Do we have the same God?

Great Debates
1

It’s wierd to me when someone says that Christians and Muslims have the same God. The thread on “Evil due to religion” brought up another example of this same thinking. Why is it that people say “Some Muslims fly planes into buildings. Most do not. Therefore, Islam is not evil.” instead of the much more logical “…Therefore, those Muslims practice different religions.”

To me, the Christian God and the Muslim God are two separate entities. I personally believe neither exists, but assuming one exists, doesn’t that mean the other does not? You might as well throw in Egyptian Gods and say that they’re the same as the Christian God and the Egyptians were just wrong about them/him/it.

Generally, when does one religion become different than another? If I started a Christian church and split off from the main ones, and changed almost all my beliefs, do we still worship the same God (just differently)? When are two people follownig the same religion differently, and when are they following two different religions?

Specifically, is the Muslim God the same as God as the Christian God? If so, why not the Egyptians? If not, what about Baptists and Catholics?

2

The Muslim Allah is the same as the Christian Jehovah is the same as the Jewish YHVH, by tradition and philosophical/historical evidence. Quite a bit of the Koran is retellings of Jewish and Christian bits of the Old and New Testament from a different viewpoint. The Muslims believe the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son by the servant Hagar. When Isaac was born and Hagar and Ishmael were exiled into the desert, Allah is supposed to have cared for them and founded the Arab race through Ishmael.

The Koran also venerates Mary and Jesus (Isa), and the Hebrew prophets.

Why not the Egyptians? Because there is no historical continuity or relationship. Egypt did rule the region of Israel politically for a number of decades, but I don’t think a lot of Egyptian theology managed to infiltrate the Jewish traditions, just as Greek theology didn’t when Israel was under the Seleucids in the Hellenistic era.

3

Muslims say that their deity is the same as the one worshipped in Christianity and Judaism because Islam is based off of the same Abrahamic tradition. It’s not a random declaration of it being the same God; to a Muslim who believes that there is truth to the Old and New Testaments they are the same God. Large parts of the Koran are retellings of Jewish and Christian theology.

The Egyptian gods fit into an entirely different cosmology. The creation myths, ideas about the afterlife, and requirements of behavior are entirely different. There is no such extreme deviation within the Abrahamic religions. They disagree on quite a few details, but not to that degree.

4

But if you take a non-theistic viewpoint, it’s likely that these various God traditions have the same roots. You just have to go back far enough. That’s not proof, of course, but just something to think about. We don’t know how all the languages of the world are related, but it’s unlikely that language was “invented” more than once by our species. Same with religion.

And if there really is a God who is trying to reveal himself to humans, then it’s also likely that the various human societies with a God (or Gods) are reacting to that.

Either way, it’s probably the same source.

5

Just as Allah, Jehovah and YHWH are purported to be the same based on the same point of origin (Abraham) it is also possible that Woden, Zeus, Ra, Krishna and The Great Spirit are one and the same simply viewed from different cultures during different epochs. The underlying messages may differ greatly but this could also be explained as suited to meet the individual culture’s expectations of what God represents.

It is quite a stretch though to try to find a common line of reason thruout all theology, even if a lot of the basic structure and teachings resemble each other.

6

The Christian God and the Muslim God are the same god in the same way that basketball and soccer are the same sport.

Both sports are played with a spherical ball, on a rectangular field with a goal at each end, and the object is to score more points than your opponent by putting the ball through the goal.

The difference is in how those points are scored.

Basketball rules say there is one, and only one way to score: throw the ball through a hoop.

Soccer rules say there is one, and only one way to score: kick the ball through a large rectangular goal.

In other words, aside from the shape of the field, and the size and shape of the ball, they’re entirely different.

Using the same argument, we can compare the two religions:

Both religions claim there is only one God. Both religions claim that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Both religions teach that God cannot lie. And, most importantly, both religions teach that there is one, and only one path to salvation (doctrinal differences between sects/denominations notwithstanding), and that this applies to everybody.

The god of Christianity says, “Path A is the only path to salvation.”

The god of Islam says, “Path B is the only path to salvation.”

As shooting baskets and kicking goals are completely different ways to score, paths A and B are completely different ways to obtain salvation. If both A and B claim to apply to everybody, then they are mutually exclusive — both cannot be true, logically. So that leaves several options, including:

[ul]
[li]More than one god: unacceptable to either religion, as both are monotheistic[/li][li]God lied to one faction or the other: unacceptable to either religion, as both say God cannot lie[/li][li]One or both religions is invented out of whole cloth: unacceptable to either religion, unless it is the other religion that is invented[/li][/ul]

There are, of course, other things I could include in that list, but hopefully you get the idea. Two contradictory, mutually-exclusive routes to the same goal cannot have come from the same god, in the logical context of the rules of either religion. Ergo, the two religions do not worship the same god.

7

We have a pretty good understanding of the relatedness of the various Indo-European Gods and myths.

Dyeus Phter (God the father, prot-IE) becomes *Zeus *(Greek), *Jupiter *(Latin), Dyaus Pita (Sanskrit), *Tiwaz *(Germanic) etc.
Judaism-Christianity-Islam are all Semitic in origin, but it’s likely that the Semitic and Indo-Europeans are fairly closely related, since their homelands (in as much as we know what those were) are not too distant.

8

I have the same trouble understanding this claim as you do. We are able to distinguish anything from anything else by its defining characteristics, right? So how many distinguishing features can you knock away before it’s not the same god anymore?

Say I said I believe in Sana Claus. But you, know it’s completely ridiculous to think that he travels around the world giving presents to children. Oh, and who has ever heard of flying reindeer? He can’t possibly have those. Elves? Give me a break. At what point does he cease to be Santa Claus and become just a fat guy in a red suit? Or is the American concept of Santa that I refer to really the same as the Dutch Sinterklaas?

On preview I see that Phase42 put it better than I did.

9

It’s a nice analogy, but where is the root? Where is the common denominator where basketball and soccer split? In the context of religion that common denominator is Abraham. While the three traditions swing widely from each other they all trace back to this one common interest. What common interest do soccer and basketball swing back to?

10

When you’re talking about God, though, if it has the same root, then it is the same. Unless you think God changes over time-- which I don’t think religious people do.

11

I think you put it better than Phase42 simply because the commercial Santa Clause and the traditional Sinterklaas have the same root source. Although they share the same root source the traditions that have followed through the ages have taken them to different worlds. But even given these differences, they are still the same in principal if not in practice.

12

Krishna? Usually the universal Father God from a Hindu viewpoint is given as Indra or Dyaus-pitar (note the resemblance of this term to Zeus and Jupiter).

13

Phase42, I don’t like your analogy to soccer and basketball.

A more apt analogy is to football. American football and association football (soccer) and gaelic football and rugby all come from the same source. Except the link between American football and association football is not obvious until you go back and look at how the two sports developed, it’s not a coincidence that the two sports have the same name.

As for the speculation about whether two imaginary entites are “really” the same, well, the comparison between Jupiter and Zeus is apt. Is Jupiter “really” Zeus? Is Minerva really Athena, is Mars really Ares? Since many of the Roman deities and Greek deities really did have the same origin, it isn’t a stretch to equate them. But is Hermes “really” Thoth? Is Isis or Hathor really Venus? Is Zeus another name for Odin, or maybe Hermes is Odin, and Zeus is Tyr?

Anyway, the equation of the Jewish God and the Christian God and the Islamic God is much more analgous to Jupiter=Zeus than it is to Hermes=Thoth. Muhamed didn’t claim to have discovered a new God, he claimed to have discovered the correct way to worship the same God that the Jews and Christians worshiped. And he didn’t invent an entirely new mythology, he confirmed that the old mythology was correct. He didn’t go to Jupiter worshippers and tell them they should worship Mithras or Isis, he went to Jupiter worshippers and told them the best way to worship Jupiter.

14

My understanding is that in Islam, god communicates through prophets. Muhammad was the only prophet with a perfect understanding of what god said and the only one who was able to communicate it perfectly. Thus, there was no lying going on.

15

Or they believe in the same God and disagree about what route to salvation he actually provides.

Even ignoring the historical matter of common origin, it seems ridiculous to me to argue that some two different monotheists do not believe in the “same God”. What does that even mean? If Person A believes that Neil Armstrong was a short man who enjoyed sweets, was scared of dogs, and supported circumcision, while person B believes that Bell was tall, hated sweets, etc., would anyone say they believe in different Neil Armstrongs? Sure, they quibble on the details, but if they both primarily think of Neil Armstrong as “the guy who first walked on the moon”, if they agree on the essence of what they’re referring to, I think we’d just say they have different beliefs about the same person.

Of course, with Neil Armstrong, it’s easy to say they both have the same referent, since he is an actually existent being. Still, I think there’s a robust enough principle here to handle the God case as well (whether or not God actually exists). If Person A believes Bigfoot has green fur and Person B believes he has red fur, well, they’re both very silly people, but we’d probably be inclined to say they’re merely disagreeing about Bigfoot’s properties, rather than talking about different things entirely. As long as they agree on the essential core properties, that is. If one thinks of Bigfoot as simply an affectionate nickname for a large classmate from high school and the other as a non-human creature of the woods, then, of course, we’d begin to say they were using the term to refer to different things.

But I don’t see any such gap with Christian and Muslim uses of “God” (or, in its Arabic translation, “Allah”). They use the term in very similar ways, with basically the same core definition. Both Christians and Muslims and all other monotheists think primarily of God, I imagine, as the unique supremely powerful intelligent entity. They disagree about what this entity wants us to do, they disagree over what exactly this entity has done in the past, but I think they agree on fundamentally enough to say they’re talking about the same thing, just disagreeing about its properties.

16

No, I don’t consider them to be the same god. Same background/roots, perhaps. Same characters believed to be involved historically. But the question is one of the characteristics given to that god today, and I would say not only within a religion but within particular sects (like Catholicism) the god worshipped may be a different one.

17

Yeah, I probably should have researched the names better. Thanks for the edit.

18

Not sure if that was a rhetorical question, but I believe it is generally recognized that Tyr is the cognate of Zeus. They just each ended up with a different part of the original two-part name

19

So are you suggesting that the Catholic God is different from the Babtist God or the Mormon God?

Would the same apply to the Catholic Christ versus the Mormon Christ?

20

Yes to the first. To the second, I don’t know enough about Christ in LDS belief to say.