Sunday, October 23, 2022

The Theonomist Similarities Of Christianity And Islam

Christianity and Islam, to the disgust or discomfort of some Christians and Muslims alike, have some major similarities in spite of the enormous differences with certain ethical and other metaphysical matters.  Both philosophies are about an uncaused cause that created humans, that possesses a moral nature that at times overlaps with that of the other idea of God and at times does not, that interacts with humans out of interest in their lives, and that has appointed a day of final judgement and a realm called hell for the cosmic punishment of sin.  Both theological systems are also theonomist in nature and do not teach, as seems to be more commonly assumed at least in the case of Christian doctrine, that subjective conscience has any epistemological validity.

Religious or not, many people are too irrational to even come close to realizing the utter, inherent irrelevance of conscience to morality, as well as the importance of this.  If moral obligations exist, no one's lack of a conscience or moral feelings that conflict with these obligations changes any of this, and thus a person's lack of conscience does not make morality not exist; a person's conscience, whatever the arbitrary things it flares up against or would compel them to do really are, does not prove that morality exists, make morality exist, or reveal anything about the nature of any obligations that exist.  If moral obligations do not exist, then, as with the hypothetical nonexistence of morality (not moral preferences and feelings, but morality itself), there is no relevance conscience or lack of it has to actual reality beyond itself.

Christianity does affirm this.  So does Islam.  In the Bible, this is directly taught in verses like Romans 7:7, where Paul admits that there is literally no way to initially know the moral obligations tied to God's nature without God having first shared them.  What if there was an uncaused cause with a moral nature that made murder or theft good and selflessness evil?  Even if every individual person felt in their conscience that it was the other way around--and it is an outright delusion to think that conscience is universally experienced at all or experienced in the same way, as well as that agreement proves anything other than that there is agreement that is irrelevant to other truths--then they would still not know morality.  This much is a necessary truth of logic, a truth that could not be any other way not even if God wanted to change it.

However, in both Christianity and Islam, even if there was nothing directly affirming this (albeit without describing these more elaborate details) at all in the Bible or Quran, the other things they teach already philosophically hinge on conscience being meaningless on its own, intrinsically irrelevant, and hopelessly subjective, and thus they already by default contradict the notion that morality exists because someone feels like it does or that morality can be known because someone feels a certain way about any deed, motivation, or concept at all, no matter how personally offensive or socially controversial it is.  In both religions, God reveals moral obligations that are grounded in his nature no matter what people wish, feel, or do, and people would still have their subjective, conflicting consciences--or no conscience at all in some cases.

Any theistic religion that connects morality with God's nature but also posits that the subjective feelings or perceptions of humans reveal anything about objective reality other than the existence of those subjective perceptions (but even this has to be logically possible and provable in order to be true and to be known respectively) has at its heart a contradiction that renders this religion logically impossible and therefore inherently false.  Certain parts of it might be true or could have been true, but the metaphysical and epistemological falsities in the aforementioned subjectivist errors would be automatically false, making any religion that even slightly holds to this false at a minimum when it comes to those aspects.

Islam is no more compatible with tradition and conscience-based moral ideas than Christianity, which is to say it is not at all compatible with them. As is necessitated by what is described in the Quran, there is according to the more foundational tenets of this worldview no such thing as an obligation that Allah did not reveal in the Quran or one that would not by logical necessity follow from the commands it does contain.  The same is true of Christianity, just with the Biblical Yahweh and not the Quran's inconsistent version of him.  Some Christians fear or despise Islam for things that to some extent are there in their own Bibles.  No, the actual commands of the Bible and Quran are far from synonymous except in a handful of cases, but the theonomist moral epistemology and metaphysics is an inseparable part of both, more fundamental and vital than even the mercy of salvation from sin.

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