would have accused the ancient Greeks of heresy for any of their beliefs about Zeus, for the ancient Greeks were idolators: worshippers of a false god. But when John says that Muslims are “mutilators of God,” it is the Christian God he is referring to. Muslims, according to him, have false beliefs about the true God. Peter the Venerable (1092–1156) also saw Islam as a vile form of heresy.3
If, on the other hand, Christians and Muslims are referring to different supernatural beings, we have mutual charges of idolatry. In his Refutatio Mohamedis (c. 870 AD), a long and frequently abusive polemic about how the “camel driver” Muhammad deceived the Agarenes (Muslims) into worshipping a false god, an apostate demon, who had “appropriated the divine name,” Niketas Byzantios accused Muslims of idolatry.
Their god is the devil, who imitates God, although, fearing he fails in his purpose, he is cunningly silent about [his] proper name, that is notorious among all men, and rather brings before himself the name of the true God.4
Niketas argues on mainly philosophical and linguistic grounds, distinguishing between an empty name, which has no proper object, and a name which has been abstracted from its proper object and applied to something alien, neither of these being a true name, which signifies the true nature [logos] of its bearer, and which principally denotes the bearer.
As the name of one thing [is applied] to the wrong thing, and as a bearer of one name [is applied] to the wrong name, that leads to error.5
According to Niketas, it follows from the semantic properties of the name “God” that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.
The disagreement is therefore not just about different and inconsistent belief systems. Everyone agrees that Christianity and Islam have considerable theological differences. Muslims do not believe in a Trinity (“Praise be to God who has never begotten a son”).6 Christians do believe in such a thing (“For there are three . . . the Father, the Logos and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.”7 Muslims recognize the historical existence of Jesus, but do not believe he was crucified and rose from the dead, whereas belief in the resurrection is an article of faith for Christians. Everyone agrees that the two faiths are in disagreement about these beliefs; the problem is what the beliefs are about. When a Christian says “God is triune” and a Muslim says “Allah is not triune,” do they contradict one another or not? John says they do, for they assert contradictory predicates of the same God. Niketas says they do not, for one asserts of the Christian God that he is triune, the other asserts of the nameless demon that he is not triune.
The difference between John and Niketas has striking parallels with the recent Hawkins controversy. To some, mostly fundamentalist Christians, it seemed obvious that a God who apparently rewards suicide bombers with a place in paradise can’t be the God they worship. Others argued that the fundamental conceptions of the deity are too different. The Revd. Dr. Magdy Gendy, lately of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, said, “I worship the triune God. The God they worship is none of my business,” when he was interviewed by Christianity Today.8 This is essentially Niketas’s position.
By contrast, the academic philosophers who entered the debate mostly took the side of John of Damascus. Edward Feser argued that we cannot understand the deep theological differences unless we understand “the true nature of Islam as a kind of ‘heresy’, a transformation of Christianity rather than an entirely novel religion.”9 Other analytic theologians, such as Francis Beckwith and Dale Tuggy, also argued that Christians and Muslims do, in fact, worship the same God. Baylor philosophy professor Francis Beckwith held that incomplete knowledge or a false belief about God doesn’t mean Muslims are worshipping a different being. Otherwise they couldn’t have false beliefs about God. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf thought that “Muslims and Christians who embrace the normative traditions of their faith refer to the same object, to the same Being, when they pray, when they worship, when they talk about God. The referent is the same. The description of God is partly different.”10
Arizona philosopher William F. Vallicella took a different line, which is the starting point for this book. He argued, against Beckwith and Tuggy, that it is not at all obvious which of the following views is correct.
View 1: Christian and Muslim can worship the same God, even though one of them must have a false belief about11 God, whether it be the belief that God is non-triune or the belief that God is triune.
View 2: Christian and Muslim must worship different Gods precisely because they have mutually exclusive conceptions of God. So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.12
The question of which view is correct requires deep investigation into the philosophy of language, Vallicella argued, and it requires an explanation of how reference is achieved. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the world? What makes our utterance of “Socrates” signify Socrates rather than someone or something else? What makes my use of “God” (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?
The question also exposes a fault line running through the whole of contemporary analytic philosophy, indeed it is older than that. We may hold with Frege, Russell, Searle, and many others that reference is routed through, and determined by, some sort of descriptive sense, whereby a singular term identifies or picks out an external object by means of an associated uniquely applying description. If this is how reference operates, “God” refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the description, and hence there are different descriptive senses attaching to the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God.
D1: “the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is non-triune”;
D2: “the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.”
Clearly no one entity can satisfy both D1 and D2. Although the descriptions overlap, nothing can be both non-triune and triune, hence if reference is determined by description, the Christian and the Muslim cannot be referring to the same being.
Alternatively, we may hold, with John Stuart Mill, and contemporary philosophers of language like Nathan Salmon, that the proper name like “God” refers directly, with no intermediary descriptive content. Mill compared a proper name to a chalk mark on a door, a symbol assigned to the object itself, so that we may understand which thing is spoken of. This will not work if the object is not revealed to us, but Kripke and others have argued that the use of a name can be causally connected to its bearer, so that (for example) the Christian’s use of “God” can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mount Sinai. If so, the question of whether Muslims and Christians refer to the same God depends on the existence of the right causal connection, rather than any descriptive content. Anglican bishop Mouneer Hanna Anis of Egypt said, “For us as Christians, and only by his grace, God has revealed himself in the person of his son Jesus Christ, whom Muslims do not know in this way.”13 If he is right, then Christians and Muslims do not refer to the same being by the names “God” and “Allah,” respectively, but not because of the different descriptions they associate with God. Christian Trinitarians and Unitarians have fundamentally different conceptions of the nature of God, yet the causal connection determining their use of the name “God” is the same.
At the time of writing, the debate between descriptive and direct reference theories of proper names is a live one (with direct reference being something like the “orthodox” view). Its immediate roots are in the early twentieth century, but it is older, and it is closely related to the problem of individuation, fiercely
