Islam and Christianity:
A Presentation by Gary Miller

Dr. Gary Miller (Abdul-Ahad Omar) - Former missionary
Biography

Gary Miller (Abdul-Ahad Omar) shows how we can establish true faith by setting standards of truth. He illustrates a simple but effective method of finding out the right direction in our search for truth.

G.R. Miller is a mathematician and a theologian. He was active in Christian missionary work at a particular point of his life but he soon began to discover many inconsistencies in the Bible. In 1978, he happened to read the Qur'an expecting that it, too, would contain a mixture of truth and falsehood.

He discovered to his amazement that the message of the Qur'an was precisely the same as the essence of truth that he had distilled from the Bible. He became a Muslim and since then has been active in giving public presentations on Islam including radio and television appearances. He is also the author of several articles and publications about Islam.

	Nature of Belief	ISLAM and CHRISTIANITY by Gary Miller Text of the section on difference between Christianity and Islam regarding the BOOK Apologies for the poor audio quality of some recordings. Select an audio presentation The bible is a collection of writings by many different authors. The Quran is a dictation. The speaker in the Quran -in the first person- is God talking directly to man. In the bible you have many men writing about God and you have in some places the word of God speaking to men and still in other places you have some men simply writing about history. The bible consists of 66 small books. About 18 of them begin by saying: This is the revelation God gave to so and so… The rest make no claim as to their origin. You have for example the beginning of the book of Jonah which begins by saying: The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Elmitaeh saying… quote and then it continues for two or three pages. If you compare that to one of the four accounts of the life of Jesus, Luke begins by saying: “many people have written about this man, it seems fitting for me to do so too”. That is all… no claim of saying “these words were given to me by God here they are for you it is a revelation”, there is no mention of this. The bible does not contain self reference, that is the word bible is not in the bible. Nowhere does the bible talk about itself. Some scriptures are sometimes pointed to in the bible, say: here where it talks about itself, but we have to look closely. 2nd Timothy 3:16 is the favourite which reads: “All scripture is inspired of God” and there are those who would say, here is where the bible it talks about itself, it says it is inspired of God, all of it. But if you read the whole sentence, you read that this was a letter wrote by Paul to Timothy and the entire sentence says to Timothy: “Since you were a young man you have studied the holy scriptures, all scriptures inspired by God” and so on… When Timothy was a young man the New Testament did not exist, the only thing that stems he was talking about are scriptures –which are only a portion of the bible- from before that time. It could not have meant the whole bible. There is at the end of the bible a verse which says: “Let anyone who takes away from this book or adds to this book be cursed”. This too is sometimes pointed to saying: Here is where it sums itself as a whole. But look again and you will see that when it says: Let no one change this book, it is talking about that last book, number 66, the book of revelation. It has to, because any reference will tell you that the book of revelation was written before certain other parts of the bible were written. It happens today to be stacked at the end, but there are other parts that came after, so it can not be referring to the entire book. It is an extreme position held only by some Christian groups that the bible –in its entirety- cover to cover is the revealed word of God in every word, but they do a clever thing when they mention this, or make this claim. They will say that the bible in its entirety is the word of God; in-errant (no mistakes) in the original writings. So if you go to the bible and point out some mistakes that are in it you are going to be told: Those mistakes were not there in the original manuscript, they have crept in so that we see them there today. Now I come back to the Quran, and as I mentioned the speaker in the Quran is -in the first person- is God. The book claims throughout that it is the word of God. It names itself repeatedly as the Quran. It talks about its own contents. It has self reference. The Quran states in the first Sura after Fateha that “This is the book, there is no doubt in it, it is a guidance for those who are conscious of God” and so on and so on. So the difference in Christianity and Islam comes down to a difference of authority and appeal to authority. The Christian wants to appeal to the bible and the Muslim wants to appeal to the Quran. You can not stop by saying: this is true because my book says it is, and somebody else would say something else is true because my book says differently, you can not stop at that point, and the Quran does not. So that the Quran does not demand belief, the Quran invites belief, and here is the fundamental difference. It is not simply delivered as: here is what you are to believe, but throughout the Quran the statements are always: Have you O man thought of such and such, have you considered so and so. It is always an invitation for you to look at the evidence; now what do you believe. The citation of the bible very often takes the form of what is called in argumentation: Special pleading. Special pleading is when implications are not consistent. When you take something and you say: well that must mean this, but you don’t use the same argument to apply it to something else. Now I can come back to the claim the Quran makes that it has internal evidence of its origin. There are many many ways that you can look at this. As one example, if I single out somebody here and say: you know I know your father, he is going to doubt that, he has never seen me with his father. He would say, how does he look like, is he tall short does he wear glasses? and so on, and if I give him the right answers pretty soon he will get convinced, “oh yes you did meet him”. If you apply the same kind of thinking when you look at the Quran, here is a book that says it came from the one who was there when the universe began. So you should be asking that one: so tell me something that proves it. Let me tell you about a personal investigation, it occurred to me that there are a number of things you can find in the Quran that gave evidence to its origin –internal evidence-. If the Quran is dictated from a perfect individual; it originates with God, then there should not be any wasted space, it should be very meaningful. There should be nothing that we don’t need that you can cut off, and it should not be missing anything. The author of this sentence said if this book came from someone besides God then you will find in it many inconsistencies. The word IKHTILAF is found many times in the Quran. But the word IKHTALAFAN is only found once in the Quran. So there are not many IKHTILAFAN in the Quran, there is only one where the sentence is mentioned.
	Reason & Revelation
	History of Religion
	Muslim Belief
	Amazing Quran
	Islam & Christianity
	I&C Symposium
	I&C: Thinking
	I&C: Scripture
	Differences
	Gospel & Muslims
	Sharing Islam
	Misunderstood?
	Intro to Christianity
	Reply to Christianity
	Christian History
	Evangelism