Responding to Huff Po Religion: Did Jesus Predict Muhammad? Part 3: The 1.6 billion Muslims argument is a logical fallacy

This is part 3 of my response to a Huffington Post Religion piece titled “Did Jesus Predict Muhammad?”

Here’s the first two responses:

 Part 1: Starting already in the Wrong Direction

Part 2: Bad Exegesis

Since my time is short in light of sermon preparation this post will respond to a shorter quote from the Huff Po writer who is trying to demonstrate that Jesus predicted Muhammad.  The quote is as follows:

When we look at Islam as a world religion, and see that 1.6 billion people and growing are following in the way of Muhammad, the time has surely come to recognize him as a prophet. If Muhammad is not a prophet, who is?

Is this argument logically sound?  Here’s my response:

• Don’t forget that we have already responded to the writer’s attempt to prove Muhammad from Scripture in part 2.  That is important to remember as we deal with this present argument.
• So Christians should accept Muhammad as a true prophet because…there are 1.6 billion of followers today?  Here the Huffington Post’s writer is committing the logical fallacy Argumentum ad populum.  It’s also known as the band wagon fallacy.  The argument presented here is fallacious because it claims to be true on the basis that many people believe it to be so.
• Let’s take this kind of logical fallacy further to its logical conclusion.  Again, I reject his kind of argument but I want to show how it is self-refuting against his own position.  The same Pew study in 2010 that said there are 1.6 billion Muslims also report that 2.2 billion cultural Christians around the world.  Cultural Christianity comes in first place and Islam second place in terms of population size.  There’s 0.6 billion more Christians than Muslims.  If our Huffington Post writer wants to use this argument from numbers, why isn’t he appealing to Muslims to become Christians instead?  It’s a self-refuting argument against his own view.
• With the last point I made above, of course we all know Huffington Post would never tolerate such an argument to be published on their page calling for Muslims to become Christians.  It’s not because it’s logically fallacious (it is); but the fact they could publish this fallacious argument calling for Christians to accept Muhammad as prophet reveals the anti-Christian bias and Leftists political correctness.
• Christians have an additional reason to be cautious of this logical fallacy of the numbers game.  For all the pseudo-intellectual front that the Huffington Post writer tries to put up with his interaction with Scripture, he should hear the words of Jesus concerning the amount of people who actually are Christians and abiding in the truth: ““Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. ¹⁴ For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:13-14).  Luke 13:24 reports Jesus saying the same thing.  So for this writer to argue that Jesus predicted Muhammad and to present an argument that Muhammad is a true prophet of God because of the large number of followers he has amassed today is actually to go against Jesus’ own teachings and principles.  Jesus never argues that something is true because of how popular it is.  If anything Jesus was counter-cultural.  He was unpopular enough to have been crucified.
• The Bible never makes the litmus test of a prophet being his popularity.  Think of Jeremiah.  Think of many other prophets of God who were not popular but despised.

As I said in my post yesterday there are a lot of huff and puffs over at the Huffington Post, but there’s no bites as far as exegesis or sound thinking is concerned.

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