Gary Miller
A compilation of Gary Miller’s analytical lectures on Islam and the logical foundations of religious belief
Many years ago, an online search led me to a lecture by Canadian mathematician Gary Miller on the Quran. It remains one of the most valuable things I have found on the internet. Since then, I have tracked several other recordings of his lectures on religion, Islam, and the nature of belief. These lectures have had a profound impact on my life and my religious education.
Throughout his life, Gary Miller has not had much of an online presence. Most of his lectures on religion were in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The recordings that survive of his lectures were ones made by event organizers or audience members that were later digitized and posted to various online forums. By that time, he had already quit public speaking and dedicated his time to teaching mathematics. As a result, much of the information available online about his life and his work is incomplete or inaccurate, and a number of photographs commonly attached to him are in fact of other individuals with the same name.
On this page, I have attempted to bring together a short biography of Gary Miller and a comprehensive collection of recordings of his lectures. Please reach out if you are aware of any other recordings that can be added to this collection.
About Gary Miller
Gary Miller was a Canadian mathematician and lecturer on religion. A Christian missionary for 15 years, he was a student of religion and often wrote to church figures from different Christian sects, asking them what they thought of a certain verse in the Bible or its interpretation, and posing challenging arguments.
Around 1977, Miller turned his attention to the Quran for the first time, wishing to put it to the test in the same way. As he read the Quran, he continued to find it in agreement with his own beliefs and with what he thought was common sense. He concluded that he had already been a Muslim for years without knowing it. He adopted a Muslim name, Abdul-Ahad Omar, although he continued to go by his original name.
After hosting his own TV and radio show in Canada, Miller turned his attention to mathematics. He was granted special admission to obtain an MSc in mathematics from Queen’s University Canada, after a series of entrance exams had determined that his personal study of mathematics was more than equivalent to an undergraduate degree. Within one year, he had obtained his degree in 1990. He then received a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grant from the Canadian government to fund his doctoral studies at the University of New Brunswick, where he obtained his PhD in 1994.
Miller also holds a diploma in Tertiary Education from the University of New Brunswick.
After teaching mathematics in Canada, the US (where he was the entire mathematics department at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon), Miller moved to Saudi Arabia, where he taught mathematics at King Fahd university as well as graduate courses in the Women’s College in Dammam.
At the time of setting up this page, he was teaching mathematics at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi.
Lecture library
Disclaimer
I do not own the rights to any of these recordings. These are mostly recordings made by the audience or the event organizers on cassette tapes which eventually ended up being digitized and posted online on different sites and religious forums. I only took the trouble to collect and organize them in a single place along with information on the speaker.