Presuppositionalist Author Interviews Eli Ayala (Audio Gets fixed at the 2 mins & 20 Sec mark)

Interview Setup and Technical Difficulties

All right, well, this is going to be a little different. This is not another episode of Working with Apologetics, but it might as well be, since it is on my YouTube channel and my Facebook page. I'm going to be interviewed by Michael Robinson, who is an author, he's an apologist, and he's written many books at a very popular level, very accessible to folks on presuppositional apologetics applied to various religions, atheism, agnosticism, things like that.

And he has been so kind to invite me onto his show, but we were having some technical difficulties, so now we are here on my platform, and he is going to be interviewing me on the topic of his choice, all right?

So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Mike Robinson, and for his purposes, you can introduce me to the audience.

Fantastic, Eli, it's so good to have you. And for my audience here on Crossing Crown Radio on YouTube and the Gospel Truth Podcast, it's so great to have Eli. He's a apologist and theologian, and he's become one of the best apologetic interviewers around.

I kind of kid and call him the precept Joe Rogan, if you will. Obviously, he doesn't throw all the curse words out, but he's a good interviewer. I mean, he's interviewed, as you've probably seen your followers, so many different scholars and apologists and theologians.

It's great. So Eli, it's great to have you back again. How's life?

It's been very busy, but it's been wonderful. I'm being told that the audio is really bad on my end. Let me see here.

Let me see if I can find it. Ask the people if it's just you or me and you on the audio.

All right, your audio is really bad. It's my audio, so let me try doing this. How about now? Does that sound a little better? No, it still sounds real grainy. Okay, so let me try one more. I can't hear you now.

It's silent on your end. Still silent. I'll let you know when I can. How about now? Perfect. Much better? Much better. Okay, it's probably because of the headphones that I had on. All right. Do you mind if we start the whole show over or is that a hassle?

Well, we can start here and I can send you the video and you can edit it on your end and just remove this part if you'd like.

Okay. Yeah, we'll just continue then. So we don't have to do any of the intro. So you said, I asked you, how's life? I don't know if our audience quite heard that yet.

Life, Work, and the New Book Project

Yeah, things have been very busy. As folks know, I'm also a middle school, high school teacher. I'm a youth director and I do YouTube. So it takes a lot of time and of course preparation. So things have been a little busy, but they've been good.

I'm actually writing a book called the Precept Answer Book and in which I'm going to just in a, actually you mentioned Hank Hanegraaff not that long ago that it's actually the book that I'm writing is inspired by his Bible answer book.

And so what I wanted to do was take common questions on presuppositional apologetics and provide an almost devotions-length answer so that it's a nice reference tool for someone to say, how do I respond to that objection that presuppositional methodology circular?

And then we'll just have like a devotions-length response to that. I'm also working on an online school where people can sign up and learn presuppositional apologetic methodology where I'll be the instructor, people can sign up and have access to a video series where I unpack some of this stuff in a way that's easy for folks to understand and apply.

And that's going to be on the platform of my upcoming website, which we are currently in the process of hopefully launching maybe within a month or so. So all of that is in the works. So things have been really busy.

Wow, it sounds like you're super busy. That's great. You must have a jet pack on. Make sure you, if you have time, you may not, but alert me when you're breaking out in some of those areas and I'll bring you on and we can let everybody know about the website and all the other wonderful things that you're doing, especially the book.

The book sounds like a fantastic idea. So I'll be praying for you that that goes forward really well. You mentioned you're a school teacher, of course. How's the lockdown affecting your area and your school over there?

Well, things have been really inconsistent. So when someone has COVID and there's some connection with being in the school or someone in the school has it or whatever, we all go home and we teach online.

So it's been like a flip flop back and forth from teaching in person and teaching online. So we had like a week and a half off. We came back one day and someone in the school somewhere had it. So they sent us back home again and that happened twice.

And then now this week we've been in person for three days, but then now we have a blizzard. So now we're back home and then tomorrow is the last day until the Christmas vacation. So it's been a little hectic, but we're making the best of it and hopefully we'll survive this year.

So.

Wow. Now you are one of the people that my channel followers request the most that I bring back. And I think because of a few things, at least by reading their comments and just understanding your ministry, number one, you're really good at breaking down difficult concepts and ideas and ways that help non-specialists and non-scholars understand.

And so that's a wonderful gift. And I know it's also one of your goals. What inspired you to do that,.

To have that kind of approach? Well, I'm very practical in my approach. I mean, a lot of people tend to be fooled by all the books in the background. So people can look at me like, oh, you know, he's such a scholarly and studious person.

Like, listen, I have three little kids. I have two jobs and most of my learning, while I've glanced over many of my books, has been through audio exposure, lectures and things like that, because I just don't have the time to sit down and open up a book.

And so when I read a book, I read with the intention of answering the specific question that I'm bringing to the book. I don't have time to learn the ins and outs of Cornelius Mantill's upbringing and the different schools that he went to before.

I want the nuggets, you know, especially with the presuppositional methodology and the various objections that people pose against it. I wanna know how do I respond to this objection or how do I understand this or that argument without having to read the entire, you know, vast literature on the topic, because I just don't have the time.

And so when I finally get a grasp on what I'm looking for, my goal is to get that information to the average person so they don't have to plow through all of the literature, which if they can, that's great, but not everyone has that, you know, the time to do that.

And because that's the case with me, I'm very sympathetic towards that and I'm a teacher. So part of my training is to break down complicated concepts and simplify them. And so I try to do that to the best of my ability.

Well, precept is always needed that and it's really good that you're doing that. Now, before we get really deep in the apologetic issues, I have a question, just a quick question on the election and so forth.

But what do you think about this seemingly false election of Biden and the growing power of the progressives? How do you think that's going to affect apologetics? Should apologists and evangelists do something different in the ministry with unbelievers with this in mind, with the growing power the progressives have?

Well, I can't really speak to whether this election has had any fraudulent issues behind it because I haven't been following that aspect of the narrative that's been going on. However, when people are in power and certain organizations are able to kind of have a platform to promote certain views that are anti-biblical, then yeah, I think that can pose a challenge in the context of apologetics and certain social agendas are being pushed.

That's gonna require us as Christians to really be able to engage what people are talking about at various levels of society, whether it's at the popular level or if it's at the level of the media and politics and things like that.

And that's just, that is not something new that Christians are challenged with. I think that apologetics and living a consistent Christian worldview perspective requires us to apply public principles to those areas of life.

And so whether, if it was Biden or Trump or whoever was elected, I think the Christian was called to apply the Christian worldview consistently in whatever realm we find ourselves in. So it may be a little more challenging in the upcoming years but given the endurance of the Christian faith throughout history, I think the Christian worldview and many Christians who are seeking to honor Christ and everything that they do, I think they're quite up to the challenge and we should encourage others.

To do it to that challenge as well. I agree. Now you got your degree at Liberty University in theology. So how did you discover, I don't know if I've heard this on your videos directly, how did you discover the work of Van Til and Bonson?

Discovering Van Til and Greg Bahnsen

Yeah, well, my exposure to the presuppositional school of thought is probably similar to a lot of others in that the first time I ever heard of presuppositional apologetics was in the Gordon Stein-Greg Bonson debate in 1985.

And again, because I was already exposed to the more evidential and classical methodologies, there was something very unique about the presuppositional approach in that it was very much grounded in scripture.

Now there was philosophical language in Bonson's presentation to be sure and there's most definitely philosophical language found in the work of Cornelius Van Til, but the principles out of which that language came out of was very firmly grounded in the authority of scripture.

And I really resonated with that. It was unashamedly a Christian defense. I thought it was fascinating that Bonson sought to defend not some specific item of the Christian worldview, but he sought to defend the Christian worldview as a worldview system.

And that was another way that I never really thought of engaging in apologetics in that way. So that piqued my interest. And so I began to devour the works of Dr. Bonson. And then of course, by extension, you hear of Van Til and who's this Van Til guy?

And I began to read the books written by Van Til and the rest is history, I suppose.

Wow. I lived in Las Vegas when I first heard about Bonson and it was 1996. He died in December of 95. I'd never heard of him at all. I lived in Southern California just down the road from him without obviously knowing him because it's a huge place.

So now I'm in Las Vegas and a friend turns me on to, like you said, the Bonson-Stein debate. And I go, wow, this blew my mind. And he had all these other tapes, because that's how old this was, of Bonson and all of his lectures and stuff.

So we're just devouring it. We go, we gotta go down to his church, right? Now this is 96. We did not know that he died. So when I heard that he died after hearing dozens and dozens of his tapes, it's like, whoa.

So it hit me in a very personal way because I couldn't go down to his church and see him, which would have only been about five hours away from Las Vegas. So that was really interesting for me, but it really brought me, and I'm similar to you in some ways, obviously, in the evidential end of it that I started as an evidentialist working on college campuses and universities and demonstrating Christianity's truth from the evidence.

But once I got Bonson, I didn't chuck the evidence, even though I know Bonson and Van Til never said to, but a lot of people thought that. And I know you've discussed that on your YouTube channel. How does evidence fit in with the system of Van Til and Bonson and some of the other precept scholars?

Evidence Within a Presuppositional Worldview

Yeah, this is a very common misunderstanding of the presuppositional methodology, especially when someone comes from the more evidential and classical perspective and they see the value in the presuppositional approach, they're kind of torn between this dichotomy of, well, the presuppositional approach seems interesting and there's some value there, but these other arguments that I've become familiar with, arguments like the cosmological argument or the teleological argument or the moral argument, those more traditional proofs that are very popular in the apologetic literature, I don't wanna give those up because I see value in those as well.

And so you have the person kind of torn back and forth. It's either or. But in reality, because the Christian worldview is being defended as a worldview system, that everything within the Christian system bears witness of the truth of the system as a whole.

And so what we would teach as presuppositionalist is that everything is evidence for God. And if everything is evidence for God, then we can appeal to anything as evidence for God. The difference is that when we appeal to the evidence, we try to avoid two evils, two intellectual evils.

And this is highlighted in the work of Greg Bonson and Van Til. I'm not sure they refer to it as the twin evils, but I do. And I think this is what, these are the two things that the presuppositionalist who seeks to defend the faith in a way that's consistent with commitment to Christ, these are the two things that they want to avoid at all cost and they want to point out when these things rear their head both in the unbeliever and most especially in the apologetic methodology of the believer.

And that is the hidden assumption of neutrality and autonomy. Neutrality being that we can talk about facts completely independent of our worldview commitments. And we kind of just follow the facts where they go.

That's a more neutral approach. It's kind of a nobody knows as of yet mentality. And then there is this idea of autonomy which the word literally means self-law. And so we are a law unto ourselves. Our reasoning capacity doesn't really rely on the resources of divine revelation, but rather within the ability of the person's mind, they can just by pure reason, just reason themselves up to knowledge acquisition.

And so we want to avoid that because number one, it's impossible to actually function in those categories. No one is really neutral. And given the fact that everyone's made in the image of God, no one is actually autonomous.

But when we pretend that we can be neutral or autonomous or and autonomous, then not only do we destroy the strength of our own perspective, but we're actually functioning in mythological categories. No one is neutral.

No one is autonomous. And so the presupposition will take the evidence and these various arguments, and instead of present them in a way that assumes the possibility of neutrality and autonomy, they'll present them in a way that's more consistent with their broader worldview commitments.

And so we can formulate a cosmological argument, a teleological argument within the context of a worldview system that doesn't cater to the pretended neutrality and autonomy of the unbeliever. That's a fantastic point.

And that's what I really got out of it. Because when I got saved, I was 19 years old. I was a professional minor league baseball player. My life was perfect. Great family, money, everything I wanted. And all of a sudden I walk in the 7-Eleven store late at night in Van Nuys, California, and this long-haired Jesus freak guy comes up to me and says, if you die tonight, would you go to heaven or hell?

I was an atheist. I don't know. I don't care. I just get this Hershey bar and milk. And right there, he showed me my sinful nature and gave me the gospel. I got saved right at the counter of a 7-Eleven.

So I get saved at 19, and I'm thinking, wait a minute here. What did I do? And so I'm putting my autonomy in place here, not knowing what you had just said is being true. And so I went home. I go, OK, if this thing is true, if there's evidence for it, I'm all in.

If it's not, I'm going to do my own thing and have a great life. So my dad had a large library. I investigated every single world religion I could come across. I even went to a Jewish bookstore and said, I'm about to become a Christian.

I'm half Jewish. Give me all the reasons why I shouldn't become a Christian. And they couldn't give me anything. They gave me a book called, You Take Jesus, I'll Take God. I read that. It was very, very weak.

And so I remember one night, I was surrounded by books, sitting on my floor, surrounded by stacks of towers of books and thinking and crying out to heaven, wow, there's all this evidence and proof. I never knew.

And so my evidential heart was so pleased, thinking I could be the judge and I shouldn't be the judge. But that's how my inclination was, just put all this in. But we should never, ever put God in the dark.

God is God. And there is no autonomy, like you said. And these things are so powerful. And that brings me to the next question. It may just kind of piggyback on what you just said, or maybe you go in a different direction.

What are some of the most important aspects of Van Til and Bonson's thought that you think?

Scripture, Revelation, and the Triune God

Well, what drew me to them is really their commitment to scripture. I mean, a lot of people will argue, well, we can't assume the Bible's true. And there's just something about that that just doesn't sound very Christian.

And a lot of evidentialists will speak this way. It's like, well, you can't assume the Bible because that's the very thing we're trying to prove. And so they'll have something else put in place with regards to their ultimate authority.

And what drew me to Van Til and Bonson is that the way they presented the Christian faith just seems more consistent with what I see in scripture. Now, granted, you don't see the Apostle Paul or John or the disciples or Jesus speaking of transcendentals and presuppositions and things like that.

There is no denying that Bonson and Van Til definitely spoke in philosophical categories that were alien to scripture. But that's because, and I appreciate this, that's because Bonson and Van Til were speaking in the context in which they found themselves in.

Van Til was interacting with Barthian theology and idealism. And so he spoke in their language. But the soil out of which he spoke was grounded in principles that I think are very much biblical and include the supremacy of God and his revelation, the necessity of God's triunity, and how we should consider God as the grounding and foundation of our being and knowledge itself.

And so I found Van Til and Bonson to be very consistent with these scriptural principles in a way that I sometimes cringe when I hear other apologists not do it that way. And I say that respectfully. As you know, I've had many guests on my show who aren't presuppositionalists, but I highly respect the work that they've done and are currently doing.

So that's what drew me to Bonson and Van Til.

What do you think, and you've talked to so many scholars recently, what do you think is the main difference between Bonson's approach and Van Til's, and then maybe even go into the difference between some of the modern high-level scholarship, like James Anderson and Welty and those kind of guys, versus Bonson?

So kind of a little bit of evolution of Van Til to Bonson and Bonson to others.

Bonson, Van Til, and Contemporary Presuppositionalists

Yeah. Before I answer that question, I actually see some people asking in the comments, because this is on my platform, they're saying, who's Mike Robinson? And I just want to give a 30-second advertisement.

Mike Robinson is a presuppositional apologist and author, and he's written many books at the popular level on presuppositional apologetics, and this is interesting, as it applies to competing religious perspectives.

And so you definitely want to check out his books on Amazon. I have one in my room, not in my office here. I highly recommend Michael Robinson's books, especially if you're just beginning. He writes in a very, very easy to follow way, and so I highly recommend his book.

So that's who Mike Robinson is, if you're wondering who it is. And he's interviewing me, and the reason I'm on my platform here is because we were having some technical difficulties. So I figured going live, folks who follow my channel would appreciate it also.

So at any rate, go ahead. Your question was, what was the difference between Bonson and Van Til?

Yeah, and then because of all the scholars that you've interviewed recently, them and Bonson.

Yeah, well, I think Van Til is, in a very interesting way, when he was around, he was in a sense ahead of his time because of the things that he addressed. But at the same time, I think Van Til, unlike Bonson, can sometimes be, he could sometimes seem as though he's frozen in time.

And so that when you read Van Til's work, you're sort of wondering, well, who is he talking to? I mean, like, you don't recognize, unless you have a good grasp on the history of modern philosophy, like the idealist and the Barthians that he was interacting with, unless you have a knowledge of that kind of period in philosophical history, you're not really sure who he's addressing.

And so it's very difficult to see how Van Til applies his very interesting apologetic to the kind of like current and contemporary scene. So on the one hand, you can learn about his argumentation and I would highly recommend that people read Van Til to learn what he's saying.

But then once you read Van Til, it becomes much harder to apply it, to say like the new atheists or the people you find on the internet. And that's where Bonson is super helpful. And I'll admit it, Bonson wasn't working in ministry when the internet was around, but he was so practical and so knowledgeable in the work of Van Til and such an astute philosopher and an excellent teacher that he was able to take the difficulties of Van Til and solidify the key nuggets and convey that to the average person.

And so this is what we're missing today in the presuppositional realm today. We have scholars that write books and they're really great and we can follow along, but there's not many people who have both feet, both in academia and popular culture in the same way that Bonson had.

And so there's kind of something that we're missing when we're reading other presuppositionalists who are excellent, but not many people doing debates as Bonson did. And so it's hard to see the practical application to a lot of what Van Til was saying.

Also, I would say that when you take Van Til and Bonson, what you see lacking in both of them, which I think was developed more in more contemporary presuppositionalists is an expectation of the philosophical issue of the one and the many.

And so it's mentioned to what people are saying, they're having some audio issues. I'm not sure. Let me see if I can fix something here. I don't want people to feel as though, well, I'm using my microphone here.

You sound good from my perspective, not perfect, but pretty good.

Okay, yeah, I'm not really sure what's happening. Echo cancellation is on. Well, I'm not sure. So I'm gonna, I'll try to speak lower. Maybe if I'm speaking out loud, switching back and forth, understandable and not.

Not sure what's happening there. I've never had that problem using this before. Try plugging in headphones. Well, I was using headphones and that's the issue there. So let me see if I go on my YouTube channel and see how the audio sounds.

Give me like 10 seconds. Sorry, it seems helpful.

People helpful in the comments. They let you know, you know. Well, he's doing that. I'll plug his YouTube channel again, Revealed Apologetics. The great thing about Eli's channel is he's got dozens and dozens and dozens of videos on interviews with scholars, with his own teaching also, as well as some debates.

And so I would really encourage you. I get in my hot tub and I just turn them on and just sit there and bask and listen to his latest interview.

That's a first, hot tub apologetics.

That sounds like a great idea. Well, see, I turn my hot tub so hot because it's very good for you. I won't get into the physiology of that, but it's really, really good for you if it's really, really hot, but it's uncomfortable.

So to be able to sit in there, I need something to focus on.

Right, right. That's funny. Hot tub apologetics would be a great title for the podcast. I tell you what, if you're listening,.

Hot tub apologetics. That's really catchy, Ashel. Maybe there's something to it. You know, I don't know how your audio is going, but I have this book that might be interesting to a lot of our viewers, not because of the book title and what's in it, although that is too, and I'm sure a lot of our audience has this book probably in a different format, but notice the early format I have it in.

It's called Christian Theistic Evidences by Ventu. People say, oh, Ventu is against evidence. Well, here you go. But that's not the main thing because most of our audience probably knows that. But Gordon Lewis, it's his copy.

I don't know if you can see that. Gordon Lewis's copy, a guy who came against Ventu because Ventu didn't believe in evidence. He has, maybe he changed his view after he read this, actually got his copy on Amazon.

I didn't know it when I bought it was his copy. And I open it up, I go, wow, here's a guy who says Ventu doesn't ever use evidence. He's against evidence. And he actually read the book.

Nice, very good. That objection constantly is put out there. Now, another interesting thing is that Ventu and Bonson, while they didn't reject evidence, they didn't really expound too much as to what that would look like.

They would say that we don't reject it and they would explain why, but we don't see a lot of examples. Now, I met up with John Frame some years back in his office when he was working. And so it's been a couple of years, it's been some years.

And we spoke for a couple of minutes. And he told me that prior to Bonson's death, he actually was interested in working on a book that kind of put this issue of presuppositional methodology together with evidence and give various examples that I guess he never had the opportunity to work on.

But that would have been an interesting book. But there are others like Tom Notaro who wrote a book on Ventu and Christian evidences. And as I said before, that Ventu and Bonson didn't really hash out a lot of this whole issue with how the Trinity solves the philosophical problem of the one and the many.

I wanna, well, this is a difficult read, but it's an example of a young apologist, theologian pastor who moves Van Til's thought on this issue forward. Now it's a difficult read, but if people can put the work into it, I think it's super helpful.

His name is Brant Bacherman. And Brant Bacherman wrote The Vindication of Christian Paradox. I think that's what it's called. And he addresses this issue of why God, in order to ground intelligible experience and knowledge, why God must be a Trinity.

And he goes into the issue of why he can't be a bininity, one being two persons, or a quadrinity. And it's very interesting. He's got charts and graphs and explains it very well. And so I highly recommend people check out that book.

But that's an example of someone who pushes Van Til and Bonson's thought forward.

See, Bonson And you had him on your show too, correct? I did, and we had a two

Well, they can check this out, yeah. It was a two-hour interview, and it's long, but it is one of my favorite interviews. But if you take a look at Bonson, Bonson was an analytic philosopher who placed great emphasis on epistemology.

And so the value of Bonson that you're not gonna get from other people is that he focuses on those important epistemological questions. How does the unbeliever justify knowledge claims? And he explains how the Christian justifies knowledge claims.

And so there's a great emphasis on the epistemological side of apologetics that we really get a robust presentation of in Greg Bonson. Whereas someone like Bosterman focuses on the issue of the Trinity, or someone like Scott Oliphant, who really tries to recapture the presuppositional methodology within the language of scripture.

And so he speaks and emphasizes the importance of covenant, you see? And so all of these people kind of put together, I think, helped move forward what Van Til was trying to get at. And I think that's very important because apologists on the internet who are engaging in kind of that popularized interaction, we need to learn to move away from many of the presuppositional quips.

All men know that God exists and you're just suppressing the truth. Well, that's true, but you can't just establish it by simply saying it. We need to learn with gentleness and respect to explain to the unbeliever within the context of our interactions, our conversations, our debates, why that's the case.

And so while it's true that the presuppositional approach does not require the believer to be an expert in the field he's critiquing because of the nature of the method, you don't have to be, they're just key questions you can focus on, that shouldn't replace our desire to really learn what the unbeliever's saying so that we could really address them where they're at and apply our presuppositional argumentation or biblical argumentation to those specifics.

So I think that's something that all of us can work a little better at as we seek to move forward, what I think Greg Bonson and Van Til kind of provided for us a very strong foundation for. Yes, and I agree.

And I'll give a shameless plug only because what you said so important about giving the evidence and stuff, I've written a lot of books on that subject, including Science Requires God, get that on Amazon as well as God Does Exist.

And then I wrote a book called Fake Atheism, which tries to demonstrate Romans 1 and applies it. But those are important subjects that have to be, like you said, not just a slogan and then, okay, I'm done, but engaging the people in a conversation, listening maybe more than you're even speaking, you're really good at that, I've noticed.

And trying to be respectful, like scripture tells us, obviously some people have to be, you have to be bold to them and maybe even robust in your response, but most of the time it's just a matter of being humble and patient and listening and then giving them the law and the gospel and then giving them proper apologetics.

But what is, in your opinion, a really good proof for the existence of God? We know that tag can come in many different forms and in different ways of applying it. What would you say to the audience, a good way of saying that, say just to an atheist, he's kind of a nice atheist, if you will, but he basically says, you know what?

There's no proof for God. Yeah, well, with regards to our emphasis in the apologetic encounter, because it's gonna depend on who we're speaking with, I'm reminded of when I had Pastor Doug Wilson on my show and he kind of spoke about how C .S. Lewis was often very presuppositional in his approach and he said something very funny that I thought was useful for practical purposes because we think as presuppositionists, I have to argue in this way and I have to make sure I have to say this and that and you start mentioning transcendentals and indirect and direct proofs and people are like, I don't even know what you're talking about.

That Pastor Doug Wilson said that when C .S. Lewis was speaking to nice atheists, he was an evidentialist. Well, I mean, there's evidence for God in the created order. Look at, if you wanted to use a cosmological argument, you can look at the historical evidence for the resurrection and say, what do you do with this?

But when you're talking to the atheist who's not behaving nice, then C .S. Lewis was a presuppositionalist. Well, given your perspective, you can't make sense out of morality. You can't make sense out of logic and things like that.

So depending on who you're speaking with, the issue is not always whipping out a transcendental argument. We speak about specific evidences and specific arguments. As long as when we're doing it, the background music of our lives, our thinking, is always keeping in mind the place in which that argument or specific fact we're appealing to fits within our broader system.

And so we're always keeping our antennas up and our warning antennas, so to speak, when we're engaging in argumentation that is assuming that neutrality that we want to avoid or that autonomy that we want to avoid.

So I'll talk about historical evidence. I'll say, you know, I've had Dr. Gary Habermas on and he spoke about the minimal facts. I don't have a problem as a presuppositionalist using minimal facts, as long as it's not presented in a way and that assumes that, say, for example, historical studies could be understood independent of a Christian worldview.

As a matter of fact, the funny story, when I interviewed Dr. Habermas, he said that he actually knew Dr. Bonson, they were friends, and he ran his minimal facts by Dr. Bonson. And Dr. Bonson, after listening to it, Dr. Bonson said, and this is something Dr. Bonson would say, Bonson said, oh, no, no, no, that's not an evidential argument, that's a presuppositional argument.

And Gary Habermas was like, well, what do you mean? You know, I'm appealing to evidences here. He's like, no, no, no. What you're doing is you're saying that given the unbeliever's assumption about historical study, right?

Given his assumption, we still can demonstrate on their own standards the historicity of the resurrection. So on his assumption, the resurrection as a historical fact is warranted. On our assumptions, the resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact.

So there are ways to appeal to the specifics of history within a consistently Christian worldview context. But we don't always have to talk about that context. I remember another thing that John Frame once said, I don't remember if it was in a personal correspondence through Facebook or something, but he says, he says, I sure wish presuppositionalists could argue presuppositionally without having to give the unbeliever a history of epistemology.

That's normally what happens, right? People will say, well, you can't have knowledge without the Christian worldview because epistemologically, it's like, lay out the whole history of philosophy that really, it just weighs down the conversation and it just loses that practical punch of really conveying the point of what you're trying to say.

And that comes in unlearning what we've learned. If we're reading Van Til, if we're reading Bonson and listening to Bonson lectures, we need to know and learn how to contextualize the language so that what I'm, this is what Bonson was so great at doing.

When Bonson learned from Van Til, Bonson was able to take that information and convey it to teenagers. I mean, he gave classes to people who were off to college, high school students. And so we need to be more intentional about contextualizing what we learn so that we're not bogged down with all of the technical language, which is the source where most of us learn this stuff.