Mohammed Hijab – Trinity Series – Part 2
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the concept of God being the concept of God being the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the concept of God being
the
AI: Summary ©
As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
Welcome to everybody.
Welcome to the second session of the Trinity
series.
A very short series but an important one
because a large part of the human population
is Christian and really if you think about
it, the thing that differentiates Muslims and Christians
the most is the Trinity.
You could say it's one of if not
the biggest theological difference between the religion of
Islam and the religion of Christianity.
So depending on who's right on this, then
one can make a decision from the 33
% population of Christians whether to become a
Muslim or not and they'll, I think, be
convinced if they're being honest with themselves and
sincere that this is the correct path, the
path of monotheism, the path of Tawheed, to
believe in one God, the God of Abraham
and Moses and of course the God of
Jesus as well.
Before we continue because if you remember, we
said that we're going to go through one
self-theories and then three self-theories.
Today, we're going to go through three self
-Trinitarian theories.
Let's go quickly to do like a kind
of what they call in pedagogy interleaving where
you look at some of the things that
we spoke about in the past session.
So we spoke about one self-Trinitarians.
Give me an example of a one self
-Trinitarian, a very important one.
Can anyone give me an example of a
theologian?
Thomas Aquinas.
Okay, and what else did Thomas Aquinas believe
in?
He believed in divine simplicity and what does
that entail if you believe in divine simplicity?
There's no parts to God.
No parts to God but also in his
case...
Distinct attributes.
Some would say this, yes, but then he
does believe in what?
Three different persons.
Three different persons and what was the major
criticism of that?
Contradiction.
Contradiction, why is it a contradiction?
Because if you believe that God is three
plus four so he's one.
So his essence is the same as his
attributes.
Okay, what do you think the response to
that would be from their side?
From their side, I'm not sure.
Okay, maybe they'll bring in an analogy.
Yeah, good.
What else do you think they'll say?
In Islam we have attributes as well.
Yeah, so they can try and do a
two kukui thing and say well you guys
don't have anything different.
Yeah.
What did we say the closest Madhab or
the closest school of thought credibly to Thomas
Aquinas was from the Islamic side?
Yeah, and can anyone remember why, what did
the Martezzlers really say about the essence and
the attribute distinction?
They said all the attributes are the same,
the one.
The attributes are an expression of?
The essence.
The essence.
And so the entailment of that is that
the seeing is what?
The seeing of God is?
The power.
Is the power of God, it's the same
thing, the hearing.
They'll bite the bullet on that, they don't
give a damn, they don't care.
They'll say well you know, the interlocutor will
say to the Martezzlers that what you believe
is, if you're saying that the essence is
the same as the attribute or is an
expression of the attributes, then one essence, one
attribute is essentially the same as the other
one, there's not really a difference, an ontological
demarcation point.
They'll say yeah, exactly, that's true, that's right,
that's what we believe in.
Who goes even further than them from the
Islamic, so who's the biggest protagonist from their
side?
Who do the Ismailis follow, intellectually?
Yeah, but intellectually there's someone that we all
know his name, Ibn Sina, right?
And what does he say about the attributes
of God?
Does he believe in them?
No.
And what's Al-Razi's response to that, do
you remember?
Al-Razi had a response to Ibn Sina
in his book, the commentaries of the Pointers
and Admonitions.
He said that well, there's something we have
in common with God, even on your world
view.
What did he say that thing was?
Okay, so what does Ibn Sina say God
is?
Something in existence.
The what existence?
Absolute existence, he does call it that, but
the necessary existence as well.
The necessary existence.
Like our relationship, like we exist as well,
like there is, we have some connection with
God.
Yeah, he says exactly, so we're contingent existences
and God is a necessary existence, so therefore
we have to share.
Al-Razi is saying this, he says we
have to share the attribute of existence.
Okay, now At-Tulsi, who is a Shiite,
who also done a commentary on Pointers and
Admonitions, he said well, there's such a thing
as ambiguous existence and he tried to weasel
his way out of this one, but it
was a difficult one to weasel his way
out of.
Which shows you that if you're looking for
a perfect divine symbol, it's very difficult to
do even on the most strict model, and
the most strict model is not Aquinas.
Really Avicenna is way more strict than Aquinas
because he doesn't believe in attributes, he doesn't
believe in parts, he doesn't believe in any
of that, let alone a trinity.
Now what did we say would be one
of the best ways to deal with a
one-self Trinitarian?
To emphasise something beginning with R.
The relations.
Between whom and whom?
Father and the Son.
Father and the Son, Holy Spirit, but let's
just stick with the Father and the Son
for example.
What do all three schools of Christian denominations,
Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants believe about the Son?
He's eternally generated from the Father.
Yes, that he's eternally generated or eternally begotten.
This is something that they all believe in
it.
Including Aquinas, he has to believe in this.
His dogma, actually in the Catholic Church, this
word dogma means it's something that you have
to believe in.
It's not a pejorative term, because when we
use it now, it's very dogmatic, it's very
unpragmatic, very unflexible person.
But in the theological sense it just means
it's a tenet of faith that this Church
has to believe in.
So what did we say?
We said that if you say that if
we stress the relations, what would we say
about the relations?
That the Son is dependent on the Father.
Yes, which shows what?
That it's not necessary.
Game over.
Game over.
Because if you're saying all three of them
are one, and you're saying they all have
one will, but you're saying at the same
time the Father is eternally begetting the Son.
You are essentially saying that God is caused
and uncaused at the same time.
That's what you're saying.
Because the Father is generating the Son, and
the Son is being generated by the Father.
He's being begotten by Him.
Now if you say that's not what we
believe in, well then now you're Mubtada.
That's what everyone believes in.
You have now become a deviant and a
heretic, and who had to become a deviant
and a heretic in order to avoid this
contradiction?
He had to.
And we said that, if you remember, last
time we said you're going to be stuck
between two things.
What and what?
That's true as well, that's not false, but
you're going to be stuck between heresy and
fallacy.
In order to make sense of your theology
you have to just say things which are
not in line with the Church and all
that kind of thing.
Okay, so this is a good way of
defeating one-self Trinitarians.
What if one-self Trinitarians come back and
say, well you guys don't understand it.
The Trinity is actually made from water that
transforms into vapour, which transforms into ice.
And likewise the Father can be like the
Son, can transform into like the Son, can
be like the Son, can have a mode
like the Son, can have a trope, to
use Brian Leftow's term, like the Son or
the Holy Spirit.
What would be the response to that?
Is this where we come to these separate
centres of consciousness?
You could, why not, yeah, separate centres of
consciousness.
You could say, well there are three separate
centres of consciousness, no problem.
But what else could we say?
Leftow had to use a time machine in
order to make this work.
Why do you think he had to use
a time machine?
Because you have H2O, okay, there's a change,
so that's one thing, a fundamental change here.
Every constituent is changed, because someone will say,
well you guys believe in change, you believe
in Hawaiz, you want me to bring up
Ibn Taymiyyah's Khawl on that?
That's not, al-Razi, what he said about
that, that's not what we're talking about.
It's a fundamental intrinsic change which no one
believes in, in Islam, but that's something else.
There's something more glaringly obvious, painstakingly obvious than
that.
H2O in the form of ice, H2O in
the form of water and H2O in the
form of vapour.
Can they be like that all at the
same time?
So it can either be ice or either
be water or either be vapour.
It's either, it's disjunctive, it's not conjunctive.
But you've made it conjunctive.
You said water, H2O could be water, it
could be this, it could be that.
But by saying could, it's either water, it's
either ice or it's either vapour.
It's not all three at the same time.
And that's exactly, you're making a case for
us, because if you're saying the similitude of
God is that of water, ice and vapour,
then what you're telling me is that you
can't have water and vapour at the same
time.
It's like having a tall, short man.
Therefore you can't have father and son at
the same time.
You've shown me why it's a contradiction.
You've helped me make my case.
Do you see the point?
So the vapour example doesn't work.
That's why Left Out had to say, well
you have to believe in this time machine,
so that all three of them can exist
at the same time.
You know what I mean?
So he had to invent the time machine.
You can see how far these people, so
God is jumping into the time machine.
I wonder what's in control of what?
It's like that film Back to the Future.
I don't know what happened in that film,
I didn't watch it myself.
But I think he met his mother.
Stephen Hawkins said that you can't go back
into the past in a time machine.
You can only go into the future.
Because it produces contradictions when you go into
the past.
But you can go into the future.
But that's something else, another discussion for another
day.
You've got the grandfather paradox and you've got
all these things that I've mentioned in the
books of philosophy.
Hijab, has there ever been a time where
they said that can the father become the
son and have two sons at the same
time?
That's a good question for you to ask.
Why is it necessary for there to be
three persons of the Trinity?
Why not four?
Or five?
Or seven or eight?
What is it about the number three?
Could there be another Holy Spirit that comes
out?
Could the Holy Spirit beget one?
Because they usually use the term beget the
son.
And they use the term spirate.
The Holy Spirit spirates.
I'm trying my best to find out what
this word spirate means.
Because it's just one of those words that
sounds fantastic, you know, but it doesn't have
much meaning.
It was cause generated.
They don't want to use the word cause
because they know what the implication of that
is.
So they use this word that nobody understands.
Spiration.
Next time I speak to my wife and
I have a debate with her, I'm just
going to throw in the, well you've spirated
me a few times.
If you want to just shove a word
that nobody, you want to pontificate in a
sesquipedalian way, then you can just use any
word.
Today we're going to go through a very
important dalil.
I was waiting for Ali Dawood to call.
I don't know if he's called but he
didn't answer.
But we're going to go through dalil al
-tamanu.
And I'm going to go through a very
particular articulation.
I'm not going to read the whole thing.
Which is taken from this book called al
-matalib al-aliyah, which is the lofty pursuits
from Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.
And this book is to me the best
articulation I've seen of this.
Now many people have articulated this.
Ghazali articulates this argument.
Ibn Taymiyyah articulates the same argument.
In fact Ibn Taymiyyah has a lot of
good things to say about this argument because
it comes from the Qur'an.
It comes from two or three different verses.
One of them is that Allah has not
taken a son and he doesn't have any
partners with him.
If that was the case then they would
have tried to outstrip one another for power.
So in other words if you have more
than two powerful things, it's showing the impossibility
of having two all-powerful agents.
And that's the other one.
Yeah that's a good one.
That's a beautiful one.
لَوْ كَانَ فِيهِمَا أَلِيَهَةٌ إِلَّا اللَّهَ لَفَسَدَتَهَا That
if the universe and heavens and the earth
had in it more than one god, then
it would have been corrupt.
It would have been destroyed.
And by the way another person who articulates
this argument really well from my reading is
Ibn Rushd al-Andalusi.
The way he puts it is fantastic.
He articulates this argument in more than one
place.
The way I read it was in a
place called Keshf Munahij al-Adillah.
This is one of his smaller books.
But he has a chapter on the oneness
of God, the existence of God, how to
prove God's existence.
And then he has a chapter on why
God is one.
But Al-Razi is one so we're going
to stick with Al-Razi today.
He does it in a very interesting way.
And I'm going to read out to you
something that I've written and then we'll start
with this argument.
Bear in mind, three self trinitarians, many of
them will say that there are actually three
wills of God.
Now bear in mind Aquinas doesn't believe that
there are three wills and neither do the
one self trinitarians.
A lot of even the three self trinitarians,
some of them believe in one will.
So be wary of how you use the
will argument.
You could say if person A wanted this
bottle to go here and person B wanted
this bottle, where is the bottle going to
go?
But if this person has a model of
the Trinity where this person does not believe
that the Father has a separate will to
the Son and the Son does not have
a separate will to the Holy Spirit, then
he's just going to say to you they
don't have separate wills.
So you have to understand where the person
is coming from and then you can just
transition to omnipotence or something like that.
It's just a shift.
It's a pivot.
You make a pivot.
But you need to be sure that the
person you're debating with, or you're discussing, believes
in three wills if you want to make
the will argument.
Okay, so this is what Al-Razi mentions.
If we affirm, now he's saying this and
I've obviously just kind of like shorthanded it
and abbreviated it and put my own words.
If we affirm or presume that there are
two agents which are fully capable.
Now the words that are used in Arabic
is tamam al-qudra.
Tamam al-qudra which means fully, the will
is perfect.
It's complete, fully capable.
You can say also omnipotent.
This refers to the capability of God, therefore
it refers to how God can do things.
Then there are three things which could be
considered impossible.
So he's saying look, if you have two
fully capable gods, two or three or four,
whatever you want, but two or more, then
these three things he's saying, these impossible things,
is beyond the realms of possibility for fully
capable being A to desire X, say, that
Socrates should live, and that fully capable being
B desires Y, which is this opposite, say
that Socrates should die, and that both fully
capable beings A and B should have their
wills enacted.
Such an upshot is absurd, since it contravenes
the law of non-contradiction.
So if God A, or person A wanted
Socrates to live, and person B wanted Socrates
to die, for them both to get their
will would be impossible, because it contravenes the
law of non-contradiction.
Unless there's a multiverse.
No, we're talking about Socrates, we're not talking
about the multiverse.
In one world he might die, and in
the other one he might live.
No, we're talking about one Socrates.
You can say that one of them was
all the multiverse Socrates.
No, no, no, it's one Socrates here, a
multiverse.
Because then you can say, okay, well you've
got one other Socrates in this other place
and one other one there.
But we're talking about just one person, because
remember the rules of contradiction have to apply.
There are eight rules of contradiction, which I
don't know if you've covered, but we've done
it in the logic course, that there are
eight rules of contradiction.
Place and time are chief, most important.
So we're talking about the same place and
the same time, and a multiverse does not
fulfil those criteria.
So we're not talking about that.
We're talking about if you've got Socrates here
and now, one God, the father wants Socrates
to live, and the son wants him to
die, what happens to Socrates?
So for them to both have that he
lives and dies is a contradiction.
He can't live and die both, that's a
contradiction.
But fully capable, do you mean all powerful?
You're saying fully capable?
Yeah, I mean there's tamam al-qudra.
I mean the thing is qudra, there is
a difference with quwa and qudra.
There is a slight difference between power and
capability.
Okay, but one implies the other.
You can't have power without capability.
So you can still make this argument with
power.
Or you can say fully capable, you can
use those terms as well, it's up to
you.
Number two is, so we said the first
thing is you can't both have your way.
It is also impossible for fully capable being
A to desire X, say that Socrates should
live, and fully capable being B desires its
opposite, say that he should die, and neither
fully capable being has their will enacted.
This would infringe the law of the excluded
middle and would possibly indicate that neither A
nor B are actually fully capable, which would
in effect contradict the premise.
And the law of excluded middle is that
it's P and not P at the same
time.
By the way, there are three major laws
of logic.
The law of non-contradiction, the law of
excluded middle, and the third one is the
law of identity.
And the trinity contravenes all three of them.
And that's why Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
has made it very easy for Christians.
Because he has not just shown them that
they are at fault or logically wrong, in
error, in one way.
He has shown them that their belief system
is impossible in all the ways logically that
a human being can find out about impossibility.
The trinity is wrong because it either implies
the law of non-contradiction, or it implies
the law of excluded middle, and we'll come
to the third one, which is very important
as well.
Or it implies the law of identity, which
we've covered before, but we'll cover it again.
Or it implies, which is the third option
here, which we're going to go through, the
following.
Using the same example, it's also impossible.
So what I just said number two is,
we said that you can't have both of
them like so.
A was you can't have Socrates live and
die at the same time.
What's B?
That Socrates can't be in the middle.
No, neither be dead nor alive.
He cannot be dead, neither dead, nor alive.
He has to be in some state.
He cannot be in a dead state, neither
in a dead state nor in a live
state.
What's the difference between the first one and
the second one then?
It's the exact opposite.
So the first one we're saying that they
can't both get what they want.
The second one is saying we can't both
not get what we want.
If one of the brothers says to his
wife, I want to have a son, and
she says well I want a son, he
doesn't want a son, the more powerful one
is going to get their way.
We don't want to admit this, but the
more powerful one in that relationship, unless she
has an ailment, but she makes a decision
like that, she has the power.
If neither of you get what you want,
this is not possible.
She's either going to have a son or
no son.
She cannot be in a state where she
has neither no son or a son.
One of them has to prevail.
The third example now, using the same example,
it is also impossible for Socrates to be
either alive or dead for no reason whatsoever.
Because despite intervention of a capable being A
or B, as such a result would contravene
the principle of sufficient reason.
Leibniz by the way said this, he said
you can find out everything about the world
with the law of non-contradiction and the
principle of sufficient reason.
He said those two things you know everything
about, you can find everything out.
If you want to find everything about dunya,
Leibniz is saying, this guy created calculus.
One of the biggest figures in the western
philosophical and mathematical tradition.
He invented calculus.
We're not talking about this guy or that
guy, we're talking about Leibniz here.
And he said there's two things that if
you understand them, you can figure out everything.
Number one is the law of non-contradiction
and the other one is the principle of
sufficient reason.
And basically the principle of sufficient reason is
you cannot say that something happens without a
reason.
Everything has an explanation, a cause of some
sort.
If you're telling me this thing happened without
a cause, this that without an explanation, then
this is nonsense.
This is impossible to say that.
So if you're going to tell me that
Socrates is either dead or alive but there's
no reason for it, the universe is here
but there's no reason for it, then this
contravenes the principle of sufficient reason.
So either you're going to, you pick your
poison.
What you're saying to the Christian is you're
going to pick your poison.
I'm not here to persuade you or this
and that, you decide what you want to
do.
You decide to either contravene the principle of
non-contradiction or you decide to contravene the
law of excluded middle or you decide to
contravene the principle of sufficient reason.
Or you can contravene, as we said before
in the previous session, the law of identity.
That if you say the Father is God
and the Son is God, it follows what?
It follows the Father is the Son.
So you've lost your Trinity.
So if you want to use, that's why
they have to say the Trinity is a
mystery and all this kind of thing.
But I don't want to overburden you with
information.
What we'll do is we'll do a little
back and forth using this and we'll have
half the class being the Christians and half
the class being the Muslims.
I want you guys to really try this
argument out in the sparring session now.
Now we've done the drilling, now it's the
intellectual sparring session.
I think with this you can go really
far.
Any questions on it before we do that?
Can you see how he's done this though,
Al-Razi?
What differentiates his one is, like a Tamannah
argument is the only person in Islamic history
that I've come across that has not accepted
this argument intellectually and he says I accept
only Khabariyya as a Khabar.
There's a man called Al-Ahmadi.
There's a woman actually called Laura Hassan who's
an academic in this country who writes extensively
on Al-Ahmadi for some reason.
Very interesting thing.
She got interested in Al-Ahmadi but he
is a huge figure actually to be fair.
And she's got good works on him.
But Al-Ahmadi, he has said that I
don't know about this Dalil.
Everyone else accepts it.
Ibn Sina does not accept it because obviously
Ibn Sina doesn't believe in the will of
God.
So the philosopher and those guys obviously will
not accept it.
In terms of the Mutakallimeen and the Hanbalis,
they essentially all accept it.
Any questions on this one?
I just wanted to ask you for another
example.
So with those three contradictions or whatever you
want to call them.
So could you give an example for the
phone.
So the phone cannot exist and exist at
the same time.
That's number one.
That's the first one you explained.
How can I use that second one on
the phone?
It cannot not exist.
Here's where you've got to be very careful,
right?
Because if you use the wrong example, you
don't get it.
Because you can say it cannot neither exist.
It can actually not neither exist.
So it's important to have a subject that
you're talking about in the end of the
analogy.
That's why I think you should stick to
this.
Because when we were doing the brainstorming, when
we tried to do the exist thing, it
doesn't work as good.
So if you think about it, when you
get to the Law of Clued Middle, it
doesn't work as nicely in the second one.
Do you see what I mean?
You've got one thing and then it's got
like two things or two attributes and it
can't be both of those attributes at the
same time but it also has to be
one of the two.
What do you mean it also has to
be one of the two?
For example, a human being has to be
either alive or dead.
That's the third option.
So it has to be one of these
two and it can't be both at the
same time.
So I think you can do it.
No, but that's what this is.
So it cannot be and the opposite.
What do you call it?
Basically, this is what this is.
It's laa yishtamiAAan and laa yirtafiAAan.
So it cannot be ishtimaAA and rafAA.
This is the same terminology, by the way,
for those who are watching and know Arabic,
I guess, and who have come across this
maybe in Usool Fiqh because you'll be surprised.
These rules are in grammar and balaagha and
Usool Fiqh, they're scattered everywhere.
But ishtimaAA and the rafAA of the naqidain
is not possible in this way.
And then obviously the principle of sufficient reason.
I don't think there's a mustalah for that
in the Arabic language or a reason for
that.
But you can say qaida al-sabibi al
-aamah.
It's really the closest thing you can get.
Okay, so let's spend, we'll have like from
Tariq onwards on this side you'll be the
Muslims and then you guys here will be
the Christians, from Hussam onwards.
You can work with your own group for
5-10 minutes as a preparation and then
after that we'll do some sparring.
So we've just had a private session, let's
call it that, where we went through some
of the debates and done some intellectual sparring
and stuff like that.
That's obviously not going to be there for
you to see.
But next week you guys will see that
because the whole session is going to be
basically us doing the sparring and the debating
and stuff because that is what's going to
propel us above and beyond our competitors to
actually try this stuff out because we need
to grapple with it.
We need to put it into the laboratory,
we need to put it in and try
it out.
This is really what differentiates the Sapiens Institute
from all other institutes in the world.
Anyway, talking about the concept things that we
need to know.
So let me just test something.
If you wanted to show, if you wanted
to demonstrate to a Christian why the Trinity
is incoherent using the law of identity, how
would you do it?
The father and the son distinction.
How would you formulate it?
If the father is the son, then the
father is the son.
So if we say there is here, if
the father is God, there can be two
possibilities.
Either the is here is used for predication.
This is something called predication, which means it
shares in the nature of God.
In the same sense as, say for example,
if I am a human being and you're
a human being.
So we're not the same person here.
Anomalists would say, what would anomalists say?
If you remember this, this is for extra
points here.
Anomalists would say human nature is not something
which is, or universals don't actually exist.
That's what they would say.
Conceptualists, anomalists say universals don't actually exist, so
there's no such thing as human nature like
that.
But putting that to the side, if I
say, look, I share in human nature, he
shares in human nature.
That's kind of like predication.
If I say identity, if I'm saying that
the father is God, the son is God,
we're talking about the same person here, the
father is the son.
Consider it, if he is fully God.
Now this whole thing about fully, if the
father is fully God and the son is
fully God, that must mean by necessity that
the father is the son.
Someone could argue, well this is what William
Lane Craig does argue, and we saw it
in the debate, where he said, well he's
not fully God but he's partially God.
And this is a heresy called partialism.
So it's number one.
In Christianity, in all three schools of thought,
they've never said that the father is one
third of God, the son is one third
of God, and that the Holy Spirit is
one third of God.
Last week we talked about the main analogy
that they use for one, one of the
main analogies they use for one self for
interiorism, and we said it was the water
turning into the vapour and also being into
ice.
We've talked about at length some of the
problems of that.
But you might have heard another analogy of
the egg.
Has anyone heard that analogy?
What is it if you've heard of it?
The three layers of the egg.
So you've got the shell, the white and
the yolk.
So now they've moved away from God being
water, and they've moved to God being like
an egg.
Now some lay Christians don't realise that these
are two contradictory examples.
So the same Christian may say to you,
well if you don't understand the Trinity, the
Trinity is a bit like water, it's vapour
and ice.
In which case you'll say, well it's H2O,
water, vapour and ice at the same time,
because that's a contradiction, like having a tall,
short man etc.
What about the relations and all the things
we've talked about?
But if then the same Christian says, well
actually the Trinity is a thing about an
egg.
But with the egg, what do we have
here?
It's all there at the same time, so
we've solved the problem of time and place,
which existed with the water analogy, because the
water, it can either be water, vapour or
ice at one time, as a whole.
The shell is there, the yolk is there.
Criteria is different, partialism.
Because in the case of the water example,
we don't have part of the H2O is
water and part of the H2O is vapour
and part of the H2O is ice.
But in the case of the egg example,
actually you do have a part of the
egg is shell, and the part of the
egg is the white, and then a part
of the egg is yolk.
So if you want to say that God,
the Trinity is like an egg.
I don't know why not a banana, or
why not an orange, or why not some
other, why an egg?
I don't know, I think they have this
thing of an egg.
No problem, you can have your egg.
But you can't have your egg and eat
it too, because the issue here is, the
issue is, maybe in your logic you
can, but I mean, let's go straight.
The egg, that would mean, if we took
this analogy seriously, that we must concede that
the Father is 33% of God, that
the Son is 33% of God, and
the Holy Spirit is 33%.
So they are not full Gods.
Don't tell me the Father is God then.
Don't tell me the Father is God.
The Father is a third of a God.
You've got third Gods, that's what you've got.
The difference between me and you, you believe
in Jesus as God, then he's a third
God.
I believe that Allah is one God and
he's a full God.
Debate over, goodnight, let's go to bed.
And William Lane Craig, we saw in the
debate, he believes in this kind of cerebus
example of the dog with the three heads.
A man with two PhDs has been debating
everyone for 30 years, 40 years.
He is the best Christian he has to
offer for the last hundred years, potentially.
And this is what he had to say.
Wallahi, if you go to a year six
classroom with smart enough children, they will be
able to see the contradictions in this.
There's no doubt about it.
The similitude of the Father, the Son and
the Holy Spirit is the similitude of a
dog with three heads.
You've got Rover, Dover and forget the other
one's name, Jack or whatever his name is.
That's for the sake of argument.
One of the dogs has got, we would
say they have three centres of what?
Consciousness.
One dog can turn around and do this.
The other dog turns like that and goes,
bite the other.
So one has got one will, the other
one has got another will.
And Craig hasn't got a problem with the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit having
three different wills.
I want to know, how is this not
polytheism?
This is clearly polytheism.
This is what exactly polytheism looks like.
Look at what one of the, just to
show you this, Gregory of Nyssa, one of
the church fathers, this is what he says,
the principle of causality distinguishes then the persons
of the Holy Trinity.
It affirms that one is uncaused while the
other depends on a cause.
Remember last week we said, because I remembered
one of the questions was, can we get
a quotation from one of the church fathers
about one of them actually admitting that the
begotten nature of the Son is tantamount to
one being caused to the other.
And Gregory of Nyssa is saying it very
openly.
This is Gregory of Nyssa, this is one
of the Cappadocian fathers.
This is one of the people that, you
have Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nisanzius and
you have Basil.
These three are considered some of the most
important figures of the 4th century in Christianity.
And he is saying one is caused, i
.e. the Father is uncaused and the Son
is caused.
This is what he is saying.
But then how can you have a necessary
being with aspects of it that are caused
and aspects of it which are uncaused?
Persons of it which are caused and persons
of it which are uncaused.
Being necessary, by the way, means you are
uncaused.
But if there are aspects of you which
are caused, then it contradicts necessity in every
single way.
And I wanted to comment, and obviously this
wasn't on the camera, but you made the
point when we were doing the rounds, and
it's a very good point about what is
it that's making them agree.
And it's such a good point that actually
a non-Muslim, I think it's a Christian
himself, his name is Scott Williams.
He has an entire peer-reviewed article talking
about what he refers to as necessary agreement.
And he gives an example, he says, imagine
that the Earth is going around the Sun.
Let's say the Father wants it to go
around one way, and the Sun wants it
to go around the other way.
Where is the Earth going to go?
Now, I gave a similar example, actually it
wasn't me, William Craig gave the example, and
this was the sticking point for a lot
of the Christians in the debate.
Because he said, look, imagine if you've got
two people that are lighting one candle.
You've got two matches, I'm not understand over
-determination.
If you've got two matches and you put
them on the candle, then they're both causing
the lighting of the candle.
This was his interrogation.
But let's think about that for a second,
right?
Because if the threshold for the lighting of
the candle was one of the matches, then
the second match becomes superfluous to this operation.
For example, if me and him, this big
strapping young fellow over here, Alhamdulillah, push this
door with a certain amount of force.
Let's say I use this amount of force
and that amount of force.
There's only two alternatives.
Either we push it, I don't push it
enough for it to close, and then you
push it so that it closes.
Think about it.
We both push it.
Let's say you need the power of 50
in order for this door to close.
So if I go 30 and he goes
20, the door will close for the sake
of argument.
If he goes 50 and I go 50,
then you don't need me anymore.
You can't say we both caused the closing
of the door.
You're telling me you've got two matches and
you put it on a candle and they
both had exactly fully the same causation ability
on this candle, then this is not a
good counter-argument.
By the way, I thought that no Christian
would say this, admit this, because this was
quite a high-profile debate.
But actually I was surprised to find that
Bob Branson, who is an academic and peer
-reviewed Christian, had reviewed this debate with Jay
Dyer and someone sent me the clip where
he was discussing William Craig's move to talk
about opening the door for determination in that
debate and he said that it was probably
done just as a move in the debate,
something along those lines.
Because he didn't seem convinced by this thing
at all.
If you consider the analogies that were given
in the debate, the analogies that were given
in the debate was, can two women be
responsible for the birth of one child to
a degree of 100%?
Is there any possible world where that's possible?
And there was no response to this.
The question that I asked was that, did
the Father create the universe fully?
This is a very simple question and if
you thought about it, his response about the
candles and stuff, sorry to say, if that's
the best response you can give, if that's
the best response Christianity can provide, the greatest
scholars of Christianity in the last hundred years
on these issues, then there is no response.
So all you have to do is ask
them the following, did the Father create the
universe to a degree of 100%?
Did the Son, because you can't have all
three a degree of 100%, you've got 300
% there.
If he says, well the candles and this
and that, say the candle, you only need
one of those matches, it's done, you don't
need another one.
The door, if you want to close it,
you only need one person at the power
of 50, let's say, you don't need two.
There's no legitimate example.
You're a physicist, you know that the threshold
from a physics perspective of heat that is
required for the candlestick is a certain amount
and if it's fulfilled by one of those
matches, is another match required for that?
No.
And if you went to the laboratory, I
don't think you'd really go there for physics
anyway, but for the sake of argument, if
you went for the order of professors and
you gave William Craig's analogy to this, do
you think he would be very impressed by
it?
No.
I don't think he would be.
It's a truthful lie.
It's just very unimpressive.
How would you argue, because in this argument
here you're saying they're doing the same action,
how is he going to respond to say,
let's say if they contradict an action, for
example one is lighting the fire and the
other one is blowing the fire away, how
do you respond to that?
Because he's saying if the flame is bigger,
what about this one here?
The whole thing is about how to get
the candle lit in the first place.
We're not talking about anything else.
I asked him the question, did the Father
create the universe to a degree of 100
%?
If he says yes, then you can't say
that the Son did and the Holy Spirit
did.
He knows that.
So his response was that yes, he's basically
trying to say the Father, the Son and
the Holy Spirit, all three of them created
the universe to a degree of 100%
and the similitude of that is like the
similitude of getting one candle and getting two
matches and both of them are able to
light that one candle.
But doesn't he hold the trinity where the
trinity is like a circle and the Father
and the Son and the Holy Spirit is
within and the trinity is like a different
being and the trinity did 100% and
therefore all three of them did 100%
as well?
I think that's maybe Brian Leftow actually attacked
William Craig on his version of the trinity
and he kind of used a very similar
thing that you just said.
He said that, well if you consider the
trinity as another, as an entity in its
own right, then you've got four gods etc.
But that's not, this is not the issue
at hand.
The issue is of over-determination.
Over-determination in the ways described by Craig
is an insufficient and unsatisfactory response even by
the admission, the reluctant admission albeit by his
peers in the academic world.
There has to be.
And the one who made this argument to
be honest and he really promulgated it in
a very good way was Ibn Rushd.
Ibn Rushd and they all took, the mutakalimeen
and all these Muslim philosophers etc, they kind
of really all took this for granted that
you cannot have two subjects that are responsible
for one object to a degree of 100%.
They all understood that.
Like for example if I get this pen
here and if I draw a line on
this piece of paper.
Now if I get two pens, every little
dot of ink that is on this piece
of paper that has been drawn by this
line, by this pen, the line has already
been drawn.
So either I've kind of like drawn half
of it and then the other half can
be done by the other pen or some
ink has fallen.
But for you to say that there can
be in every molecule and every atom of
that piece of paper two exact causes, two
exact pieces of ink that fall in exactly
the same place, that have exactly the same
responsibility for exactly the same demarcation or exactly
the same pen type ink on the exact
same paper is a contradiction.
Another way of thinking about it, we can
go to an analogy from philosophy of science.
So we have a problem known as underdetermination
by observation.
So the problem is that the same observations
can give rise to a number of theories
and we don't know which theory actually represents
the real state of affairs.
However, if a philosopher was to turn around
and say that the problem of the underdetermination
of scientific theories by observation is not an
epistemic one, it's an ontological one, right?
It's not the case that there's many different
theories that fit into the data and we
don't know which theory is correct.
It's not an epistemic problem, it's an ontological
problem that actually all these contradictory theories are
responsible for the phenomena in question, everybody would
throw that person out the window because it
would be incoherent.
Yeah, I like that.
Exactly what you're saying, unless he's making an
epistemic point, we don't know whether the father,
the son or the Holy Ghost is responsible
for that.
Which he would not, he's not making that
point.
He's making an ontological point and it goes
to show it's a sleight of hand.
It's a sleight of hand, like Robert Ransom
said it's a move in the debate because
he knew that it's a trap, it's a
trap door.
You're going to have to say the father
is responsible 33% for the son, that's
the only way out.
I mean, why did he adopt partialism in
the first place?
Why did he adopt the equivalent of the
egg analogy or the dog?
Because he realises that if you say they're
all fully God, then that's a problem.
Is the father all powerful, is the son
all powerful?
They see it as a problem.
And that's why Scott Williams is basically saying
in this article that they, he said exactly
the same thing as you, what is causing
necessary agreement?
Why do their wills have to agree?
Is it something from inside, is it something
from outside, is it something impinging on, is
it something in hearing in, what is it
exactly?
The will, wills, why do they have to
agree?
So Shakira was right to say, well it
could be like he tried to do, the
omnipotence.
I'm not sure if you saw the debate
but I said to him, if you say
Craig, that it's due to some attribute, say
for example goodness or omnipotence, then it leads
to necessitarianism because it alleviates or dissolves God
of the will fully, which in other places
I know Craig has denied that.
That's not his view.
He doesn't take the Ibn Taymiyyah view of
everything is due to the wisdom or something
like that.
He doesn't take that view.
And so because of that he's trapped and
he didn't actually respond to that.
He knew that no one was going to
understand what we're talking about.
He's kind of like, forget this, let's not
get involved in that.
There's a term he used when it came
to the two candles.
What was it?
During the debate.
Overdetermination.
Was it overdetermination that he used?
Overdetermination, yeah.
But how did he actually define that?
Overdetermination is essentially when two things can be
the cause of one event.
No, no, I know that.
But did he say that it's because we
don't know which of the entities caused the
lit or is it the case that all
of them played an equal role, full role?
It's completely incoherent.
Yes, impossible.
And that's what Ibn Rushd said, that's what
all of the scholars of Islam basically said.
No one understood this.
But like I say, I think he realises
that this is a brick wall for him
and he doesn't have an answer.
And they all don't have an answer.
And this is why actually there's a philosopher
of religion called Richard Swinburne.
I'm not sure if you've ever come across
him.
He's up there with Alvin Plantinga and the
big ones.
And so to answer the question of Scott
Williams of how do you establish necessary agreement,
because as we said it's a very difficult
question.
Why did it all have to agree?
In the academic literature it's one of the
most difficult questions for them to answer, especially
on three self-trinitarian models.
Especially on models where they have three wills
like William Craig and other people say that
they do have it.
And William Hasker has the same three wills
thing and all that kind of thing.
Swinburne says look, the father, what's the relation
between father and son?
The father has to be respected.
He said the father is the parent.
Surely the son has to follow what the
father says?
Because he has a moral responsibility to follow
the father.
Academic, yeah?
This is one of the great academics of
the Christian world in the 21st century.
This is the argument.
And actually Scott Williams responds to it.
He says, OK, I'll take you for the
sake of argument on face value of what
you're saying.
He said, but why is it always the
case that the father has to make the
decision even on your world view?
Sometimes the father, out of his love and
his mercy, he wants the son to do
his own thing.
Sometimes my son tells me what to do.
He does.
He says, look, I want to go and
get some ice creams or something like that.
I'm not going to say no.
Just so I can impose some kind of
authoritarian.
So basically, according to Swinburne, Christopher Hitchens was
right.
God seems to be a dictator and the
father is a horrible dictator.
You've got the son here, all the powers
and everything.
Get out of here.
Don't say anything.
I wouldn't even do that with my own
son.
Be quiet.
Don't say a word.
I'm going to make all the decisions here.
Somehow some men are in the household.
Not here in the UK.
Maybe some other countries.
Some glorious countries, actually.
I'll make all the decisions.
So the necessary agreement thing, and a good
way to spin it is to ask them
to establish a necessary agreement.
And just keep pushing on.
Whatever answer they give, because of an attribute,
either you have a necessitarian objection or they're
going to go into subordinationism.
By the way, this is subordinationism.
You know in the beginning where they considered
it to be heresy, where if you say
the father is not equal to the son.
Because essentially what you're saying here is that
the father is more authoritative than the son.
Then they're not co-equal anymore, are they?
Co-eternal, co-equal.
Then don't lie about it.
You've had to leave the tree.
You've had to become a heretic again.
You keep having to become a heretic.
You might as well just leave this religion.
If you're going to keep having to become
a heretic, do you know what I mean?
Why are you a heretic?
Anyway, with that we will conclude.
It's been a fantastic session.
I think a lot of it has been
offline, but in the next session you'll see
what these people are capable of.
They're going to be producing these arguments and
the counter-arguments and we're going to be
pretending to be Christians.
And I think some of the arguments here
are going to be better than what William
Rankin came up with, based on what we
talked about.
And with that we'll conclude.
Assalaamu Alaikum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuhu.