Introduction: What is the Roman Catholic Argument?
Why do Roman Catholics believe that Christians and Muslims worship the same God? Well, the answer here goes back to their application of Natural Theology to this question as well as their reliance on a faulty theory of Proper Names.
According to Natural Theology, there are truths about God that we can figure out just by looking around at the world. In other words, we can reason up to God from created things. For example, consider the fact that we can look out at the world and observe that things are in motion (i.e. undergoing change from potentiality to actuality). Everything that moves is moved by something else. But this chain of movers cannot regress infinitely — there must be a First Cause of motion that itself is unmoved. Because change implies potentiality (i.e. something that could be but is not yet), the First Cause cannot have any unrealized potential. Therefore, that First Cause must also be Pure Act (actus purus) — a fully actualized being. He would not come into being or change, because He is being itself (ipsum esse subsistens). This second conclusion would be a result of careful metaphysical analysis of what it means to be a cause that is not caused, and a being that does not change. If the First Cause were composed of act and potency, He would depend on something prior to actualize His potential — which is incompatible with being the First Cause. Okay, so, so far, we've been able to establish that there is a First Cause who is also Pure Act… what else can we establish? Well, in the world, we see things that come into being and pass away — these are what we call contingent beings. If everything were contingent, then at some point in the past there would have been nothing. But from nothing, nothing comes. So, since there is in fact something, there has to be at least one being that must exist — a being that exists necessarily, and whose existence is not dependent on anything else. In other words, the First Cause must be a Necessary Being which is also Pure Act.
So, to recap, what facts about God have we learned just from looking around the world He created? Well…
Fact #1: God exists and is the First Cause or "unmoved mover" of all motion and change in the universe.
Fact #2: God is not composed of parts or potentiality — He is Pure Act.
Fact #3: God is a Necessary Being, not dependent on anything else for His existence.
How is any of this relevant to the topic of this paper? Well, consider the following thought experiment…
A man who is part of an unreached tribe looks at the world around him and is able to reason his way to the conclusions that we just listed. There must be a Creator of all things who is the First Cause, Pure Act, and a Necessary Being. Upon realizing this, and moved by awe and wonder, the man drops to his knees and cries out: “God, whoever you are, out there — I praise and worship you! Please reveal yourself to me!”
Regardless of what happens after that point in the story, I want you to consider the following question: did the man in the story identify and worship the One, True, God? As Christians, we know that the man in our thought experiment doesn't have a full understanding of who God is. He's missing a bunch of key information, like: God is Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), God became incarnate, God is love and has a plan of salvation for mankind. However… the man did figure out that there is a Creator who made the world around him and the man did get several key things right about that Creator. Well, since the Christian God is the Creator of all things — it seems fairly clear that, however imperfectly, the man in our story did correctly pick Him out and direct worship to Him.
How is this relevant to the situation at hand? Well, the Roman Catholic position is that Muslims are like the man in our example. They have looked around, they’ve arrived at a lot of similar conclusions about the Creator of all things and they worship Him. Or, in the words of Vatican II…
“[T]he plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.”
“The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God.”
So, that’s it, case closed, right? Well, not so simple. As many non-Roman-Catholic Christians have pointed out – this conclusion is incredibly problematic. After all, Muslims believe a whole host of things about their Allah that paint a VERY different picture from the Christian God – including outright rejections and reversals of large portions of the Christian God’s self-revelation as found in the Bible. We will dive more into this later, but just to list a few: In Islam…
So, how do our Roman Catholic friends answer this challenge? Well, a lot of them rely on a particular semantic theory of Sense and Referent to explain how Muslims have the same referent as Christians when they speak of “God” (i.e. “Allah” in Arabic) despite having several wrong beliefs about Him. Roman Catholic apologist and philosopher Timothy Gordon argues in favor of the Roman Catholic position in this way and he even helpfully cites for us the originator of the semantics theory this argument is relying on…
Gottlob Frege is one of the most renowned logicians and philosophers of the 20th century, and the Roman catholic argument stated here relies upon Frege’s theory on Sense and Reference. Unfortunately for our Roman Catholic friends, Frege’s theory has long been outdated and has been displaced by much better semantics theories.
So, what we're going to do in this essay is go through a brief crash course in the philosophy of language. We are going to:
Learn what Frege's theory of proper names is, what the problems with the theory are, and what theories came afterward.
Consider how our Roman Catholic friends may adapt their case to try to fit each subsequent theory while retaining their conclusion that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
Learn the best current theory of Proper Names and lay out a positive case for why it is utterly incompatible with the idea that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
I know that sounds like a lot, but stick with me – I promise it will all pay off in the end. Oh, and to give credit where credit is due, my crash course on Philosophy of Language here will be highly derivative of Dr. Jeffrey Kaplan’s lectures on the relevant philosophers – he does a much more thorough job than me and I highly recommend that you check his lectures out.23
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Crash Course: Philosophy of Language
Crash Course on Frege
Before we get to Frege, let’s start by defining what we mean by a Proper Name. A proper name is a name, such as “George Washington” or the “Grand Canyon,” that refers to a specific, unique individual or entity, like a person, place, or object.
So, what even is Frege’s theory of Proper Names? To know why Frege came up with his theory on Sense and Reference, it is important to understand the Proper Names puzzle that he was trying to solve. To illustrate this puzzle, let's consider a silly example from the beloved children's show “Hannah Montana.” If you watched this show as a kid, you'll remember that the main plot revolves around this girl named “Miley” who is trying to balance her regular teenage life with the fact that she secretly moonlights as a famous popstar who performs under the stage name “Hannah Montana.” It's a kids' show, so all sorts of ridiculous shenanigans ensue, including the fact that some of Miley's closest personal friends are big Hannah Montana fans and they interact with Hannah Montana at different points in the show, all without knowing that she is secretly their friend Miley. When it is eventually revealed to them that Miley Cyrus is Hannah Montana, they are absolutely shocked.
So why am I telling you a story about a goofy kids’ show?4
Well, consider that final bit that I just said a second ago. When each of Miley's friends found out that Miley is Hannah Montana, it was a massive realization and it constituted one of the show’s most momentous occasions. But why is that? After all, “Miley” and “Hannah Montana” are both proper names that refer to the same girl — so why would this be a momentous occasion at all?
Consider the following two statements:
Miley is Miley
Miley is Hannah Montana
The first statement seems obvious and completely self-evident; in fact, if Miley's friends heard this sentence, it wouldn't seem to convey any new information to them at all. But, by contrast, the second statement is incredibly meaningful — this second sentence conveys all sorts of new, empirical information to Miley's friends.
When each of Miley's friends have their big realization moment, they're not realizing something about the meanings of the terms “Miley” and “Hannah Montana” — they were realizing something about the world around them.
What is it about statements 1 and 2 that makes statement #1 uninformative and banal, but statement #2 informative and extraordinary?
This is precisely the puzzle that Frege wanted to solve. He gave the exact same sort of example not with Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana, but with the Morning Star and the Evening Star. He wanted to know what it was about the statement “The Morning Star is the Evening Star” that made it informative in an empirical manner – or, which makes it contain, “True Knowledge” as Frege calls it.
So, what Frege came up with is his theory of Sense and Reference. Frege says,
“It is natural, now, to think of there being connected with a sign (name, combination of words, letter), besides that to which the sign refers, which may be called the referent of the sign, also what I would like to call the sense of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained. [...] The referent of ‘evening star’ would be the same as that of ‘morning star,’ but not the sense.”5
So, here, we would have three separate things as pictured below…
Philosophy professor Jeffrey Kaplan gives us a good example for trying to understand what “Mode of Presentation” means. In a video lecture on Frege, Kaplan asks us to imagine a McMansion, as he calls it, that is constructed with brick and elaborate columns on the front, but plain, white vinyl siding on the side. Kaplan says,
“Imagine a case where you've seen this house from the front; that's one way of viewing the house — one literal angle or perspective from which you can view the house.
You might also see the house from the side; that's a different perspective or ‘Mode of Presentation’ — a different way the house could be presented to you.
You can know the house in both of these ways without knowing that they're the same house. Then, it might be informative to you to find out, ‘oh wow, look at that! It's the same one house!’
That's what Frege is trying to get at with this whole idea of the mode of presentation.”6
Back to the Hannah Montana example, there are two different ways of knowing the girl in question. Her friends can know her as “Miley”, the kid who's a fellow student at their school, or they can know her as “Hannah Montana,” the incredibly famous pop star whose concerts they’ve attended. As such, we can think of the “mode of presentation” as a description. We can describe the girl in question as a highschooler who lives in Malibu, California. But we can also describe her as a massively famous pop star.
As Dr. Kaplan sums it up for us: “Frege’s point is this: a name has not only this level of meaning which is the object named, but also the way that that object is characterized or presented by the name [i.e. the sense].” And, according to Frege, the sense of each name is common property, something that multiple people can share, such that multiple people can mean the exact same thing by the name being used as someone else.
So, hopefully, you can see why our Roman Catholic friends want to lean on this theory. As Roman Catholic apologist Kevin Fernandez of the apologetics YouTube channel, Since Thirty Three, put it:
“Vatican 2 is correct – Muslims and Jews worship the same God as us Christians by way of reference but not by way of sense. This simply means that when we say ‘God,’ we are referring to the same being: the one Creator of all things – but we describe Him in different senses. [...] A difference in the way that we conceive or describe a reference (this is what some philosophers call the sense) does not entail a difference in reference [i.e. the object of intention]. The object of reference remains the same even if we conceptualize that object differently. [...] Muslims do not worship the same God in sense. Because the name ‘Father’ necessarily implies ‘Sonship,’ one cannot say they honor the father in the fullest revealed sense if they do not honor the Son – but this has nothing to do with reference. This does not entail a difference in reference.”
- Kevin Fernandez, YT Video: Vatican 2 VINDICATED on ISLAM, Since Thirty Three (@SinceAD33)7
So, is that it? Muslims and Christians worship the same God – Case closed? Well… not quite. As it turns out, unfortunately for our Roman Catholic friends, Frege’s theory on Sense and Reference was superseded by later semantic theories. Enter philosopher John Searle.
Crash Course on Searle
John Searle starts out his famous paper “Proper Names” by describing Frege’s theory of Proper Names, Sense, and Reference as it exists in conflict and tension with John Stuart Mill’s theory that Proper Names attach to Referents without any form of mediating sense. Searle, first, points out that there are two different ways to teach someone the proper name of an object…
By ostension (i.e. by pointing at the object).
OR
By description.
And Searle says, “In both cases, we identify the object in virtue of certain of its characteristics. So now it seems as if the rules for a proper name must somehow be logically tied to particular characteristics of the object in such a way that the name has a sense as well as a reference; indeed, it seems it could not have a reference unless it did have a sense, for how, unless the name has a sense, is it to be correlated with the object?”8 In other words, both of these methods of teaching names involve picking out characteristics. Even pointing is another way of picking out certain characteristics of a thing; In Dr. Kaplan’s words, “When I point to woman in a room, it’s really like describing her as: ‘The woman who is standing over there.’” As such, this reality would seem to favor Frege’s view of Sense and Reference. Additionally, as Searle points out, any theory that does not account for sense struggles with non-existence statement. As Searle puts it,
“We say of Cerberus and Zeus that neither of them ever existed, without meaning that no object ever bore these names, but only certain kinds (descriptions) of objects never existed and bore these names. So now it looks as though proper names do have a sense necessarily but have a reference only contingently.”9
Additionally, statements like “Zeus did not exist” cannot simply be rephrased as “The name Zeus has no referent,” since there are plenty of people, pets, and objects that go by this name – for the sentence “Zeus did not exist” to be both meaningful and true, the Proper Name “Zeus” must be mediated via a sense such as “the lightning-throwing, chief god of Mt. Olympus”, for example.
Thus far, it seems that Searle clearly favors Frege’s theory. However, Searle also explains several ways that Frege’s original theory is not sufficient to answer several different puzzles and hypotheticals. Searle demonstrates this by asking: what is the sense of a proper name? It cannot be just a single definite descriptor. After all, it could turn out that the single description that one utilizes to teach a proper name may end up being wrong – but the proper name still sticks to the referent that was originally in view. Searle says the following: “Suppose, for example, that we teach the name ‘Aristotle’ by explaining that it refers to a Greek philosopher born in Stagira, and suppose that our student continues to use the name correctly, that he gathers more information about Aristotle, and so on. Let us suppose it is discovered later that Aristotle was not born at Stagira at all, but in Thebes. We will not now say that the meaning of the name has changed, or that Aristotle did not really exist at all.”
Searle argues that a Proper Name is not actually identical with a single definite descriptor, but its use still presupposes that the referent has certain characteristics. This leads Searle to further develop upon Frege’s theory by suggesting that the “Sense” of a Proper Name is actually a set or cluster of “uniquely referring descriptive statements” – in so doing, Searle is accounting for the fact that someone could be wrong about some of the descriptions attached to a particular Proper Name, but that name still attaches to the correct referent as long as enough of the cluster of descriptions is correct.
Here, our Roman Catholic friends may think that they have found yet another ally! After all, utilizing Searle’s theory of Proper Names, they could simply argue that Muslims have a few parts of their Sense cluster wrong (e.g. thinking that God is Unitarian), but have a large enough part of their Sense cluster right (e.g. thinking that God is Creator, Actus Purus, etc…) – so, BAM! Muslims must share the same referent as Christians when they worship, right?
Well, not so fast. This theory, too, was superseded by later semantic theories. Enter philosopher Saul Kripke.
Crash Course on Kripke
Kripke summed up Searle’s theory into six theses, which Dr. Kaplan summarizes as follows:
Names have associated properties.
The properties uniquely identify something.
The unique object with the weighted majority of the properties is the referent.
If nothing satisfies enough properties, then the name does not refer.
It is a priori that the referent has these properties.
It is necessary that the referent has these properties.
Kripke attacked Theses #5 and #6 by pointing out that there are all sorts of descriptions that are contingent – NOT necessary. For example, George Washington was elected as the first President of the United States in 1789; however, this could have been otherwise. Any number of other people could have been elected president had George Washington, say, refused to run for office. In other words, there are all sorts of possible worlds where the description “was elected as the first President of the United States in 1789” would not be a descriptor of George Washington; as such, while it is actually true that George Washington was elected as the first President of the United States in 1789 – it is NOT necessarily true and therefore also CANNOT be known a priori. As such, Kripke argued that a Proper Name, like “George Washington”, is a rigid designator, meaning that it continues to designate the literal guy, George Washington, in every possible world – regardless of how many different contingent descriptions might map onto him in those possible worlds.
Kripke attacked Thesis #2 by pointing out that there are all sorts of descriptions that people learn Proper Names by which are not sufficient to uniquely pick out a uniquely specific man. For example, maybe a non-American, whenever he thinks of George Washington, simply thinks of a “former U.S. President” without any other descriptions. Well, as it turns out, there are many different people who would fit the description of “former U.S. president” – and yet, he can clearly use the name “George Washington” to refer to the actual historical figure.
Thesis #3 is disproven by Kripke through a thought experiment called the Gödel-Schmidt Case. Gödel is famously the author of the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem. Here Kripke’s thought experiment:
“Imagine the following blatantly fictional situation. Suppose that Gödel was not in fact the author of this theorem. A man named ‘Schmidt’, whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circumstances many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Gödel. On the view in question, then, when our ordinary man uses the name ‘Gödel’, he really means to refer to Schmidt, because Schmidt is the unique person satisfying the description, ‘the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic’....So, since the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is in fact Schmidt, we, when we talk about ‘Gödel’, are in fact always referring to Schmidt. But it seems to me that we are not. We simply are not.”10
In other words, according to Searle’s theory, when anyone refers to “Gödel” in this thought experiment, the proper name should snap onto Schmidt as the referent – because the dominant property of “Inventor of the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem” actually applies to him. And yet, that conclusion is clearly absurd; the referent of the name “Gödel” as everyone is utilizing it is clearly the guy who traveled around the world lecturing and receiving awards – not the guy who was found dead in a ditch years earlier.
Kripke attacks Thesis #4 by having us imagine that nobody had discovered the incompleteness theorem; in this thought experiment, the theorem “simply materialized by a random scattering of atoms on a piece of paper” and Gödel found the paper and published it. As Kripke points out, even if this was the case, whenever people used the name “Gödel”, they would clearly still be referring to the real-life guy – even if the description of “Inventor of the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem” is not satisfied by any unique object. According to Thesis 4 of Searle’s theory, this simply should not be possible… and yet it is.
So, Kripke went one-by-one through Theses #2-5 and debunked them all. By the end, only Thesis #1 was left standing. But if that’s the case then… now we need a new theory of Proper Names. So, what did Kripke propose in place of Searle’s theory which would survive the aforementioned critiques?
Kripke put forth a Causal-Chain theory of how Proper Names actually work. In Kripke’s theory, there is a sort of “naming ceremony” or “baptism” event by which someone picks out an object either by ostension or description and assigns it a Proper Name; say, for example, someone pointing at a baby and naming the baby “Kurt Gödel”. After this original naming ceremony, other people are taught the name “Kurt Gödel” and intend to use it with the same reference as the person from whom they heard it, forming a causal chain that goes down through the ages all the way to me or you using that Proper Name name today. According to this theory, our use of the name is brought about by a chain of causation which can be followed back and ultimately terminates at the original naming ceremony.
Kripke puts it this way:
“Someone, let’s say a baby, is born: his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends…Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain. A speaker who is on the far end of this chain, who has heard about, say, Richard Feynman…may be referring to Richard Feynman even though he can’t remember from whom he first heard of Feynman…He knows that Feynman is a famous physicist…A certain passage of communication reaching ultimately to the man himself does reach the speaker. He then is referring to Feynman even though he can’t identify him uniquely. He doesn’t know what a Feynman diagram is, he doesn’t know what the Feynman theory of pair production and annihilation is…So he doesn’t have to know these things, but, instead, a chain of communication going back to Feynman himself has been established, by virtue of his membership in a community which passed the name on from link to link…”11
I like the way Dr. Kaplan describes Kripke’s theory:
“The idea here is that you can use a name and sort of defer to this causal chain leading back to this original baptism or dubbing or naming ceremony – and you can do that without having in your head a bunch of descriptions that uniquely identify this person. You essentially are thinking to yourself: ‘Oh, I’m using this name to refer to whoever these other people are using that name to refer to.’ [...] The person we’re imagining can use the name ‘Feynman’ to refer to Feynman even though he doesn’t know any facts or descriptions or properties of this guy. ”12
Now, an astute Roman Catholic may abandon Frege and Searle’s theories and try to defend the idea that Muslims and Christians worship the same God by invoking Kripke’s causal theory of reference. They may try arguing the following: “Aha! Well, Muhammad learned the name ‘God’ / ‘God of Abraham’ from Christian sources and was trying to refer to the same being as them, so if we follow Kripke’s Causal-Chain theory of how Proper Names work, then these names would still refer to the same God since the Muslim chain would extend all the way back to Christians, Jews, and even Abraham himself!”
In fact, here is Roman Catholic apologist Cameron Bertuzzi echoing this sort of argument originally made by Roman Catholic philosopher Trent Dougherty:
Only one issue with this… Kripke’s theory is also wrong. Enter our final philosopher of language for this paper, who will help us to dismantle the Roman Catholic case: Gareth Evans.
Crash Course on Evans
Gareth Evans critiqued both Searle’s Cluster Theory AND Kripke’s Causal-Chain Theory, and then developed a synthesis of the correct parts of each theory which is far more robust than either of the former two theories as they were originally formulated. Evans raises the same problems for Searle’s theory that Kripke did (albeit with a different thought experiment), so I won’t re-state those a second time.
The way that Evans goes about demonstrating the problems with Kripke’s theory is through his real life example of what actually occurred with the name “Madagascar”. Evans asks us to consider the island nation of Madagascar. As Evans put it, “Change of denotation is similarly decisive against the Causal Theory of Names. Not only are changes of denotation imaginable, but it appears that they actually occur. We learn from Isaac Taylor's Names and their History (1898): In the case of Madagascar' a hearsay report of Malay or Arab sailors misunderstood by Marco Polo . . . has had the effect of transferring a corrupt form of the name of a portion of the African mainland to the great African Island.” In other words, with the name “Madagascar”, we have a real-life example of an errant causation-chain that ends up with two different referents. Sailors teaching Marco Polo the Proper Name “Madagascar” was the cause of Marco Polo learning the name and he even intended to learn the name in reference to the same geographical location as them; however, whereas the sailors utilized the name “Madagascar” to refer to a portion of the African mainland, Marco Polo misunderstood them to be referring to the African island and propagated the name that way – and the name has stuck to the island ever since. If we followed Kripke’s theory, the referent of the name “Madagascar” today should refer to the portion of the African mainland that the sailors were themselves referring to – but this is clearly not the case. Today, the name “Madagascar” refers to the famous island off the African shore.
That being said, however, Evans maintains that the true theory of Proper Names should retain at least partial reliance upon a causal chain. The reason for this is because constructing a theory which relies only on descriptions and does not account for a causal relationship between a Proper Name and the person utilizing the name leads to absurdities. Dr. Kaplan illustrates in his lecture on Evans by giving the example of a person looking at a shoe. Let’s say that a person walks into a large department store and sees a shoe from far away – the causation here being light bouncing off the shoe and entering the person’s eyeballs, thereby bringing about a mental image of the shoe in the person’s mind. Let’s say that, because the shoe was far away, the person doesn’t end up with a perfectly accurate picture of the shoe in their head. As it turns out, there is a different pair of shoes in a completely different store thousands of miles away which more closely fits the mental image that is in the person’s mind. The question Dr. Kaplan asks is this: Which shoe is the person in our example seeing? Obviously, the answer is that the person is seeing the shoe which is in the same store as them and which they are causally related to. However, a theory that disregards causality entirely in favor of simply matching descriptions should come to the absurd conclusion that the person in our example is seeing the shoe that is thousands of miles away, which they haven’t interacted with and don’t even know exists.
According to Evans, it would be absurd to completely discard every aspect of Searle’s and Kripke’s theories, but it would also be absurd to fully buy into either one in isolation. As such, the right theory of Proper Names would account for BOTH causality AND a body of information/description being attached to a given Proper Name (even if not according to fittingness). Here is how Evans puts it,
“[The real weakness of an undifferentiated Description theory lies] Not so much in the idea that the intended referent is determined in a more or less complicated way by the associated information, but the specific form the determination was supposed to take : fit. There is something absurd in supposing that the intended referent of some perfectly ordinary use of a name by a speaker could be some item utterly isolated (causally) from the user's community and culture simply in virtue of the fact that it fits better than anything else the cluster of descriptions he associates with the name. I would agree with Kripke in thinking that the absurdity resides in the absence of the causal relation between the item concerned and the speaker. But it seems to me that he has mislocated the causal relation; the important causal relation lies between that item's states and doings and the speaker's body of information – not between the item's being dubbed with a name and the speaker's contemporary use of it.”13
This is what leads Evans to come up with his own theory which holds that a Proper Name’s referent is the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions associated with the name. In other words, the referent of a proper name is not what best fits the cluster of descriptions associated with the name, but simply what causes them. Evans provides the following fuller definition of his theory:
“With this background, then, we may offer the following tentative definition:
'NN' is a name of x if there is a community C…
in which it is common knowledge that members of C have in their repertoire the procedure of using 'NN' to refer to x (with the intention of referring to x).
the success in reference in any particular case being intended to rely on common knowledge between speaker and hearer that 'NN' has been used to refer to x by members of C and not upon common knowledge of the satisfaction by x of some predicate embedded in 'NN'.
(In order to keep the definition simple no attempt is made to cover the sense in which an unused institutionally approved name is a name.)”14
This new theory serves to avoid the pitfalls of the previous two theories when it comes to mistaken identity cases. As Evans puts it,
“Misidentification can bring it about that the item which is the source of the information is different from the item about which the information is believed. I may form the belief about the wife of some colleague that she has nice legs upon the basis of seeing someone else-but the girl I saw is the source. Consequently a cluster or dossier of information can be dominantly of an item though it contains elements whose source is different. And we surely want to allow that persistent misidentification can bring it about that a cluster is dominantly of some item other than that it was dominantly of originally. Suppose I get to know a man slightly. Suppose then a suitably primed identical twin takes over his position, and I get to know him fairly well, not noticing the switch. Immediately after the switch my dossier will still be dominantly of the original man, and I falsely believe, as I would acknowledge if it was pointed out, that he is in the room. Then I would pass through a period in which neither was dominant; I had not misidentified one as the other, an asymmetrical relation, but rather confused them. Finally the twin could take over the dominant position; I would not have false beliefs about who is in the room, but false beliefs about, for example, when I first met the man in the room. These differences seem to reside entirely in the differences in the believer's reactions to the various discoveries, and dominance is meant to capture those differences. Dominance is not simply a function of amount of information (if that is even intelligible). In the case of persons, for example, each man's life presents a skeleton and the dominant source may be the man who contributed to covering most of it rather than the man who contributed most of the covering. Detail in a particular area can be outweighed by spread. Also the believer's reasons for being interested in the item at all will weigh.”15
Evans then provides another example which will especially helpful to us in showing his theory in action and demonstrating why our Roman Catholic friends’ position does not work. Evans asks us to imagine two situations:
Situation #1 where an impostor has taken over Napoleon’s role from 1814 onwards.
Situation #2 where an impostor has taken over Napoleon’s role from 1793 onwards.
And he provides for us two diagrams to help illustrate this:16
As Evans points out, in Situation #1, most of the feats the historian community focuses on and rely upon to pick out Napoleon (e.g. conquering most of Europe, crowning himself emperor, etc…) would have been caused by the original, actual Napoleon – making him the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions associated with the name “Napoleon.” As such, in Situation #1, the name “Napoleon” maps onto the original guy as the referent, since he is causally responsible for the dominant cluster. As such, when people in Situation #1 say that “Napoleon” was exiled to an island for a second time after a failed revolt – they are wrong. But why is that? Because “Napoleon” mapped onto the original guy as the referent of the Proper Name – and the guy that was exiled was NOT him, but was instead a different referent (an imposter).
In Situation #2, however, most of the feats that the historian community focuses on and relies upon to pick out Napoleon (e.g. conquering most of Europe, crowning himself emperor, etc…) would have been caused by the imposter – making him the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions associated with the name “Napoleon.” As such, in Situation #2, the name “Napoleon” maps onto the imposter as the referent, since he is causally responsible for the dominant cluster. As such, when people in Situation #2 say that “Napoleon” was exiled on an island for a second time after a failed revolt – they are correct. But why is that? Because “Napoleon” mapped onto the impostor as the referent of the Proper Name, and he was, indeed, exiled a second time.
And now that we have laid down all the background information, this brings us to the reason why Muslims and Christians don’t worship the same God.
Why Christians & Muslims DO NOT Worship the Same God: A Positive Case
Argument Clearly Stated
Our argument here will be laid out as follows in the Barbara Syllogistic form (AAA–1):17
Major Premise: All uses of the term “God” that have different dominant causal sources for descriptive clusters refer to different beings.
Minor Premise: The Christian and Muslim uses of “God” have different dominant causal sources for descriptive clusters.18
Conclusion: Therefore, the Christian and Muslim uses of “God” refer to different beings.
The first premise simply states Gareth Evans’ theory of Proper Names (albeit in relation to the question at hand). The entirety of our paper up to this point constitutes the defense of the first premise. The second premise will be defended by virtue of the fact that the dominant causal source for Islam’s descriptive clusters is a demonic entity which is distinct from the Christian referent.
Muhammad’s Allah: a Different Causal Source
A Counterfeit Messenger of “Allah”
What is the crown jewel of Islam that brings about, characterizes, and sustains the entirety of the Muslim religion? According to Muslim sources, it is the revelation of Allah to the prophet Muhammad.19
The very first appearance of a supposed messenger of Allah to Muhammad took place in a cave. Let’s look at the way that Sahih Bukhari Volume 9, Book 87, Hadith Number 111 retells this story:
Narrated By Aisha : The commencement of the Divine Inspiration to Allah’s Apostle was in the form of good righteous (true) dreams in his sleep. He never had a dream but that it came true like bright day light. He used to go in seclusion (the cave of) Hira where he used to worship(Allah Alone) continuously for many (days) nights. He used to take with him the journey food for that (stay) and then come back to (his wife) Khadija to take his food like-wise again for another period to stay, till suddenly the Truth descended upon him while he was in the cave of Hira. The angel came to him in it and asked him to read. The Prophet replied, “I do not know how to read.” (The Prophet added), “The angel caught me (forcefully) and pressed me so hard that I could not bear it anymore. He then released me and again asked me to read, and I replied, “I do not know how to read,” whereupon he caught me again and pressed me a second time till I could not bear it anymore. He then released me and asked me again to read, but again I replied, “I do not know how to read (or, what shall I read?).” Thereupon he caught me for the third time and pressed me and then released me and said, “Read: In the Name of your Lord, Who has created (all that exists). Has created man from a clot. Read and Your Lord is Most Generous… up to… that which he knew not.” (96.15) Then Allah’s Apostle returned with the Inspiration, his neck muscles twitching with terror till he entered upon Khadija and said, “Cover me! Cover me!” They covered him till his fear was over and then he said, “O Khadija, what is wrong with me?” Then he told her everything that had happened and said, ‘I fear that something may happen to me.” Khadija said, ‘Never! But have the glad tidings, for by Allah, Allah will never disgrace you as you keep good reactions with your Kith and kin, speak the truth, help the poor and the destitute, serve your guest generously and assist the deserving, calamity-afflicted ones.” [...] But after a few days Waraqa died and the Divine Inspiration was also paused for a while and the Prophet became so sad as we have heard that he intended several times to throw himself from the tops of high mountains and every time he went up the top of a mountain in order to throw himself down, Gabriel would appear before him and say, “O Muhammad! You are indeed Allah’s Apostle in truth” whereupon his heart would become quiet and he would calm down and would return home. And whenever the period of the coming of the inspiration used to become long, he would do as before, but when he used to reach the top of a mountain, Gabriel would appear before him and say to him what he had said before.
This is the start of Muhammad’s career as a prophet of “Allah” – throughout which there would be countless instances of messages from “Allah” being relayed to Muhammad through Gabriel. Our Roman Catholic friends may here object that the imposter angel didn’t claim to be God Himself – he simply falsely claimed to be relaying God’s messages to Muhammad. Thus, our Roman catholic interlocutors might conclude, Muhammad’s referent is still still the God of the Bible, since he isn’t directly interfacing with an impostor. However, this response falls apart once we understand that direct interface wouldn’t really matter when it comes to the impostor being the dominant causal source of “Allah’s” description cluster. To help illustrate this, consider the following analogy…
Analogy #1: Imagine a situation where a scammer begins a lengthy pen pal relationship with an old lady – let’s call the lady Anne. The scammer claims to be the agent of Hollywood star Clint Eastwood and claims to be relating messages to Anne from Clint Eastwood; in reality, however, all of the messages are actually from the scammer himself. As the years go on, Anne and the scammer have exchanged countless letters and the scammer has gotten Anne to send over money several times. When Anne regales her friends with stories of her exchanges with “Clint Eastwood” and talks about sending money to “Clint Eastwood” – who is the referent in question? As it turns out, the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions that Anne has about “Clint Eastwood” is the scammer.
Similarly, the demonic entity in contact with Muhammad is the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions that Muslims have about “Allah.”
A Counterfeit “Allah”
That being said, there are actually other times where Muhammad directly interfaces with a demonic entity which is supposed to be “Allah.” According to the site IslamQA, which is supervised by Islamic scholar Shaykh Muhammad Saalih Al-Munajjid, Muhammad spoke directly with Allah during his ascension on the Night Journey…
“It is proven in the story of the Prophet’s ascent (Mi`raj) to heaven, concerning which he (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) said: “… Then I was taken up and came to Musa. He said: What has been enjoined upon you? I said: Fifty prayers every day. He said: Your Ummah will not be able to do fifty prayers every day. By Allah, I tested the people before you and I tried hard with the Children of Israel. Go back to your Lord and ask Him to reduce it for your Ummah. So I went back and He reduced it by ten for me. Then I went back to Musa and he said something similar… Go back to your Lord and ask Him to reduce it for your Ummah. I said: I have asked my Lord so much that I feel too shy. Rather I shall accept and surrender.” (Narrated by Al-Bukhari (3674) and Muslim (162)).
Al-Hafidh Ibn Hajar (may Allah have mercy on him) said: “This is among the strongest evidence that Allah, may He be Glorified and Exalted, spoke directly to his Prophet Muhammad (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) on the night of the Isra’ (night journey) without any intermediary.” (Fat-h Al-Bari, 7/216) Ibn Kathir (may Allah have mercy on him) said: {Among them were those to whom Allah spoke} namely Musa and Muhammad (blessings and peace of Allah be upon them), and also Adam, as is mentioned in the Hadith narrated in Sahih Ibn Hibban from Abu Dharr (may Allah be pleased with him). {…and He raised some of them in degree} as is proven in the Hadith of the Isra’, when the Prophet (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) saw the Prophets in the heavens in accordance with the variations in their status before Allah, may He be Glorified and Exalted. (Tafsir Ibn Kathir, 1/670). The Hadith of Abu Dharr (may Allah be pleased with him) to which Ibn Kathir (may Allah have mercy on him) referred is narrated in Sahih Ibn Hibban (2/76). Shaykh Shu`ayb Al-Arna’ut said concerning it: “Its chain of narrators is very weak”. However, the Hadith of Abu Umamah (may Allah be pleased with him) quoted above is sufficient.”20
There are also other instances where Muhammad sees “Allah” or receives unmediated messages from him. Let’s illustrate why this is a problem for our Roman catholic friends through another analogy…
Analogy #2: Imagine a situation where a guy named Joe is on a dating app. Joe runs across the profile of a girl named “Mary Doe” and the two of them match with each other. As Joe begins talking with “Mary Doe” on this dating app, he wants to make sure she’s a real person, so he looks her up on other social media platforms – and lo and behold, he finds several accounts which go by “Mary Doe” and have matching pictures to the girl he’s talking to! Joe begins a lengthy conversation with Mary Doe over DM’s and this eventually snowballs into a full blown online relationship that lasts several months. Joe tells his friends and family about Mary Doe and her relationship with Joe becomes a regular topic of discussion among Joe’s friends and family. Unbeknownst to Joe, however, the person he’s talking to is is actually a guy and has been catfishing him since the moment they met; he simply stole the name and pictures of a random girl online who is the actual Mary Doe and has been impersonating her the whole time. So, the question we’re left with is this: when Joe’s friends and family use the Proper Name “Mary Doe” – who is the referent? When they say things like “Joe spends night and day talking with ‘Mary Doe’ – he’s obsessed with her” – who are they talking about? Clearly, the referent of the name “Mary Doe” is the scammer that Joe has been interacting with all this time. It is the scammer who is the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions that Joe’s friends and family associate with the name “Mary Doe.”
In this case, the demonic entity is analogous to the scammer in our story.
A Counterfeit “God of Natural Theology”
Here, our Roman Catholic friends may wish to fall back on their original claim summarized in the introduction to this article: the Muslim is no different than the man on an island who comes to identify and refer to God by observing the world and coming to conclusions about him. “As long as Muslims start out with natural theology,” our Roman Catholic friends may argue, “the referent is the same! None of the later falsities from impostors can change that.” Now, this is manifestly wrong-headed for a number of reasons. Let me illustrate how with yet another analogy…
Analogy #3: Imagine a murder scene. Two detectives arrive. After initial analysis, they agree on some general facts: a murder occurred, it happened at night, and the killer used a blunt object. So far, they share some truths about the nature of the killer. But then their paths diverge: Detective A becomes convinced the killer is Suzy, and actively builds a case around her. Detective B becomes convinced it was Jack, and pursues him instead. Detective A doesn't just lack knowledge about Jack — he explicitly denies Jack could be the killer. His entire investigation is oriented away from Jack. But it turns out: Jack actually was the killer. Now, here’s the key question: when each of the detectives refers to “the killer” – who is the referent? Do the detectives share a referent when they discuss “the killer”? The truth is that the answer depends on which point one zooms in during the investigation. If we were to zoom in on the first day the detectives arrived, we might be able to say that they have the same referent when they talk about “the killer” – albeit something like a vague, dotted, gray silhouette of a referent in mind. But the answer is very different if we zoom in several months into the investigation. Detective A has become so convinced that “the killer” is Suzy that both names have become interchangeable; after countless hours building a case around her, Suzy has now become the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions that Detective A attaches to “the killer.” Likewise, Detective B has become so convinced that “the killer” is Jack that both names have become interchangeable; after countless hours building a case around him, Jack is now the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions that Detective B attaches to “the killer.” Can we say that both detectives investigated the same person, simply because they both started out with some shared facts about “the killer”? Of course not, they spent all their time chasing after two completely separate people. They converged on some general traits that a killer must have — just as many religions converge on basic philosophical attributes of God (like eternality or being the cause of the universe). But their differing conclusions about the identity of the killer put them on two different investigative tracks. At the end of the day, only one detective was pursuing the actual killer.
The situation with the person on the island is analogous to the first day the detectives were on the scene – there is a shared vague, dotted, gray silhouette of a referent in mind. But the situation with Christians and Muslims is analogous to the detectives being several months into the investigation – each one chasing after and cuffing entirely different suspects. To borrow a Kripkean term, Muhammad “re-baptized” the Proper name “God” (i.e. “Allah”) through his interfaces with the demonic entity that he was in contact with – and this counterfeit demonic entity became the dominant causal source of the cluster of descriptions that Muhammad’s community (i.e. Muslims) propagate and use to this day.
Conclusion
By this point, we have seen that, just like in these analogies I’ve provided, if a person pursues and offers worship to a being who does NOT actually possess the Divine attributes of the God of Abraham and is simply impersonating the God of Abraham — then that person is not in relationship with the God of Abraham, but with something else entirely. Just as intention alone doesn't make Joe’s texts go to the real Mary Doe, nor make Anne’s money go to the real Clint Eastwood, nor make Detective A arrest the actual killer… intending to worship “the God of Abraham” doesn't succeed if the being one addresses is not actually the God of Abraham.
In conclusion, it should be clear that Christians and Muslims do NOT worship the same God. Additionally, this same issue serves to debunk the infallibility of Vatican 2, provided the following syllogism:
P1. If Vatican II erroneously claims that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, then it is not infallible.
P2. Vatican II erroneously claims that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
C. Therefore, Vatican II is not infallible.
Once we have established, as we did in the introduction to this essay, that Vatican II makes the claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, then Premise #1 can be defended a priori – infallible councils don’t make mistakes. Premise two is established by the entirety of this paper.
I hope this paper proves useful and edifying to everyone reading it. Please feel free to let me know what you think about it in the comments!
If there happen to be any mistakes or oversights which may have unintentionally been included in the original essay, I will gladly fix them in future editions. I hope to keep updating this article as I continue refining the argument even further.
Until then,
The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
John 4:23 NKJV “But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.”
Note: Speaking of giving credit where credit is due, a big thank you is in order to Cameron Brinkman and Samuel Cordova for helping me to proofread and polish this paper.
Note: I’m of the opinion that silly or goofy examples often tend to help people remember concepts better; could I have chosen a different, more mundane example than Hannah Montana? Sure. But I think a Hannah Montana example in the middle of a philosophy of language paper will be far more memorable than a boring example would have been.
Note: While I am not very good with symbolic logic myself, fellow Lutheran Samuel Cordova actually proofread my paper and is going to help me put my argument into symbolic logic sometime soon. Once he helps me do so, I will add that here in this footnote.
Note: While it is actually not necessary that this be the case for our argument to succeed in this case, it is certainly worth noting that a large portion of the description clusters for the Christian use of “God” and Muslim use of “God” are mutually exclusive as well as fundamentally contradictory and incompatible.
Note: Here are several quotes from Muslim sources that affirm this reality…
“The believers believe in all the Prophets and Messengers, and the books revealed from heaven to the slaves of Allah, the Messengers and Prophets; they do not differentiate between any of them, believing in some and rejecting others. Rather they regard all of them as truthful, righteous, rightly-guided and guiding to the path of goodness, even though some of them abrogated the laws of others, until all of them were abrogated by the sharee’ah of Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets and Messengers, upon whose sharee’ah the Hour will come.”
“Blessed be He Who sent down the criterion (of right and wrong, i.e. this Quran) to His slave (Muhammad) that he may be a warner to the ‘Aalameen (mankind and jinn)”
“Jabir said that God’s Messenger used to say in his prayer after the tashahhud, ‘The best speech is Allah’s speech, and the best guidance is Muhammad’s guidance.’”
“The best talk (speech) is Allah's Book (Qur'an), and the best way is the way of Muhammad, and the worst matters are the heresies (those new things which are introduced into the religion); and whatever you have been promised will surely come to pass, and you cannot escape (it).”
“Tariq reported: Abdullah ibn Mas’ud, may Allah be pleased with him, said, ‘Verily, the best speech is the book of Allah, and the best guidance is the guidance of Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him.’”
“Malik reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, ‘I have left you with two matters which will never lead you astray, as long as you hold to them: the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of his Prophet.’”
“One day Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) stood up to deliver sermon at a watering place known as Khumm situated between Mecca and Medina. He praised Allah, extolled Him and delivered the sermon and. exhorted (us) and said: Now to our purpose. O people, I am a human being. I am about to receive a messenger (the angel of death) from my Lord and I, in response to Allah's call, (would bid good-bye to you), but I am leaving among you two weighty things: the one being the Book of Allah in which there is right guidance and light, so hold fast to the Book of Allah and adhere to it.”
To add your argument that a person attributing the attributes to a being that is not god but an impersonation, a good example is the incident of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32:3-5
And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD.
Take note what is happening in this passage:
1. The Israelites make a Golden Calf to Worship and bring their jewelry as a form of offering and worship.
2. Aaron builds an altar and proclaims this calf as being the source of bringing Israel out of Egypt, and makes a feast to God. Thus, he takes the attributes of Yahweh and places it upon the calf and gives it the name of God ie Yahweh
3. Therefore, this is an example of taking the attributes of God and applying it to one who is impersonating the one true, God but in this case in the form of idolatry. Even though the calf is called Yahweh it's not truly Yahweh but a false impersonation.
Love it. I also appreciate all the notes and resources you include in your posts. God bless you.
To add your argument that a person attributing the attributes to a being that is not god but an impersonation, a good example is the incident of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32:3-5
And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD.
Take note what is happening in this passage:
1. The Israelites make a Golden Calf to Worship and bring their jewelry as a form of offering and worship.
2. Aaron builds an altar and proclaims this calf as being the source of bringing Israel out of Egypt, and makes a feast to God. Thus, he takes the attributes of Yahweh and places it upon the calf and gives it the name of God ie Yahweh
3. Therefore, this is an example of taking the attributes of God and applying it to one who is impersonating the one true, God but in this case in the form of idolatry. Even though the calf is called Yahweh it's not truly Yahweh but a false impersonation.