I would argue that logic detached from history is not a reasonable grounds for judging religion. I would argue that Christianity is the more reasonable religion, and that Islam is unreasonable given the problems in Islamic history.
God
Christianity: God is love, and much of God’s actions may be understood through reason.
Islam: God is pure will and power, unbound by love or reason. God is totally unbound by reason or love. Here are verses in the Quran that speak to this issue:
- “The Jews say: Allah’s hand is fettered. Their hands are fettered and they are accursed for saying so.” (5:64)
- “He cannot be questioned concerning what He does.” (Qur’an 21:23)
Islamic movements that embraced reason as a means of understanding God’s actions in the universe (e.g., Mu‘tazilites) were suppressed and now widely viewed as anathema. The great Muslim mystic al-Ghazali condemned science, then understood through Aristotelian philosophy, as placing constraints on the free will of God.
Historicity
Christianity: There is a continuous chain of textual support for orthodox Catholic teaching, beginning with the pre-Pauline text of 1 Corinthians 15:3b-7 (which nearly all modern textual critics agree as being datable to 1-3 years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus) and other citations to earlier Christian works in Paul’s letters (e.g., Romans 1:3-4, Philippians 2:6-11), continuing through the Gospels (
Injeels), the epistle of James, the book of Hebrews, the Pastoral Epistles, Revelation, and the Catholic letters. That takes the New Testament canon from the mid-late 30s AD to around 100-125 AD. In addition, the extra-canonical text, the Didache, documents early Christian practice (which was NOT Islam) and is dated by critical scholars to as early as 40 AD. In 111 or 112 AD, the Roman governor Pliny the Younger sent a letter documenting orthodox Christian liturgical practice to the Emperor Trajan – very much in keeping with much earlier Gospels, 1 Corinthians 11, and Didache. The letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch (who was probably present for the confrontation between Peter and Paul in Galatians 2) and St. Polycarp of Smyrna, both of whom were documented independently to be students of the Apostle John, provide extremely early 2nd century AD documentation of Christian practice that is entirely consonant with the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and the Didache.
Islam: The 6 major books of hadith accepted as orthodox by Sunni Muslims cannot be objectively dated to before the early 8th century, following the reign of the Caliph Abd Al-Malik (references: Juynboll, Schacht). The conception of the Hijaz as polytheistic before Muhammad has been largely set aside by the understanding that the Arabian peninsula’s non-Abrahamic traditions were largely henotheistic with one god, Allah, being at its center. Archaeological discovery of Bedouin graffiti has shown that salat probably originated from prostration to shines throughout the Arabian peninsula, including the Ka’ba. Ablutions before prayer with water or earth was proscribed in the Babylonian Talmud, likely providing a syncretic influence on salat. The first Qibla pointed to Jerusalem, again illustrating syncretism. The qiblas of the oldest mosques in existence didn’t point to Mecca, and didn’t until after the reign of Abd Al-Malik. Within the Quran, most references to the followers of Muhammad are to “believers,” and Arabs following Muhammad did not refer to themselves as “Muslims” until around the Second Fitna (Civil War). The Quran’s geography describing the settlement of Bakkah does not match the geogrpaphy of Mecca in any way. The majority of stories of Jesus and the figures of the Old Testament occur in the identical sequence as Biblical and Rabbinical texts in which they first appear, suggesting the Quran used them as (probably oral) source material (e.g., Sura 5:112-115 // John 6:34-53 – why does Islam need a Eucharist?). The Quran cites stories of Jesus that originated in extracanonical gospels, folk tales, which did not exist in the 1st century AD (e.g., the Syrian Infancy Gospel on Jesus blowing life into earthen birds).
I’m glad!