that are fully responsible
for each of those things to a degree
of 100%?
How is it possible that I can go
to the gym and pump 100 kilos and
somebody else can pump the same 100 kilos?
How is it possible that a mother can
give birth to a child to a degree
of 100% and that another mother is
responsible to the same degree for the production
of the same child?
These analogies are the ones that are analogous.
Not to cut you off, but we couldn't
hear you the last 10 seconds or so.
Can you just repeat your last point?
I said the analogies which are analogous are,
for example, how is it possible, I asked,
for there to be a mother who gives
birth to a child and that she is
responsible for that production 100% and there
to be another mother for 100% responsibility.
Why don't you admit that on your model,
you have to say the father is not
fully, wholly, completely responsible for the creation of
the universe.
He has to only be partially responsible.
Why can't you admit that?
I don't admit it because your analogies are
inept, like two women giving birth to the
same child.
In a case like that, you're absolutely right.
You cannot have overlapping causes or causal overdetermination,
but that doesn't imply that there are not
other cases such as the illustration I used
to show that there can be cases of
causal overdetermination where three agents work together to
bring about a single effect.
Now every physical illustration is going to involve
points of disanalogy when you're talking about spiritual
entities.
So the fact that maybe the flame would
be bigger if it's lit by two matches
instead of one match, that's just irrelevant to
the question of whether or not you can
have two causes currently acting to produce a
single effect.
So I'm just not persuaded at all by
your objection.
It's not, it's with the greatest of respect,
but it's not for me to be, I
mean, it's not for you to be persuaded
with what I'm saying.
It's really for us to be persuaded with
what you're saying, because frankly, even Christian co
-religionists of yours are not accepting what you're
saying.
Scott Williams, who wrote a peer-reviewed paper,
and he was asking the fundamental question about
necessary agreement, and he gave an example which
maybe we can move to, because I don't
agree with anything you've just said there.
I mean, you talked about the flame, the
two matches coming together to create a bigger
flame, but that is clearly a different product.
The two matches are different to the flame.
There is not a single analogy that you
can bring which match the analogies that I've
brought forward, which show the fundamental point, which
by the way, many of the Islamic thinkers
and like Ibn Rushd and Al-Razi and
others spoke about this at length, which is
that you cannot have two subjects that are
responsible fully for the same thing, to a
degree of 100%, but the public will judge.
The public will judge who is right and
who is wrong on this, and maybe even
your Christian brethren will judge, but at this
point, you have not convinced anybody.
The second point that you mentioned, yes?
He's got another minute.
Oh, sorry, yes.
So my question is this now.
Unnecessary agreement, yes?
If the father wanted to do something, let's
say for example, he wanted to take life
away from William Lane Craig, and the son
wanted to keep life in William Lane Craig,
is it possible that that can both happen
at the same time?
No, it cannot happen.
Is it possible that both of them won't
happen?
No, because that will contradict the law of
excluded middle.
The first one contradicts the law of non
-contradiction.
The second one contradicts the law of excluded
middle.
Is it possible that William Lane Craig can
have life in his body without any reason?
No, because that contradicts the PSR, the principle
of sufficient reason.
Now, the question is this.
Is the father capable of supervening on the
will of the son?
Is the son capable of supervening on the
will of the father?
Is the father capable of creating the universe
all by himself?
All right, that's time.
Without any involvement from the son.
Oh, those are two different questions.
Certainly, the father would be capable of creating
the universe by himself if he wanted to,
and the son wanted to.
What I'm arguing simply is that there is
no disagreement among the three persons of the
Trinity, nor is there any reason, I think,
that this is impossible or incoherent.
And in fact, the position that I'm articulating
here is the standard Christian position.
Opera ad extra sunt in divisa.
The operations of the Trinity toward the external
world are undivided.
It's only the opera ad intra, the intra
-Trinitarian relations that are traditionally differentiated from each
other.
So the position I'm taking, whether it's right
or wrong, is the mainstream Christian view.
It's not a peculiarity of William Lane Craig's
theology.
No, no, no.
Sorry, sorry.
The position that you take on partialism is
absolutely not the mainstream view.
I mean, it's seen as a heresy almost
across the board.
It's seen as a heresy across the board
with Protestants and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox to
say that the persons are parts of God
in the way that you've said.
But put that to the side, no problem.
My point is this.
Let's go back to the thing that you've
said.
You said it is possible for the Father
is capable of creating the universe by himself.
Okay, let's take that for a second.
If the Father is capable of creating the
universe by himself, but he does not create
it by himself, but according to you, creates
it in concert with the Son and the
Holy Spirit.
These are your words, not mine.
In concert, these are the words he used.
Yes, that the Father is capable, but no,
he does it in concert with the will
of the Holy Spirit, the Son and the
Holy Spirit.
That means to say that the addition of
the Son and the Holy Spirit have had
an inhibiting impact on the will of the
Father.
That means to say that the Father is
being inhibited by the Son of the...
And by the way, just to be clear,
this is not my arguments.
This is exactly the argument of the Quran.
مَتَّخَذَ اللَّهُ مِنْ وَلَدٍ وَمَا كَانَ مَعَهُ مِنْ
إِلَهٍ إِذَا لَذَهَبَ كُلُّ إِلَهً بِمَا خَلَقَ وَلَعَلَىٰ
بَعْضُهُمْ مَعَ لَبَعْضٍ In chapter 23, verse number
91, that Allah has not taken a son,
nor does He have any creator with Him.
If that was the case, they would have
taken each part of what they have created
and they would have tried to outstrip one
another in power.
The reason why you are not able to
answer this question is because it comes from
the highest source.
We believe it comes from God.
This argument is a godly argument.
And this is why necessary agreement on your
model cannot...
There is no real way to prove it.
You ask, what is incoherent about your model?
What is incoherent about your model is that
when you look at it, and you look
at each person of the trinity, and you
look at the father, what he's capable of
doing by himself versus what he's capable of
doing the son and the Holy Spirit, you
realize that he's capable of doing less because
of the son and the Holy Spirit.
And if he's capable of doing less because
of the son and the Holy Spirit, that
means to say that the son and the
Holy Spirit are having an inhibiting impact, which
is not powerful then.
The father has been stripped from his omnipotence
because of the son and the Holy Spirit.
There's no possible way that you can have
a part of God which is both omnipotent
in the full sense and in the partial
sense at the same time because a part
is by definition smaller than the whole.
Wouldn't you agree with that?
That the part is not the whole, certainly.
Yes.
But I simply don't understand the objection that
you are pressing here.
I don't see how the father, the son,
and the Holy Spirit willing together to produce
the same effect is any imposition upon the
Father's will or derides in any way from
his omnipotence.
I think that your argument is just a
non sequitur.
And as far as partialism is concerned, I
think our audience needs to have this defined.
I suggested that we could think of the
persons as parts of the Trinity in the
sense that the whole Godhead is not just
one person.
Now you yourself hold to a sort of
doctrine of Tawhid that involves partialism, if I'm
not mistaken, because you believe that God has
a diversity of attributes like omnipotence, omnipresence, goodness,
eternity, and that God is not identical to
his properties, neither are the properties identical to
one another, but that they are distinct.
And so this is the same sort of
position that I've suggested that a Trinitarian could
take if he wants to.
William Lane Craig, whether I believe in the
moon is made of cheese or whether I
believe that I can fly, it doesn't change
the Trinity, it won't make it into coherent
because right now we're talking about whether the
Trinity is coherent and you're talking about what
I believe.
You're talking about fallacies and non sequiturs.
This is a tukwukwe fallacy.
If anything, let's look at what you said
because you talk about the part of the
God because you do like to do this.
You like to make analogies with animals, godly
analogies with animals.
You said a cat's DNA or skeleton is
feline.
Even if neither a cat nor is this,
sorry, even if neither is a cat nor
is this sort of a downgraded or attenuated
felinity.
A skeleton is fully and ambiguously feline.
So what you're doing is essentially saying that
the persons of the Trinity are to God
like a skeleton of a cat is like
to a cat.
And that is different from what anything any
Muslim has ever said in the history of
Islam.
You will not find a quote like this
from a single Muslim scholar, even the most
extreme of them or the most heretical from
a mainstream demographic perspective.
But the point I'm making to you is
this.
If it is the case that God or
the father is a part of God, if
the son is a part of God and
if the Holy Spirit is a part of
God, how can a part of an entity
take responsibility for the actions of the whole
entity?
The creation of the universe is one act.
How can a part of an entity take
full responsibility for the creation of an entire
act?
Can you please answer that question?
Well, real quick, we are coming at the
end of our time together today.
So we will need to transition at this
point to closing statements.
Okay, okay.
No problem.
I think the point has been made.
Thank you.
With that, Dr. Craig, whenever you're ready.
Sure.
I want to close by addressing personally our
Muslim listeners today.
I imagine that most of you have probably
been raised in Muslim homes and perhaps even
in a Muslim culture.
And I think you would agree that being
raised in a certain way doesn't provide a
good reason for thinking that that religion is
true.
If a Christian were to say that I
believe Christianity is true because that's how I
was raised, you would think that was a
pretty weak argument.
And exactly the same way, I think many
Muslims today are beginning to ask themselves, how
do I really know that Islam is true?
And as a result, many Muslims are succumbing
to the temptations of the new atheism and
to agnosticism.
Now, I think that's wholly unnecessary and unwarranted.
I think there are good arguments for the
existence of God.
And so I believe that we should be
theists.
But the question of where you go beyond
that to what sort of theism, Islamic or
Christian theism, I think is going to depend
upon the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Who was Jesus of Nazareth?
He was more, I believe, than just a
mere prophet of God.
He claimed to be the long-awaited Messiah,
the Son of God in a unique sense,
and the divine human Son of Man.
And he was crucified for these allegedly blasphemous
claims.
But I believe that there is good historical
evidence that God raised Jesus from the dead.
And by doing that, he vindicated in a
public and unequivocal sense the truth of those
allegedly blasphemous claims for which he was crucified.
And for that reason, I am a convinced
and ardent Christian theist.
And so I would simply want to invite
you to begin to look at the person
of Jesus and the evidence for him and
his resurrection.
We have thousands of resources available free of
charge on our website reasonablefaith.org, and I
would invite you to view or to read
those resources and to ask yourself, could this
really be true?
Could the Christian God actually be the true
God?
And I think if you'll do that, it
could change your life in the same way
that it changed mine.
All right.
And Mohamed, when you're ready, I did want
to just mention really quickly that I'm so
sorry we haven't been able to read any
super chats.
We just haven't had time today.
We wanted to devote most of it to
the dialogue between Dr. Craig and Mohamed.
So Mohamed, whenever you're ready.
The public will realize that Dr. William Lane
Craig, despite completing two PhDs, and in my
opinion, being the foremost and the most prolific
and most influential, most significant Christian debater of
the last century, has retreated from the entire
discussion altogether.
Instead of talking about the Trinity and summarizing
his arguments, which he knows are feeble and
that the Christian population doesn't even agree with
themselves, he started talking about the resurrection and
crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and he's gone into
full preacher mode instead of going into philosophical
mode and rational mode, which he made his
career on.
That's the first thing.
Look, I mean, at the end of the
day, the public will see and the public
will make their decision today based on what
we have said, because what we have done
is we've dismantled Thomas Aquinas together, me and
Dr. William Lane Craig.
Yes, Dr. William Lane Craig is right that
if you take an identity view of God
such that the Father is what the identity
is, God and the Son is God and
the Holy Spirit is God in that sense,
then that means that the Father is the
Son, because that contravenes the law of identity
to say that it's not the case.
And if you take the social Trinitarian view
of Gregory of Nyssa and these other people,
which many of the Eastern Orthodox believe, that's
already 60 or 70% of Christianity.
Then according to him, it's polytheism.
So me and Dr. Craig done the work
together to dismantle the majority of the Christian
faith.
And then now we talked about his view,
which is the partialist view, really and truly.
And we've seen how it doesn't achieve necessary
agreement.
We've seen through the Quranic arguments how there's
not an impossibility for them to conflict.
And what I will say is this, he
talks about reasonable faith.
I've been following reasonable faith and they've done
really good work with the atheists.
But the Sapiens Institute, which I work for
and co-found, has a website, which is
sapiensinstitute.org, has a lot of what he's
talking about Christianity for Islam.
So if you're a Christian listening to this
and you realize now that the Trinity is
false, it's defunct, it's a rationally incoherent doctrine,
and you want the pure monotheism, the one
God to worship without this complication, this Father,
Son, Holy Spirit, Incarnation, this, that, the other,
then it's Islam that you have to start
looking into with sincerity.
If you are sincere, if you are sincere,
the whole problem is solved.
The whole problem is solved, sapiensinstitute.org.
And if you want evidences for the rationality
and the truth for Islam, then muhammadhijab.com
has an article of 10 of the evidences
of why Islam is true.
So the point I'm making to you is
that the argument has been failed miserably by
Dr. Craig.
He has not been able to achieve, even
to the pleasure or the satisfaction of his
co-religionists, a standard of evidence that is
acceptable for a rational mind.
All right, thank you.
Do you mind if I ask you guys
one last question?
Dr. Craig, I know you've got a short
time limit here, but can I ask one
question that might help to bring us back
together?
I sent you guys these questions in advance,
but I want to know, what is one
thing that you like about the other person's
views?
I like his monotheism.
We both agree that there is exactly one
God.
Moreover, I like his denial of divine simplicity.
I don't agree with those who say that
God is not complex in his being.
Mr. Hijab's doctrine, or Tawhid, which we really
didn't hear very much about tonight, is not
a doctrine of divine simplicity, which says that
God's properties are all identical, that God is
identical to his properties, or that his essence
is existence.
And so on that, we very much concur,
and I appreciate that positive feature of his
view.
Muhammad, what about you?
I like Dr. William Lane Craig as a
person.
I think he's done a fantastic job, and
I've read almost every single book that he's
written.
It's maybe to his surprise.
But what I will say is this.
I mean, what I do like about his
views is his bravery in denying the eternal
begotten nature of the second person.
Yes, on the one hand, he's rejected all
of Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, with a small case
O.
He's rejected it.
But it takes bravery to do so, I
have to say.
Intellectual and academic bravery to do so.
And I particularly like it because I agree
with it.
How can you believe that there is a
co-equal, co-eternal son who has now
been generated and caused by the father?
This is a contradiction, and it's rationally implausible,
in my opinion.
And it's something we are taught as children,
as five-year-olds and six-year-olds.
قُلْ هُوَ اللَّهُ أَحَدْ Say, is Allah one
and only?
Allahus-samad, the self-sufficient?
He begets not?
لَمْ يَلَدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ He begets not?
Nor is he begotten?
وَلَمْ يَكُلْ لَهُ كُفُوًا أَحَدْ And there's nothing
like him.
And this is the simple doctrine of what
it means, the Islamic standard of believing and
worshiping one God, that if someone believes in,
they will be saved.
They will be saved.
Well, I appreciate you guys watching Capturing Christianity,
this debate.
Feel free to continue watching our other content
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.com.
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Thank you guys for watching today.
We'll see you in the next video.