Bill Roach on the Debate over Thomas Aquinas and Natural Theology

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. And before we get to the topic today and our special guest, if you wonder what

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I'm drinking today for my special Conversations That Matter mug, it is an

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American Christian brand of tea called Gold River Company Tea, and they are sponsoring this episode.

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And I'd love it if you went and got yourself some of this tea because it's cold outside. It's winter.

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It's winter. What you need is tea. It's not coffee. I know the coffee drinkers, they all say that that's what you need. It's not what you need.

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It's tea that you need. That's the quintessential, original, believe it or not,

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American drink. Even before the Revolutionary War, that's what Americans drank. And so I'm just going back to the traditions of my forefathers and drinking some good mint tea.

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And you can get yours at Gold River Company Tea, GoldRiverCo .com,

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GoldRiverCo .com. And put in the promo code conversations to get 10 % off.

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Well, we have a special guest with us today, Dr. Bill Roach, who is the president of the

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International Society of Christian Apologetics. You can go to their website at ISCA -apologetics .org.

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And if you go there, you're going to find out there's actually a conference coming up, Engaging Culture with True Truth.

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And that's coming up March 25th through 26th at the Southern Evangelical Seminary and Bible College.

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And I'm not sure if I can make it yet. I'd love to go and I'll see if I can. It's only a Friday and Saturday, so you can just fly right in.

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Charlotte's a hub. And then fly right out. Tickets actually shouldn't even be that expensive since it's in Charlotte.

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So they're going to talk about the woke movement and social justice, and they have tons of breakout sessions.

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I'll let Bill talk about that more. But we're also going to get into another topic today, and that is

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Thomism. And we'll just see where the conversation goes. So with that, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast,

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Dr. Bill Roach. John, it's a pleasure to be on here with you today. And I'm so thankful for all of your hard work and how you have truly just been a stalwart on this issue.

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Your conviction has just shown through, and we're just so thankful for the way that you've been that bright light on this issue for the church during our day.

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Well, thank you, Bill. It's definitely a mutual feeling that we have. And you've actually been on here at least once before, if not twice.

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I think once or twice. We did something on hermeneutics and how it affects the wokeness movement, and then a couple other things we've discussed.

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So we're starting to have a multi -show relationship that's gone on. Well, I have to know, do you drink coffee or tea?

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Let me tell you this, if America could be founded on something, it would be founded on coffee right now.

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Oh, no. And you don't ever see Duncan saying America runs on tea or something like that.

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We run on coffee. Yeah, that's true. Tea's coming back, though.

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It really is. And I don't know if it's because of the boba stuff. My wife loves that, the Eastern stuff.

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But now I see a lot more even like European and British tea and stuff. But OK, well,

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I'll forgive you for the coffee thing. I actually never really drank a lot of tea until a roommate of mine from South Africa slash

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London. He lived in both. And every day, Bill, turn on the kettle, Bill, turn on the kettle.

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And I just couldn't help it. I mean, he would make gallons of tea every day. And I just kind of got immersed in all of it.

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And it was worth it. So yeah. Yeah. So I have a friend from Kenya, a good friend. And same thing. Yeah. Just everything's tea.

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And so I didn't grow up drinking it, but I do now. So. All right. Well, let's talk about this conference a little bit.

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And I know that there's some breakout sessions you have. Michael O 'Fallon is your keynote. Talk to me about what people can expect if they come.

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So one of the things we're looking at is this idea of true truth. And anybody who has studied the history of apologetics in the 20th century, you know that is coming from Francis Schaeffer.

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And Schaeffer was real big on this notion that people have this idea of truth, but is it actually a true understanding of truth?

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Is it one that corresponds to the reality that God has given us? And he looked at different things during his era on, well, is it existential truth?

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Does my background and all of my being in that sense determine truth? He said, no, that whole existential method or postmodernism and all the different avenues.

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So what we're doing is we're having a conference on true truth, but we're going one step further. And this is what's going to make it unique.

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We're actually going to look at that as it applies to the social justice movement. And in many ways, we're drawing a line in the sand for the apologetics movement.

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We spent so much time defending true truth that we're not going to let it be undermined by this sort of racialized methodology and epistemology and interpretation of the

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Bible. So we're bringing in speakers from all over the country to do breakout sessions on various topics, but the plenaries are going to specifically address that topic within the church.

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Excellent. Excellent. So you're taking out the standpoints, the epistemology and just this relativism that seems to permeate.

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And it's not even just social justice. I just, I sense it everywhere. Like everywhere you look, there's a relativism of some kind.

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And so I'm really glad you're doing this. Where can people go? If they want to sign up for this, is there a sign up?

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Can they just show up? How does it work? The way that they can sign up is they can go and pre -register on our website.

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And you listed that at iskaapologetics .org. And there's a little button there for you to register.

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And one thing that we're doing with it is we're having a pre -registration. We're hosting it in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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And the one thing we're doing is we're actually going to make the plenary sessions open to the public.

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So to come to the full conference, you would need to sign up and register. But if you are somebody who wants to come and hear the plenary sessions, and we're going to have the schedule released very soon, you're welcome to come because we want to equip you and your church on those topics.

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Now, we would more than love for you to show up for the whole conference. We think the full package is definitely what's needed.

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But those key sessions will definitely be able to equip you and your church to deal with these issues on a day -to -day level.

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Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to this, and I hope I can make it.

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And it's right there at the website iska -apologetics .org. It's like a top of the website for register, and it looks phenomenal.

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So I want to talk to you about something that's been a controversy lately. It's a little outside of my wheelhouse because I've been, as most people know, talking about the social justice movement and how it's made incursions and evangelicalism.

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And this is related, as I'm sure your description you just gave at the conference would indicate.

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But there's a controversy right now that I've noticed in the evangelical, and I mean conservative evangelical world, over what some would call tomism or natural revelation.

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It's a metaphysical argument over reality itself. And there seems to be two sides.

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And on one side, I don't know if these lines are strict or not. Maybe you can help me with this, Bill. But you have maybe more people of a more presuppositional kind of apologetic outlook that are very skeptical of Thomas Aquinas.

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And then you have people on a classical apologetic outlook that they love Thomas Aquinas. I don't know if the lines are exactly there, because I know of a number of presuppositions you do see value in Thomas Aquinas.

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So maybe you can help me with this and navigating it. What's going on there? What's the controversy over in your mind?

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So there's a controversy, like you said, going on right now between a whole host of people.

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It's not really a large number, but it's really an issue of coming down to epistemology and what they see as the grounds of doing different types of theology.

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And this is nothing new. This has been something that's gone on for generations now. And I think probably the height of the debate that people have in their minds was between R .C.

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Sproul and Greg Bonson. And they actually had a discussion on this matter several decades ago, probably 30, 40 years ago.

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And R .C. Sproul was just an ardent Thomist. And Greg Bonson was obviously

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Vantillian. And they're heralding those positions. And I think one of the reasons that it's coming about is that you're seeing these claims made today that we don't want to have syncretistic epistemologies, which is basically just saying you have this biblical epistemology and usually everything else.

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So if it's sort of CRT plus the Bible syncretism, if it's Thomism, which is viewed as Aristotelianism and the

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Bible, that's syncretism. And they just play this out. Think of any other thing you can make it with. And I think what's going on there is that they're almost claiming too much when they're saying that.

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I think people are laying too hard of a category. And it's because we can find counterexamples on what actually qualifies as syncretism.

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For example, what about logic? Is that syncretistic? What about fundamental features of reality and looking at it with the

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Bible? Does the Bible have a metaphysics of a door when Jesus says that he is the door?

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And those are some basic things that we can look at. I mean, I know you have more examples on it, but it's a debate that's gone on for a long time.

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And there's been a disdain between the methodology on different competing groups today that has gone back into the

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Reformation, post -Reformation, but you see it come to its head and the difference between classic and historic worldview theory.

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So really Kuiper versus B .B. Warfield, Sproul versus Greg Bonson, and then some of the advocates today.

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That's a very bird's eye view of it. There's a lot of specifics that can get into it. So for those who might not understand everything you just said, they're not perhaps introduced to some of this philosophical terminology.

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When you talk about metaphysics, you're talking about the nature of reality. What kinds of things are out there? What is reality, right?

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Exactly. So metaphysics is what is reality? Epistemology is how do

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I know reality and make justified claims about reality?

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And that even gets into linguistics. How do I communicate reality or hermeneutics? How do

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I interpret what was communicated about reality? So that's really what it is.

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What is real? How do I know what's real? How do I communicate what's real? How do I interpret what was communicated to me?

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And you do teach all of these subjects, I'm assuming, as a philosopher, right? I do.

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In fact, I regularly teach metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of hermeneutics. So these are avenues that I'm regularly just having to immerse myself in.

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It's kind of whenever people take, say, a foreign language class, sometimes they just use that foreign language all of the time, and they don't think anything of it.

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That's kind of what theologians and philosophers do. But don't let it get puffed up. It's really just a simplistic way of describing terms.

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Instead of saying that, you know, this using 10 words to qualify something. Sometimes we try to just shorthand it and call it one.

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You know, we do that in like picture if you went to go have your car replaced and said, or your engine replacing, can

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I get the metal thing that it causes the gas to explode with it? You mean the engine?

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Yes, the engine. That's what we're talking about. So that's what we're trying to do with some of the bigger terms. So the controversy here is over metaphysics and over whether or not you can take, you know, biblical revelation, what the

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Bible teaches us about reality, because it makes claims about what's out there, what God's created.

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And then are you able to then merge that or use, in addition to that, some like the

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Pythagorean theme, laws of mathematics that pagan philosophers have even discovered? Like, is that valid?

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Is that okay? Or is that an attack on the sufficiency of scripture? Are you taking away from scripture when you do that?

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Right. Am I, am I tracking with you so far? That's a big part of it. Yeah. It's dealing with the metaphysics and the epistemology.

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So not only what is there, but what can we know and how do we come to know? So they're, they're linked together.

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There's a distinction between the two disciplines, but they come together within philosophy.

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And one of the key issues is, is that, you know, when we look at the sufficiency of scripture, that's an issue of authority.

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The Bible and the Bible alone presents all the divine words necessary for faith and practice.

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Now think about what I'm saying there. If we need a divine word on something for faith and practice, how we live our lives and what the essence of Christianity makes up, that's the issue of the sufficiency of scripture.

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But then there are other things that the Bible assumes, which is a common doctrine of humanity about the fact that God created a world that all people live in.

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So for example, let's give just a few examples here. You don't find any divine words on how to fix your computer or on how to change your tire, because they're not necessary for faith and practice.

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But you do find divine words on things related to how do

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I go to heaven? What is the nature of justification? Is there such a thing as say, the perseverance of the saints and all of these different sort of essential doctrines in that regard.

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But you brought it up right when you're looking at things like, how do I look at things like the Pythagorean theorem?

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How do I look at issues with science? I don't have this sort of appendix in the back that gives me

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Einstein versus Newton and their different theories on quantum physics of other figures or relativity from Einstein.

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So what do we do with that? And the historic answer has been is that God has given us two books, one of nature and one in the text of scripture.

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And what comes from the book of nature comes from a common doctrine of humanity that says all people are made in the image of God.

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They have rationale. They're able to understand reality. It's something that's cross -cultural, cross -individual.

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So two people at two different times, two different places can come to know these things. And it doesn't attack the sufficiency of scripture in that regard, because it's

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God giving us common knowledge through a common doctrine of creation with common humanity found in the image of God in those individuals.

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So what's the controversy then? Because everything you said makes sense to me, right?

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There's natural revelation. There's special revelation. God's given us a way to sense the world through our mind and our sense perception.

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And we can understand in such a way that some things we know for certain. I don't see any problem with any of this, but there is one somewhere.

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So I think maybe the key to this is

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Aquinas or natural theology. Those are the words that I see the most being used by some on the more conservative

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Christian side. Those are the people that the person and the term that they attack and say, that's taking away this whole line of thinking that came from Aquinas from the

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Bible. And it's an attack, actually. I've seen some brutal things,

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Bill, said online about Aquinas. So what's the deal there?

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What's going on? Is he this Trojan horse, Catholic, pagan philosopher that's coming into evangelicalism, being brought into certain seminaries, or is there something that can be learned from Aquinas?

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Is there something valid there? Well, I think the issue that comes down to it is when it comes to natural theology, first of all, it's an issue where people think if you're doing natural theology, you're by default making this

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God of the philosophers, which is, in their idea, an idol as such.

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So what it is is it's a zeal to preserve the integrity of the God of the Bible.

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But when we start to look at different things, if something has the same attributes, then we recognize that there's something similar about it.

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So for example, if the God of the Bible is eternal, immutable, simple, and these kinds of things, and we can find a natural theology where there's a being that has those exact same characteristics, and we know that there can't be two beings that have those same characteristics, it's talking about the same being from two different avenues.

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So what they're trying to say is that if you take the natural theology avenue, you're leading yourself into idolatry because you have false interpretations of who

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God is. You're not infallible in the way that you're reading the book of nature.

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But when you come to the Bible, they're going to say it corrects those things. And in one sense, they're right. There are false pagan views out there.

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People have false ideas about who God is. And the

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God of Aristotle is not the God of the Bible because the God of Aristotle is this impersonal being.

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But it's not to say that when Christians are doing natural theology, and even when

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Paul is speaking in Romans about creation, we can know that there is a creator and his divine attributes, clearly taught in the text of Scripture.

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There's something that's going on there. But let's look at it in this sense. Let's back up and throw a term out there, explain the term, and then show how it can apply here.

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There's something within the discipline of philosophy and epistemology known as an infallibilist epistemology, which basically says that unless you have infallibility, you don't have knowledge about what's taking place.

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And where we see this start to come about is really in the debates between Protestants and Catholics.

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And we know that Catholics will point to tradition that's going to say, you know, when you're reading the

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Bible, you have your fallible interpretation of the text. You're not arriving at an infallible certain interpretation of it.

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So, come to Rome, and we'll give you the tradition from our infallible interpreter that's then going to help you interpret the text of Scriptures, and you sort of jump that gulf, and so forth.

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Well, we deny that kind of thinking for a variety of reasons. One, you don't have to have an infallible epistemology to have true knowledge.

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If you don't have comprehensive knowledge or absolute certainty on something, it's not as though you don't have knowledge.

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Now, I think you can have certainty. I'm not denying that at all. But here's the whole point. It's that when you look at the

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Roman Catholics, they don't have an infallible interpretation of their so -called infallible authority.

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Well, we as Protestants recognize that the Bible is an infallible authority, and we go, yeah, we don't have an infallible interpretation of our infallible authority.

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So, now we're down to fallible interpretations of infallible authorities.

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Now, I'm not saying that Rome is an infallible authority, but I am saying that it levels the playing field.

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That said, the same argument can be said when we're talking about the doctrine of God.

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People are looking at you saying, oh, you have these fallible, unregenerate interpretations of nature, and you're coming up with an idol.

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Well, look at all the different interpretations people have of the Bible. They have a fallibilist interpretation of their infallible authority, and sometimes they come to false conclusions.

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So, in one sense, I use this phrase a lot, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If I can show you people having errors in their interpretation of the

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Bible and coming to false conclusions, what's to say you can't do that with God's other book of common nature and nature itself?

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And we find that in competing ideas that are going on. But just because groups of people have wrong interpretations doesn't jettison the idea that you can have a true interpretation, because in that very claim, people are giving you a true interpretation about errors of reality.

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They're sort of superseding that concept. So, that's one of the issues it's coming down to is this idea of infallible authority and this notion that if you somehow start with the non -God or with creation or non -Scripture, you're always going to end up in error.

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But there's a lot of things that can be said about it, but that's one of the many key issues. You know,

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I had someone tell me the other day that in Acts 17, which may be a good passage to talk about in these regards, that Paul takes words used to worship

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Greco -Roman deities and then attributes them to the true God, and that what

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Paul was doing there was he was changing the interpretation of words.

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He was taking these words for his own purposes and completely changing them. But the more I thought about it, the more

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I thought, I don't know that that's what he was doing. It seems to me like more like what he was doing was he was taking a term that already had a meaning, and the pagans, it seems if you read the chapter, it just seems like it flows this way.

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The pagans were grasping at something they didn't understand. It was like if a young boy said daddy, but they called them, you know, someone else daddy.

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They said the mailman's daddy or something like that. And, you know, the mailman's not daddy. This is daddy. The interpretation of the word didn't change.

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It's just that it's being applied to the correct person.

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And that seems like what Paul was doing is like, hey, you're worshiping this unknown God over here. You're getting started.

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You're seeing some things that are true. But let me give you the full story over here. This is daddy.

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This is the person that you're actually striving for. Now, this is the John Harris, you know,

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I'm relying on Bill Roach to just correct this if I got anything wrong in that because I haven't read any commentaries or anything else.

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I'm not necessarily supporting what I'm saying, but I sensed a dividing line even right there. One person is telling me that what

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Paul's doing is fundamentally changing paradigms and giving new meanings to words.

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And then what I'm saying is I think closer to what you're saying is that it's not a fundamental paradigm change.

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Pagans can get some things right. There is possible for them to look at the world, use their sense perception, use their minds and figure out some things.

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But it doesn't mean that they're going to get it all the way. They're not going to find out

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Jesus died for them and all this. They need special revelation. So I don't know if that's what popped into my mind.

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That's a big part of it. There are two really big or different interpretations of sort of the

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Acts 17. And you can just look at, say, how Sproul has interpreted Acts 17. And Bonson even has a different interpretation of Acts 17.

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They think that they're both fulfilling the biblical mandate in that regard. But it really comes down to a debate on what's the relationship between faith and reason.

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And like you've said, there are certain things that reason can know that's coming from a common doctrine of humanity.

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And when we look at reality, there are things like the laws of logic. There are certain features about that.

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The law of identity, how things just exist, how contradictions can't both be true and not true at the same time.

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Law of non -contradiction in that sense. Law of excluded middle. Law of causality. You know, every effect has a cause and that effect can't rise higher than its cause.

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These are things that we use to just operate in reality. But there are limits to that.

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You can know that God is eternal, immutable, simple, and all of these other things.

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But that's not going to give you what the special revelation, what faith. And now, faith isn't blind faith.

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Faith is the articles of faith. And when we look at it, they're nothing less than rational, but they're more than what reason in and of itself can give.

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It's that which God must reveal to you. And that's things like justification by faith alone, the doctrine of the

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Trinity, the incarnation of Jesus Christ. You don't see any of the ancient

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Greeks or the Platonic or the Aristotelian philosophers buying into that. In fact, they ridiculed that.

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In fact, that's what we find in Acts 17 that's taking place. So what you actually find is that there are great books related to this.

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And I think probably the best book that I've seen on it is God and the Philosophers by Étienne

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Gilson, who is a top Thomistic scholar. And it doesn't have anything to do with Thomism.

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He's a historian of philosophy that said there were some radical things that went on from really the death of Christ on and the history of philosophy.

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And it was the advent of Christians coming into it. You see figures like Augustine and Anselm and Aquinas taking biblical revelation and correcting what's going on in these pagan philosophers.

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But they also recognize, because of the common doctrine of humanity, that there are certain things that they got right, even if they didn't get everything right.

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For example, the pagan who happens to put the wiring inside of my house, he got something right.

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I'm not going to say that they're wrong every single time. But here's where the crux comes down to. Here's really we can recognize these issues.

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Within classical realism, there's this idea that humanity can know reality and that there's a common doctrine of humanity that gives us true knowledge across different times, people, and places.

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Whereas presuppositionalists are going to say it's not the ontological grounding, but upon the presupposition of the

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Christian worldview, you can have knowledge. So unless I have this whole presupposition of the

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Christian worldview, I can't account for knowledge of anything, mathematics and all of it.

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Now notice what I'm saying. I'm not saying the grounds of it. Everybody agrees that the grounds of knowledge have to be the fact that God is the creator who gave us a stable creation that we can know.

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It's based off of this idea that based upon only this presupposition, can

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I justify any knowledge claim? And what classical realists are saying is that I can explain it in a different way.

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I can say people can justify truth claims, not just based off of that axiom alone.

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In one sense, it's not just a one -legged stool. In that sense, I can give you a three -legged stool or just to build off of it, one that has a more sure foundation.

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So instead of saying that can justify knowledge, I can say, well, how about this? There's a common doctrine of humanity and we all are made in the image of God.

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And based upon that, we can justify truth claims amongst both the pagan and the

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Christian. And I think that it's one, based in biblical revelation. And two, it doesn't claim too much because the issue that presuppositionalists run into is, well, how do we actually justify truth claim?

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Not the grounding claim, but the presupposition claim. And they're going to argue, well, they're presupposing the

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Christian worldview and what they're saying. But in the next breath, it's going to be whatever the pagan thinks and whatever the pagan does, it's antithetical pagan thought.

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And again, you're assuming that in those instances, they have an infallible interpretation of the

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Christian worldview that they're banking upon when they're then talking about something else, which is axiomatically opposed to what they're trying to claim in every other sphere of knowledge.

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Yeah, so this was something I was into years ago. I read a lot of Bonson.

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Schaefer was probably the first one, but then that got me into all kinds of other areas. And so this was something

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I wrestled with. And I actually put, some people have even seen it, a whole course on presuppositional apologetics.

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But the thing, you just hit on something that was always a lingering thing in the back of my mind was

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I thought about Adam. I thought about the first man who didn't have, he had revelation from God, but it wasn't anything like what we have in our scripture.

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And yet he had, God expected him to live a life that God wanted him to live.

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And he was able to, I mean, within a very short order, his children are making instruments and building cities and all of these things.

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And so there's an order that happens. And so all they really had was the stories that Adam might've told them, the limited stories about his interactions with God, and then the sense perception and the minds that God gave them to interact in the world.

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And I thought, well, how does it work for them? Are they assuming the Trinity? They don't know about the Trinity. I mean, there's nothing to indicate that they would have known that.

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And so there was, I think I mentioned to you a book that I read. Now I got rid of it.

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I had it pulled up here a minute ago, returning to reality. I think it's by Paul Tyson, where he talks about Christian Platonism and traces through, especially the new

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Testament, how Paul constantly uses platonic terminology to describe things within Christianity.

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Like you go to like first Corinthians 13, we see dimly, but then we'll see face to face.

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This is kind of like the world of forms. He talks about a lot of these, it's all over the new Testament. I didn't realize how much.

30:45

And so there is this place. And I know John Frame has wrestled with this to some extent, where he tries to take even the

30:53

Thomistic arguments and say, look, these are all valid arguments. It's just that Christians kind of come with us understanding that God exists.

31:00

When we apply them, we don't start with a man as a autonomous being.

31:07

And so these have been discussed for thousands of years. It's not like someone's going to come along.

31:13

Saying nothing new. I mean, it's just what it is, is it's a bunch of people that are really zealous for a debate that's been going on for centuries now.

31:21

Right, right. And what I say it comes down to really is it's an issue of how does reasoning function?

31:28

And if you, I mean, I have a whole shelf sitting right over there of book after book after book of presuppositional thinkers, because I wrote my dissertation on presuppositional epistemology on Carl Henry and the avenues of Clark and Van Til.

31:44

So this is not something that I'm just sort of opining about. I mean, I had to defend a whole doctoral dissertation.

31:50

And ironically, I defended it almost in favor of it. I said, I used to not only flirt with, but I probably dated presuppositional epistemology.

32:00

And it's because I was immersed in the literature. But it comes down to what is the full validity of using the transcendental method about all claims of knowledge.

32:14

And the transcendental method for anybody who's read presuppositional literature, that is, you know, one of the first words you have to learn.

32:22

And transcendental methods find their root within what's known as idealistic philosophy.

32:29

But Immanuel Kant and his transcendental method. And really what it comes down to is, is that knowledge can start in reality, but not all knowledge comes from reality.

32:39

You have categories of thought that are trying to sift and put reality together.

32:45

And here's the analogy that I like to give. If you've ever driven in the snow at night and you're in your car and you've got your lights on and you see the snow and it's all scattered, it's coming at you from every which direction.

32:57

But when it's in the light, you can sort of categorize it. You can see where it's at. Shut the lights off.

33:03

Well, the snow doesn't have any categories or lights to put it all together. Turn the lights on and you can kind of see what's going on.

33:11

It's giving categories to it. And in many respects, that's kind of what Kant is saying knowledge is like.

33:16

The world out there is scattered, uncategorized.

33:22

And the categories of the mind are like the lights on a car. When they shine upon reality, it gives structure to reality.

33:30

But he would also say things like you don't know the thing in and of itself, but only as the mind structures it.

33:38

And when you look at these great debates that were going on in sort of post -Kantian debates with it, you find individuals like Kuiper, who were saying, or Diltai, who would say things, who's a non -Christian in that sense, saying this is what worldviews are.

33:54

It's these whole encompassing ideas that you structure and place upon reality.

34:01

And the Christians are saying with these guys like Kuiper, when you're looking at reality, you have to presuppose the whole of the

34:07

Christian worldview to account for any knowledge claim or any uncategorized thing of snow and your car light in that sense.

34:16

But you also had figures that said, no, we're not going to buy into transcendental reasoning. I still want to say that we can know reality in and of itself.

34:25

The mind can have direct knowledge of reality because I don't want to give into transcendental reasoning.

34:32

And that's why when you see this shift, you kind of had two big avenues that people were taking.

34:38

Within more Roman Catholic circles, people were reading more within that Thomistic ground that was going about.

34:47

Within more Protestant circles at that time, you had Thomas Reed and his sort of naive realism.

34:53

And there's a strong similarity between them. Now, the nuances, somebody can shred the nuances, but the reality is both of them, both groups were saying the mind can know reality.

35:04

It doesn't have to be according to transcendental reasoning. And for that, I can make truth claims about reality without having to have the whole idea slapped down to it, sort of in that Kantian sense of the term.

35:18

And that was what the big debate was, just taking it one step further between Kuiper and Warfield. Warfield said, no, there's a common science because there's a common knowledge because he wasn't presupposing transcendental reasoning.

35:31

Whereas Kuiper was saying, no, there's a distinctly Christian science and a distinctly non -Christian science, and you can't overlap or merge them.

35:40

And that's what people are doing. Take that exact same debate and play it into any other issue that's going on.

35:47

And people are doing it right now with Thomism saying that's just baptized Aristotelianism. And I think we have a better account for it by one, denying transcendental reasoning and full deductive slam down sort of transcendental thinking like that.

36:02

And we can account for it as a common doctrine of humanity and common knowledge between people. Let me push back on one thing.

36:11

I don't believe the light analogy is great. Christians would say the lights are the Christian worldview. You put these

36:16

Christian worldview glasses on, you see everything makes sense. And one of the things that I've enjoyed and I like about the presuppositional guys is they say that the reason, like when they appeal to unbelievers, the reason that I can make sense of the world is because what

36:34

I believe comports to the reality out there. You're off here saying that men can be, you know, women and women can be men.

36:43

And like, we all like knock it off. We all know that's stupid. We all know that's not true. I can make sense of why that's not true, why women are women and men are men.

36:52

And that seems true to me. Like that's, that is a very like plus one for Christianity right there.

36:57

Like the Bible describes the world as it is. But when we say that though, there is that as it is that we're appealing to.

37:05

There is this like, we do think our senses are actually seeing things as they are.

37:13

We are able to ascertain knowledge from the real world around us. So I don't know if that's an

37:18

Achilles heel or not, but that's, I think that's one of the main things that I always got from presuppositionalism is, hey, you guys are looking at the world and the way you're looking at the world, it makes no sense.

37:29

And you're running into all these corners. If you see it from our perspective here, that it comports with what we actually live in.

37:36

We both live in the real world, right? Is that seems valid to me, right? And I think it's completely valid.

37:43

And I think it's the issue is it's a test for truth and presuppositionalists aren't the only one that had that test for truth.

37:50

You know, livability and the practicality of something is a test for truth. Ironically that line of reasoning on consistency,

38:01

I can go and show you several platonic dialogues where Socrates does that over and over and over again, where he's calling people to consistency with their truth claims.

38:13

So it's not just presuppositionalists who do that. It's also non -presuppositionalists who are able to do it.

38:20

But I think when you're looking at the issue of the, I'm trying to remember what you said earlier there of how do other groups try to look at different approaches to knowledge.

38:32

And you're looking at guys like frame and others, you know, the claim about traditional classical theism.

38:39

And that it's not like you have Thomas's and then Augustine's.

38:44

Classical theism is a tradition from Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas. And I would even go so far, you know, writing on guys like Fesco to say

38:54

Calvin and Edwards and Warfield and Gerstner are within that.

39:01

But the claim is, is that that line of thinking is one of two things. One, it's somehow less than reformed.

39:08

So you kind of get into this where you have the truly reformed and the less than reformed. Well, I'm never going to look

39:13

John Gerstner in the face and say he's less than reformed. I'm afraid his raspy voice would come after me.

39:20

But the big issue is, is that it's somehow baptized Platonism or baptized

39:25

Aristotelianism. And I would actually make the case that presuppositional apologetics is nothing more than baptized

39:31

Kantianism. They're doing the same thing. They're just justifying it in a different era of philosophy.

39:38

And that's why R .C. Sproul was so keen on saying it's either Aquinas or Kant. You either know reality in and of itself, or the mind somehow structures reality.

39:50

But now let's think about this in a little broader sense. Do we really want to buy into the idea that the mind is structuring reality like that?

39:58

And this idea of perspectivalism, even if it's a baptized Christian perspectivalism, because my whole argument is this.

40:06

Perspectivalism, even a glorious, royal, divine, inspired perspectivalism is still a form of perspectivalism, which is still a form of subjectivity.

40:18

It doesn't have trans paradigm ways of justifying truth claims.

40:24

It's on this I can do it, but I can't get it across the board. Whereas I think the strength of sort of this classical method is that it's not a perspectivalism.

40:36

It's a form of objectivity. And it's something that I can justify with Christians and non -Christians, not because I'm presupposing as my category, the foundation of the

40:49

Bible, but because I'm really doing justice to the fact that we have a common humanity.

40:55

And as Christians, we go, well, it's not just, oh, we're just rational beings. It's, we realized God made us in his image.

41:02

And part of that is that rationality is given to us. Now, what about the noetic effects of the fall?

41:09

Yeah, we're not denying that. We're not infalliblist in what we're saying, but we are saying that given the fact that humanity is made in the image of God, and even with the effects of sin, we can overcome that fallenness and finitude to make truth claims.

41:25

Well, how? We see it happen all the time. People do it all the time. You drive on roads where fallen people have made roads.

41:32

You have medical doctors that aren't saved. They're making true claims about when they open up your body and they do surgery on you.

41:41

So I think what's happening is, is the presuppositionalists are almost claiming too much in their idea and they're presupposing too much transcendental idealism.

41:51

So now that you've made half the audience mad, I want to ask you a question because, um, you see, so maybe

42:00

I'm still struggling through some of this. I, uh, I think for me, when I, I had a big question, this was probably 2017 about classic literature and pagan literature too.

42:12

Like, you know, why should we read, you know, the Iliad or the Odyssey or something like the Puritans actually thought no

42:18

Greek statues, no Greek architecture, no anything from that literature. And it was in the

42:25

South. It was actually Charleston, South Carolina for a while there that was keeping Oxford university press afloat because they were buying all this classic literature.

42:33

And you can even see it in the architecture down South. So this is like a, also in my mind, like a historical divide. And I started,

42:39

I started exploring that. Like, why is it that in the North, you know, the Puritans thought this way in the South you had, um, you know, the, the, uh,

42:46

Episcopalians and the Presbyterians primarily, they didn't think that way. There was a complete divide.

42:51

And then you see that, uh, Paley was really big, you know, they would use Paley down South and a lot of their seminaries and their institutions.

42:59

And so I started struggling with this and I started seeing, you know what, there is some validity to, we, we should like a classical education is important, but I also have, you know, maybe you can help me with this.

43:11

I also have like a soft spot for the presuppositional apologetic stuff. I still, even as you're talking, I'm thinking of all the things like Monson's told me that, you know,

43:19

Oh, I am too. I hear the ghost of Bonson and MP3s, you know, in the background all the time. And I, I know what his response is.

43:26

And that's why I'm saying things, not the ontological grounds, but the epistemological presupposition of all knowledge is it all immediate versus, versus media knowledge.

43:36

You know, Sproul would have said we can have immediate versus Bonson would claim we need to have immediate in that regard.

43:44

Um, yeah, I sympathize. So the thing about like a pagan literature though, is there's virtue in it.

43:49

Now, some of the virtues we don't like, you know, we, we, some of the morals are, I should say, are, are repugnant, even if you,

43:56

I mean, go read some Socrates, right? Find out what he thought. We're not saying these guys don't have issues, right?

44:01

We recognize massive issues. I mean, Augustine even talks about that in city of God, where he critiques

44:06

Platonism again, we're not just baptized Platonists. When you go and read things like Augustine city of God and he has radically taken the pagan where they could never go.

44:18

In fact, Aquinas, his whole work on being an essence is to show exactly where he differs from Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus and pseudo

44:28

Dionysus. And when people try to make those kinds of claims, I look at it and I go, I'm not getting into any of the, the apologetic methodology.

44:37

I just look at this as a historian of philosophy. And I'm kind of just going right there.

44:42

Like, where's the book? It's right there. Like it says, you know, somebody ever went about and said, well, you know,

44:48

Augustine said all of these things and you didn't read his retractions, like later in life, you'd be like, right there.

44:56

He said the opposite. And that's kind of what's going on as you find these guys saying that's, that's not where I'm at.

45:02

I'm going above and beyond. Okay. So here's the question that I wanted to ask you. Can you name one good thing that you like about presubstantial apologetics or one thing you appreciate?

45:11

Here's, here's my big thing. If anybody's ever heard me say things like this, I'm not a fan of what's known as minimalism and apologetics.

45:17

I'm not where William Lane Craig is. And there are a variety of different sort of classical approaches in this sense.

45:24

And, you know, you've got William Lane Craig. I'm arguing about the generic idea of a, you know, blanket theistic

45:30

God and the general probability of the resurrection. I'm not there at all.

45:36

And one of the reasons I'm not there, it's because I'm not a pure evidentialist in that regard.

45:42

And neither is classical apologetics in that regard. So when you look at presuppositionalist, the beauty of it is, is they don't want sort of a watered down Christianity.

45:51

They want a fully orbed Trinitarian, high Christology, high soteriology.

45:58

And I go, praise the Lord. That's exactly what I want. I don't want a generic God because I don't stop at God as just this eternal, infinite, immutable, simple being.

46:11

I say, God is nothing less than those things. However, this is where the message comes in.

46:17

God is significantly more than those things. Namely, He's three persons within one essence, the divine

46:24

Trinity that has revealed itself. So I think that's one of the greatest strengths that it has.

46:31

But when I look at this debate that's gone on today, sort of on wokeism, you've heard this, this is kind of where I think the rubber meets the road.

46:39

The historic answer has been wokeism is false because it's, what is it, contrary to or antagonistic against the

46:48

Christian worldview. And I go, I agree, but how do you understand worldview?

46:54

The big picture, slam it down, has to be everything. Or can you just say, well,

47:00

I think wokeism is false because it's false. Or you could say something like this.

47:06

All truth is God's truth. And here's the key. This is the big thing. I want people to listen to this. If it's actually true.

47:12

So not only do I think that wokeism is contrary to the Christian worldview, I think as it sits on the table, it's false.

47:20

And a common doctrine of humanity has allowed individuals who are secular atheists to the most reformed

47:28

Christian or the non -reformed Christian or the most, any of those regards to see that it's false because it's something that's just false as it sits on the table.

47:38

Not just because it's contrary to the Christian worldview, just like two plus two is five is false as it sits on the table.

47:47

In the same sense, I really think it's that fundamental of a philosophical error. So when resolution nine passed in the

47:53

Southern Baptist convention, you had a herald of woke guys saying, wait a minute, we use

47:58

Greek philosophy for some things. Why can't we use critical theory? And Bill Roach says, what? My answer is because it's false.

48:07

Aristotle's logic is fundamentally different and critical theory and perspectivalism.

48:14

That's why. But I'm saying much more. That's on the most basic level.

48:20

It's also false because everything that it claims is directly contrary to the

48:25

Christian gospel. It's grievance instead of repentance and faith in Christ.

48:32

It's instead of, we have a thus saith the Lord who's revealed himself in the inspired infallible inerrant scriptures.

48:39

You have a very, very encultured white versus black interpretation of what's going on with doctrine and perspectivalism.

48:49

So I agree it's contrary to the Christian worldview in a classic worldview sense.

48:54

And I have a whole video on that. If somebody wants to look on my YouTube channel with it. So I'm saying in two regards,

49:01

I agree, but I think we can also just say, no, it's just false on the table. Isn't one of the big differences between the two though, that, and I think you explain this to me.

49:10

So I'm putting it in more layman's terms. If you look at Thomas Aquinas and even some of the

49:15

Greco Roman philosophers, they were trying to deal with reality. What's fundamental to reality.

49:21

What can we observe about this world that we live in? What laws exist?

49:27

It's out there. And where does the scientist trying to go find it? It doesn't come from us. It's outside of us.

49:33

And then in critical theory, though, it's actually, all it is, is an abstraction in one's own mind.

49:40

It doesn't actually come. There's no stable external reality that's out there for critical theorists because they're idealized.

49:47

That's one of my big fears is that in the broad picture of it, if you're in the stream of idealism, you're within the stream of subjectivity, whether that's

49:59

Christian subjectivity or critical subjectivity or queer subjectivity or anything, because subjectivity is subjectivity.

50:07

And the only way to get rid of it is you have to just deny that fundamental starting point and argue from reality.

50:13

And it's funny, when you look at the history of ideas, you look at the pre -Socratics, they had rampant, rampant, rampant relativism.

50:23

And one of the of Plato and Aristotle is they put to death for generations, relativism.

50:30

Now they grounded it in a world of forms, which is nothing more than just saying there's a stable essence that makes up reality.

50:37

Plato put them in an extra material world. Aristotle put them in the physical world. But what did

50:43

Christians come along and do? They said, well, there's some truth to it. Forms are in the material world, yet there's also some kind of extra world sense to them.

50:51

How can we account for them? They're divine ideas. And God, when he creates, he manifests those divine ideas in reality.

51:01

But what we find ourselves in today is that there's no stable reality and no stable divine ideas within critical theory and postmodernism and relativism.

51:11

And we're almost living in that chaos of the pre -Socratics again. And I think it's going to be coming about with an objective worldview and the objective way that we ground that worldview in the nature of God and divine ideas and divine revelation in Scripture and external reality, that we can actually beat this.

51:31

So all truth is God's truth if the thing's actually true and grounded in the actual

51:36

God of reality. I'll never forget what Bruce Little, who I know you were a colleague with for a while at Southeastern, told me when

51:42

I was in seminary that the reason that gender was under attack and becoming a social construct in the minds of so many, they think that's what they think of gender, is because of the slackening hand of Plato.

51:53

I still remember him standing up in class and he did it with his hand, I think, as he said, it's the slackening hand of Plato, that there is no, as you said, a stable element anymore.

52:03

Everything is up for grabs. And so power becomes the, if there is a stable element, it's just that there's power.

52:09

Someone gets to come in. And I mean, this paves the way for totalitarianism, does it not? That's exactly what it is.

52:14

You just have, who can yell the loudest and who can punch the hardest and who can put the most political power on you.

52:22

And that's what politics is today. We don't talk about what's good, true, and beautiful, what's just and unjust.

52:28

It really just comes down to power structures. Why? There's nothing more than competing paradigms. Get away from perspectival paradigmatic thought and get back to an objective reality and you can have, well, this is actually right.

52:43

And it's right for everyone at all times and all places. Amen. Well, we'll land the plane here a bit.

52:49

And if anyone wants to ask you questions, I'm sure I'll get a lot of questions after this episode, but you're the philosopher.

52:55

So where can they find you? I know you said you have a YouTube channel and we talk about some of this. Is that the best way to find you?

53:01

Yeah, go to my YouTube channel and I'm going to be putting out more. I actually have a few videos where I talk about this one on classic versus historic worldview theory.

53:11

And I really just lay that out in more specific detail. Do you want to see the hermeneutics of it?

53:16

I did one on kingdom hermeneutics, which, you know, if you put the word kingdom in front of it, it somehow makes it acceptable.

53:24

Right. And my whole point is, is that when people are looking at Gadamer, Heidegger, and all the rest that they're really buying into modern day hermeneutical theory.

53:34

And I look specifically at Walter Strickland's chapter on that in his thing.

53:40

It's called kingdom hermeneutics. And we try to investigate why that's actually contrary to the

53:45

Chicago statement of biblical inerrancy and specifically the Chicago statement of biblical hermeneutics.

53:51

But one of the things that I'm actually going to do is I'm actually going to give a whole talk at the international society of Christian apologetics.

53:58

And I'm going to talk about the relationship between hermeneutics and critical theory and why we as evangelicals must return to an objective form of hermeneutics.

54:11

If we're going to actually be able to win the battle at that level with critical theory, we can't buy their perspectivalism and their subjectivity and somehow overcome the concept of subjectivity.

54:22

So again, that's what we're going to look at at ISCA in March. Yeah. Oh man, I'm looking forward to that. That's great.

54:27

And I hope people can make it out to that because that's going to be definitely worth your time.

54:33

So, um, you know, Bill, as a white male, no, I'm just kidding. Can you be authoritative on everything you just said to me?

54:40

I'm just kidding. No, apparently no. Well, um, I appreciate you coming on the show, talking about some of these things.

54:47

I think it's probably raised a lot of people's minds, more questions, maybe than answers, because, let's face it.

54:53

Some of this stuff is deep. Some of this stuff requires a lot of thinking, maybe, you know, take your vitamins and maybe an

54:59

Advil to, uh, to delve into this subject metaphysics and epistemology are very, um, deep subjects, but, but you've given us,

55:07

I think at the very least a, a starting point to, to start to understand these categories, why there is this debate that's existed for so long.

55:15

And so I'd encourage people go check out your YouTube channel. You have some good videos on this and, uh, looking forward to maybe seeing you then at the apologetics conference.

55:24

We hope we can see you then. And we hope that we see a lot of people there. And again, you know, we're not out here to, um, put down these other people on the other side of the apologetic debate.

55:35

You know, I just really want to finish by saying the people that would differ with me on that are faithful Christians.

55:42

They love the Lord. They serve their church well, and we may differ on this and that's okay because given the regimes that we live under, when it comes to the political structures that we're facing and issues, and really the, the debates that we're facing with issues, you've looked at like the wokeism and all of that.

56:02

These figures are definitely men that I want to lock arms with. So don't act like this divide is something that's earth shattering and that you can't sit down at a table or take the

56:13

Lord's supper with them. This is a debate that's been going on for centuries. And if men like Kuiper and Warfield can sit down at the

56:22

Lord's table together, and Bonson and Sproul can sit down at the Lord's table together.

56:27

This is something that me and others who would maybe take a presuppositional approach.

56:32

We can still sit and share the Lord's supper together with one another, because we're

56:38

Christians made in the image of God, following the scriptures to the best of our ability. All right.

56:44

Well, on that note, Bill, I appreciate it so much. You've done a good deal of, you brought a good deal of help,

56:50

I think, to our side as far as on the anti -social justice, pro -Christian side.

56:57

And I just can't thank you enough. You've helped me understand some things too that I didn't put together. And so if anyone wants to check out the conference, again, go to iska -apologetics .org

57:08

and you can go to YouTube, I guess, just type in Bill Roach on YouTube, you'll come up with Bill Roach's YouTube channel. I'll try to remember to put the links in the info section and go get you some

57:16

Gold River tea as well. Goldriverco .com promo code conversations.