It has been criticized by both theologians and scientists, who say that it is a logical fallacy to base belief in God on gaps in scientific knowledge. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount appears in Matthew chapters 5-7. The sermon is Jesus’ longest speech on record and lays out the basic tenets of Christian belief that are still followed today. Clearly, then, the atheist may concede that there is some remote analogy between God and human minds and still insist that there remain other analogies and hypotheses that are no less plausible. According to the 2011 census, there were 638,708 Muslims in Bulgaria, who accounted for 9.8% of the population of the country. These include: pre-existing high population density owing to the late inclusion of the two mountainous regions in the Ottoman system of taxation; immigration of Christian Bulgarians from lowland regions to avoid taxation throughout the 1400s; the relative poverty of the regions; early introduction of local Christian Bulgarians to Islam through contacts with nomadic Yörüks; the nearly constant Ottoman conflict with the Habsburgs from the mid-1500s to the early 1700s; the resulting massive war expenses that led to a sixfold increase in the jizya rate from 1574 to 1691 and the imposition of a war-time avariz tax; the Little Ice Age in the 1600s that caused crop failures and widespread famine; heavy corruption and overtaxation by local landholders-all of which led to a slow, but steady process of Islamisation until the mid-1600s when the tax burden becomes so unbearable that most of the remaining Christians either converted en masse or left for lowland areas.

Two large-scale studies of the causes of adoption of Islam in Bulgaria, one of the Chepino Valley by Dutch Ottomanist Machiel Kiel, and another one of the region of Gotse Delchev in the Western Rhodopes by Evgeni Radushev reveal a complex set of factors behind the process. While some authors have argued that other factors, such as desire to retain social status, were of greater importance, Turkish writer Halil İnalcık has referred to the desire to stop paying jizya as a primary incentive for conversion to Islam in the Balkans, and Bulgarian Anton Minkov has argued that it was one among several motivating factors. Bulgarian ceased to be a literary language, the higher clergy was invariable Greek, and the Phanariotes started making persistent efforts to hellenise Bulgarians as early as the early 1700s. It was only after the struggle for church autonomy in the mid-1800s and especially after the Bulgarian Exarchate was established by a firman of Sultan Abdülaziz in 1870 that this mistake was corrected. The First Balkan War was accompanied by forced Christianization of Muslim Bulgarians settlements.

Even though there were no ethnic Turkish or Muslim parties, every single national assembly until Bulgaria’s occupation by the Soviet Union in 1944 had Turkish and Muslim MPs. Muslims also began publishing their own newspaper, Miusiulmani, in both Bulgarian and Turkish. The program, which began in 1984, forced all Turks and other Muslims in Bulgaria to adopt Bulgarian names and renounce all Muslim customs. The reason for this difference is mostly because of ethnicity: most Muslims in Bulgaria are Turks and Roma (and to a much lesser extent ethnic Bulgarians) and those ethnic groups live mainly in rural areas; they have different reproductive traditions and they have a younger age structure compared to the ethnic Bulgarians which leads to higher fertility and birth rates. The motivation of the 1984 assimilation campaign was unclear; however, many experts believed that the disproportion between the birth rates of the Turks and the Bulgarians was a major factor. For example: Bulgaria had a total birth rate of 10.5‰ in 1992 while Muslims formed about 13 percent of the total population. In provinces with large Muslim concentrations, birth rates are a little bit higher while death rates are lower than the country average. The Principality expanded somewhat after the Balkan Wars when the largely-Muslim Rhodopes and Western Thrace regions were incorporated into the country.

Muslims fought in the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885 (and all of Bulgaria’s subsequent wars except for the Balkan wars and earned widespread respect as well as a high number of medals for bravery in action). According to the 2011 Bulgarian census 94.6% of Muslims in Bulgaria were Sunni Muslim, 4.75% were Shia, and 0.65% were Muslims without further specifications. There is also a small Ahmadiyya presence in Bulgaria, but they are not counted on the census. There were two municipalities with a Muslim population over 90 percent: the Sarnitsa Municipality with a Muslim population of 96.4% and the Chernoochene Municipality with a Muslim population of 90.8%. Practically all municipalities with a Muslim majority are small and very small and generally rural. As a result of these factors, the population of Ottoman Bulgaria is presumed to have dropped twofold from a peak of approx. The goal of this “mixing of peoples” was to quell any unrest in the conquered Balkan states, while simultaneously getting rid of troublemakers in the Ottoman backyard in Anatolia. The Ottoman Empire’s greatest advantage compared to other colonial powers, the millet system and the autonomy each denomination had within legal, confessional, cultural and family matters, nevertheless, largely did not apply to Bulgarians and most other Orthodox peoples on the Balkans, as the independent Bulgarian Patriarchate was abolished, and all Bulgarian Orthodox dioceses were subjected to the rule of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople.