Reason and Faith

The Athanasian Creed states that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God — yet there are not three Gods but one God. Each person is fully God, they are distinct from each other, yet identical to the same single being. This is like saying A equals C, B equals C, but A does not equal B — while insisting there is only one C. The hypostatic union (Jesus being 100% God and 100% man simultaneously) faces the same issue: fully omniscient yet ignorant, fully omnipotent yet limited. These are not mysteries — they are logical contradictions.

This is the Euthyphro dilemma, and Islam resolves it: God's commands flow from His nature, which is perfectly good. God cannot command evil because evil is contrary to His nature. So morality is neither arbitrary (God happens to command it) nor independent of God (existing apart from Him) — it is rooted in God's essential nature. God is good essentially, and His commands reflect that goodness necessarily. This is Ibn Taymiyyah's position and it resolves the dilemma without the problems of pure voluntarism.

The Trinity cannot be demonstrated from the Old Testament without reading later theology back into earlier text. It was not the theology of the earliest Jewish Christians. It required centuries of philosophical development — borrowing heavily from Greek Neoplatonism — to even articulate. And it remains logically incoherent: the Athanasian formula that each person is God, the persons are distinct, yet there is one God, is formally identical to a contradiction. No amount of sophisticated vocabulary changes the logical structure.