Expanded Debate Review: Dyer's Monarchical Trinity vs. Jake's Anthropomorphic Allah

This evening saw a much-anticipated debate between the Orthodox Christian thinker Jay Dyer and the Salafi Muslim Jake Brancatella, a self-styled metaphysician. Below is my expanded review of the debate where I acknowledge where Jake’s arguments landed, discuss some weaknesses in Dyer’s positions, and expand on some of my issues with Jake’s theology.

It is worth mentioning that in the Christian tradition, there are many models of the God as the Trinity. These include the Monarchical Trinity, the Thomist Trinity based on “Relative Identity”, Constitutive models of the Trinity, and Social models of the Trinity. I once hosted three Christian scholars as shown in this video.

Likewise, in Islam, there are numerous models of Tawhid (God’s Unicity). These include the Mu‘tazili, Ash‘ari, Maturidi, Hanbali, Salafi, Taymi, Ismaili, Twelver, Avicennian, and Sufi Akbari models of Tawhid. I explain some of these in this video.

This was a debate over which theology is true: Dyer’s Orthodox model of the Christian Trinity known as the Monarchical Trinity vs. Jake’s Salafi model of Islamic Tawhid. Without doing a full-blown review of this, below are my immediate comments.

First, neither debater really offered positive arguments for their positions. Jake simply asserted his Salafi Athari model of Tawhid, which he bases on the views of Ibn Khuzayma, Muhammad b. Isma‘il al-Bukhari, and Ibn Taymiyya. Jake affirms that God has real-distinct attributes that are not identical to God’s Essence and not separable from God’s Essence. This is already a major problem because the Sunni doctrine of “entitative attributes” (sifat ma‘nawiyya) effectively means that Allah is a metaphysical composite. These divine attributes are uncreated and eternal but they are not identical to God Himself, which begs the question as to whether they are dependent upon God or whether God is dependent upon the attributes. Both options are fatal to Tawhid. Most recently, Dr. Hasan Spiker, a Sunni Akbari metaphysician (he is a real metaphysician unlike Jake), told Dr. Shadee Elmasry that the Ash’ari/Maturidi/Hanbali doctrine of God having real-distinct attributes is devoid of intellectual content (see video).

Overall, while both debaters launched assaults on the other’s worldview, I found Jake's theological positions to be weaker and less rigorously defended against Dyer's attacks. Like Ibn Taymiyya, Jake affirmed the plain meaning (zahir) of all the anthropomorphic descriptions of God found in the Qur’an/Sunni Hadith including Allah’s face, hands, eyes, feet, descent, sitting, etc. On the face of it, this type of theology is contradictory. One cannot claim that God has no likeness to His creation and affirm a real face, hand, eyes or descending for God (as Jake's friend Dr. Chowdhury argued in a journal article).

Jake pre-emptively tried to defend against the charge of anthropomorphism - of making God similar to human creatures - by claiming that the shared wording and shared meanings between God’s face/hands/feet and creaturely face/hands/feet does NOT entail any ontological similarity between them. I find this to be an odd argument for Jake to make. In a podcast with Dr. Rasmussen, Jake evoked the ‘correspondence theory of truth’ to argue that multiple linguistic descriptions of God in the Qur’an/Hadith entail the existence of real-distinct ontological attributes in God: “Shouldn’t it be that there is a real correspondence between those attributes and what we are actually saying such that it provides evidence against divine simplicity?” But here, Jake has committed to a nominalism, thinking that this would allow him to avoid the problem of anthropomorphism. After all, if there are no universals whatsoever, then words like face, hands, etc. no longer designate things that necessarily share any similarities. But this totally destroys Jake’s commitment to the ‘correspondence theory of truth’ as there is no more correlation between the signs (scriptural language) and the signifier (extra-mental reality).

Another problem with Jake’s “apparent meaning” position is that the Athari/Hanbali scholars say: “the apparent meaning’ (al-ẓāhir) is what first comes to the mind from that text, irrespective of whether it is literal or metaphorical” (Ibn Qudama 2002, 55). So when we hear or read the word “hand”, “foot”, or “fingers”, what is the meaning that first comes to the mind? Dyer pounced on this and argued that Jake must choose between two options:
1) either the plain meaning entails that God is similar to His creation in some respect - this being the basis of speaking of both God’s “Foot” and a creaturely “foot”;
2) alternatively, one can assert that there is no similarity at all between God’s Foot and a creaturely foot; but in this case, Jake’s entire discourse of affirming these attributes is uninformative and meaningless.

Jake also affirms that God performs temporal actions - like speaking, forgiving, commanding, etc. - which Taymiyyan Atharis regard as uncreated actions that subsist in God’s Essence. Hoover refers to these as God’s “voluntary attributes”. This leads to the paradoxical belief that God performs temporal yet uncreated divine actions - an idea that Jake ascribes to al-Bukhari himself.

Jake went on to attack Dyer’s Trinity model by arguing that the Monarchical Trinity amounts to tri-theism using 3 arguments from his older debates: first, he argued that the Orthodox Trinity is polytheistic because the doctrine admits of 3 "gods" (three beings that are predicatively divine); Jake may have a point here but it did not clearly come through in the slides or the cross-examination. Furthermore, Dyer would later parry to this by showing how Sunni scholars like al-Ghazali are not very clear when it comes to “counting” either and they switch between counting by division and counting by identity. In fact, I have read al-Ghazali, al-Bazdawi, and al-Nasafi (Abu Mu‘in) explain the concept of God and His Attributes being distinct yet inseparable using the analogy of numbers where each distinct attribute is like the number one in relation to the number ten. For example:

“For if we say ‘God, the Exalted,’ then we have referred to the Divine Essence together with the divine attributes, and not to the Essence alone… Thus Zayd’s hand is not Zayd and is not other than Zayd; rather both expressions are absurd. Similarly, every part is not other than the whole, nor is it the same as the whole… Thus it is possible that an attribute is other than the Essence in which the attribute subsists”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazālī, Moderation in Belief, 2013, 129

“God the Exalted is eternal and everlasting with all of His attributes and names. God’s names and attributes are not identical to Him and not other than Him – just as in the case of the number one with regard to the number ten.”

Abu Mu‘in al-Nasafi, Baḥr al-kalām fī ʿilm al-tawḥīd, 1997, 91

Therefore, when Jake uses the counting argument against Orthodoxy - “how many gods do you count?”, I do not see why the Orthodox cannot come back and say: “how many uncreated things (ghayr makhluqat) exist?”.

Second, Jake argued that the Father, Son, Spirit cannot one God because they do not have the same power or knowledge; I think this is a valid argument but I would have focused on the problem of the Son and Spirit lacking aseity in the Monarchical model (and to be fair, Jake has focused on that in past debates). I am not sure why he did not exploit the problem of aseity against Dyer.

Third, Jake charged Dyer's methodology for proving Orthodoxy using TAG with epistemic circularity. As far as I understand TAG and this critique, I would agree with Jake’s argument, which I acknowledge below.

Fourth, Jake argued that the Trinity was not affirmed by the earliest Christian Church fathers and is not really orthodox. I am not a specialist in Late Antique Jewish thought or early Christian thought, but generally speaking, most critical scholars (as far as I am aware) would agree that the first century Christians were NOT Trinitarians and that Jews like Philo and those writing the Targum literature are NOT Trinitarians. What is noteworthy is that some Jews certainly affirmed a subordinationist Logos theology. Later in the cross-examination, Jake mentioned Justin Martyr as an example of someone who is a Saint for the Orthodox but who did not believe in the Trinity. This was a good point.

Dyer devoted almost the entire opening statement to launching several fatal arguments against Jake's Salafi theology. First, he charged Jake with a gross double standard: Jake made his career attacking the Orthodox for affirming 3 "gods" and chiding them for not counting by identity; instead, the Orthodox count by division and thereby claim that there is but one God. However, Dyer notes, Jake himself asserts that there is only one God yet he affirms that this God has multiple uncreated and mutually distinct attributes. There is an analogy between what Trinitarians call Divine Persons and what Sunnis call the uncreated Divine Attributes. As I noted in my debate against Jake, some important Christian theologians writing in Arabic such as Abu Ra'ita, Ammar al-Basri, Bishop Elias, and Ibn al-Tayyib, argued that what Muslims call divine attributes (such as the divine life, knowledge, power), the Christians refer to as the divine hypostases (see Husseini 2014). Thus, Dyer makes a good point here that Jake never dealt with. I discuss this Person-Attribute connection based on scholarship in this video.

Dyer further pushed Jake on God's attributes like hands, eyes, feet, etc. He argued Ibn Taymiyya and Jake are not consistent on this: is the similarity between God’s hand and creaturely hands only in name? Or is it also in meaning? If it is only in name, then these predications are uninformative. If the similarity is in meaning, then God and creatures share a real similarity. In Dyer's words: "What is an uncreated foot that is nothing like a human foot? What is a more perfect foot?" For those who do not know, Dyer was picking up on Ibn Taymiyya's argument that God must have attributes like hands, eyes, etc. because He must possess all perfections. Hoover summarizes Ibn Taymiyya’s arguments on this issue as follows:

A living being who can see and hear is more perfect than one who cannot. Similarly, one who is living and knowing is more perfect than one who is not. Moreover, God must be qualified as hearing and seeing lest He be imperfect and dependent upon another... One who has power to act by his hands is more perfect than one who does not because the former can choose to act with his hands or through some other means whereas the latter does not have the option of using his hands. By implication, God’s hands are among His attributes of perfection.

Jon Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya's Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 64-65

Dyer went further and asked Jake: “Are the divine attributes a se or are they dependent on God? Or is God dependent on His mutually distinct attributes? These were questions I asked Jake in our 2022 Debate and he has yet to provide any answer.

Furthermore, Dyer caught on to the absurdity of believing that God has uncreated yet temporal attributes. Dyer rightly argued that temporal divine attributes or temporal divine actions issuing from God and subsisting in His Essence entail that God’s Essence itself must be temporal. This was the position of the Karramiyya, whom orthodox Sunnis like al-Juwayni condemned as heretics. Dyer went on to attack Jake's epistemology as problematic because it rejects universals and is wholly nominalist.

However, I thought that Dyer’s TAG (Transcendental Argument for God) did not fare too well under questioning from Jake. Basically, Dyer holds that only the Orthodox Christian worldview provides a metaphysical and epistemic foundation for various truths about human selfhood, knowledge, and the Cosmos including the laws of logic and the very possibility of knowledge. Jake pressed Dyer as to how he can avoid circularity in making this argument. Furthermore, why must the answer to the argument be an Orthodox Christian theology? Conceivably, Ismaili Neoplatonism would be an adequate solution to TAG. Perhaps even the Salafi creed…?

I also have problems with Monarchical Trinity models. While Jake accused the model of falling into tri-theism, I think a bigger problem is that the Son and Holy Spirit are not truly divine but eternal proximate creations of God. In my friendly debate with Dr. Joshua Sijuwade, I pressed my interlocuter on the issue of the Father alone being a se and the Son and Spirit lacking aseity or ontological independence. In my view, aseity is both intrinsic and essential to God. The Monarchical Trinity model collapses into the Father alone being God and the Son and Spirit as Neoplatonic-like emanations that eternally depend upon the Father. In Islamic philosophical language, the Son and Holy Spirit - as emanations from the Father - are dependent realities and contingent in themselves (mumkin al-wujud bi-dhatihi) while the Father alone is necessary in himself (wajib al-wujud bi-dhatihi).

Ultimately, while Salafi Da‘wabros debating Orthobros may be entertaining for YouTube, the strongest and most internally consistent philosophical critique of the Christian Trinity can only be deployed by Muslims who believe in divine simplicity - such as Mu‘tazilis, Ismailis, Avicennians, and Akbaris. Salafi, Hanbali, Ash‘ari, and Maturidi critiques of the Trinity are always handicapped by the metaphysical inconsistencies within their own systems, such as mutually distinct uncreated divine attributes, anthropomorphic attributes (for Salafis), temporal creation (for Ash‘aris, Maturidis, and Hanbalis), and arbitrary divine will (Ash‘aris and Hanbalis).

I encourage everyone to watch the entire debate and be prepared to laugh out loud at certain points