Classical vs Presuppositional Apologetics: Bahnsen vs. Sproul - Round #2

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God doesn't have those features.

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That's why this has always blew my mind. For God, for God, there's no such thing as over there.

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Everywhere is here for Him because He's present everywhere. That's both mind -boggling and so comforting because literally when

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God says, I will never leave you nor forsake you, He says that because He loves you, but He also says that because He can't help it.

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God is everywhere. He can't help to be everywhere. That's just the nature of who He is. You either embrace that on the side of redemption and say, praise

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God, my Redeemer is always here, or you can embrace that as an unbeliever and say, I can't stand the existence of a

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God who's always watching me, which is exactly what Jean -Paul Sartre said, the famous existential philosopher.

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He hated the idea of an all -seeing God who is always watching him all the time. See the difference? That's comforting to redeem people, but it's disgusting and intruding to people who hate

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God, but that's the nature of God. And all that to say, God is the ultimate, and so we deal with ultimates, we're gonna have to deal with circularity.

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Now, how do we avoid the fallacy of circularity? So we prove A by B, we prove

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B by C, and we don't want to go forever. So how do we prove our starting point?

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Well, if our ultimate starting point is in fact ultimate, I can't prove it by appealing to something else.

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You see how that works? Because then this thing is ultimate, not the ultimate that I said already, okay?

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For the presuppositionalist, we prove the truth of our ultimate not by appealing to something else, but by appealing to what a presuppositionalist say, by appealing to the transcendental necessity of that starting point.

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In other words, I want to demonstrate God's existence not by appealing to something more fundamental, but by appealing to the necessity of there being a

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God. In other words, if this God doesn't exist, we couldn't even have the conversation we're having. That's how essential he is.

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And what that looks like when we're arguing is going to be particular to the context, but that's the gist of a presuppositional method.

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Why must God exist in order for anything to make sense? That's going to be a discussion that can be had at the more sophisticated level, and it could actually be done at a very practical level.

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Ready? God is the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience. Your average neighbor's gonna be like, what did you just say?

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Okay, because that's no one who talks like you. Have you ever seen someone in the street talk about preconditions of intelligible experience? No, you don't.

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But in a casual conversation, for me, God makes sense out of the world. When I read the scriptures, it just gives meaning to everything around me.

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How do you make sense out of anything without God? Is that manageable? That's a transcendental argument in layman's terms.

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Basically saying, God is my foundation, I can't see the world any other way. How do you make sense out of a world without God?

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And then when they start giving your explanations, then you can poke holes in their explanation, right?

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And that can take different flavors depending on what they say. That's why it's important to not have a pre -planned script, right?

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Ask questions. We want to know what the unbeliever believes because we respect the unbeliever as an image bearer of God, and we want to hang them with their own rope.

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Okay, now I mean that joking, but I'm not joking. Like, I want to destroy the unbeliever's position, right?

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Because his position is foolishness. But I don't want to destroy the unbeliever's position because I hate the unbeliever.

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I don't want to destroy his position because I want to look smarter than the unbeliever. I want to destroy his position because it consists of ideas and beliefs that raise itself up against the knowledge of God, and the person's deceived.

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So out of care for the person, I do want to refute what they say. And the Bible uses that language as well.

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We, what, we destroy arguments. That's what the Bible says. Apologetics is just so harsh.

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I just, you know, we just need to respect the person. It's like the Bible is using destroy. It's using literally like military language.

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Destroy the foundations, okay? And that's what we should be doing. But we do it strategically, through conversation, a genuine care for the other person, with patience, okay?

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And as I think it was Greg Bonson or Cornelius Van Till was considered the father of presuppositionalism, he says that we want to be willing to buy the unbeliever the next cup of coffee.

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In other words, we want to interact with them in such a way that they want to have the conversation again.

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Like, you know what? I'll get the coffee. Why don't we meet here tomorrow? Well, a lot of people, we want to go straight for the jugular, and we want to destroy the person, not caring for the person.

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And so what is the person, they perceive you as an obnoxious Christian, especially you

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Calvinists. Guys always think you're right on everything, and we are, but I'm just kidding.

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But seriously, at least, I'm totally kidding again. All right, but you get the point, right?

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We want to be willing to buy the next cup of coffee. So we don't want to cut lines of communication. Sometimes we do this out of kind of a false sense of like humility, right?

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Well, I want to glorify God and what I say, and so we need to destroy falsehood, and then we use that as an excuse to flex our intellectual muscle and make someone feel stupid.

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That's unbiblical. Even if we use a presuppositional argument, it can be unbiblical if you use it like a jerk, because not being a jerk is part of the presuppositional argument.

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Isn't that right? If I call my ministry revealed apologetics, an apologetic that is revealed to us in Scripture, that includes not just the way that I interact with the unbeliever in terms of argument, that includes how

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I conduct myself, because speaking the truth as a jerk is going to just contribute to the person rejecting the truth that you're offering.

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So rule number one to apologetics, don't be a jerk. Don't be a jerk. Why are you being a jerk?

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What's going on? See, we need to be able to speak the truth in love and not use that biblical truth as kind of a platitude.

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It's true. We should speak in genuine love to the person. Now I speak sarcastically, and I'm being silly here, and that's just a teaching device so no one falls asleep, right?

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But in reality, I don't speak this bluntly with the unbeliever, but I have all of these things turning in my head, and I try to find opportunities to employ elements of this method with the hopes that I can get the next cup of coffee, right?

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So very important. Now the presuppositional procedure, Bonson lays out, and here's the procedure of the presuppositional approach, and this is less technical, it's kind of more rooted in biblical principles than philosophical terminology, but Dr.

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Bonson says that presuppositional apologetics, the procedure, what this looks like involves rejecting foolish presuppositions.

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Now presupposition is a fancy word which refers to like our elementary assumptions about the world, okay?

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If you want to be a good presuppositionalist, avoid foolish assumptions that are not rooted in the

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Word of God, right? I do not want to adopt standards that the unbeliever is adopting in his

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God -denying perspective, and that's biblical, that's not philosophical and technical. We want to avoid foolish presuppositions.

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We want to present the facts within a Christian context. We are evidentialist in a sense.

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I want to use evidence for the Christian faith with the unbeliever, but I don't want to present this evidence outside of the context of my

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Christian view of the world. In other words, when I talk about science with the unbeliever, I don't talk about science as though it's this field out there that both of us have equal justification for using.

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I'll speak of science, but I'll say, but science only makes sense within a Christian framework, right?

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And we can get into the details of that, but the point is, within a presuppositional approach, we are not allergic to using evidence.

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If someone were to ask me, you know, what's the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, and I'm a presuppositionalist, I'm like, well, how do you make sense of evidence to begin with?

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I wouldn't go that route. I'd give him the evidence. There's plenty of evidence, okay? And if he said, man, that's great,

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I never thought about that, you know, like, hey, I'm not gonna be like, no, no, you have to wait. I didn't get to, like, my presupposition. That's not how it works, right?

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That's not how it works. I give the evidence, I answer the questions, and when the discussion moves towards a situation where I now have to identify, well, wait a minute.

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The reason why you have trouble with what I'm saying is it seems like you're assuming this other thing, and then we go to the foundation, right?

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But we still talk about evidence. I'm not allergic to evidence, but we present it within a context that requires

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Jesus Christ as Lord of the world to understand even science, right?

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And it's so important. People think that the facts speak for themselves, right? The scientists have irrefutably proven, when someone says that, by the way, they don't know science because science can't do that.

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There's no such thing as irrefutable scientific proof. That doesn't make sense. Real sciences, even unbelieving sciences, don't use that language because science is based upon empirical data, and empirical data is based upon something called induction, in which you, based upon an instance or an experience, you generalize about that experience in the future.

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No one has observed the future, right? So you get probabilities based upon regularities that I observe, and the future instances of this situation most likely will be the same.

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You create scientific laws and things like that, but science doesn't give you certainty. That's why you have theories that change and paradigm shifts and things like that.

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Sean Carroll, who is a noted cosmologist, he's an atheist agnostic, debated

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William Lane Craig, who's another leading Christian philosopher, and he says that science, he's coming from an unbeliever, he's like science doesn't give us truth.

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Science gives us theories that work. Think about that. Science doesn't give us truth.

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It gives us theories that work, and he's correct, because science is a pragmatic discipline.

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Albert Einstein's theory of, you know, relativity and all these sorts of things, he said that my theory is not true, it just better explains things than, say, like Newtonian physics, when

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Isaac Newton came up with his theory of physics. He's like, my view is not necessarily true, it just explains data better, you see, and who knows,

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Einsteinian physics might be overturned by someone else, okay? That doesn't mean science is bad. Science is great, but it's bad when we make science accomplish what science can't accomplish, i .e.

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irrefutable proof, evolution, right? We observe, right? You know, these sorts of things. It's very interesting when you see fossils that seem to have an evolutionary relationship, and then fossils over here that seem to have an evolutionary relationship, and then you have a

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Christian who believes in the Bible, looks at those and says, wow, God created these organisms with similar physical features, and then you have an unbeliever who will say, look, evidence for common descent.

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How can they look at the same thing and come to different conclusions? Not the evidence, it's the worldview, the glasses, right?

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The question is, who's wearing the proper lens? It's an important question. Who's looking at the data in light of the right worldview?

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As a Christian, Bonson points out that we need to look even at the evidence from a Christian framework. Okay, very important.

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All right, we forcefully, using a presuppositional method, we want to forcefully attack the unbeliever's presuppositions.

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This is the kind of the cutthroat aspect of presuppositionalism, okay? You don't let the unbeliever take anything for granted.

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Anything. It's like, well, we both want to be logical. Well, how do you make sense out of logic in your worldview?

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Well, I didn't get there yet, and we want to be logical. I said, no, no, no, time out. I want to be logical, because within a

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Christian worldview, it makes sense to believe in things like logic. How do you make sense out of that? Well, let's just grant.

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No, no, no, we're not going to grant. See, if you want to reject God, then make sense out of the world without him, and don't take his stuff in trying to do it.

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Kind of that old cheesy pastor joke. You know, one guy said, I don't need God to create life. I can make life all by myself.

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And God says, well, fine, show me. And he says, well, first, you need a little dirt over here. And God says, nah -ah, get your own dirt. That's basically what the unbeliever needs to do.

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You want to reject God? I'm not going to grant you logic. Well, according to mathematical principles, how do you make sense out of things like math and numbers in a world, say, if the person's a naturalist and believes, you know, realities matter in motion?

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If everything's material, where do you get something like numbers from? Things people take for granted. Oh, your

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God is so immoral. I can't use the Bible as a standard for morality. Look at all the things that your

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God does. And what do we do? We try to justify God's actions. No, no, no. There was a reason why he did it. Look at the context.

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How do you make sense out of right and wrong to begin with? See, I forcefully attack his presuppositions.

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Instead of trying to justify God's actions in the Bible, which you can do. There's value to that. Why should

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I even engage that when, from your perspective, you don't even have a basis for right and wrong?

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Well, I'm assuming that the Bible's true. Look, we assume the Bible's true. Look at all the horrible things that God did. Oh, wait a minute.

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We assume the Bible's true. Then you have to assume the portions of the Bible where it says God is good. And if the

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Bible says God is good, and he has a justification for all that he does, then every instance you point it to, you can't say is wrong because, from the biblical perspective, he had good reasons for the things he did.

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You see? So you need to critique the Bible from outside the Bible, and we could just reject their unbelieving assumptions.

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Like, I reject, you're coming from a non -Christian perspective. I don't accept that. Or you accept the Bible and say, well, if you accept the

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Bible, you got to accept all of them. Here's what the Bible says. Why God did this? Why God said that? These sorts of things. Okay?

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See the value of attacking the assumptions? We could argue all day long who has more evidence, when reality is, we need to be attacking the foundations.

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What are you standing on when you appeal to evidence against God? We want to look at what that person is saying.

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We forcefully attack the unbelievers' presuppositions. We want to declare that God and Scripture are the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience.

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God and Scripture are two important features of a presuppositional framework.

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There are three main foundations of every worldview, and they're typically described in technical terminology, but they're very easy.

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Going back to my old student in childcare with his Pokemon encyclopedia, let's learn some

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Pokemon names, okay? Not really. Three foundations of every worldview. Metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

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Fancy words which mean things very easy. Metaphysics deals with your view of reality.

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What is real? Is the world illusion? Is the world purely physical?

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Like, what is real? When I teach logic, I put a question on the board. First day of school, and I put,

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I write on the board, I say, I have a pet unicorn. Do you believe me? Why or why not?

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And of course, the students, why? Well, I don't believe you because I want to see it. Show me the unicorn.

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Oh, now he's, what is he doing? Now he's appealing to epistemology. Well, how can I know you have a unicorn, right?

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He thinks that by seeing, he can know. Well, it's not as simple because a unicorn is invisible, so I didn't say that.

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He's like, well, you don't have a unicorn because unicorns don't exist. Ah, how do you know unicorns don't exist? Well, because he has a metaphysic.

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He has a theory of reality that excludes unicorns, unfortunately for him. They are wonderful creatures.

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Okay, you get the point? Okay, by asking these sorts of questions, we could expose a person's worldview without using the fancy terms.

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Oh, it's impossible for that to happen. That will often reflect their view of reality, and if their view of reality excludes

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God from the beginning, you should point that out. Well, why do you exclude God as one of the things that can exist? You say, prove to me that God exists, but then you have a worldview that says it's impossible for him to exist, right?

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That's an important inconsistency to point out. Okay, so we want to declare that God and Scripture are necessary.

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Metaphysically, for a Christian, God is our ultimate metaphysical foundation. He is the one that grounds all reality, and not only is he the metaphysical or ontological, they're related, grounding for reality.

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This is our metaphysics, but he is also needed for our epistemology, because the metaphysical

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God, who grounds all things, reveals himself. That's why

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I have a foundation for knowledge, because my pipsqueak little limited self has access to a revelation of the one who created everything and gave meaning to everything.

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Now, the unbeliever doesn't have to believe that. I don't believe the Scriptures, that's fine, but from within my worldview, it makes sense for me to say

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I have a foundation for knowledge, because on my worldview, there's a God and he's revealed himself such that I could know.

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You don't have to believe it, so reject it. What are you standing on? And then you're right back to square one.

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Well, I know because of science, and then you're right there. On what basis do you have science? How do you make sense out of these things?

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You don't let the unbeliever off the hook, right? They want you to grant them things. You do not grant them anything, because they're trying to build a house without God, and you can't build a house without God, because the stuff you need to build your house with is

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God's stuff, right? He's stealing from God. There's a book that was literally entitled that.

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Not presuppositional, though. That's a conversation for another night. Anyway, okay, and this is the important part that often we don't have time to get into, because there's a lot of conversation that gets in the way sometimes, but part of the presuppositional approach is inviting the unbeliever to operate on Christian assumptions.

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You have a worldview. You have assumptions. I'm arguing that you can't make sense out of the world with your assumptions, and we have that conversation.

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Suppose the unbeliever says, fine, I have these questions. You asked me these questions. I can't answer them. Those are good. You know,

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I'll think about them, but how do you make sense out of things, and then I give my unbelieving friend or my debate partner or whoever,

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I give him my Christian lens and say, suppose the Bible were true, and then with those assumptions,

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I want the unbeliever to explore how things could be made sense out of, given the Christian position.

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See how that works? Okay, if God exists, then yeah, I do have a foundation for knowledge, because there's an all -knowing

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God who reveals. I have a foundation for science. It makes sense to assume that nature is orderly because it comes from an orderly

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God, right? On my perspective, that makes sense. On your perspective, it doesn't. You see?

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And if you could do that in a skillful and relational way and in a kind way where you're having fruitful conversation, you're buying the next cup of coffee, the rest of the stuff comes in the work of the

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Holy Spirit, which we didn't mention. We're talking about rational argumentation strategy. The Holy Spirit plays a central role, especially because we're

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Reformed. We have a particular understanding of how God works in that regard, and my apologetic is not divorced from that reality, as ultimately the unbeliever is not going to come around until it is granted to him by the

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Holy Spirit, right? Faith is granted to us, Philippians 129, Ephesians 2, 5 through 8.

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Repentance is granted to us, 2 Timothy 2, 24 and 25. These are gifts of God. And so your job, and I love this,

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Dr. Bonson said this, this is your job as an apologist. It is not to convince the unbeliever, but it is to shut his mouth.

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Now, he didn't mean that in a disrespectful way. So we offer such a strong answer to their objection that there is nothing else they can say, okay?

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Very, very important information here and very grounded in Scripture. Now, Sproul's complaints of presuppositionalism, he thought,

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Dr. Sproul thought that it leaves the pagan or the unbeliever with an excuse because of circular reasoning. You have to assume the thing you're trying to prove, then the unbeliever has an excuse.

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Why didn't you accept Christianity? Well, because it was based upon an argument that's a fallacy. You can't assume the things you're trying to prove.

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And that's true, unless you're dealing with ultimate foundation. At that point, everything's circular because we always assume our ultimate starting points.

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I cannot correct my eyes, there's something wrong with my eyes, without using my eyes.

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I have to assume the reliability of my eyes to even get the thing that's caught in one of my eyes.

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Isn't that true? In some cases, you have to assume the thing you're trying to prove when you're dealing with ultimate foundations.

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When you're not dealing with ultimate foundations, then you can't do that. It is a fallacy. But when you're dealing with ultimates, this is a weird exception in logic, okay?

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That's unavoidable. Okay, so he believed that presuppositionalism leaves the unbeliever without excuse, but it doesn't because what we're trying to do is argue for the hundred percent certainty of God's existence.

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When I say God is necessary in order to make sense out of anything, I'm arguing that God must exist because we make sense out of things.

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If we make sense out of things, he must exist because he is the necessary pre -condition.

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He is what must be the case in order for us to make sense out of anything, okay? Dr. Sproul said that presuppositionalism leads to subjectivism.

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Christianity is true and the claim is based upon my authority. Why is Christianity true? Because I said so. Is that what we're saying?

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No. Christianity is true because God says so. And we don't just stop there. When you reject it, look where you end up, in foolishness.

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And the foolishness of rejecting God has been borne out throughout the history of philosophy.

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If you study philosophy, you will know that at the end of the day, all of it leads to, we don't know.

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What's the ultimate grounding for reality? Beats me. How can we really know? How do we escape skepticism? Unless you have some other variations of religious perspectives that claim to have knowledge and that we can talk about that.

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But you take a look at Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and philosophers like that,

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Plato and Aristotle, eventually their philosophy boils down to a skepticism.

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You can't know ultimate things, okay? Or if they claim to know ultimate things, they were unable to justify that they know ultimate things, okay?

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You following so far? Okay. Are there any questions so far? Yeah, yes. It's just interesting because I've had a very different experience with philosophy.

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I've actually seen like, it's taken so many thousands of years for people to reach conclusions that are just in the

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Bible. Especially when you think of some of the classical philosophers, like the

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Stoics, their whole concept is basically like, oh you shouldn't worry because it's out of your control anyway.

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Sure. Which is like, a very biblical teaching. Well, I wouldn't say necessarily that's biblical.

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For the Stoics, fate is in control, which is impersonal, and what you do doesn't matter.

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But within a reformed context, God is in control and our actions matter.

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So they are compatible with each other. So there is not the same. When someone says, well Calvin, oh you guys are the

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Calvinists, but you guys believe like everything's fated to happen. No. There's literally a difference between God's divine decree and an impersonal, irrational fatalism, where ultimately nothing is in control that's personal.

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Whereas in Christianity, everything's in control by a personal God who is working things towards a goal, and that is incorporating our own rational faculties, the decisions we make, and things like that.

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So we want to be careful from a Calvinistic perspective to say that because God is absolutely sovereign, our actions don't matter.

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They do matter because the Scriptures tell us they matter. So even if we can't understand how they matter, because it's a deep philosophical question, that we can't as Christians conclude it doesn't matter because the

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Scriptures teach that it does. Now, how do we explain that? It can be explained. We can go into details, but that would take us off.

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But the Stoics, Plato, any philosophy that is rooted in autonomy and a non -reliance upon revelation is going to lead you to skepticism.

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Because without the link of revelation from God, then it's your guess versus that person's guess, because you don't know everything.

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I can say this about the world, and for all I know that can be falsified later on when someone smarter comes along.

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So we start with revelation. You don't have that same starting point in the Greek philosophers. Matter of fact, when you have the first philosopher, he's considered the father of philosophy,

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Thales, who posited that all is water, so he thought everything boiled into water, when you study philosophy, he will be noted as the first philosopher.

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Now, he wasn't the first philosopher. Alvin Plantinga, who's a Christian philosopher, said that philosophy is thinking hard about things.

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Was Thales the first person to ever think hard about something? No. Why do secular schools or schools not rooted in scripture point to Thales as the father of philosophy?

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Because he was the first one to try to explain reality without recourse to the gods. It was naturalistic.

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But he wasn't the first one. Adam was the first one, but that's because I'm a

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Christian. So there is a difference there. Does that make a little sense? I'm gonna zip through these quick because I know

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I'm taking long. Anthony said I could take as long as I want. I'm so that the presub claim boils down to an arbitrary and dogmatic assertion

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Christianity is true and reality that's not what we're saying. I'm gonna skip ahead here. There's a quote

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I want to make sure I get in. So natural theology.

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So when we talked about the difference between presuppositionalism and classical apologetics, I made mention of those theistic proofs, right?

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Well what's wrong with theistic proofs? Is there anything wrong with trying to prove God's existence? No. A Christian can use a

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Kalam cosmological argument. Dr. Bonson did not have a problem with the traditional arguments per se.

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He didn't think some of them actually proved what they claimed to prove, but some people think the arguments are pretty good. The problem that Dr.

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Bonson had, and I think we should all have, and this is relevant to all of life, not just apologetics. He says, that's the problem

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I have, as a direct quote, that's the problem I have with natural theology. This idea of arguing for God based upon these proofs that are typically used.

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He says, because it says on autonomous grounds we can take some facts about the universe and from that reason to there being a

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God. In other words, he didn't have problem with arguing for God's existence. What he had problem with was arguing about God's existence in such a way that assumed the autonomy and self -sufficiency of man's ability to reach that conclusion independent of relying on God.

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You see how that's relevant to all of the Christian life? Because not only are we not to do this because we rely on God for everything, we're not supposed to do this in apologetics and we're not supposed to do that for anything in the

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Christian life. Everything we do as Christians is relying on the wisdom of God.

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Lean not on your own understanding. This is Christianity 101, yet we forget it in our day -to -day.

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We act as though we can think about things here and it's completely unrelated to the Lordship of Christ and it's not.

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When we reason independent of the Lordship of Christ or reason autonomously, then we are doing reasoning, apologetics, or whatever the case may be unbiblically.

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We're doing in a way that is inconsistent with that foundation we so wonderfully profess on Sundays or whenever we meet.

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For Bonson and for presuppositionalists, the issue is consistency. If I say I believe this, scriptures, and the theology that flows from that, then how much more should my apologetic be consistent with that?

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And not just my apologetic, my life as a student or my life as a parent, as a father, as a mother.

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All of that is rooted to the foundation out of which the manner in which we conduct ourselves in those areas must be consistent with the foundation of the

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Revelation. So ultimately and finally, this can sound very sophisticated and philosophically abstract, but it really boils down to who is the

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Lord of your life and how does that Lordship play out in apologetics and everything else.

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So apologetics is not this narrow little thing. It is a small little nugget of a broader outlook on life that seeks to bring every thought into captivity to the

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Lordship of Christ. All right, that's it. There's more, but I'll never finish because it's so much here.

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I'll be remiss if I miss this. So transcendental arguments. When we talk about presuppositional apologetics, what we're using is called a transcendental argument.

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A transcendental argument tries to prove something by showing that unless this other thing over here is true, this other thing can't be true.

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So it's asking the question, what must be true first in order for this other thing to be true? So if it's true that I could have knowledge, what must be true first before that?

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I'm arguing that Christianity must be true. Christianity is the necessary precondition. This is not a made -up, weird presuppositional thing.

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It's actually a real argument in logic. Throughout the history of philosophy, you can look up this form of reasoning. So for any

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X, X in this category would represent any belief, any statement, anything that you believe is true.

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For any X to be the case, Y must be the case because Y is the necessary precondition for X.

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X is the case, therefore Y must be the case. So I'll give you it in a deductive form here.

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Premise one, for knowledge to be possible, God and his revelation must be true. That's step one.

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Step two, knowledge is possible, therefore God and his revelation are true.

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That's the logical structure of what I'm saying. So it's not like this weird thing that like only like weird presuppositions arguing this strange way.

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There's actually precedent for this in like the history of philosophy. People are like, oh your presupposition is so weird, like who argues that way?

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A lot of people, not even Christians. There are people who are like unbelievers who use like sorts of arguments like this.

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It's just that the presuppositional argument is better when you put it in a Christian context. Obviously it does the work that say a secular philosopher can't do when he tries to do these sorts of arguments.

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So anyway, there's so much here and there's a lot but I apologize for going long.

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Are there any questions, comments, observations, anything? I don't bite hard.

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I don't bite at all actually but okay. All right. Okay. Thank you.