Islam is a false religion, and the god who spoke to Muhammad is clearly not the God of Christians. Below is the opening portion of a paper I wrote on the fatalism of Islamic theology (i.e., the Islamic teaching that all things - good and evil - are predetermined and caused by Allah):
The Absolute Predestinationism of Islamic Theology
The author of the text concerning the nature of predestination in Islam needs to look more closely at the problems inherent within the Ash’arite “Theory of Acquisition (kasb),” which basically says that Allah is the creator or cause of all things and actions, including human actions, and that man only acquires these predetermined acts. The Ash’arite theory is an attempt to say that man, although not the cause of an action is somehow responsible for the action through a process of acquisition, but this idea defies reason. If Allah is the creator or cause of the action, and man is predestined to commit the act, no theory of acquisition can legitimize the punishing of a man for an action that he was compelled to make, and which he clearly lacked the freedom to avoid. Of course this problematic theory was promulgated by one of the greatest of the early Islamic theologians, a man named al-Ash’ari, and by the members of his orthodox school of theology.
Al-Ash’ari (died A.D. 935) was originally part of the Mu’tazilite movement, which of course accepted the doctrine of man’s free will, and which also taught the heresy that the Qu’ran is not eternal and uncreated. Eventually, al-Ash’ari rejected the Mu’tazilite position, both on free will and on the nature of the Qu’ran, because he held that neither position was founded upon Qu’ranic revelation itself, but that both ideas were actually founded upon Greek philosophical rationalism, and so they should be rejected by every pious Muslim. Now the Ash’arite theory holds that Allah is not only the creator of the action (i.e., the object of the act), but that He is also the creator of the power or capacity in man to acquire the act. Now this created capacity empowers man to acquire the action that was itself preordained by Allah, but it does not empower man to acquire that predetermined action’s opposite, and so man is compelled to act and can only act in one way. In other words, the created capacity to act does not give man the freedom to choose between various possible courses of action, but enables him to acquire only the act that was preordained by Allah from all eternity. So, Allah creates both the capacity to act and the action itself and man cannot do anything else but that which Allah has preordained for him to do. Al-Ash’ari sets down how acquisition is to be understood: (1) the power to acquire an action does not subsist normally in man, (2) the created power to acquire does not endure beyond the act acquired, (3) the created power to acquire the predetermined action is created simultaneously with the act itself, (4) the created power to acquire is attached to only one object, i.e., only one predetermined action, and thus cannot be used to do anything except that which was preordained by Allah, and (5) both the power of acquisition and the acquired act itself are properly acts of God alone, and not of man. (see, al-Ash’ari, Kitab al-Luma; Juwayni, Irshad)
As the creed of al-Ash’ari clearly states, “We hold that there is no creator except Allah, and that the acts of human beings are created and decreed by Allah, as He said, ‘Allah has created you and what you do’ [37.96]; and we also hold that human beings are unable to create anything but are themselves created; as He said: ‘Is there any creator other than Allah?’ [35.3]; and: ‘Those to whom they call apart from Allah created nothing and are themselves created’ [16.20]; and: ‘Is He who creates as he who does not create?’ [16.17]; and: ‘Or were they created from nothing, or are they creators?’ [52.35]. This thought occurs frequently in the Book of Allah *.” [Watt, Islamic Creeds, p. 42] The Ash’arite theory is basically an evasion of the real issue and thus solves nothing. If Allah is the cause of man’s actions, and also the cause of the acquisition of the acts, then it follows that man is not responsible for either his good or evil actions.
Click here to read the rest of the paper
The false god of Muhammad is not the one true God revealed by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.*
