Muslims are Stuck in a Vicious Circular Argument
By Mike Robinson
A pettio principii is the logical fallacy of arguing in a circle: the conclusion of your argument also rests in your premise. The claim strictly ends at the place it began. Christian theism avoids this fallacy inasmuch as it rests on transcendental necessities of God and His revelation.1 But most Muslims argue that Allah is true because the Koran says so, and the Koran is true because Allah says so. They also try to prove the Koran by positing Muhammad and proving Muhammad by positing the Koran. That is a vicious circular argument and these sorts of circular arguments are invalid. Islam fails to deliver the transcendental necessities to avoid an invalid epistemic foundation; thus it fails to provide a sound argument or a virtuous circular argument.
Biblical Inerrancy
“And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns, and the morning star rises in your hearts; knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke, as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:19-21).
“The sufficiency…of the extant biblical manuscripts is not divorced from…the original manuscripts” (Greg Bahnsen).
The Christian has an infallible word in the Bible and it reveals a saving Redeemer. Many Muslims attack the Bible, despite the fact that the Koran affirms the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Koran is alleged to be a collection of revelations from Allah. Muslims propagate that the Koran was perfect in heaven. However, the Hadith (authoritative inspired commentary and information regarding Muhammad) asserts that the Koran had many divergent and conflicting readings. The manner in which the Koran evolved into a standardized manuscript was not by divine intervention, but by the choice of men. Uthman proposed the Hafsah Manuscript should be the standard text of the Koran. He had it dispensed throughout the Middle East and had the variant copies destroyed. So, unlike the Bible, there is not a reasonable system to find the original text.
The Koran Cites the Bible as God’s Word
The inability to think critically and logically or to draw a distinction becomes a casualty of our time. We will never come to the truth on serious matters of faith and belief, if we do not know how to think our way through those beliefs. Reason is essential and the God of the Bible declares “come let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:17).
The Koran testifies in numerous places that the previous revelation (the Old Testament and Gospels) is the word of God; but, nowhere does the Bible testify of the truth and inerrancy of the Koran (obviously because it came first). The Koran affirms the Bible in the following verses:
Suras: 66:6, 12; 48:29; 34:31; 35:31; 19:12; 12:111; 10:37; 9:111; 7:156-157; 6:154-157; 5:49, 113-114; 3:3, 48-53; 2:91.
The above mentioned verses formally end the debate between the authenticity of the Bible in contrast to the Koran. The Koran avouches the biblical text and the Bible disaffirms Islamic teaching. This is devastating to the particular notions of Islamic thought and doctrine. Based on its own book, Islamic theology cannot be true for it contradicts the book it cites as the word of God.
The New Testament
The New Testament is the most widely attested ancient text that humanity possesses.
There resides such a voluminous amount of copies of the New Testament ancient texts that we know we have the infallible word of God. Josh McDowell expounds and aims to establish this in his two volumes of Evidence Demands a Verdict I and II.
“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).
God has spoken and His true revelation is in the Bible alone. No other book can furnish the rational pre-necessities to examine any document. In order to probe, examine, question, and to ponder the authenticity of any alleged holy book, one is required to utilize the laws of logic and other necessities that make intelligibility possible. Only the Bible has the conceptual scheme and a priori rational web to account for these essential laws.
The main presuppositions for biblical textual purity are:
- God has providential control over His revelation.
- God’s word supplies the necessary truth conditions for logic that are required to test, analyze, and examine any text (see my previous posts on atheism).
The New Testament names streets, sites, fields, courts, pools, places (the pool of Siloam, the Field of Blood, Solomon’s Porch, etc.) and towns, which were destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Romans, when they conquered and crushed Judea and its holy site, the Temple. The Gospel writers speak of these locations as still standing, and describe details that only an eyewitness would know. This is very strong evidence that the New Testament books predate 70 A.D., when the Temple and countless sites were destroyed. It takes more than great faith to believe that most of the New Testament books were written many years after the events it records (90 A.D. and after). It takes strong-willed blind faith fueled by faulty presuppositions to believe such unsubstantiated claims.
The inspired writers of Scripture proclaim the authenticity of copies of the originals. King Josiah found a copy of the Torah and God declared that it was the pure word of God (2 Kings 22). “The book by the hand of Moses” was discovered and all the Old Testaments texts were true and pure. Bahnsen pressed Van Til’s view, “If we presuppose a sovereign God, observes Van Til, we need no longer worry whether or not the transmission of Scripture is not altogether accurate.”
The Truth is God and God is Yahweh
That by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie. … This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast… (Hebrews 6:18-19).
For I am the LORD (Yahweh), I do not change (Malachi 3:6).
I maintain that Yahweh, in contrast to Allah, furnishes all a priori essentials for the necessary epistemic equipment utilized in all thoughts and achievements. Yahweh has the actual ontic attributes of omniscience, immutability, and omnipotence (He has universal reach) thus He has the ontic capacity to be the ground general principles, immutable laws, universal operational aspects of human thinking and understanding. In Christian theism God can be known (John 17:1-3). Moreover, a position that rejects Yahweh as the epistemic (knowledge) base cannot be true, thus whatever evidence one discovers, must be discerned and processed with the rational tools that arise from Christian theism and the worldview that streams from the Triune God.
The true God is the elemental requirement for knowledge, proof, evidence, and logic. He is the a priori verity condition for the intelligibility of reality. This is the case inasmuch as the immaterial, transcendent, and immutable Triune God supplies the necessary pre-environment for the use of immaterial, transcendent, universal, and immutable laws of logic utilized in all knowledge pursuits. Christian theism is the pre-essential truth condition for the grounding and understanding of knowledge. Christianity is true not only because it seems more probable than its antithesis, but because it supplies the basis for knowledge.
Muslims presuppose the rational necessities that the Christian worldview underwrites while they verbally reject it. What are the obligatory conditions that make thought possible? The Triune God furnishes those preconditions to establish the rational flooring for intelligibility. Van Til called this “method of implication into the truth of God a transcendental method. That is, we must seek to determine what presuppositions are necessary to any object of knowledge in order that it may be intelligible to us.”
“Allah is the best of deceivers” (Sura 3:54).
“Allah leads astray whomsoever He wills” (Sura 14:4).
The laws of logic presuppose and require the Triune God:
• The laws of logic are immutable and universal.
• Allah is not immutable since he ultimately lacks any real attributes including the attribute of immutability.2
• Allah is not sufficient (he lies and reveals untruths) to account for the laws of logic.
• Allah is not God.
• The Triune God is immutable and universal in position and power.
• The Triune God is sufficient to account for the laws of logic.
• Human experience presupposes the laws of logic.
• Human experience presupposes the Triune God.
Transcendental analysis of Islam demonstrates that it is, in the end, self-confounding inasmuch as it fails to give what it does not possess: immutable universals including the laws of logic and objective moral values.
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1. The true God is the elemental requirement for knowledge, proof, evidence, and logic. He is the a priori verity condition for the intelligibility of reality. The immaterial, transcendent, and immutable Triune God supplies the necessary pre-environment for the operational features of human thinking and experience ( laws of logic, predication, universals, knowledge, absolutes). In principle, Allah cannot supply the necessary a priori truth conditions for the required operational feature of human experience; hence the Islamic worldview results in futility because of its internal weakness. The Islamic worldview falls into absurdity inasmuch as it is self-conflagrating and leads to conclusions that controvert its own primary assumptions.
2. Allah is described as “inscrutably arbitrary” in his decrees (Sura 5:18, 40; 4:171). Allah can do anything, including lying and changing his promises. Some significant aspects of Islamic theology postulate a capricious, unpredictable, untrustworthy being that is inconsistent, irregular, and has a mutable will. He can tell falsehoods and hoodwink men. This theology declares that this god can change for he is not bound to a nature, so he can lie and deceive. Hence, if Allah says he has forgiven the Muslim upon a non-forensic whim (justice has not been met), Allah can change his mind regarding one’s forgiveness so a Muslim could still be hell-bound, or perhaps he merely deceived the Muslim in thinking that his sins were forgiven and he still ends up in hell. Forgiveness in Islam is arbitrary and it is declared by the greatest deceiver.
“None deems himself safe from Allah’s deception except men that perish” (Sura 7:99).
For more see my Apologetics eBook Christian Philosophy and Presuppositions Refute the Islamic Concept of Allah HERE
“[YHWH] has the ontic capacity to be the ground general principles, immutable laws, universal operational aspects of human thinking and understanding. ” Yeah!
Mike, I have experienced that Muslims are evasive about the authority of the Hadith. Taqiyya?
yes. it’s always advantageous to ask specific questions first – if they affirm attributes that are truths regarding the true God – then they r poss a step closer to the truth – so then press their need of a Savior – since law/gospel is always something to press upon false religionists.
Very informative article Mike. My only objection is that there is the implication that a Christian does not engage in “circular reasoning” when reasoning about the existence of the true God of the Bible. We certainly do. God is Who He says He is because we read this in God’s word where He tells us that He wrote and/or inspired these words that are therein written; we know that these words express truth because God wrote them, we know that God wrote them because the words in the Bible, which must be true because God “wrote” them, are written by God, Whom we are told in the Bible cannot lie…. Must I go on? I’m getting dizzy! Circular reasoning is essential to any human thought when ultimate, or transcendent realities are considered. Unless we can become God and see from His perspective then these unattainable realities can only be considered in a self-attesting way, and confirmed by faith alone.
(Van Til: Metaphysics of Apologetics, p. 12)
We hold it to be true that circular reasoning is the only reasoning that is possible to finite man. The method of implication as outlined above is circular reasoning. Or we may call it spiral reasoning. We must go round and round a thing to see more of its dimensions and to know more about it, in general, unless we are larger than that which we are investigating. Unless we are larger than God we cannot reason about Him by any other way, than by a transcendental or circular argument. The refusal to admit the necessity of circular reasoning is itself an evident token of Antitheism. Reasoning in a vicious circle is the only alternative to reasoning in a circle.
Sal: I noted that Islam is stuck in “a vicious circular argument and these sorts of circular arguments are invalid…” Christianity is not viciously circular but has a virtuous move from God and His ontic necessity revealed in scripture.The word “virtue” is rooted in the word “truth.”
again you are confusing a semantic with a phoentic
Mike says: “Christian theism avoids this fallacy inasmuch as it rests on transcendental necessities of God and His revelation.1 But most Muslims argue that Allah is true because the Koran says so, and the Koran is true because Allah says so.”
Sal says: Hi again Mike. Just to clarify what I said. There is a false (or at least misleading) premise to your comparison between the circular reasoning employed by Islam and that employed by Christians.
Islam’s reasoning likewise “rests on transcendental necessities” for validation. The only different between Islam’s transcendental necessity and our (Christian) transcendental necessity is that theirs is false and ours is true. That conviction of that truth is acquired by faith alone.
This likewise is the case for Islam’s source for validation of their transcendental necessity; their false faith. So you see that there can be no distinction (from an objective logical critique) but only one that focuses on the validity of the faith which is claimed for validation. So your statement that “Christian theism avoids this fallacy” is false or misleading inasmuch as it does not, from an objective perspective, avoid in any way, that fallacy present in any pettio principii defense of that which someone knows by faith to be so as an a priori before entering into the circle in which they will then argue for the validity of their belief.
To say that we have a better logical basis for our circular argument than they is simply not true. They both depend on the presupposed validity of that transcendental necessity integral to both (I would prefer to say that theirs is transcendental and ours is transcendent, but that is also a biased distinction based on my faith commitment).
I have no problem simply stating that Islam is a false religion without positing that we have a better use of a logically fallacious argument for the validity of that statement based on a better use of that logically fallacious argument. In other words, the truth that makes our use of circular reasoning valid does not prove that thing that we presupposed to be true before we entered the circle that made our use of it better.
Rather that thing, that we presupposed to be true, is what makes our use of the circular argument different from theirs. So in essence we already presuppose, without a logical argument, the truth of our belief and the falsity of theirs. To validate ours by means of a more legitimate use of a logical argument has nothing to do with why we believe that their belief is false. We would already have to believe that theirs is false and ours is true before the distinction in the use of the logical argument could be expressed.
Since that is what we must believe for us to be able to make that distinction, than it is better to state upfront that we, by faith believe, apart from any logical argument, that Christianity is the only true religion and that all others are false. It states what we believe more forthrightly and, I believe honestly. We simply do not believe in the God of the Bible because someone has presented a better logical argument to us for the validity of that claim; why would we imply otherwise?
Sal: Thanks for the thoughtful post. Perhaps you can write a guest blog post and posit your argumentation for all my readers. Send it to me in an email and I will post it.
Since your comment is well-thought-out I will try to write a post in the future concerning our poss disagreements.
today, i’ll only attempt to address what u stated here: “Islam’s reasoning likewise “rests on transcendental necessities” for validation. The only different between Islam’s transcendental necessity and our (Christian) transcendental necessity is that theirs is false and ours is true. That conviction of that truth is acquired by faith alone.”
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I. Allah is so utterly transcendent (tanzih) that he (it) is unknowable by humans. But if Allah is unknowable, how can the Qur’an reveal anything about him? Can one call Allah a him? An unknowable and unidentifiable strict unitarian god cannot be the indispensable foundation for the unity of experience and knowledge. Van Til warns that “the only alternative to thinking of God as the ultimate source of unity in human experience, as it is furnished by laws or universals, is to think that the unity rests in a void. Every object of knowledge must, therefore, be thought of as being surrounded by ultimate irrationality.” If one denies the Triune God, in principle the world must be encircled by irrationality, but that is not possible. Islam’s doctrine of god leaves room “neither for diversity, diversity in unity, nor a person grounding creation, for Allah is a solitary monad with unity only.” Islam clearly and completely denies the Trinity and so it undermines itself. Tanzih is divine incomparability, which implies Allah’s transcendent distance from all things including men and thqt Allah cannot be likened to anything makes it an impossible and unworkable transcendental necessity. “Nothing is like Him” (Sura 42:11). So before one starts, allah fails because he is an imposs starting point. Other poss god/gods may work w/ ur construct, but not allah.
Futhermore, the Triune God is not only transcendent in His power, but immanent in loving in his gracious condensation–so He is the ground for knowledge; it’s not just that allah is not this ground, he (it), in principle, cannot be this ground. So, w/o this imman., any alleged god cannot be the ground for intelligibility.
II. You wrote: “The only different between Islam’s transcendental necessity and our (Christian) transcendental necessity is that theirs is false and ours is true. That conviction of that truth is acquired by faith alone.”
Yes in touching salvation, but an atheist or another unsaved man can and have stated with conviction that allah is false and the Biblical God is true. but then declare: “I do not want to repent and trust in the God of the Bible.”
Blessings to u my friend.
Mike: Great post!!!! You Brothers are brilliant! Really trying to understand this apologetic. As I keep reading it’s making more sense. It feels like I’m having to reprogram my whole mind. I believe that the Scriptures are the inerrant words of God. I believe what He says but even still, it actually takes great effort to reprogram everything in me. I’m really looking forward to that day when I finally have that breakthrough in my understanding. Also looking forward to reading your books.
Sal: You really made things more clear. Thank you for your insight.
Jordan: thanks for the kind words. Keep pressing on. To God be the glory.