Theologian Shocks Muslims

Look, you said that you were looking at all the different religions. And once again, you said you don't accept idolatry and stuff I accept accept, I believe in that as well. I agree with you. Look, the first thing I want to say to you is, from a Muslim perspective from an Islamic perspective. Yeah. Is that we would say the starting point for us, is a very strict monotheism. Yeah, yeah. So, for us, the starting point is like a monotheism. Well, we believe that there is an ultimate creator sustainer and ultimate power that initiated the universe, if that makes sense. Now, how feasible does that sound? How does it sound to your mind? Yeah, I believe that the Creator is what brings

life to the material realm. Yeah. To around. Is this an illusion? Yeah, we can't take any of this stuff with us when we go. So the idea of an immortal God, from which we will originate gives us purpose. So you agree with that? I hear you accept it. I mean, do you believe in it? The Creator? Yeah, yeah. It's life to existence. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So you said you were an

empirical

evidence?

I don't believe, I don't believe for example, the ad was created in seven days, as creation is different between the creator and creation is a creation is something different. So as an empirically, you're saying you rejects kind of like the biblical narrative. By the same time you don't reject the idea of an all knowing all powerful creator forced outside the universe? Yeah. Okay. So all right. So what I was gonna say now, since that's the case, now we have to define some of the attributes of this creator. Would you accept that some of the attributes are creative capacity, or power? Or knowledge? Would you say that these are fundamental to such a force?

Creativity?

was really is?

Is

you're saying is the creative, the creative essence of the universe and of individual souls? Yeah, yeah. It's got to completely agree. How can we how intuition, for example, is a fundamental metaphysical function of our, of our personality, our soul? Yeah. How can we know how can we we can't really we can't program a machine, for example, to do these things. So how can we ever prove that? This is I exist? Yeah, it's good. All right. So having said that, I will ask a question, what's the most appropriate relationship you can have with such an entity, the most appropriate relationship is harmony.

Essentially, when you live in harmony with mankind, and with the planet, you are living in harmony with God, there is no separation between the effects that you enact upon the world, and what comes to you what moral, moral consequences, okay, I accept that, to a certain extent, let me tell you something, we have our own version of that, right. So we say, because if you look at Eastern traditions, they do reference how to be one with God and these kinds of things. From our perspective, we say there is a way to basically be harmonious with the will of the Creator. And the way that works is basically, the creator has made has created the creation and integration, you have

animate and inanimate, right? As for the inanimate objects around us, they are forcibly or

obliged to kind of submit to the will of the, of the Creator, right. So basically, in other words, in order to be one with creation, in that sense, not in the sense of actual physicality, but we're talking in that figurative sense.

The way to do that would be to do what everything else around you is doing. So everything around us, if you accept the premise of an all powerful creator, is submissive to that creator, we will say, by extension, it makes sense to also be submissive to the Creator, in the same way that everything around us has been submissive, does that make sense? I completely agree. submissive to the will of the Creator, exactly the will of the Creator, but never to an authoritarian figure. That's why I'm so against idolatry. Does anyone these false prophets are these dogmatic beliefs, these are these are not fun. These are not creations of God, but they're creations of human beings. And so never

listen to a boss or something that doesn't agree with your own sense of morality comes from within, but live in harmony with with that, that intuition which comes essentially from God. Right. So let me ask you a question. Because the thing is, it becomes very subjective when it becomes clouded and that kind of terminology, I'll be honest with you, because what we will say is that if our, essentially our aim in life is to be submissive to God, right,

in the sense of the aforementioned, if that's the the aim of life or the purpose of life, surely there should

In a uniform way, a universal way that God has allowed human beings to be able to do that. A uniform I agree. Yeah, yeah. So now that we would say this is the Islamic narrative, I'll be completely straightforward with you. Yeah. The Samak narrative is that the way that happens is that the creator communicates with the creation. And he does so through prophets who have come before time. Yeah. So prophets are unnecessary extension of what is necessary to happen or appropriate, between the creator and the creation, or, in this case, human beings, specifically, who are sentient beings and able to make your own decisions on free willed creatures. So there was a need for profits, there was

a need for the communication between the creator and the creation. And so profits cable for time, the sonic narrative is that so long as humans were on Earth, they were prophets preaching the message of what we'd call submission. Yeah. So people like Adam, you might have heard of these kind of biblical names, Adam, and Noah, and Moses and Jesus, all of those are prophets that came to their respective peoples and their respective times and preach the message of submission to their peoples. Does that make sense? Completely? Right? So what we would say is that the messengers came fundamentally with two different things. They came with a message and they came with a, an evidence

base to substantiate that message.

So in the, in the case of Moses, you might have heard of these stories of basically, you know, the sea splitting and all these kind of different things. Yeah. It's in the Old Testament, it's also on the forearm.

These stories are meant to indicate that these these are evidences. Yeah, that are used to prove the message of submission, because there's something which break the natural capacity or physical reality around us. So there are evidence that basically God is is the author of, of the message that these prophets come with.

Now, whereas all of the prophets and messengers were sent to their respective, yes.

Why is that? I mean, why why does that give evidence that this is the right what's that got to do with Mohammed? Right? So this is playing doesn't have anything to do specifically with Muhammad's message. But it's I mean, although is no Quran, we're talking specifically about Moses. So in his time, and this is an interesting thing that largely been alluded to by some of our scholars in Islam, that, depending on the societal kind of what society popular at the time, the evidence base that the messages come with, suits that so at the time of, kind of what is it the the young, what do you call it, the middle Empire, whether whoever is in Egypt, when Rome says the second was there.

And they say that Ramses is linked to Pharaoh and whatnot. Let's mention that. At this time, they were fascinated with magic, magic, and all those kind of things. Now, Moses came with a, you could call it a miracle, really, which basically broke the rules of physical nature. Yeah. And which, which acted as an evidence for for his people. So when people saw it, they said, Okay, well, this makes sense. You see what I'm saying? Right? So for us now, it will say was our miracle, right? Because we need some evidence as well, to be able to substantiate the claim that Prophet Muhammad is the final messenger, because that's our claim, where our claim is that Prophet Mohammed, whereas all

of the other prophets were sent to their people in their times, Jesus, Moses, etc, Abraham, Mohammed was sent for all peoples at all times. So that's the Islamic narrative. So his, what he's come with, as he's come with an auditory

miracle, or auditory

evidence base, whereas all the prophets came before, usually with a visual evidence base, so like, for example, in the case of Moses, the sea splitting was something for human beings to visualize and see, was what we say is the evidence base for the Islamic message is actually the Quran itself, which is something actually which is transmitted orally, although it does have of course, written books as well to corroborate and triangulate the, the veracity of the oral message. So here,

the Quran has many different things within it, which basically would lead someone to believe that it couldn't have been because you were saying use a kind of like rationalistic approach. We're using a probabilistic kind of rationalistic approach. You would I would argue that the Quranic discourse contains within it an evidence base. I'm actually not a rationalist. I'm an empiricist. Okay, so yeah.

rationalism Oh, yeah, I think I got mixed up. Yeah.

We need to experience to fire enough. I think you're right about that as well. And that's why By the way, the fundamental thing in Islam is as follows. One of the one of the fundamental messages Islam comes with is follows. Well, as Christianity says, We're born with original sin. Yeah. Islam says no, we're born with something called the fifth or the fifth.

As a predisposition to basically submit to God not only to know who he is that the higher power but to submit to Him automatically. So this presupposition is awakened by the various messages or the various evidences that human being is there thereafter exposed to. So human beings, for example, exposed to the fine tuning of the universe. And you don't have to be a physicist to read to appreciate the fine tuning of the universe, you can literally look with your naked eye, at the fact that the universe is in fact finely tuned, right.

And these kinds of things aim to reawaken human beings from the sale of slum buy into

the recollection of God. So that's the main thing of the Islamic message, as was the Quranic discourse, as we've said before, it has within it evidences we would say, which are very powerful in convincing people, that this is basically something which has to be extra human. In other words, it couldn't have been

put together by a human ability. So we will say, for example, the fact that the Quran precisely discusses events that happens in the future. I'll give you one example of that, though, at the time of the Prophet, there was the Romans in the Persians, and the Quran makes very specific predictions about who will win wars. In the case of chapter 30, verse one to six, it talks about the Romans decisively going to beat the Persians in three to nine years in a nearby land. Now these are this is one of many different predictions of the future that the Quran makes. And that the sun, which is the secondary book of the corpus that Muslims believe in, or the Hadith, the strong Hadith, make of the

future, from a probabilistic perspective, we can say, Okay, well, probably, if someone says one thing or two things they might have guessed and to be correct, but if we put them all together, it becomes very, very difficult to make the argument that he guessed all of those correct, especially when we consider By the way, did you know, let me tell you something, and jovis witness in the church of the Jehovah's Witness, you know, they predicted, and by the way, they believe that this kind of thing where people were being, you know, divinely inspired, they predicted that the day of judgment will be on 90 and the year 1977.

You know, that. And when that year did not when the Day of Judgment didn't happen on that year, they called it the greatest appointment. Because I mean, I don't know why anyone would be disappointed for the Day of Judgment not happening, but they call it the greatest appointment. The reason why is because the prediction didn't materialize. And that has repercussions or ramifications for the message because it couldn't have been divine if it didn't materialize because it was meant to be for all knowing source.

saying the Quran predicted the Romans were gonna defeat the Persians. Yeah.

Romans didn't the Roman Empire for before the Roman Empire fell out. Are you talking about the Holy Roman festival, the two Roman Empires, right? So the Roman Empire started in the year 31 BC, yeah, the Gulf, the Gallic wars and stuff like that, whatever. And it continued on, but then the Holy Roman Empire started, okay. Now, the Byzantines Empire, which was what was around at the time of the Prophet Mohammed, and continued on to until the 1400s. This is what we refer to. Yeah, okay. But the Roman Empire, as you would have known from the history lessons that you've done, were in constant wars with the sassanid Empire, or they also called the sassanians, emphasis aliens, others Yeah,

basically, the, the Persians. And that, and this was referred to in the western history books as the Roman assassinated wars. Now, the point is the Roman Empire, as you would have known from from the year 400. onwards, and the Prophet came around 630.

You know, around that time, so from the seventh century, but from that year, from that time period, it was going down, there was a degeneration of the Roman Empire anyways, so the sassanid Empire was much stronger. So when I made the claim that the Roman Empire was gonna beat the assassinated Empire, in three to nine years in a nearby land, all these different things, it was an It was a kind of ridiculous claim, if you think about it, from a public perspective, it's the equivalent of betting on a very low tea, maybe in the Champions League, being a very high team in the top five in the, in the Premier League, right? I'm betting that they will beat them in a certain way, in the

same place in a certain time period, all these different things. So probabilistically, the odds are very low for that. And that's one example. But there are many different examples, for example, the conquest of Arabia, by the Muslims, the fact that other nations will fall into the hands of the Muslims like Egypt and Yemen and Syria and Jordan, you know, I'm Pakistan and India ascend to a land and all these different places, which are now part of the Arab or the Islamic empire have been predicted to be conquered by the by Muslim hands by basically. So this is what we put this into a probability generator, it becomes very difficult to argue that this could have been guessed. And I

would actually argue and make a very daring claim here and say, This is this kind of

frequency and accuracy of predictions has never been eight but has never been predicted by anyone think of, I don't know of any human being, you want to bring Nostradamus or the Jehovah's Witness or anyone that you want to have made predictions of the future, with this many with this much frequency and detail, which have actually materialized in the way that they're materialized.

Do you see what I'm saying? So here, when we say we have evidence for the veracity and the truthful ness of Islam, we're not just saying that we have kind of superfluous evidence or kind of arbitrary subjective type evidences, all evidences are probably

actually can be analyzed objectively, you see what I'm saying? This is not regarding the fact that the Quran is also in and of itself, a book that claims that it has no contradictions, a book that challenges mankind to produce a chapter like it a book of the we would actually make the argument that the only religious ancient religious book entry religious book, which has been preserved in terms of its, its its material, as corpus, we've never the Muslims have never had a controversy. And this can go on the record. And believe me, I'm here every week, and people try and they will try and maybe, well, I can say this completely. Clearly. The Muslims have never had a controversy on what

constitutes the Quran is never It's never happened. They've had controversies on everything else, but they've never had a controversy on what constitutes different. The Christians are on the other hand, there are differing on how many, how many books on in the biblical canon, the Protestant say, 72 books that Catholics say, Sorry, the Protestant say, 66, Catholics say, 72, the Eastern Orthodox 81. So hey, we don't even know how many books are in the, in the Bible, let alone the manuscripts in these things. So here, what we're saying is not only about evidences

that are analyzable, that's a word. But also we have that which is necessary for a book to be a word of God preserved book, free from contradiction, and inimitable.

So with that, you see the power of the, the the argument? Yeah, no, I believe that it's made like, you know, you when you buy software for the first time, and you install updates. Yes. Like, Christianity came along. That was one update. And we've had Islam. Yeah. I think that's a good one. The thing is that we the probably the only problem while Yeah, in any religion is violence, as you know, yes. We've always seen this violence in all religions. I'm not blaming. Yes. I think that the only problem is that the thing that people blame Islam for Yeah, yes. Why are they so violent?

There is no, they have to kind of look at themselves. The Western intervention, we also have exactly, exactly they, they that area of the world has been a kind of hodgepodge of different civilizations to the west, the Mongols, Arabs, right? All competing.

And, of course, that violence is very harmful to empiricism. And it causes arguments.

Yeah, okay. I accept what you're saying. You're right. Violence is never a good thing. But this is

in defense of Islam. Yeah. When people can accuse Islamic world of being so violent. Yeah. Look at the cultural context. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if we look at the war data, you'll find that in terms of population, I would actually make the argument that Muslim people as a proportion of the population are probably the least violent. I know that sounds ridiculous. In the last 100 years, they have proven to be the least violent people in the world, in terms of religion. Why

is this gonna sound ridiculous? Some guys laughing their head off, and believe me, but if you count the amount of people that have died as a result of the imperialistic wars, World War One World War Two, also if you count the full wars of America, and if we consider state violence as a kind of violence, which which there's no reason for us not to, will come to the conclusion that the most violent people have been atheists like Stalin, others, and Christians. If you consider Hitler a Christian, I don't know why he considered himself and people like him, so on and so forth, Islam actually fails reasonably, and in the grand scheme of things as a proper proportion of the

population, especially if we're talking about the colonial period because most of the Muslim world was subjugated under the colonial or Western rule. It says actually, quite well. But having said that, because of the kind of the post Cold War, terroristic backlash that we've been getting, and the the focus on terrorism, so a lot of people now will think of Islam as a violent religion. But we shouldn't think just looking at the whole data of Islam as any more or less violent as the war phase. We have proponents of those phase, actually performing more, more violence.

In the in the span of the last 100 and 150 years, then Muslims. But going back to what I was saying, I was saying that look, we have an argument for basically the the truthfulness of Islam, and I'm not gonna lie to you, I believe. I just want to be straightforward with you. Yeah, because I like you, you know, you're a nice guy. He's dressed. Well, you know, I came here. I didn't even I didn't even dress properly today, you know?

You know, I was gonna I was gonna come out, I wasn't gonna come today, but I'm happy I did, because I had a conversation with you. Yeah.

Listen to me. I'm gonna tell you that. I believe that the purpose of life is to worship God through submission.

Not only is that the case, I believe that the guidelines for human beings is therefore the Quran because it's the final book for the reasons I've mentioned.

So if you want to live a fruitful life, which isn't in compliance with the will of God, it's got to be done through the injunctions of the Quran and the Sunnah. Now, I've given you the reasons why, like I've given you somewhat of an epistemological base as to why we believe in what we believe. Do you accept that that epistemological base I've given you is an argument, which can be accepted or should be accepted? based on the evidence as before? I agree. I think that unless someone comes up with a more up to date, version of truth.

Yes, I suppose

it makes sense to accept that as the most up to date.

Fantastic. So what we can do is we can do the Shahada right? Now, this

is the declaration of faith, I believe in Do you believe in what I've just said? Do you agree that the Quran is probably the Word of God? Based on what I've told you?

Okay, so what you do now is you is good now, to become a Muslim. And what the word Muslim actually means is someone who submits their will to God. As you said in the beginning, that's the whole point of it. What I'll do is I'll give you my number, and then you will discuss more like, you know, how to kind of perform your rituals and these kind of things. We'll get your package of things to do and watch and we'll take it easy on you. But how do you feel should go for it? Then I wouldn't call myself not practicing.

Yeah, it's nothing new for me. But I was very, very much like that. Yeah. Would you like that? Okay, let's do it then. So I'm gonna say an hour but you also are you just kind of follow I say, and then I'll tell you in English, okay.

So follow, I say, do

you have to say, yeah, I'll say no. And then you say no, but and then she'll say to me first? Yeah, okay, fine.

So say,

Okay.

I'll say that. So what are you gonna say is I bear witness that there's only one God worthy of worship being submissive to which is we believe that the gods

Yeah. And that the Prophet is the final messenger. Yeah, okay. And shadow. Allah. Allah. Allah, Allah, wa, shadow.

And Mohammed, Mohammed Rasulullah.

So now we know

this

video.

Keep it going. Keep it going, guys. Listen, I'm gonna give you my number off camera.

And then you can call me for anything you need. Yeah. And by the way, we're probably gonna get some food to eat afterwards. You're definitely invited. Today's eat, by the way is one of the extensions of you. So you're already in a Muslim celebration, and I

just give you my number. I'm very fond of you.

Yes, yes. I'm

sorry.