Former Christian Rapper Examined, Found Wanting

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today I have two very special guests with me that I will be introducing in just a moment.

But today, my two guests are going to be interacting with a book that recently came out by Brady Goodwin Jr.,

who is a former Christian rapper, who wrote an interesting book called,

Let There Be Gaslight. And before I invite my guest on, I wanna kind of create some context here by reading the kind of the description of the book that's given here on Amazon, and perhaps that can prime your mind, so to speak, for the sorts of things that we're gonna be covering.

If you are interested in apologetics and you're interested in kind of just like how do we engage in some common objections to the

Christian faith, this book offers a lot of those common apologetic points that I think is very useful for people to be able to interact with.

So I'm very much looking forward to inviting my guest on in just a moment. But let me take a few moments to read kind of the description here.

Here's what it says. Tell one lie and you'll have to tell another. But what happens when you're caught and given the chance to come clean?

Do you fess up or continue to spin new tales to cover your old tracks? As humanity's understanding of the past continues to grow through scientific and historical investigation, the world's revealed religions are having to answer tough questions about the stories they've told concerning us and God.

Often, instead of acknowledging the shortcomings of a particular faith, representatives put the blame on doubting believers.

This is psychological abuse, but there is another term for it. We are either being gaslighted by God or by the religions that claim to represent

God. In this book, former Christian rapper, professor and apologist Brady Goodwin Jr. explores the

Christian rendition of this phenomena. And that is kind of the quick little, you know, summary of the book.

You would imagine where he might go. Again, he goes in multiple directions in terms of how folks are being gaslighted by the revealed religions.

But today we're gonna be covering a specific chapter in that book. And I'll let my guests kind of explain the details there.

Just real quick, this is also part of a multi -part series. I was asked by my good friend,

Vaucab Malone over there at the Street Apologist YouTube channel to kind of do a video here. And I have my guests here who are very accommodating and coming onto my show to talk about this.

And there's a multi -part series that can be located in various places, but initiated,

I believe, by Vaucab Malone, where they are gonna give responses, video responses to all of the different chapters of this book, "'Let

There Be Gaslight.'" So whenever I find out where you could find all those other videos, I will point you in that direction.

Or maybe my guests might even know where you can go for that. But without further ado, I'd like to introduce my guests,

Adam Coleman and Alex McElroy. Folks, I'm super happy to have these guys on, and I want them to kind of take a moment to tell you guys, listeners, who they are and where you can find their content.

So Adam, why don't you go first? Who are you and what do you do? First of all, man,

I just wanna say I appreciate you, brother, I'm a fan of your work, man. I definitely follow the channel. I am Adam Coleman, the founder of True ID Apologetics Ministries, and I also have a

YouTube channel as well that goes by that name, True ID Apologetics. It says T -R -U -I -D

Apologetics. I got trueideapologetics .com and all that kind of stuff. And essentially, I'm just like you, man.

I'm an apologist out here trying to put out content to help people to work their way through objections to Christianity, come alongside folks to think well, and particularly things that are cropping up within the

African -American context. Before I, or as I was getting into apologetics, I was encountering a lot of objections to Christianity that just kind of hadn't been touched on yet.

So I figured I would kind of dip a toe in and address those kind of things. And so, yeah, man, that's me in a nutshell, man. That's awesome.

So like for people who are in like a more urban context and the sorts of things that they find in that context is kind of different than what you find in other segments of society.

Would you say that your content covers a lot of like that urban context, the sort of things that people hear in like the cities and things like that?

Yeah, sure. I think at bottom, you know, people are all dealing with the same kinds of questions, the same kinds of problems. It's just to kind of give a quick example.

I mean, obviously the problem of evil is something that apologists are gonna deal with all the time. In other contexts, people might say, you know, well, why did

God allow the Holocaust? Or why did God allow COVID -19? You know, things like that. Well, in the

African -American context, you tend to see the same problem framed around questions like, where was Jesus during slavery?

You know, why are black people suffering under various forms of oppression? Like that's just the same core issue just expressed in a different way.

And so we bring a different vantage point to bear on questions like that. Is Jesus the white man's religion?

You know, all those kinds of things we try to tackle, yeah. Okay, well, thank you for that. And my next guest is

Alex McElroy. Did I pronounce your last name correctly? You did actually, thank you. Very good. And he is at Relentless Pursuit of Purpose.

Is that the name of your channel as well? That is, yes. Okay. Yeah, so first, I'm glad to be here. Once again,

I've been a fan for a while, and so it's good to finally connect with you. So thanks for having me on. Yes, the -

My pleasure. Thank you. The channel is Relentless Pursuit of Purpose, but my ministry, my apologetics ministry is called

Proof for the Truth. You can go to proofforthetruth .org. And we provide apologetics workshops that churches can host.

It's just unrealistic, obviously, for churches to have apologists on staff. So we provide this content where we come and deliver the content.

A lot of times I focus towards youth and young adults, because that's where we see the trend of them walking away. Sure. Enter this book.

And yeah, so outside of that, speaking and doing the videos,

I do tend to focus a lot of my work on scientific evidence, as well as the historical evidence for Christianity.

All right, excellent. Well, it's a pleasure to have you both on. So let's kind of jump right into this book. So I'll let there be gaslight.

We're covering chapter 12 of that book entitled Truth vs.

Trust. And so Adam, why don't you kind of share your thoughts first? What is this chapter generally about?

And maybe we can kind of jump into some points of contention with the chapter that you have. And of course, feel free, please, to go in any direction you'd like.

The same for you, Alex. And you don't have to be polite here. If you want to come in while Adam's talking and say, hey,

Adam, I also want to add, you can feel free to do that as well. But Adam, why don't you start us off? Sure, man, for sure.

So, I mean, first of all, just to kind of give a bit of background, Brady Goodwin, he's a pretty influential guy, you know what

I mean? At least in the circle that I would say that I kind of came up with. Christian hip hop, anybody who knows

Christian hip hop is going to be familiar with the cross movement. It's got to be probably, if not, well,

I have to say, at least one of the most iconic groups to ever, you know, grip that mic, man. And let it -

Good Christian rap, as opposed to - It was good, hey. Good Christian music. Real, hey, man, listen, I, you know -

Grab your Bible - I'm trying to be nice, you know what I mean? But I would say that some of the philosophy that we're going to go over is pretty sketchy, but let it not be said, the man is cold on that mic.

There's no doubt about that. He's nice on the mic. And so I personally, I was definitely a fan, a fanatic, as many of us were.

But that being said, man, you know, it's very unfortunate that he's now denounced to faith, you know what

I'm saying, to say the least, and adamantly so, which I'm sure is probably shocking to just about everybody, you know what

I mean? When I found out, I was like, man, I felt like my dog died or something like that. I was like, oh man, you know, it's terrible. But he's denounced to faith, and at very least, he appears to be a very strong agnostic, you know, seems to be more atheistic leaning as far as I can estimate.

But, you know, at very least, I would say he's a strong agnostic. And so this book is supposed to be the fruit of his labors, if you will, laboring away from the gospel, you know what

I mean? And so the first, like you said, we're going to be dealing with chapter 12, which really is kind of like the punchline of the whole book, really.

You know what I'm saying? At least the first punchline. You know, the first 11 chapters really spent a lot of time. As a matter of fact, if I could,

I'm going to share my screen. That's cool. Sure, yeah, that's all right. Get it popping now, you know. Let me see. I got it there in the chat.

There we go. Okay, cool. So shameless plug, Troy, the apologetics. Yeah, no, fine, hey.

Okay, here we go. Yeah, so kind of have it here. The first 11 chapters are really dealing with this idea that somehow

Genesis has been debunked, essentially. You know, particularly its account of human origins.

You know, so he's essentially trying to establish in chapters one through 11 that the Genesis account is best understood when interpreted literally.

That's what the authors intended, and that's how we ought to approach it. He would say, unfortunately, well, actually,

I guess he wouldn't say unfortunately, but he would say that the evidence, the scientific evidence for the theory of evolution is so strong such that we ought to take it seriously and confirm it to be true.

And in so much as the literal reading of Genesis cannot accommodate the theory of evolution, the

Genesis account is therefore falsified. That's kind of how he's coming at it. And so he takes it a step further to suggest that if Genesis is falsified, particularly, again, you know, the account of human origins, and you have

Jesus and the Apostle Paul, for example, figures in the New Testament quoting Genesis as historical, then therefore they're also falsified.

Like, you know, claims that they make about like human depravity and human origins and so on and so forth, those things are falsified.

Therefore, Jesus and Paul are not reliable sources of information. And so he believes that he's essentially done away with the whole

Bible, beginning with the starting point of Genesis being false, you know?

And so that's kind of what you have in slides, excuse me, chapters one through 11. And then in chapter 12, we see this statement here.

There's a quote from page 276. He says, after considering the preceding chapters, we must ask what implications does all of this have for the core beliefs of the

Christian faith and any religious worldview based upon the Judeo -Christian tradition? There are at least four pathways forward.

And he's gonna lay out what he believes to be four paths, basically four options that we have in light of this notion that Genesis has been debunked.

And so I'll kind of pause there. I know we'll get into some of these options here in a second, but essentially, that's kind of what you've got working your way up to chapter 12.

You wanna say something there, Alex, or? Yeah, so let me, if I could share one quick, so we're still kind of laying the groundwork, sorry.

So like Adam said, there's a lot, if you read the book, and actually, another Seamus plug, if you haven't subscribed to my channel already, please do.

I'm debunking chapter two this Thursday. In that chapter, it's titled, Has God Said?

And as Adam said, he's basically using a flawed hermeneutic to get to the conclusion of the

Bible, which even the most atheists can't do that. You know, there's some other methods and everybody about how we arrive at truth.

But because my organization's called Proof for the Truth, I'm very concerned with truth and how we arrive at it.

And so I care less if somebody disagrees or has a different worldview than if they're jacking up how we arrive at truth, because you're not even playing by the same rules at that point.

So your epistemology, all these things have to be in order, not because I say so, just because of the rules of logic and philosophy go that way.

And so I want to start with these definitions because I think throughout the whole book, he kind of does this straw man attack on faith, especially when we talk about what biblical faith is and what he's trying to allude to it being.

Real quick before I put that slide up, it is interesting that this gentleman, because I don't think

Adam shared this part, he was in seminary. He's been saying he's doing apologetics for 20 years, which, you know, that's debatable, but he's at least been familiar with all this information.

Sure. So to arrive at this conclusion, it's like, what were you doing for you? Because this isn't new stuff.

It's not new information that he suddenly discovered and brought now he's like, oh, I'm waking. There's something else going on.

I don't know what it is, but just keep praying for him. So yeah, if you have, Eli, if you're able to share my -

Sure, absolutely. Hey, can I just second that right quick? You know what, that you made a point.

I mean, again, I'm sorry. Did I grab the wrong slides? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, I see. Okay, my bad. Woo, there we go. No, you're good. Just real quick, I just want to second that. Like, you know, a lot of what

I have to say might seem like nitpicking, but in the context of what Alice just said, I mean, we're dealing with a guy who said that he's been in the faith for like 30 years and like 20, 25 of those he's been, you know, into apologetics.

He has taught apologetics, I believe, at the collegiate level. I think it was at a local college. So, you know, once you present yourself that way, when you present yourself as having some, you know, acquaintance with the subject matter, like we got to treat you at a different level.

We can't, you know, panicate. You know what I mean? So that's where nuance becomes very important. So I'm just throwing it out there as long as I can.

Just if I could add something too. This whole thing with science conflicting with Genesis, and this is not even like a, not only is it kind of an old hat for anyone who does apologetics, just philosophically and scientifically,

I think science to rely so much on the interpretations of the data from specific scientists.

To dance with science, it's important to understand that science is a very fickle dance partner.

I believe it was the atheist agnostic cosmologist, Sean Carroll, who said that science is not a truth finding discipline, but rather science provides us theories that work.

So that it's a pragmatic discipline. You don't get an absolute truth. And that's why science, and this is a good feature of science.

That's why science always changes. Because as we come to learn more things and stuff. So to say that like, you know, science seems to be against Genesis, therefore we should go with science and not, you know, the

Bible or something along those lines. I think that's a very superficial way of coming at it. But those are just my thoughts there.

No, yeah, to your point, science is always provisional. You know what I'm saying? It's always provisional. So you had to be careful. Yeah, gotcha. And so at the beginning, in the forewarning, he says, faith is a temporary bridge of unbelief.

I'm sorry, a belief between the known and the unknown. Like, right? Like we ain't even gotten to - Oh wait, time out.

I gotta stop you right there, bro. Okay, I haven't read all of chapter 12 and I did not read that.

That is the most loaded definition of faith. It's not - Oh yeah. That's not even in chapter 12.

That's in the introduction. Oh, okay. Wow, that's loaded. Okay, good. It is loaded, right?

And inaccurate. And then he says on page 278, but why did I believe in God in the first place?

Did I skip over logic and arrive at faith? So what you see this straw man is logic versus faith, religion versus faith, science versus faith.

Simply because of a mind numbing yet heart stirring message. It's tempting to think that this is what God wants from us, that we should distrust our five senses and our minds and only use faith as our epistemology, in which case the only things we can know to be true is whatever

God tells us in the Bible or in our souls, if this practice can be trusted. And then he also says, because it is faith that counteracts the unbelief in our hearts.

Once again, I don't know... Well, Christians who have thought these things through,

I don't know any of them who would affirm any of these statements. And so when we say faith biblically, we're talking about trust.

The Bible is talking about trust. The Bible is never talking about blind faith. And once again, this is really...

Like when I used to be a youth pastor and when I would teach kids, they got that. They understood it wasn't supposed to be blind.

I'm supposed to understand what I believe, why I believe it and what is... So it's weird for him to come to this conclusion now, 20 plus years into this, but we're not talking about this version of faith that he's putting forth, but no one, including

God in the Bible, suggesting that him or any Christian should believe the gospel without it being true or without justification, which

I'm sure we'll get into. Can I ask a question though? So what educational background does he have? And at what level, you said he taught at the collegiate level.

I'm curious because I'm not aware of any Christian scholar or theologian who would define faith that way.

I'm wondering how could he teach at a collegiate level and then use this very superficial and really unchristian way of defining faith?

That's a good question. Do you know any of his educational background? I'm not aware of his background. Yeah, so I know that,

I believe he went to Lancaster. I believe, I feel like he graduated from Lancaster and he also attended.

I know he attended at Westminster. I'm not sure if he completed whatever education he had.

I know Westminster wouldn't define faith that way for sure. No, it's very strange, but see to your point though, and I'm glad you picked up on that, that I feel like throughout the chapter, not just this chapter, but I've also looked into chapter 13 as well.

You find these very idiosyncratic or just off -base definitions. And you guys know that when you're talking about philosophy, it's really all about precision of language.

And if you don't get the definitions right, if you don't have tenable definitions, then you find yourself making really egregious mistakes later on down the road.

Like your definitions are gonna be kind of the building blocks, if you will. And it just helps with like conceptual clarity, like keeping the lines clear in terms of being able to say what you mean and make coherent statements.

And so I think that, again, we're not dealing with some just random dude, you know what

I mean? Like he's graduated from seminary, I believe, or at least he has a degree in something, you know, and attended at Westminster and has claimed that he's, you know, acquainted with these kinds of things.

So it's really odd to see these very elementary missteps, you know, at various points in his work.

Alex, can you unpack for us the biblical definition of faith one more time?

Because I think that's an important key thing. Where it says here, faith is a temporary bridge of belief between the known and the unknown.

That, I mean, that's not biblical. Why is that not the correct definition of faith a

Christian should be operating on? And maybe you could unpack the biblical definition in a little bit more detail. Sure, and we can go around, but I would say faith is trust in God.

So it's trust, it's the belief, we're gonna talk about, I guess, justified true belief in a second, but we are saying that Greek word pistis, that we have full trust in the person and personhood of Christ and in the gospel message.

Not because we don't have warrant or justification to have that trust, but based on the justification we have now, some would say, okay, well, that's not enough evidence for me.

Okay, that's you, but you can't say this is still not a properly basic belief if we have enough justification to warrant that belief.

And so I would also talk about, not right now, but external historical archeological evidences, not that those are primary, but those co -sign the trust that we have in God and in his personhood.

So when you further nuance justification, I know this is a long answer, but when you further nuance justification and we get into all the big words, doxastic and propositional.

Watch your mouth. Young people watch this show, what's wrong with you, bro? But the amazing thing is

Christianity is the only worldview that meets every test of justification.

So if you're whatever kind you like, we got it. And that's further evidence for the validity or the truth of this worldview, not against it.

And so he almost had to really turn off every, like he had to turn off a lot of his brain to get to that definition, which is ironic because he would say he turned on all of his brain to get all that.

Right, right. Now that's not to say, and I know that people who watch this be like, listen, it's because he was thinking about these things.

He's been a Christian a long time and he's thought about these things. Hey, that's not impossible.

It's not impossible for someone to be a Christian for a long time, really think about these things and have rigorous responses.

I mean, obviously as Christians, we'll wanna have counterpoints, but this definition of faith is so haphazard, so illegitimate in terms of what any

Christian would say. It really causes me to think, well, how hard was he thinking? Number one, and number two, maybe he was thinking hard and got really bad theological education.

And I don't mean that disrespectfully. Again, I have to repeat, no Christian would define faith in that way, at least in terms of what the

Bible says. So I think that's just odd. Yeah, and real quick, just in terms of what you just said, it's not just, okay, well, the

Bible says it and we believe in it and he didn't give us the biblical definition. I think really at the heart of what you're saying is if you take the biblical authors in terms of how they're using the term faith, whether you agree with them or not, whether you believe the

Bible or not, regardless, in terms of, you can't essentially put words in their mouth in terms of what they mean when they use the word faith.

And that's essentially what we see him doing. It's definitely a strong man. Okay, so Alex, this is your presentation here.

Are there any points you wanna kind of move forward from, okay, so he has a really bad definition of faith that kind of already muddies the water.

Where do you wanna go from here in terms of? I'll just keep with the next couple of slides and I'll let Adam piggyback off those. But I think what you just said is really important because it's like the leaning tower of Pisa, right?

If you're built on a faulty foundation, whatever you build from that point is always gonna be off.

It's just like you're on a boat, you get one degree off course, and then 10 miles later, you're way off course. So literally in the introduction and the forewarning, that's how he defined faith.

There's nowhere to go but down from there. And that's the unfortunate reality of how that goes.

So yeah, let me move to the next one.

All right, so he has this kind of little story he runs through. He says, I can still remember the very first time

I waded into these deep philosophical waters. I was around eight or nine years old riding across town on a city bus with my mother.

When I confess, sometimes I feel like other people's lives aren't real, like life is a play about me and other people are just acting in it.

So what I was really doing was expressing an epistemological view that says, if I can't verify the reality of other minds or the sensory perception that others experience, how do

I know or validate my belief that other people are real, as real as I am? When I stop paying attention to them, how do

I know that their stories continue? I only know my own sensory perception, my own mind, and I can only continuously follow my own story.

Therefore, I can only verify that I am real. I am the only one whose experiences I can validate. He says, was this a logical way of thinking?

It was. We'll come back to that. If logical can describe the conclusions that naturally follow a given premise.

And I don't really need to read the rest of it, but obviously it was not a logical conclusion because it's not a true conclusion.

And when I say logical, I'm saying within the confines of justified true belief, you cannot have knowledge of a non -true thing.

Truth is a necessary ingredient for something to be knowledge. Exactly. That's right. It's not a logical.

So the funny thing, and not the funny thing even, so in his own example, he fails his own test.

And to me, I'm like, why would you put that in a book? Why would you call something logical that's not logical and use this whole explanation to get to that point when where you dropped us off at is an illogical conclusion?

Yeah. Can you go back to that neck, that previous slide? I mean, what is he describing there?

If we can't verify what other people exist, it seems like he's suggesting that it's logical to affirm solipsism.

Solipsism doesn't mean that you're the only person that exists. I mean, how is that logical? That's, yeah.

And funny, so with that, this is once again, most people who already did recognize this, this is not new, this is

Cartesian. Sure. I'll just read a real quick summary from Journal of Modern Theology, Journey of Modern Theology.

So if you don't know the story, I won't read all that, but Descartes, he's in a room, he's trying to think, what does he really know?

He gets down to this idea. So it says, he bore in, dug out, dug down into all he knew, doubting everything until he realized there was one thing he could not doubt, his own existence.

And this way, Descartes became one of those rare figures in history who's given us the world a sentence as a touchdown, cogito ergo sum, which is

I think, therefore I am. In other words, Descartes could not doubt his own existence as a thinking self, because in order to doubt, he had to think, and in order to think, he had to exist.

But here's the thing, Descartes deduced the logically necessary existence of God.

So Descartes didn't take his own understanding to the conclusion that Mr.

Goodwin took it to, which is an illogical conclusion from that premise, which even the man who originated the proposition thought of himself, that that's not where this should end.

There's still a necessity for God in the paradigm for any of this to even matter or work. And so even when he's kind of taking other people's arguments, he doesn't fully vet them or take them to their own logical conclusion.

Like Adam said, we can't put words in the apostle's mouth or even Descartes. Yeah, if you start with the, well,

I mean, I have criticisms of Descartes, but the thrust of what, I don't think you can literally doubt everything.

I think that's impossible, but I think the point of what you're saying is that Descartes starts with the self,

Mr. Goodwin starts with the self, and they come to completely different conclusions as to what that implies, showing that it's not as clear as Goodwin thinks.

By the way, if you're wondering who I'm talking about, and you're just kind of coming in, we're talking about the former Christian rapper,

Fnatic. He was associated with the cross movement, and now he identifies as an agnostic or an atheist,

I believe, is that what you said towards the beginning there? So that's who we're talking about here, a couple of people asking.

There was a funny quote here, solipsism. If solipsism is the view he's suggesting, again,

I haven't personally read the whole book. I read portions of the chapter we're addressing, but Chris Bolt, who is an apologist, a friend of mine, he said he wrote a book to tell other people he is a solipsist, which, of course -

He does back away from it at a different point. Right, most people do, but it's kind of the back pocket, ultimately, of what we can't know, right?

And then they try to sneak in things that we should believe anyway, in spite of the fact that we possibly couldn't know those things anyway.

But go ahead. Can I chime in on that logic piece for a second? I have a slide, a couple of that ones, that I think really emphasizes

Alex's point, if I could. Let me just skip over there. So, and again, this just gets into, where are we at?

Oh, there we go. Yeah, this kind of gets back to what we're talking about as far as definitions and how you can get off to a bad start, essentially, by having wrong definitions.

This is actually how he defines logic right here. He says that logic can be defined as the mind faithfully mapping itself onto the external world.

The mind faithfully mapping itself onto the external world. Now, I've put in some asterisks here, some of the key words, because first of all, when he says the mind, he makes logic mind dependent.

And I think that's very interesting, because if that is the case, then, I mean, obviously human minds can't be that which the logic depends upon, right?

So you're gonna have to - If you know that route, you've just relativized logic in a way that's very self -initiating, but go ahead.

Right, and then he says that it's something that faithfully, the mind is faithfully mapping itself onto the external world, which

I find interesting, because I think you run into some problems there as well. Like, what about mental experience?

Like, can I know, without sensory experience, can I know that one of my thoughts is occurring before the other?

Or that, can I know that a proposition in my mind logically entails a proposition that follows from it?

You know, things like that. So this notion that somehow logic is, at least in some sense, grounded, or must have as its object the external world,

I think is very problematic. And I think that philosophers would really take issue with that as well.

But what makes matters worse is, in chapter 13, he goes into it further.

Actually, I'm gonna stay here for a second. This is another quote from here. Forgive me for being a long quote. I'll try to read it as quickly as I can.

But he says, can anyone deny that logic is simply the name we have given to the exercise of trying to think, speak, and act in accordance with the material world around us?

I can deny it, I can deny it. Can anyone deny it? Yes, yes, I can deny it. Absolutely, right?

He says, you know, whenever we think, speak, or act out of alignment with the nature of the external world we encounter, it can be said that we are being illogical.

And we could say that logic is universal. Listen to this. And we could say that logic is, quote, universal to the extent that this matter, you're talking about the material world, maintains the same properties and characteristics wherever it can be found in the universe.

So logic is contingent upon, jeez, that's wild, that's really wild, right?

So logic is essentially the material consistency throughout the universe.

It says, but if these characteristics change, for example, then what was, for example, with quantum physics, then what was previously thought to be illogical might become logical.

At the very least, a different logic will be needed to properly map onto the different reality.

Is it true, then, that there could be no laws of logic without God, and specifically the God of the Bible? Only if it is true that there could be no material world without God, and we have already addressed this above, unless or until God steps forward to make a believable claim concerning the creation of the universe, what reason do we have to think that the only possible cause for a matter and logic is a personal

God? Lastly, it says on the next page, if it can be argued that human logic is not necessarily a reflection of God's mind, but instead refers to the mind of mankind mapping itself onto the natural world, the question can still be asked, what about the mind and conscience?

And he goes into critique the argument from Coxon is huge problems there in terms of how he defines -

Too many to address in your previous month, the longer quote. There are a lot of philosophical assumptions that are baked into everything there that I think is open to criticism, but what direction do you wanna go?

Where were you thinking in terms of interacting with that? I just wanna give a quick counterexample. Again, I take issue with this notion that logic is to be relegated to just being mapped onto the external world, the physical universe, as he indicates.

So first of all, let's imagine that you have a self, you know what I'm saying? Let's say you imagine somebody is born with whatever reason, they have no sensory perception whatsoever, you know what

I'm saying? They have no access to the physical world through their five senses, right? Now, the nature of consciousness is that when we engage in consciousness, we are self -aware, we have direct access to the self, right?

I have access to the external world via my senses and then kind of interpreted through my internal self, but I don't know myself in that way, you know what

I'm saying? I don't know, my knowledge of self is not mediated by some other thing, I know it directly, right?

Now, if you can have direct knowledge of yourself, there are some logical truths that flow from that.

First of all, I can have direct awareness in terms of just my mental life that I am identical to me, right?

I know that I am myself, I am me, I am not some other entity, even if I had no language to describe it, that's number one.

So already, if I know that I'm identical to myself, then now I've encountered the law of identity, one of the basic laws of logic, that everything is identical to itself,

I've encountered some shade of that. I could also know that I myself am a numerical single,

I'm a singular entity, rather than a multiplicity of cells. I can sense through direct awareness of my mental states that I am a single self.

And so now, if I can have direct sense that I am a single entity, mathematics comes into play, because I can imagine there being a multiplicity of other beings versus me just being a singular.

And so now I've got access to mathematical truths, right? So even without sensory perception, what

I'm trying to say is that you can still have access just through internal reflection about one's self -awareness, and then that yields certain truths, such as the law of identity, laws of logic, rather, and mathematical truths.

So is it the case that logic is necessarily tied to the external world? No, obviously not, because we don't have to have access to the external world in order to access those kinds of truths.

I'm saying those kinds of laws of the truths. Last thing I'll say about that, again, I'm gonna go back to his definition, where he talks about the mind faithfully mapping itself onto the external world.

And in the other quote I showed, he talked about this, he's referring to human minds. The reality is, before there were any humans around, clearly it was the case that, let's say, the planet

Earth could not be Earth and Jupiter in the same way at the same time. That's logically incoherent, right?

The presence of physical minds, excuse me, human minds, rather, is not necessary for that truth to obtain, right?

But if he believes, I think that's kind of a powerful quote, I don't think it's all that deep to understand, you know what

I mean? But if he believes that logic must be mind -dependent, and we have fundamental truths like that, you know, that are true regardless of whether they're human minds or not, then it's rational, then, to look for another mind, right?

It's rational to then say, well, these truths must be grounded in a mind that can account for these truths that occur in every possible world, and, you know, to kind of keep a snippet fashion.

But God would be - Can they account for the universality? Logic needs to be grounded, its universal nature needs to be grounded in a foundation that can ground something like a universal concept, like the laws of logic, yeah.

Alex, now, why don't you chime in a little bit here? Do you want to piggyback on anything? Yeah. Anything that Adam said, or maybe add some -

Go ahead. Just not much, but basically, and I think somebody put this in the comments, too, and Adam kind of hit it, that once again, the definition is problematic for a lot of reasons, and really, it's hard to talk about logic without talking about the rules of logic, at least the three foundational ones that Adam kind of demonstrated, the law of non -contradiction.

But whenever I talk to somebody who presents this faulty paradigm regarding logic,

I just ask, okay, if there were no humans ever existing on Earth, would the law of non -contradiction still be a valid law?

And it would be. It doesn't matter if there's sentient beings around to be able to recognize that law.

The law sustains in and of itself. And so the laws of logic are not contingent on us, nor are they contingent to the external world, nor is our mind, as Adam said, solely contingent to the external world.

So there's a lot of assumptions, and I think this is important to talk about because we're here talking about this, but I think a lot of people who read that book, and if they're not well -versed in all these different lanes of philosophy, they may be led astray because he sounds good.

It sounds like a good case. It sounds convincing, big words included. So it can throw some people off.

But understanding that the laws of logic exist and describe certain components of reality, but you don't have to know the law of non -contradiction to be bound by it.

A baby's bound by it. It doesn't mean that they know that law or they know that part of logic.

That's not a pre -requirement. That's because, as you said, Eli, the laws of logic supersede or transcend us.

And if we're gonna say these laws transcend us, then we have to ground that transcendence. And if you remove

God from the picture, obviously we're left with our feet in midair. So that's where he left us.

If I wanted to be, I could even say that the animals understand certain laws of logic, at least they function according to it anyway.

He said that it depends on mankind mapping on a reality. But I think an orangutan can ascertain certain truths about what to eat and what not to eat and things like that.

So there's so many different ways that it goes wrong, man. But again, I just wanted to kind of highlight this.

This is just one of those examples. Like when I see basic mistakes like this, then I think that that's when

I begin to lose confidence in the person who's putting forth the case. I'm like, yeah, there's something wrong here.

There's something in the back. And I think challenging definitions are so important too. I mean, look how,

I mean, this just popped. Logic can be defined, okay? Logic can also be defined as that which reflects the mind of God.

So which definition, if you're talking about how words can be defined, I want to know what logic is. Challenging definitions,

I think, is super important. But go ahead, Alex. I think I spoke - No, no, no, that's an excellent point. And maybe he was leaving himself a loophole,

I don't know. But I suspect he was probably trying to be cautious because he frames things like that a lot throughout the book.

But I think the problem is, you know, when you're, there's nothing wrong with being cautious, but at the same time, he's still presenting these things as if such and such is the case, you know what

I mean? So I kind of, it's this balance between being cautious and say what you mean, bro. Like you're saying, this is what it is, all right, cool.

Let's work on it, let's work from there, you know what I mean? Well, kind of to everyone's point, like I said,

I like doing a lot of work on the scientific evidence, but it's not because I think that that supersedes everything else.

I just think that people have a misunderstanding of a supposed disagreement between the two. But in this, while we're talking about it, like it's very clear, even as you said, amongst many scientists, that science can't tell us everything.

True. And specifically with regards to some of the claims that Mr. Goodwin made, like science presupposes, we're talking about logic, logical truths and mathematical truths.

It doesn't necessarily give us those things. Metaphysical truths, which is ironically, one of the things is knowing that there are other minds, but other than mine, is a metaphysical truth that usually most people are pretty okay with.

Ethical beliefs, aesthetic beliefs, none of these things are validated by science.

In fact, science can't even validate science. So there's things that are assumed, the speed of light, all these things that are taken for granted within the confines of different scientific disciplines, but they are taking these things for which they can't actually prove them, but they're just assuming that they'll be constant enough.

And I'll go back one step further. All of the scientists that started their sciences were

Christians because they expected order in nature, which would allow them to do their science.

We talk about Newton, we talk about whoever, physics, astrophysics, chemistry, biology, whatever it is.

So a little bit of research would help them understand that no, science actually exists because people recognize the existence of God, not the opposite.

Right, I also think it's important to keep in mind when someone says, well, science often says things that are in conflict with Christianity, and so Christians need to answer tough questions.

That understanding I think is wrong -headed as some other apologists have pointed out and some philosophers have pointed out that science doesn't speak, right?

Science is not in conflict with Christianity, particular interpretations of the data that are engaged in those, for those who are engaged in the scientific enterprise, their interpretations can be in conflict with Christianity, but science as a method of investigating the natural world is completely consistent with a

Christian outlook. Indeed, it's based on a Christian outlook, I would argue. So I wanna make that distinction for folks.

Science doesn't speak, scientists do, and scientists have their own worldviews, their own bias, their own blind spots.

And so we need to ask the question, who is interpreting the data correctly when they're engaging in the method of science?

I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. And on that quote, can you put my slides back up real quick,

Eli? Yes, sir. Let me just get these on there. And then I'm gonna turn it back to Adam. So, nope, sorry.

Hey, while you're looking for that, just real quick, somebody asked the question, are we gonna be dealing with the Genesis critiques?

And they may have missed it, but like brother Eli said, that this live stream that we're doing here is actually part of a multi -episode, if you will, stream, kind of a series rather.

And our brother, BK Apologist at the YouTube channel, BK Apologist, they just did a excellent job yesterday addressing some of Brady's critiques.

So I would commend to you, yeah, no, chapter one, I would commend that to you. Now, will vocab have all of these videos in like a playlist on his channel or how's that work?

I believe so. I think either him or BK Apologist, I believe, are gonna compile it all together and like I said, put it as a playlist, so.

Excellent. And I think it was Sean who asked that, and I'll be doing, like I said, chapter two this

Thursday. It'll deal with defending the Bible, but also kind of debunking this science versus faith argument as well, that he kind of makes in there.

But this gentleman is John Lennox, who's a mathematician, a scientist, a Christian. He said, the success of science sometimes leads people to think that because we can understand the mechanisms of the universe, then we can safely conclude that there was no

God who designed and created the universe in the first place. This reasoning commits a logical error and that it confuses mechanism and agency, right?

So if somebody says, well, I know how the car works. I know how a car works.

So therefore Henry Ford never existed. Right. No, two things can be true at the same time.

And, you know, a lot of the science versus faith debate gets bogged down into a misunderstanding of this very point that you said,

Eli, that people are misunderstanding the reaches that science can have, and their misunderstanding that science never says anything.

Scientists say something about the science they're doing. Right. Right, very good.

Let's see here. So that was John Lennox. I mean, those quotes like that can be reproduced all over the place.

I think the generic understanding that science is in conflict with faith is

I think very superficial and has easily been debunked, not just by Christians, but many non -Christians who would say, yeah, it's not inconsistent.

We just happen to disagree with the Christian interpretation of the data, you know? So this isn't even a sticking point.

That's what I'm saying. These are very, again, I haven't read the whole book, but these seem to be very superficial. And again,

I don't mean that disrespectfully. I'm sure there are many atheists who can come up with much more fuller and robust objections against Christianity, but these seem very superficial in terms of the depths with which he's engaging

Christianity and its relationship with science. If I could, man, I just wanted to deal with like one more, I got at least one more definition

I want to address, and I feel like it is kind of pivotal to what we'll talk about later. And I know we want to get to those four options that he laid out for the

Christian. I know we definitely want to touch on that, but if I could just kind of add this to the screen. Yeah, yeah, sure.

You and your slides, man. What's up with that? Oh, I got it, man. I'm learning from my man, BK. Apologize, man. I got slides for days now.

I'm getting my slides, you know what I mean? Never have too many slides. Right, right, right, right.

So he deals with this issue of belief, right? He lays out his definitions, and among them he lays out this definition here of belief.

He says that belief is trust that a particular understanding of reality can be verified or will be justified.

But it's, wow, and in another place, and I should have made it more clear here. I guess I would have to cut it after the word justified, but there's actually a separate quote where he says, then what we are willing to accept as a reality without confirmation, he puts in parentheses, belief.

So essentially you have this notion that belief is an understanding of reality that, you know,

I'm sorry, trust that a particular understanding of reality can be verified or will be justified and in a separate place, you know, he equates it with accepting something as reality without confirmation, you know?

And again, again, these definitions are killing me, bro.

I mean, because - They sound off when I read it. I'm kind of like, well, that doesn't sound right. Well, it's so idiosyncratic. I mean, here's the thing.

First of all, you know, he quoted Stanford Encyclopedia and is defining something else.

And so I decided to put it here, you know, when it referenced to how it defines beliefs. He says, contemporary

Anglophone philosophers of mind generally use the term belief to refer to the attitude we have roughly whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true.

So, you know, this is this notion of a propositional attitude. So if you have a proposition say, you know, it's raining outside, my attitude toward that proposition can be that I take it to be the case that is raining outside or I don't take it to the case to be raining outside.

That's essentially what it is when we're talking about belief and disbelief, right? Right. At least in this basic sense.

Now, I don't, belief proper, you know what I'm saying? It doesn't entail that I have to also trust that it can be verified, you know, or that it will be justified.

I can believe things for which maybe we have, there's no way that it can be verified and justified, but I can still take it to be the case that it is true.

You know what I'm saying? When it comes to this notion of it being without confirmation, I mean, I could have levels of confirmation of a belief for which

I believe that something is more likely than not to be the case, but maybe I don't have certainty about it.

You know, maybe I believe that it's raining outside because, you know, my wife walked in 20 minutes ago and she was, you know, totally drenched in water.

But in reality, my son, my eight -year -old squirted her with a water hose, which that's a very real possibility.

My son does crazy stuff, you know what I mean? Entirely likely too. It's entirely likely, right? So I might believe, you know, and I might have, and maybe it was raining earlier, so maybe

I have some sort of confirmation, but I may not have certainty, you know? And so I think that his definitions, again, they leave room for some skepticism in terms of where he's coming from.

And it gets even worse, unfortunately. I'll make this quick, but he has this really strange quote, you know, where he says, but how does one know if what he or she understands, especially when it comes to spiritual matters, is the truth, right?

Aren't people of faith, Christians included, operating at the level of belief, right? So now he's making a distinction.

He said, we're not, he's suggesting we're not operating at the level of truth, we're operating at belief, you know, something lesser than truth, right?

He says, Jesus reportedly claimed to be the truth, but also called others to believe in him. You know, the author of John, excuse me, 1

John 5 .13 says, I have written all these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.

This raises the question, at what point can we say that we have knowledge and not just that we believe?

Now, I got some things I want to say about that. I don't know if you guys want to jump in now or, but I got a few things I want to say about that.

Mark, a couple of things I could say, but Alex, feel free to jump in as you're my guest. You're quiet down there.

It's all right. I know I was reading a while, so I just want to give you guys, yeah. No, no, no, it's good. Well, I saw this in the book too.

And once again, the first thought was, this is a straw man between truth and belief again. I mean, it's just, it's sloppy, when you really dig in.

That's the one part. And then, we could rephrase

John. We don't need to, but we could say, no, I've written about all these evidences so that you can believe.

Like, you're taking the words totally away from what he was trying to say. So John just wrote 21 chapters and he's trying to convince people with evidences about Jesus and about who

Jesus is. It's not, he's not saying, hey, I wrote all this. Now, turn off your brain and just believe, because I said so.

Like, that's not what he's saying. And no one could read it and say, that's what he's trying to do. Now, if that's your later interpretation, but it's intellectually dishonest to assume that's what

John or any of the apostles was trying to do. Well, and now here's the thing about it too. And that actually leads to my point, because what he's trying to do is to center on like propositional beliefs.

You know what I'm saying? That something is the case or that something is true. And he's saying that we don't have that, you know, we're not operating at the level of truth.

But first of all, you know, and you brought this up earlier, you know, Eli, you can't have knowledge of anything.

You can't have knowledge of the truth if you don't believe it, you know what I'm saying? Like, you know, there are certain, there are pieces to knowledge that are just kind of indispensable.

It's like, if I say, if I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but no jelly, I don't have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you know? Likewise. What if the peanut butter identifies as -

Okay, all right, all right. Touche. Hey, it is 2022, anything is possible.

Anything is possible, bro, anything is possible, you know. Oh man. But I wanna go back to what he says.

He says, so, but how does, I'm sorry, but how does one know if he or she understands, especially when it comes to spiritual matters, is the truth?

Aren't people of faith, Christians included, operating at the level of belief? Well, here's the thing, in so much as we believe what is true, we are operating at the level of truth, right?

If you believe something that's true - Right, well, that's something I'm saying too. He seems to be suggesting here, aren't people of faith, Christians included, operating at the level of belief?

In other words, that's lesser than knowledge. Right. Now, how does he know that we are not operating on the level of truth?

What's his justification? His justification to know that we're simply in the level of belief and not truth, his justification is what?

Science and the Bible are somehow incompatible. We need to shut our brains off.

Logic needs to be put over there while science, you know what I'm saying? He doesn't have a justification to know that we are simply operating on the level of belief.

For all he knows, we could be operating on the level of truth and we have proper justification for believing to be true the things that we believe.

Exactly, exactly. And of course, I wish I had the quote here, but when he's kind of breaking down his definition, he's got like truth, knowledge, belief, perception, and then opinion.

And these are kind of like levels of knowledge, kind of on the spectrum of knowledge, if you will, with belief being lower than knowledge.

But I think what he's missing is that belief is a component of knowledge, just like truth is. And so you can have a belief that is tied to the truth and therefore be operating at a level of truth, just like you described.

Another problem is that when he quotes these scriptures, again, I'll go back to quotes, but he references

John 14 .6, John 6 .29, and 1 John 5 .13. Well, when you look at 1

John 5 .13, to Adam's point, these authors aren't talking about propositional truth as in belief that something is the case.

They're talking about belief in, right? That word pist is very different things. I'm saying,

I can say, again, I believe that it is raining outside. That's different from saying, I believe in my wife to be a faithful wife, right?

That's belief in, right? So when 1 John says, I've written all these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God, right?

Now, you're not just believing that his name is Yeshua or something like that. You're believing in his name.

You're believing in the person, right? You're putting your trust in the person. That's very different than the way that he tries to leverage this scripture against some sort of level of propositional truth.

Likewise, the work of God is this, to believe in the one he has sent. That's what

John 6 .29 says. So when he references John 6 .29 in his quote here, he's referencing it in the context of talking about propositional truths, but the authors themselves aren't using the term belief in that sense.

They're using it in the sense of trusting in somebody, someone, namely Jesus Christ.

This is just a really sloppy word, man. It's just really sloppy. And it's interesting too, that the Bible doesn't argue for the existence of God.

It assumes the existence of God and says it's foolish to deny it. So that the concept of faith is not meant in scripture to believe in a proposition that you otherwise don't know about.

It's basically trust in the one whom we know and has proven reliable. Of course, the Old Testament is a perfect example of God's faithfulness.

And the additional reasons why we should today believe that God will always fulfill his promises, so on and so forth.

So it's not a, as you mentioned, it's not a belief that, it's a belief in this idea of trust in a person who's been reliable, not trust in some abstract and personal proposition that a

God exists somewhere out there. And real quick on that note, which is the point,

Eli, that we need to get somehow to Mr. Goodwin. But as Adam was talking too, and I remember

I was preaching somewhere and it was about something about truth, but I had a realization in preparation for that.

And that he put John 14 and six, as well as in that quote that Adam had up, as though it's a point for his propositions that he's stating.

But here's what's so amazing to me. When you think, when you look throughout history, you look at every prophet, every guru, every religious leader or whatever,

Jesus makes an ontologically unique statement, the likes of which has never been made before or after him.

And so in that light, I look at John 14 and six different. So most prophets, gurus, religious leaders have claimed to have special access to the truth, special gnosis, but none of them claim to be the truth.

That distinction is extremely important, extremely powerful. So when you encounter Jesus, you're literally encountering the truest man to ever live.

You're encountering personal truth. And that also makes sense for us because we're talking about grounding truths and grounding these things, grounding logic.

Well, if we're gonna ground moral or ethical truths, they have to be grounded in a person. So this is why naturalism to me fails when there's no

God in the paradigm, there's no transcendent source to attach objective moral values to.

So they're always subjective, right? And so it makes sense, not just cause the Bible, just that we wanna quote it that way.

It makes sense logically that the truth would be a person. If in fact truth exists, yeah.

Now, wait a minute, I gotta disagree with you there. Fanatic has something to say to your brother cause he covers this in his book, man.

I hate to tell you, but he - I saw it. He got something for you, though. He got something for you. He says, I'm being funny.

Here's another quote from the book, he says, he says, if you're a Christian, cause what he's about to do is go into this, setting out definitions.

And what I'm just gonna do is give a definition of truth. He says, if you're a Christian, try to resist the urge to respond with truth is a person and his name is

Jesus Christ. Why should you resist this for now? Well, first, the truth of two plus two equals four is quite indisputable.

And the truth is that you are reading this sentence right now. Yet neither of those truths are

Jesus Christ. So our definition needs to be a bit more specific. Now, I've tried to be nice, man, but seriously, yo.

Well, he goes on to say truth is reality or exact representations of reality.

He later says, you know, whatever the reality is, it is what it is, even if we as human beings never come to grasp it.

Reality is truth. Now, what's funny is he chides the Christians just like you,

Alex. He's coming at you, dog, you know what I'm saying? For saying that Jesus is the truth. Nevertheless, he wants to later on say the reality is true.

Now, the funny part about it is if you're gonna leave that open, then in so much as Jesus is the ultimate reality, then as a

Christian, I'm on good grounds to in that sense, you know, affirm that Jesus is the truth. So if he can make a metaphysical claim of this identity relation between reality and truth, then don't deprive the

Christian of that. And obviously when Christians say that, you know, well, even when Jesus said that he is the truth, he's not talking about propositional truths.

He's talking a bit about that ultimate reality. So again, this is your boy throwing out definitions and all that kind of stuff in just really sloppy ways.

I think that are very unfortunate for the reader because I think that he owes his readers more than that.

So when we say that Jesus is the truth, we're not saying that Jesus is a proposition. No, what we would say is

Jesus is being God, right? And with a triune God is the metaphysical ultimate upon which all derivational facts, facts that are derived from more fundamental things come from so that in a very, very profound sense,

God is the ultimate ground of reality. There's nothing beyond him and everything else that exists as a creation exists because of him.

It's defined because of how he's defined it. So it is entirely appropriate to call Jesus Christ the truth.

And what I recognize in this quote, that was a portion, if you can put that two plus two thing there, that was a portion that I did get to read and it kind of my antennas went up.

And this is important, especially for people who watch my channel. And we have a big emphasis here on presuppositional apologetics and the importance of avoiding neutrality in thinking.

Look what he says here. Think in terms, you're a Christian, you have a Christian worldview, you're committed to Christ in your worldview perspective.

Look what he's asking us to do. And it's the very thing that I keep telling people to be careful for.

Van Til said this, Greg Bonson said this, all of the presuppositional thinkers and Christian thinkers have pointed this out and I think it's vital to understand.

Look what he says. He says, if you're a Christian, try to resist the urge to respond with truth as a person and his name is

Jesus Christ. In other words, try to resist the urge to ground truth and reality in the ultimate foundation of our worldview as Christians.

So try to do that. In other words, try to understand truth in a neutral fashion that does not necessitate and require

Jesus Christ, the triune God to be the grounding and metaphysical foundation for that. Again, he's literally asking us to be neutral, which is something that he's not being neutral, nor shouldn't we be neutral as well.

So on a very surface level, it's very possible to talk about definitions that we could agree on and we can kind of communicate.

But when we're talking about the truth or falsity of the Christian worldview, we are talking about paradigmatic issues, worldview issues in which we can't just speak generically and use generic definitions.

We need to be very specific because we're talking about foundational issues. So I think that's a very important thing to point out.

And two plus two, by the way, equals four. Mathematics are based upon logic. And if we take, for example, the basic law of logic, the law of identity, something is what it is, it's not what it's not.

And the law of non -contradiction, a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time in the same way. People do deny those.

I mean, the law of identity is denied by some certain philosophical perspectives.

Now we might think it's foolish, but we can't just say this is indisputable. In philosophy, everything is disputable.

Everything is disputable. We need to be very careful about that. Sorry for rambling there. That kind of - No, that's really good.

No, it's important. That's very important. My antennas went up. Well, I got one more,

I think one more slide. And it's something we can all discuss because I wanna hear y 'all's thoughts on it too.

Yeah. Just to give a heads up too, we're at the top of the hour.

And so we will be wrapping things up soon. But if there are some major points that you wanna include that we haven't discussed, feel free to introduce them and we can kind of talk about them and then we'll wrap things up if that's okay.

Okay. After Alex's, I'm gonna get to the heart of the matter. Oh yeah, the four options. So yeah, I'll be quick. Cause I just wanna read this and kind of show where he, once again, it's not really defined.

This is not really about terminology on this one. Oh wait, it's not up there. While you're looking for that,

Vocab Malone here says he's gonna create and share a playlist later tonight. So if anyone is interested, they can check out the

Street Apologist, look up Vocab Malone on YouTube, check out his playlist section and see if you can find all of the videos that have made thus far.

So just giving folks a heads up on that. And you just let me know if your slides are ready. Yeah, it's ready.

Okay. So, and this kind of goes back to some Adam said earlier and I'll get your thoughts too on this,

Adam. So he says, there are, however, schools of thought, I don't know who or where or what, but there's schools of thought that see the human mind as an innately having the imprint of universal ideas or categories pressed upon it before we ever encounter the outside world, before our senses feed on any data.

I'm just gonna pause there for the sake of time. But here's some of the issues.

What grounding do these anonymous schools of thought have for suggesting that our immaterial minds could access concepts pertaining to the material world without our presence in that material world?

So I don't know if that made sense that he's trying to kind of throw this bait out that some people or some schools of thought, some other religions,

I don't know, seem to think that there is some imprint that we're born with almost, that we were born knowing certain logic or certain things about circles and different things of that nature, which we all know is just false.

We don't really even have to go into depth about this. Babies have to learn everything. There's nothing that they really come into the world with a priori in that way.

So I don't know what he's really suggesting here or I kind of know why he's suggesting it, but it also fails on other levels.

Who determines what those universal ideas or categories that we have a priori access to are?

What are the things that all humans would have that a priori access to and what would those things need to be?

Is it just up to Mr. Goodwin to tell us what those are or do we all kind of intuitively know that? Is the moral law included in this innate imprint?

It doesn't seem that it is and how could it be? And so even things that we consider basic now, such as that the earth revolves around the sun or is that innately imprinted?

So there's so much left in the air. It's the biggest case of question begging that I've seen in a while.

Like you just put a thought out and didn't verify it, didn't validate it and just left it there.

So this is where I wondered if maybe, I don't know if he felt like he was running out of space, he didn't want to make the book too long or whatever, but so this discussion here comes into context and I wanted to make a slide as I just kind of ran out of time.

I'll just have to read it off of my notes, but I think what he's talking about is the discussion between empiricism and rationalism, where a rationalist might say that we are not in a sense blank slates when we come into the world, but we have some sort of innate knowledge about certain,

I think he refers to them as universal ideals or something like that. I think what he's trying to do is critique rationalism.

And what he eventually does, as I understand, I think he rejects rationalism and he says this, he says, quote, and again, he's talking about in basically how do we get knowledge, gaining knowledge?

He says, quote, this is on page 275. As a child, I had unwittingly stumbled upon the realization that the validity of our logic with which we can have knowledge of reality comes to us in two ways.

Through empirical perception, in parentheses, what our five senses relate to our minds and rational processing, the reasoning power of our minds working upon the data fed to us by our five senses.

One can hardly work without the other. And so what he does is he kind of rejects rationalism, this notion that there could be some sort of innate knowledge or something like that.

And he adopts like this hard empiricism, this idea that everything comes down to, in terms of how we gain knowledge, it comes down to experience and more specifically experience through the five senses.

Now, the problem is that, again, this is another one of those, it's just an interesting way of describing things.

So empiricists, those who subscribe to empiricism would generally, as I understand it, give room for not only experiencing things through your sense data, the five senses, but also reflective experience.

So that would be like those internal screens like I was talking about earlier with having direct access to oneself and then deriving certain truths from that.

So they would say that, yeah, everything that we know or can know about any given subject comes to us through experience, but again, they'll likely bifurcate between sense experience and reflective experience internally.

Now, the problem with him is that he actually condenses down to just the experience and even then experience that is fed to us by the senses.

So essentially without sense data, we can't know something, right? Now, the problem with that is, and he doesn't spell this out in this book, but I think that leaves open the objection that there are certain things that we can know about the world that transcend our sense data.

Like your point, mathematics, Eli, that you talked about. There are mathematical truths that we can ascertain through functions of logic that don't map onto the physical world.

Like there's certain things that mathematicians can do with infinities and manipulating those and equations and things like that.

And I would argue that infinity is not something that's physically possible. There's no way that we could sense an infinite number of things, physical things.

And so I think that, I don't know if he was trying to save time or what, but these concepts are kind of sloppily dealt with in such a way that it leaves, opens a lot of ambiguity.

Also, if you're going to relegate knowledge to that, which can be experienced through empirical means or simply rational reflection, that kind of reminded me of the statement where he spoke about that physical things in the universe maintain their identity over time.

How do you know that without universal observation? For all we know, things don't have the same property from one moment to another.

You kind of undermine your knowledge of the universal fact that according to the law of identity, things maintain their identity throughout time and don't change.

I mean, how do you know that's the case if knowledge only comes through sensation and experience?

We haven't had, no one has universal sensation or universal observations. So again,

I think that would be self -initiating there. Yeah, I agree. And I didn't think we were going to get here, but since we're here,

I'm just gonna make a real quick quote. Again, he references Stanford Encyclopedia, Philosophical Encyclopedia for some of his definitions.

So I pulled up in regards to empiricism, I'm just gonna quote this right quick. It is also important to note that the rationalist slash empiricist distinction is not exhaustive of the possible sources of knowledge.

One might claim, for example, that we can gain knowledge in a particular area by a form of divine revelation or insight that is a product of neither reason nor sense experience.

In short, when used carelessly, the labels rationalist and empiricist, as well as the slogan that is the title of this essay, rationalism versus empiricism, can impede rather than advance our understanding.

So it seems like he's taking an aim at rationalism or in kind of going the empiricist route, but that may not even be a fight worth having.

But nevertheless, the main thing about that quote that I wanna emphasize is that, you could be an empiricist and still allow for the notion that there are sources of knowledge outside of one's reason or sense experience.

And so that's gonna go to somebody like Calvin, you might appeal to the sense of divinitate, or the witness of the

Holy Spirit and things like that. I'm curious if he's going to mix together empirical truths and rational truths, how does he overcome the hurdle that is presented to us by Immanuel Kant?

So that for example, knowledge doesn't come through sensation simply without imposing rational categories onto empirical data, right?

But then again, if we are imposing conceptual realities and categories upon the empirical data, are we seeing reality in itself, or as it only appears to us?

You see Immanuel Kant combined rationalism and empiricism and found that we have no access to the noumenal, in other words, we have no access to the true state of affairs.

So if he's trying to mix those categories, then he still doesn't get to reality about anything. You only, you never see, as Kant says, you never see the thing in itself, you only see what our interpretation of those things are since we must impose, our mind is active in the knowing process, and it's imposed by our rational faculties.

But someone else might be imposing different categories and understanding things differently. We can never see a tree, for example, in itself, we only see our perception of the tree.

Okay, okay. Now, let me go back to something real quick. All right, so if I could share my screen again, because you just brought up a point,

I hadn't thought about this. He does reference Kant in the book, by the way. Okay. I'm gonna go back to a quote. He says, okay.

All right, so he talks about truth, he says reality or exact representations of it, whether written, spoken or otherwise mediated.

He also says, whatever the reality is, it is what it is, even if we as human beings never come to grasp what reality is truth.

Now, to your point, this is how he defines truth and reality. Kant might take him to task on that, because the reality is, just think about like eyesight, for example.

I don't actually see the computer that's sitting in front of me. What I see are the reflections of the light rays and so on and so forth hitting my eyes, and I'm interpreting it through the lens of my mind, if you will,

I'm saying, but I don't see it directly. I see it by way of the light rays. Likewise, you could say the same thing about smell, any of the five senses,

I'm saying, is mediated to us in that sort of indirect way. If that's true, then we actually never have a direct representation of the world, right?

And if we don't have a direct representation of the world, then on his definition of truth, we can never have truth.

We can never, or at least we can never be, we can never have knowledge, I'll say, because we can never really have justification to say that we really are seeing things or experiencing things as they are.

That is distant from us in a way that I think renders his understanding of truth untenable.

It's also a more fundamental problem. Why should we listen to him? Like if what he's saying is true, then we shouldn't be listening to you.

Like, you know what I'm saying? You cut your own feet out for him. But even that, when you say, even if what he's saying is true, on his view, you can't have truth.

So you can't have truth. You've refuted yourself since you had to be true and that you don't have truth.

It's contradictory at its foundation. And this is what happens when you remove the absolute. When you remove an ultimate point of reference, there are no standards.

You subjectivize everything. All of philosophy that is autonomous and independent of an all -encompassing absolute

God runs into the problem known as the egocentric predicament. There's no way to get outside yourself for an objective perspective.

And that's why we start, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. It sounds Bible -y, it sounds Christian -y, but that answers the question of getting outside of ourselves.

We have one who knows all things, is absolute and ultimate, and reveals himself. It can be wrapped up in the simple truth of that little song,

Jesus loves me this I know because the Bible tells me so. God has revealed himself unmistakably and we take him at his word.

And to reject that, we lose ultimate point of reference. We lose the foundation for science. We lose the foundation for objective moral values and duties and all is sound and furious, signifying nothing as Shakespeare says.

And that is a conclusion that is drawn not just by Christians, but other philosophers who recognize what you lose when you drop

Christianity. Friedrich Nietzsche is a good example of a consistent person who acknowledged the role of Christianity in terms of giving us absolute standards and reference points.

Yeah, that's excellent, man. Obviously, God, particularly if we're talking about a being that's maximally great, has all perfections, he's gonna be morally perfect, things like that.

He's not gonna be engaged in deception. He gives, and he can order the world in such a way that we are in contact with truth.

But again, if you take that off the table, then, and you're just less to the five senses, all of which cannot really render certainty for sure.

And they really can't even give you, I'll just kind of leave it at that. There's always gonna be room for doubt in terms of whether you're sensing things correctly.

For all we know, this could all be just our imagination. We could be dreaming right now, you know what I'm saying? You could be, right?

And you wouldn't really know, because when you're dreaming, you have sense perception of what appeared to be anyway. But I said all that to say, if you take

God off the table and you adopt the kind of modality he suggests, then you're really left with,

I think, just a hyper -skepticism. You really just can't know anything. And if you can't know anything, then all 300 -some pages of his book are really of no use, because he hasn't communicated anything akin to knowledge, and there's no way that we could know it if he did.

Yeah, right. Well, excellent points, gentlemen. We're at the one hour and 16 minute mark.

This has been an excellent conversation. Are there any points of summary that any of you would like to mention before we kind of wrap things up here?

Yeah, if I could just like, and what I'll probably do is I'll finish this out. Feel free to share more slides if you have some other points you wanna bring up.

That's fine as well. Great, well, I'm just gonna do a couple, and what I'll probably do is explain this further on my channel, if you wanna stop by, you know,

True Idea Apologetics. But I just wanna point out earlier, excuse me. I'll make this real quick.

Okay, so he says, after considering, this is page 276, after considering the preceding chapters, we must ask what implications does all this have for the core beliefs of the

Christian faith and any religious worldview based upon the Judeo -Christian tradition? He says there are at least four pathways forward.

So he at least puts the at least in there, you know, so he opens the door for other options, but he himself chose option four, which

I'll just read really quick. And then in terms of where he decided to take things, to me, this whole book kind of reads more autobiographical than a thorough, rigorous, you know, case -making type of a thing.

It's kind of more so him, you know, taking you through his thought pattern in terms of how he arrived. And I think there's some obvious missteps

I wanna address. So he believes that based upon, you know, the evidence that he showed in chapters one through 11, that we have cause to doubt the biblical record.

And what he believes is finally we could conclude that even though the writers who compiled the biblical narratives have told an amazingly heart -stirring saga about God and humanity, nevertheless, on the grounds of history, logic, and ultimately truth, two concepts there that he didn't define well, the

God of the Bible is not a trustworthy source of divine revelation, you know? And so he kind of, you know, uses this, this is his launching off point to talk about, you know, essentially why he left the faith.

Now, again, he said that there's at least, you know, four options. And I'm gonna say, man, you definitely missed a spot.

Because there's no good reason. Yeah, yeah, for sure. The question for me is, you know, is there any good reason for the reader of this book to follow him in option number four and conclude that the

Bible is not a trustworthy source of divine revelation? Obviously my answer is gonna be no.

And I think there's at least a couple other options that I wanna just go over really quickly. First of all, you know, again, this is kind of the heart of the book.

This is where he's trying to get to, you know? So first of all, I wanna make a distinction between belief that and belief how, right?

And we kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, you know, in reference to believing in versus believing that something is the case.

One can confirm, affirm that scripture is true, even if in the face of uncertainty in terms of how particular passages of it are true.

So you can affirm that scripture is true, even if you don't have every single answer in terms of how it is the case.

And this is not special pleading. This is something that we employ all the time. I can't tell you how the light switch works in this room that I'm sitting in right now,

I'm saying, but I can affirm that if I switch it on and off, it's gonna do what it does, right? So knowledge of how something is the case is not, shouldn't be conflated with knowledge that something is the case.

Likewise, even in science, I'm thinking about John Polkinghorne, who is a theoretical physicist credited for discovering quarks, you know what

I'm saying? And the existence of quarks long before there was any independent evidence that they existed. And there was years that went by where he was able to kind of do his mathematical equations and suggest that, hey, these things called quarks exist.

And he had on those grounds of the math, he has sufficient grounds to say that they do. Nevertheless, they weren't really discovered until, you know, however many years later, you know?

So again, he had knowledge that something was the case, even if he couldn't give you a thorough A to Z account of how.

And even with Brady's pet theory, evolution, right? Can evolutionists answer every single question about how evolution is true?

Can't even tell you how life got started. You're dead right at the beginning. And that's why evolutionists tend to separate those as separate questions.

Well, we have evidence that evolution occurs, but we, you know, abiogenesis, we don't talk about how life got started because that's too speculative.

I mean, Richard Dawkins says we might've been, aliens might've implanted us here. I mean, you can't connect those.

You know, you can't say, let's not talk about the beginning, but let's talk about all this other stuff that happened upon which depends on the kind of beginning that was there.

Or the existence of information, you know, how that got off the ground, you know, things like that. You know, they can't answer all those questions, linkages and so on and so forth.

But nevertheless, people like himself have such confidence in it such that they would leave the faith. Now, my whole point is, again, if all these examples are legitimate for others, certainly we're not special pleading to apply to ourselves.

So we can affirm that scripture is true, even if we don't have certainty on all the passages in terms of how they could be the case.

With that in mind, you know, and I'm just gonna read these. Sure. Because I know we're running out of time.

So I'm just gonna, you know, read a couple and I'll get back to it later. So option six, you know,

I'm just gonna read it off the screen. You know, one could, I'm sorry, one more preface, I apologize. I'm given options that different Christians would appeal to.

I know this won't be palatable for all theological traditions. Each of these options may not, but I'm just kind of listing out ways that Christians could potentially respond.

Okay, so option six, one could begin with a cumulative case for theism using arguments that are independent from yet consistent with biblical claims.

For example, such arguments might include the Kalam cosmological argument, argument from morality, argument from consciousness, et cetera.

And then having established theism, one might appeal to an argument from the resurrection of Jesus to further establish theism and demonstrate that God can be specifically identified as Yahweh, the

God of the Bible. Now, upon considering Jesus' resurrection, one might take it to be a stamp of validation on his claims in ministry.

Thus one may conclude from Jesus' self -disclosure, prophetic context, and historical evidence that he is

God. Given that Jesus is God and taught that the Old Testament scriptures are inerrant, one has good reason to affirm that the

Old Testament is inerrant. Having laid the groundwork for the inerrancy of the Old Testament, plus the deity and authority of Christ, one could argue further for the reliability of the

New Testament. I got something's in my way. Oh, okay. By noting the implications that follow from these facts, right?

Namely that Jesus handpicked the disciples and you have the Holy Spirit who is said to empower and affirm the message coming forth to that first generation of Christians over which those disciples had oversight.

If you have the Holy Spirit witnessing and so on, there's a good reason to think that what's coming out of the

New Testament should at the very least be reliable, and then I would argue inerrant as well, given what's attested to in it.

There's a way to get to inerrancy even that doesn't require one to have this exhaustive knowledge and answer for every single conundrum in the

Old and the New Testament. You can have rational grounds based upon arguments that get you there deductively, whereas it seems that Brady wants to narrow the conversation to the inductive, you're saying working from the ground up, right?

One last thing, just one other option that he hadn't considered, and again, I'm gonna go over this more deeply on my channel, but in so much as Jesus handpicked the disciples for establishing the church post -resurrection, commanded them to teach the truth as he taught them in Matthew 28, 18 through 19, and the

Holy Spirit empowered and affirmed them, one can reasonably conclude the church's founding documents written within the period that those disciples had influence and oversight to be reliable, thus substantiating our trust in them as authoritative.

Against the backdrop of Jesus' authority and his commissioning of the disciples upon whom the church is built, when the

New Testament authors commend to us the New Testament texts are inspired, one would have rational grounds to hold some form of doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy, thereby undergirding the conviction that what scripture teaches is true.

This option leaves room for the Christians to affirm that scripture is true while taking critical biblical studies seriously as they pursue how scripture is best to be understood.

So that just kind of finished it out in my last point there. So I think that's my last slide.

Now, the last thing I'll say is, even if you don't wanna take the cumulative case route, you could also either supplement it or replace it with some sort of reformed epistemology, wherein

God himself, or you could say, but the senses divinitatis attest to us that the scriptures and the cardinal truths of Christianity are true, to use the words of Alvin Plantinga.

And this would be actually consistent with empiricism as I read earlier, there's some source of knowledge that is apart from reason and our sense experience.

And so you can take the warranted Christian route, you can say that we have warrant based upon the witness of the Holy Spirit and the based upon the sense of divinitatis or however you wanna go there.

And in so much as that's the case, there's rational grounds or there's a model for affirming inerrancy and being rationally sound in doing so.

So I know that was quick, I'll unpack that later, but you know, I just wanna throw that out. I don't have any more slides, Eli.

So, sorry about that. No worries. But I'll say one thing because this four part false dichotomy that he sets up at the end is kind of like, that's where he's going.

So I wanna say a couple of things. So I'm just gonna read for everybody. It says option one, the Bible over everything.

So here he's saying, well, these are the people, he probably put you in there, Eli or me and all of us.

Oh, you guys know the Bible doesn't align with reality, but you're gonna stick with it no matter what.

That's that group, right? And then he says option two, it's not you, it's me. So it's, we understand the

Bible correctly and y 'all just need to understand how we understand it so that you can understand that there's no contradiction. Option three, bless this mess, he called it, which is kind of funny.

But he said, basically all these Christians, we know it's horrible, we know the Bible's garbage, but we're just gonna pray

God bless it anyway and hope it works out. And then he says option four, as Adam just alluded to.

So once again, this is why we started with definitions because all four of those options are set up as straw men based on a faulty foundation of defining logic, belief, trust, faith, like every word that you needed to get to that point, he misdefined or didn't define.

So that's how he got where he's going. We just wanted to show everybody that and just make sure that we all understand,

I know your audience understands, there's no mess to bless. That's right. I got it right.

There's a beautiful consistency to the Christian worldview. And I'll say one last thing on Tuesday, it's gonna be about 45 minutes, but I'm gonna go in a lot of depth on what you just said,

Eli, that let's look at the consistency internally in the scripture. Let's look at, not as primary, but let's look at the consistency, even at science and how it correlates with inscription.

Excellent. Yeah, and likewise, I'll be hopping on probably later this week as well to kind of go more in depth about those options.

Cause I think that again, this is the punchline of his whole book. That's the direction he took.

And I'm saying that one can have rational grounds to affirm the scriptures.

I'm saying in ways I think he just flat out didn't consider. So we'll get to that. Well, excellent.

Well, guys, this has been an excellent conversation and I hope that people will check out the rest of the videos that are in response to the various chapters of the book,

Let There Be Gaslight. Once again, also check out Adam Coleman's YouTube channel, True ID, and Alex McElroy's Relentless Pursuit of Purpose.

If you have not yet subscribed to their YouTube channel, sometimes I say, stop demonstrating the truth of total depravity and go.

Go and subscribe and support their channel. That's hilarious. I highly recommend their content.

Gentlemen, I would like to thank you so much for coming on and giving me of your time and your fellowship as well.

And so I'd love to have you guys back on in the future to kind of cover a different topic, if that would be okay.

Would that be okay? Of course, absolutely. All right, excellent. Excellent. Well, absolutely.

I'd totally be down for it. I love hopping on people's channels. Actually, I have to get going only because I need to hop on Matt Slick's channel.

He's having a - Oh, okay, all right. Yeah, a live stream there. So I was gonna hop on there, but I definitely want you guys back and I highly recommend you guys to check out those other videos that will be created in a playlist on Vocab Malone's channel,

The Street Apologist. So definitely check that out. Well, gentlemen, once again, thank you so much. Everyone who's been listening and behaving in the comments,

I appreciate it. I'm happy of my comment section. There are a couple of things every now and then, but my comment section on my videos are pretty well -behaved and I do appreciate the respectful interaction, guys.

So, oh, well, that's it for this episode, guys. Until next time, take care and God bless.