Chris Bolt & Eli Ayala (Presupp Applied to Competing Religions)

Welcome to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala, and if you're just tuning in, you will notice that I am dressed very differently.

The roles have been reversed. My collared t -shirt is missing. I always wear my colorful collared t -shirt, and the day that I choose to wear this generic t -shirt,

Chris Bolt is wearing the fancy collared t -shirt. So I was trying to make popular the collared t -shirt in the same way that James White makes popular the bow ties.

I don't know if it's working. I do get some comments here and there about my shirts, but my wife dresses me, so this time she didn't dress me, so I just picked the random shirts.

I hope you guys don't mind. All right, well, we are back with Chris Bolt. We did have him on a while back to discuss transcendental argumentation and things regarding presuppositional apologetics, which is the primary focus of this channel, but I'm very excited to have him on today to discuss what

I think is an area that is not very much developed in my estimation within presuppositional thought.

At least it's not very much developed within the popular arena. I'm not sure if there's extensive writing with regards to presuppositionalism applied to religious perspectives in the scholarly literature, but a lot of people ask about this.

Everyone who does apologetics presupp really appreciate the ability of the presuppositional methodology to refute atheism, materialism, and things like that, but the question keeps coming up.

How do you apply presuppositional methodology to competing religious systems?

Okay, that's number one. Number two, why is it the triune god that provides the necessary preconditions?

What if you have something like, you know, the god of Islam who is transcendent? He is, you know, can he be the grounding of the necessary preconditions for intelligibility, logic, knowledge?

We're going to talk about those sorts of things with the hopes that we can move the popular discussion forward for those who are looking into these issues.

So without further ado, let me, oh, oh, I forgot one more thing. We have a double show today, so at three o 'clock eastern,

I'm going to have Gary DeMar on to talk about the apologetic legacy of Greg Bonson. And so we're going to also mention the new book that came out by American Vision, Against All Opposition, by Greg Bonson.

Interestingly enough, I guess I'm gonna have to call Greg Bonson the Tupac of Christian apologetics, because after Tupac died, he kept on coming out with albums.

What's up with that? Well, Bonson apparently is publishing books after his death, and just as a sneak peek,

I have received an early copy, a digital copy of it, and then I have my physical copy, and I have read through it, and it is an excellent, excellent presuppositional resource for people who are interested in this topic.

All right, so that was my last announcement. Now, Chris, if you'd like to introduce yourself to perhaps the people who haven't seen the previous episode, why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself, and then we'll jump into our discussion.

Yeah, well, my name is Chris Bolt, and I'm a husband and a father, father of four, and I'm a pastor and a professor and an author, and today

I'm hanging out at home, and so you're not gonna get the nice uppity looking office chair and study behind me and everything.

You've got the mess that's behind me and my gaming chair, because it's the most comfortable. But anyway, thank you,

Eli, for having me on, and I look forward to our discussion today. Well, I'm very much appreciative that you're coming on, or you're on, because I know that you're a very busy guy, and so I really do appreciate the sacrifice of time.

Now, I must ask, okay, because I consider myself a theologian, an apologist, and you consider yourself, you know, you wear many hats.

You're a pastor, is that what you said? You're a pastor, you're a professor, you're an apologist. How do you fit gaming in the midst of all of that?

Well, I'm just sitting in a gaming chair, right? Oh, but you don't actually... That doesn't entail that I game, actually, but I don't have much room to fit gaming into my schedule.

I might do something, mess around with a friend or some of my family, play Minecraft with my kids or whatever, but yeah,

I wouldn't consider myself a gamer. What system do you have, man? I'm looking at an

NES Classic right here, actually, but then I also have an Xbox.

I just use Xboxes and PC. All right, so you're not fully presuppositional. That would require you to have a

PlayStation, but PlayStation, you know, provides the necessary preconditions for a fun time.

Well, I had a PS1. That was my first real gaming system after the original

Nintendo, but I don't have a lot of nice stuff like that. All right, that sounds good.

All right, well, let's just jump right into the topic. Now, I want to talk about this topic. It's a nice, juicy topic for people who are interested in this topic.

They really just want to know. People see the power of the presuppositional methodology, the power of the transcendental argument, which was exemplified so beautifully by Dr.

Bonson when he was around and, of course, in his works. How do we apply this methodology to other religious perspectives?

What is it about the approach that makes it flexible enough to be applied to any non -Christian perspective?

Yeah, so I actually want to back the question up quite a bit and address it from a little bit different angle.

I saw your show with Dr. James Anderson at Reform Theological Seminary, and he had said something that I've been mulling over for quite a while with regard to Greg Bonson and the way that he approaches things things.

I think that a lot of people come into presuppositional apologetic methodology, in particular, through the 1985 debate with Greg Bonson and Gordon Stein.

They hear the way that Greg Bonson makes his arguments there. His famous point that he made against Stein was regarding the nature of the laws of logic, in particular, with regard to their material or immaterial nature.

And that is not necessarily a presuppositional type argument, right?

You find that in classical literature as well. In fact, J .P. Moreland makes a very similar argument in Scaling the Secular City as far as the nature or the makeup of logic, metaphysically speaking and whatnot.

So a lot of presuppositionalists, I think, come to this question from the view of understanding the transcendental argument and presuppositionalism as pertaining to atheism in particular, because Greg Bonson was debating an atheist, because that's kind of the easiest target, as it were, is to deal with atheism.

That's often what we're looking at when we're looking at proofs for the existence of God and this sort of thing. Of course, we know that apologetics is vast, right?

It covers a lot of different topics apart from just rebutting atheism or something like that. So when you come to Greg Bonson that way, you can almost read

Greg Bonson Thomistically, or as a classical apologist. And I think that is actually what gives rise to this question of, well, then what do we do about the other world religions?

Because people think of the transcendental argument at that point as a

Thomistic -styled argument, an argument for general theism, as opposed to an argument for Christian theism in particular.

If an argument is actually for Christian theism in particular, then the question does not even come up, well, we've dealt with the atheists, but then how do we deal with these other religions?

Because if we are showing, demonstrating the existence of the Christian God in particular, we've already dealt with all of the other false religions, you see.

So that's the first thing that I would say, the first little caveat there is to it. Go ahead.

Real quick, I do apologize. That's very helpful. So if the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience is demonstrated, it's a

Christian God, and we do that to the atheist, then the question, what about these other religions, don't pop up, since if it is in fact the case that we have correctly demonstrated the existence of the

Christian God against the atheist, then that automatically negates any other possibility. If in fact we've successfully demonstrated the

Christian God, is that what you're saying? Yes, so I'm really suggesting this as a pedagogical type point, where when we're teaching presuppositional methodology, we actually need to start in closer to the

Christian worldview, and those who attempt to mimic it through some type of religious worldview, we need to start there rather than starting with, let's go with atheism and get rid of that, and then we can move closer into this explicitly

Christian theistic worldview. Do you see what I'm saying there? So in other words, in presuppositional methodology, we're

Christians who want our methodology to work out from our theological worldview, whereas in classical apologetics, at least classically construed, you actually have people wanting to refute atheism, refute naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, then refute atheism, then refute agnosticism, then refute a particular religious worldview.

They are taking these steps closer and closer into fuller and fuller, more explicitly

Christian claims. That's not how presuppositionalism should be taught. That's not how presuppositionalism actually works.

So when we're presenting a presuppositional view, when we're presenting the transcendental argument, when we're presenting the

Christian worldview, it is in fact the Christian worldview. So in reality, what all

I'm saying, I guess, is the mere fact that this question exists as such a popular one with regard to presuppositional methodology is very concerning in that we have missed what the claim has been all along, that we are seeking to demonstrate the

Christian worldview and the Christian God in particular, not a general theistic God.

You see what I'm saying there? Sure, sure. Well, was that not precisely what Monson sought to do?

Didn't he mention that in the debate specifically? Yes, I think he sought to do that. I think he was doing that.

My difficulty is that in terms of his objective argumentation, someone could easily misconstrue that as Thomistic or classical, and I think this is what

Dr. Anderson hit on correctly in his show with you. You don't see a really explicitly

Trinitarian apologetic with Greg Bonson. I'm sure that he intended it to be such.

He is, of course, suggesting that this is the Christian worldview as a whole, the whole enchilada, as he would say.

But nevertheless, that doesn't come out a whole lot explicitly in his actual arguments. So you would say that, so we would both agree that in Dr.

Bonson's debate with Gordon Stein, he's arguing that the triune God is the necessary preconditions for logic, knowledge, or whatever, but that his argument is too broad so as to demonstrate that specifically.

He didn't develop how it is that the triune God undergirds those things, and I think this is a criticism that a lot of people have had with Bonson's approach, and just generally in the literature.

He focused very much on issues of epistemology, but didn't really address specifically issues of the one and the many and how that all fits, which would strengthen the positive demonstration of the

Christian perspective. He believed it, but didn't iron that out, and I think a lot of people would benefit greatly from reading

Brant Bosterman's book on the Trinity, and we've had him on the show as well, where we discuss this in a little more detail, but I think

I would agree with you, Chris, that Bonson didn't go into as much as he would probably have liked to.

Right. Yeah, and it's not to fault Bonson. It's just simply that it didn't come up. There wasn't necessarily an opportunity or a need for him to bring these things out.

So if we're here right now, he'd probably say, well, yeah, let's talk about what Van Til said, you know, because this is very much in Van Til.

All right. Yeah. Very good. All right. So again, so we need to narrow the scope. Is that what you're saying?

To narrow the scope in our argumentation more specifically than is typically done? I think we should start with the

Christian worldview and say that it is both necessary and sufficient for human intelligibility, and any deviation from that worldview at all renders one with unintelligibility.

It creates some problems. Human predication is impossible on these other worldviews.

Now, at base, there are only two of these worldviews, and you can put this out in terms of biblical theology with, for example, the war of the seeds, the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent all the way back in Genesis chapter three.

Yeah. There's this war of the seeds that is both individually expressed there, but then also individually expressed eschatologically.

We know that the seed of the woman ultimately is Christ Jesus who crushes the head of the seed of the serpent or crushes

Satan really through his ministry, through his death, burial, resurrection on the cross for our sins, but we see also the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent collectively expressed in Scripture.

In Exodus, there's a lot of this going on where God calls Israel his beloved son, his son.

Israel is my son. Then he tells Pharaoh, let my son go, let my people go, or I will kill your firstborn son.

We see that collectively expressed throughout Scripture. We actually see it collectively expressed, I think, in the church now, those who are in union with Jesus Christ.

What I'm saying here, I'm setting up what presuppositionalists would call the antithesis between these worldviews that are constantly at war with one another.

You can set this up systematically as well. Even when we get through the Psalms, you see the righteous and the wicked.

When you get to Proverbs, you see the wise and the foolish. There is this antithesis, these competing worldviews that are at base two different worldviews.

There is submission to God. There is the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge and understanding.

There is submission to Christ. There's the philosophy that's according to Christ. Then there is the philosophy that's according to the world.

It's a philosophy that is autonomous or self -law at bottom rather than being submitted to the law of Christ.

We see that presuppositional conflict of worldviews. Jesus says, you're for me or against me.

Somebody may say, well, I don't believe what Jesus says there. Okay, then you're against him. I think that we can construe this antithesis, biblically speaking, in terms of what

I would call biblical or narrative theology, in terms of systematic theology, in terms of particular texts.

If we went to some of the texts and went through them carefully and what they said, I think we have that there.

I think we have it there philosophically as well. When a presuppositionalist says that everyone has presuppositions, we're not merely making the point that everyone has presuppositions in some naked fashion.

We're talking about one is either for Christ or against Christ. Now, how does that apply to these religious worldviews?

It means this, that various religious, so -called religious worldviews, and it's very difficult to even define what religion is, but those various religious worldviews are simply different manifestations of what is at bottom that adherence to a non -Christian would -be autonomous worldview.

Islam is no different from atheism in that regard. They're both rejecting the authority of God.

Okay, can I ask a question real quick? Absolutely. I know Van Til and Bonson always put the idea that there's only two worldviews, and of course, people say, well, that's ridiculous.

There are many other worldviews. Yes, that's true, but there are two in the sense that all of the non -Christian worldviews are joined together by the same commonality and deficiency.

What is it specifically that binds all the non -Christian worldviews together such that we are justified to clump them into the one category, the non -Christian worldview?

Yeah, it's interesting because that question itself is presuppositionally loaded, right? And so we wind up begging the question one way or the other, right?

So we want to think about how do we categorize, how do we set up this taxonomy of worldviews in terms of one principle, one overarching theme, or one core principle that ties all of them together?

And we want to say in accord with the Christian worldview, it's this principle of autonomy. That's what lies at the root, at the base of all non -Christian rejections of Christianity, of God's authority.

So God is the ultimate authority. We are not the ultimate authority. And whereas you may have a

Muslim who says, well, Allah is our ultimate authority. Okay. Allah does not exist.

Allah is not the authority. And hence what you're doing there is you're using your own autonomous, would -be autonomous reasoning to reject the authority of the

Lord. Go ahead. Real quick though, but if we were to engage in an internal worldview critique of the

Muslim perspective, would it not be the case then that we have to hypothetically grant its truth and then engage in the internal critique?

So if we hypothetically grant the truth of the Muslim worldview, is it true to say that the

Muslim worldview posits an autonomous man? From your perspective, it seems as though you're really autonomous because your

God doesn't exist. But given within the Muslim perspective, we say, well, my God does exist. And so does the

Muslim believe that autonomy is a necessary feature of his own worldview?

Of course, the Muslim would not say that, right? Which is why I'm saying that this is a presuppositionally loaded question,

I think. So let me back up. If I don't come back to what you just questioned, remind me, okay?

So I'm getting older, so these things don't click the way they once did. But again, if we were to say, okay, but everyone's not autonomous the way that the

Christian says, okay? Well, we need something else that classifies these worldviews as this one thing ultimately, right?

Different variations on this one theme. If we were to say that, the reason

I'm saying this is presuppositionally loaded, that's simply begging the question, in one sense,

I understand what you're saying about the internal critique, so we'll get to that. But it's simply begging the question against the way that the

Christian would construe these things. Really, I think what the unbeliever needs to do at this point, if we're talking about the transcendental clash of worldviews, the unbeliever needs to grant the point for the sake of argument.

Not that they're giving up on what they're saying, but grant the point for the sake of argument that, yes, okay, we see it's internally consistent with regard to the

Christian claims that there are at base simply these two different worldviews.

By the way, we can come back to this philosophically in a moment too, but again, it's presuppositionally loaded.

So let's get back to your question, because I kind of lost track of what I was saying there anyway. No, the

Muslim is not going to say, yes, we adhere to some sort of autonomous worldview, but we would say, okay, so you do set up a law or have someone or something, you believe, setting up a law that is different from or opposed to the law of Yahweh, the authority of Yahweh, in which case they would say, yes.

And so we would say, okay, that's simply what we mean by autonomy there. The point that's tying you together with the atheist is that you and the atheist alike reject the authority of Allah, because that word autonomy there is itself not presuppositionally neutral.

It's tied to an overarching worldview. We need to get fairly radical when we press these things home, right?

So we need to read our Thomas Kuhn while realizing that there is still one metanarrative, there is still one objective overarching worldview that makes sense of all reality.

It's not merely a coherentist view of truth or epistemology or something like that.

It also has correspondence involved in it. We're talking about an object of reality, right? So we're different from Kuhn in that sense, but we still need to understand the radical nature of our presuppositions and the role that they play in our thinking such that when the

Muslim is saying, well, we don't adhere to an autonomous worldview. We're not basing our system on autonomy.

Yes, we understand what you mean by that in terms of internal critique, in terms of wanting to be generous in our understanding of your view, right?

Because we are going to do an internal critique. We want to grant that you posit this deity.

We understand that. And you posit that you're in submission to this deity. It's not like objectivism, right?

Where it's all about reason, human reasoning, and explicit autonomy, that sort of thing.

We understand that. We're not saying that. We're simply saying you're rejecting the God of the

Bible. You're rejecting the Christian God and his authority. And in that sense then,

I don't know why they would disagree with that. If they don't disagree with that, then they're Christian, right? Now, this is difficult with Islam, and this will set you up for some other questions,

I guess. But this is difficult with Islam because there's a sense in which they do submit themselves to the authority of God, and there's another sense in which they do not.

All right. It gets tricky at that point. All right. Well, let's jump right into this then. And we'll back up.

And let's just assume, let's presuppose, right, that people have a knowledge of the presuppositional method, and they're asking the question, well, how do

I use this against the competing religious perspectives? Now, you gave a response at the beginning that if you successfully use the presuppositional approach with the atheist, and you've demonstrated that the

Christian God is in fact the necessary precondition for intelligibility, for knowledge, and you've demonstrated this, then that by default demonstrates the falsity of all non -Christian perspectives.

But, be that as it may, how, let's get some practical tools into people's hands. How does the

Christian presuppositionalist engage with the Muslim who has the Quran, who has the

Hadith, who has the authority of Allah, the authority of Muhammad? How would you give advice presuppositionally to the

Christian who is engaging with the Muslim? Yeah. And so just like with Basan, it depends upon the particulars of the discussion in question, right?

And so you're not Muslim, and so we won't get into all of those. I just want to let the listeners know, you know, this is not going to be exhaustive, but we can throw some things out there.

So, still flying at 30 ,000 feet, and then we'll try to land some things. Okay. Philosophically, and I wanted to get to this point a moment ago, philosophically we can make this point, we can press this point home with these two competing worldviews by simply saying, again, that positively speaking, this principle of autonomy is actually tied to the negation of the

Christian worldview. So you've got the Christian worldview, and you've got the negation of the Christian worldview. And someone says, well, could you come up with a third option?

Isn't there some third option that's not Christianity or non -Christianity? What would that be, right?

Because Islam is non -Christian, Hinduism is non -Christian, Buddhism is non -Christian. And so in that sense, in the transcendental exchange of worldviews, to refute one is to refute them all.

Because they share this principle in common, and because they are in the nature of the fact a rejection of the

Christian worldview, in terms of a transcendental clash of worldviews, when you demonstrate, this is really weird, but when you demonstrate the sufficiency of the

Christian worldview, you've actually demonstrated its necessity as well, because there can only be one transcendental.

There can only be one transcendental worldview that accounts for intelligibility, okay?

And so also then, when you refute one manifestation of the non -Christian worldview, you have shown that non -Christianity itself cannot account for the preconditions of intelligibility, and hence

Christianity must be that worldview which provides those conditions. Were you going to say something? So when you say you have the

Christian worldview or not the Christian worldview, it's not the non -Christian worldview, therefore it's the

Christian worldview. Would you, in your mind, are you setting it up as that kind of disjunctive syllogism, P or not

P, therefore P? Right. And when we say the

Christian worldview or the non -Christian worldview, someone can't say that's a false dichotomy, because that is a true antonymic pair.

If one is falsified, the other one is validated. Correct, yeah, and that is a, that is simple, you know, that's simple logic.

But, I mean, people have, of course, questioned that, right? Because people will say, if you're familiar with Alec Malpass's objection to the disjunctive syllogism,

I'm not sure you're familiar with that. I'm not. Let me hold that and address it and see if he does this.

But, you know, people, this again, I just want to point this out real quick by way of observation, not as a strong argument or something, but even rejecting that dichotomy ends up presuppositionally loaded, right?

Because that is, philosophically, but also theologically, that is the claim of the Christian worldview, okay, first of all.

I know this jumps back and forth between external and internal critique, I understand that, but I'm just making that observation.

And then the other thing, I have had people before try to argue and say, well, what about dialetheism, right?

What about Graham Priest and some of the things that he's brought up, this logician, which is probably what

Malpass, maybe he goes down that road, I don't know. I know he's a logician, and so he's aware of these sorts of things.

But there are different logics. It's not as though someone like Greg Bonson was unaware of this.

He actually makes reference to logics in some of his lectures and whatnot. So that's not a surprise to presuppositionalists.

It shouldn't be a surprise to presuppositionalists. The problem when you're getting into things like true contradictions, let's suppose a true contradiction, let's try to reject the principle of explosion that helps to demonstrate at least the utility, if not the necessity, right, of the law of non -contradiction, this sort of thing.

I hope people are following along here, but we'll get out of the weeds in a moment. I'd be surprised. A lot of people do follow what you're saying.

One of my, my understanding of this is that the problem with proposing a system like that is that it does not obtain in every situation, right?

And so sometimes we have some sort of true contradiction, and then other times we would not.

The difficulty is knowing which one of those is which, okay? There seems to be a type of agnosticism with regard to this, such that much of the utility of logic is undermined when we adopt a view like that with the multivalued logics and with dialetheism and this sort of thing.

And so I would just push back presuppositionally and say, God cannot know a true contradiction.

God is, in his very essence or nature, truth. Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, right?

And so God cannot know a true contradiction. So as a Christian, that's how

I would press back against something like that. I still think there are many interesting things to be brought up there.

Alex Malpass would know a lot more about it than I would. I'm not going to pretend to be able to go down that road with him.

But that's kind of how I would approach that topic. The thing is that at the end of the day, this does not undermine something like the dichotomy that's set up by the presuppositionalist.

And I just want to make this one last comment on this. Isn't it interesting how far out we get in an attempt to press back against presuppositional methodology when

I have never seen, I don't believe, someone push this hard on classical or evidentialist apologetics to where we're talking about questioning logic itself and the very most basic principles in logic, like the law of excluded middle or the law of non -contradiction or identity.

So that to me is corroboration that we have a very good method of apologetics, actually.

Well, I agree. So let's get back to the responding to Islam then. Let's put some practical tools in people's hands.

How do you respond to a Muslim? Someone says, Hey, I'm a Muslim. I believe Islam is true.

I don't believe Christianity is true. How do you then begin presuppositionally in conversation with that person?

What would that look like? What kind of questions would you ask, points that you would bring up? Yeah, we would want to look at the source of authority in that worldview.

We would want to look at the history, the evidences in that worldview. That's not off the table.

That is something that a presuppositionalist can engage in because we believe in the holistic clash of transcendental, supposed transcendental worldviews, not merely some a priori deductive, detached, abstract competition of worldviews.

I mean, worldviews involve these evidentialist type claims as well. And then we want to look at the actual philosophical and theological content of the worldviews in question.

So let's start with the question of authority, which is something that we hit on earlier. A lot of people don't realize it, but there is a sense in which

Islam actually does accept the authority of God's word, the authority of scripture.

And so what they want to say is that this is the word of Allah, but it came down before.

And so the later revelation and the later sources of authority, such as the

Quran, actually corrects the corruptions of what came down before.

And so if we are talking about a worldview like Islam that starts with our authority explicitly states, actually, we're beginning with the

Bible as Islam does in a sense. At that point, we can work within Christianity to critique

Islam. Does that make sense? So because they accept tenets of the

Christian worldview, we could take that agreement and critique it in light of their acceptance of those true features.

That's right. Because at that point, arguing on the basis of hypothesis, accepting the claims of their worldview is in fact accepting our claims.

So we're dealing with Islam at that point the way that we might deal with a question in a

Sunday school class. We're actually using the Bible to say, well, no, this is what it says and that sort of thing.

Now, there are lots of different ways that can go. If you watch some of the debates with James R.

White and his debates with Muslims, particularly with Shabir Ali, you see that Shabir Ali will rely upon the claims of liberal scholars to try to prove that, for example, the

New Testament is corrupt and it gets into textual critical questions and this sort of thing. So here's

James White doing textual criticism with Muslims because they're operating on shared premises there that are stemming from the

Christian worldview, and the Muslim is explicitly accepting it. I think this is the reason why John Frame actually refers to Islam as a

Christian heresy, the way that one might refer to a religious cult as a

Christian heresy. There are many examples of those. And so you can work with Islam in that way just from the

Bible itself. Now, you don't have to go to the philosophical arguments, but you can go to the philosophical arguments.

For example, I mean, if Allah allowed his word to be corrupted in that fashion such that the

Quran had to later on supplant that, get that out of the way, replace it, correct it, how can we trust that the

Quran's not been equally, in the same way, corrupted over time?

I mean, what's the argument in principle that that could not have happened? You can't say, well, the word of Allah is eternal and can't be corrupted as established because if the word of Allah is found in the

Old Testament, then that's still the word of Allah and it should be eternal and unable to be corrupted. Well, I think that's a distinct argument, but another good argument, right?

Because the Quran is supposed to be an eternal book in the heavens, Allah's eternal word, and yet we find the principle of abrogation, which is a theological approach to this topic from Muslims, where you'll see one moral principle, for example, set forth early in the

Quran and then later on, of course, it's not chronological anyway, but then in another place, you'll find that the principle is contradicted.

And it's not that I'm positing here a contradiction. You can do that. That is a particularly annoying approach to apologetics for me,

I'll just say, right? I mean, how many atheists have come to you with the website and, oh, what about this contradiction?

And it's something the church addressed 2 ,000 years ago. And so I'm not going to do that to Muslims either, typically.

It just gets us down a path that's not useful to me. But we're talking about something much more significant.

We're talking about how is it that you can have this eternal word of Allah in the heavens where he would have already taken all of these different changes into account such that he did not have to set forth the word and then later abrogate it or change it or put something in its place.

That does not make sense to me. But yeah, I think that's a distinct argument from the one that I was making, which is just simply in principle, how can we know that the

Quran has not been corrupted if, in fact, the Bible was the word of Allah and it was corrupted, right?

Right. So we can take, so to simplify a little bit, so we can take, for example, the Proverbs 26 methodology.

Answer not the fool according to his folly, lest you become a fool like unto him. Answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

Don't think along the lines of the Muslim, but hypothetically grant what the Muslim is saying, because in hypothetically granting what the

Muslim is saying, he is granting important truths within our worldview that are sufficient for our refuting their worldview.

So we can do it that route, right? That's right. Yeah. So really we're working from within the context of the

Christian worldview to refute Islam in that sense. We're treating it as a Christian heresy.

We're treating it as a false teaching in that sense. That's not the only way that we can do this, right?

So that's a doctrinal approach to things. So what does this look like? Well, you might be arguing that God is

Trinity, right? You might be arguing that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, right?

You might be arguing that salvation is by grace through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, right?

And so that's a very good thing. We familiarize ourself with scripture. We familiarize ourself with Protestant theology, and we push back against the claims of the

Muslim. That's a very explicit and dogmatic way to interact with Muslim apologists.

Now that's distinct from setting ourself on the hypothesis of, okay, the Bible is corrupt.

Let's start with the supposed authority of the Quran and argue that way. Okay. All right.

Now, okay. So we can go the more evidential route and look at the history, the textual critical issues and all that other kinds of stuff.

Okay. But what about this idea when we posit God from the transcendental argument as a necessary precondition for intelligible experience or knowledge for logic, what happens when someone tries to say, well,

I can do that for the Muslim God. Let me just remove the Christian God. And I'm going to say Allah, that is taught in the

Quran, he provides the necessary preconditions for, let's say, we'll use logic because logic is so foundational and everything else is based upon that.

In Islam, God is transcendent. God is universal. He is a mind. He has the ontological prerequisites to house universal conceptual laws.

How would you respond to that from a presuppositional approach? Yeah. So let me back up once again and then apply it.

That's okay. So I think that it's helpful. So we went through authority.

We went through the issue of authority. If the Bible is true, then the Quran is false. If the

Quran is, what, true, then the

Bible is true, right? Because it supposedly borrows from it and that sort of thing. The Bible is true, but if the

Bible is true, the Quran is false. There we go. It's the issue of authority, right?

With the word from God. And then like you just said, yes, we can use evidence as that sort of thing.

Talk about the history of these things, all that. You can employ a cultural apologetic there. You can use the evidential argument for the historic resurrection of Jesus Christ, those sorts of things.

Now we're talking about the philosophical content of these things. You're saying, why can't the Muslim then appeal to Allah for laws of logic and an account or justification for that?

And what I want to say is this before we jump into this, and this is interesting to me, is the uniqueness of the

Christian worldview. Because the Christian worldview teaches that there is one God who eternally exists as three persons, the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And each of these three persons is God. You don't find that type of claim in any other worldview, religious or otherwise.

Now, I know people will set these different things forth, but when you get down into the details of them, it's simply not the case that they teach.

Triads and stuff like that. In Hinduism, they have the triad. It's kind of the same. Right, right. All kinds of stuff, right. So when you get then, what's interesting to see, what's important to see here, the way through the progressive nature of Christian revelation, the way that we know or come to know the

Trinity more explicitly is in the person of Christ, who is both truly

God and truly man, right? In this one person, Jesus Christ.

So we've got the hypostatic union, the one person of Christ with two natures, which is also a claim that's unique to Christianity.

Again, you'll find these different views that may try to mimic that in some sense, but when you get into the details of it, they're not saying the same thing that we are.

Now the Trinity and Christ are inextricably related in that sense, right?

If you don't have the Trinity, you don't have the deity of Jesus Christ. If you don't have the deity of Jesus Christ, you don't have the

Trinity, you see. Now these are inextricably related to a third point that I want to make, which is that salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

If you remove the deity of Christ, well, now you don't have a God who's saving you. If you remove the humanity of Christ, well, now you don't have one who is tempted as we are, yet without sin.

If you remove that, then you remove the Trinity. So all three of these things, like, you know, the triune

God, just as he's active in creation, we know that the triune God is active in our salvation per, for example,

Ephesians 1, right? The Father selects and the saves and the Spirit seals us in terms of our salvation by grace through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone.

Now, all I'm doing here is talking about Christianity, saying this is like Sunday school. Why are you bringing these things up?

Because we need to find this bottleneck, this lens through which we can view other religions, world religions.

And what I want to point out, we were talking about what do these other religions hold in common? What is it that these rejections of Christianity hold in common?

Well, you will find that every other world religion, because we don't need to act from the sense of comparative religions, like we're sitting atop all the different religions,

Christianity included, and making these judgments. No, we want to approach world religions from the perspective of Christianity and say, look, what all of these have in common is that they explicitly or implicitly reject those three things that I just mentioned.

And they're all interrelated that they reject them. So world religions reject the Trinity. World religions reject the person of Christ as far as his deity and humanity in one person.

And they reject salvation by grace through faith alone. So when you're looking at cults like Mormonism or Jehovah's Witnesses, when you're looking at Islam, what you're seeing in those is this shared theme of a rejection of the

Trinity, a rejection of the deity of Jesus Christ, and guess what they're committed to?

Works righteousness, works salvation, where they set up these different hoops and whatnot to jump through.

Now I put that that way because this is a way that you can teach this to the most, and no offense intended by this at all, but the most uneducated

Christian, right? A baby Christian. You can point these things out to that person.

And it just strikes me that Christianity is unique in this way that we teach those three things, that it teaches those three things as the revelation of God.

Now, how does this apply to Islam? Islam explicitly, not just implicitly, but explicitly rejects the doctrine of the

Trinity. In fact, at the very center of Islam is an adherence to this understanding of the doctrine of Tawheed, okay?

And that's spelled in various ways, T -A -W -H -I -D or T -A -W -H -I -D in the

English transliteration of the Arabic. But that refers to the absolute unity of Allah.

The problem with positing the absolute unity of Allah in that type of philosophically dogmatic fashion, as Islamic philosophers themselves have said when they think through the implications, the problems with positing that absolute unity in that way is that it renders particularity and hence predication impossible.

And if you don't have particularity, if you don't have a predication, then it's impossible to use predication in a system of logic.

You don't have a system at all. Systems require more than one part. Now, can you break that down a little bit for people who are listening?

You say, if you have a God that is posited as ultimate unity, then you can't have predication.

Why is that the case? And why don't you explain for people what predication is and why it's related to what you just said there?

Yeah, we can just do this in terms of, let's use a sentence as an illustration. So the ball is blue, okay?

So the subject of that sentence is the ball. Now we're wishing to predicate something of that subject.

In other words, we're wishing to say something about the ball, namely that the ball is blue.

And so we say the ball is blue. The subject's the ball. I feel like I'm in elementary school.

Blue, right? Yeah. And so it's really that simple to illustrate just through our language itself.

And language itself does use subject and predicate. Logic uses subject and predicate.

You know, the way that we understand the world, philosophy uses these subjects and predicates.

If we want to say anything about anything at all, we have to be able to predicate, right?

And so if you read Van Til carefully, and this is one of my objections, actually, to a popular objection to Van Til.

I was just dealing with this the other day. You know, someone will say that Van Tilians, that Cornelius Van Til and his followers, they present a coherentist worldview or a coherentist understanding of truth.

No, they do not. That's not true. In fact, Van Til explicitly rejects that. If you pay attention to what

Van Til says, he's very careful to say, he's very careful to talk about the impossibility of human predication.

He's not merely talking about hard and fast contradictions when he's speaking of these various things.

He's talking about the possibility of predication itself. By the way, this is one of the things that's come out recently too, in terms of self -stultification versus self -contradiction or refutation and these sorts of things.

Van Til has it that one cannot utter a word in affirmation or denial unless God exists.

He's not just after whether or not there's a contradiction in a worldview. He's after the possibility of intelligibility.

He's after the possibility of predication, of being able to say anything about anything else at all.

There's a lot more I could say there. I'm going to let you cut me off so I don't get carried away. That predication presupposes one and many -ness categories.

Yeah, predication itself does, sure. Right. When I say the ball is blue, there is this particular thing

I'm calling the ball, which is a particular, an individuation or individual manifestation of something.

Then there is universal categories that I'm predicating of that object that reflects this unifying oneness.

If I'm predicating, I'm presupposing particularity, the specific ball, and the predication, which is the universal concept that transcends the ball.

I'm presupposing particular and universal at the same time when I'm making a sentence.

So the issue is, if you're going to have a worldview that's going to ground both unity and plurality, which is presupposed in predication, you're going to need to have a worldview in which the metaphysic of that world you can sufficiently ground both unity and plurality without swallowing up the other.

What we're saying is that the Christian worldview posits a God that is both unity and plurality, and unity and plurality are equally ultimate within him.

So neither one swallows up the other. We have the metaphysical context that can house oneness and manyness of which human language and predication is an expression of.

Does that make sense? Yeah. Understand how radical and how genius this insight is from Van Til.

I agree. Because the problem of the one and the many presents itself at every single point.

Okay. Every single point. That's one of the difficulties of even trying to properly construe the argument, because we can talk about the ball, a ball, right?

In particular, we can talk about what is it to be a ball in terms of the universal attributes of a ball.

We can talk about blue, the particular instantiation of blueness in the ball, or we can talk about blueness as a universal.

These are things that philosophers talk about, but then we can talk about this at the level of the language that we're using to express these difficulties themselves, right?

And so you can bring this up at any level. I think I wrote a post one time talking about Islam, and I said, you can't even spell

Islam if Islam were true, because you're using individual particular letters, which in terms of a

Muslim metaphysic and in terms of a Muslim epistemology, we don't have access to.

So Allah cannot claim to be Allah in distinction from anything else, because there is nothing else.

If Allah is absolute unity, it strikes me that I'm not even sure how exactly he can create something distinct from himself, much less know anything distinct from himself.

And so you do come across these Islamic philosophers saying things like, well, Allah doesn't know

Muhammad, the prophet. He doesn't know that. He's unable to know that particular. And it gets into metaphysical and epistemological worries at this point.

There are Muslim philosophers who then propose something called emanation, so that we're actually seeing the emanation of Allah in the world around us, which gets us into actually a panentheistic or pantheistic type worldview.

And then we're all the way back into the problems that that proposes. And so there are many different ways that we can approach this.

But I think that ultimately, yes, what we need to do is come back to the issue of the one and the many, because this is representing itself and manifesting itself, this problem of philosophy in every problem of philosophy.

I'm a strict fantilium in this sense. When we're talking about the big three that Bonson used, logic, science, and morality, the issues with those in an unbelieving worldview are really just different versions of the problem of the one and the many.

How do you have these unified laws of thought that apply to the many thoughts that we have? How do you have these unified regularities that apply to the many different situations in the contingent realm that we have?

How do we have this one law, unified law, moral law that's applied to the different situations we find ourselves in?

You see, those are all instances of the problem of the one and the many, but then it reapplies within both the law -like structure of these things, and then it applies in their actual application to the particulars of experience.

And so this issue, this is why your listeners need to go back and listen to your interview with Brent Bosterman, because he's onto something here.

He is reiterating these themes that appear in Cornelius Vantil. This is at the crux of our apologetic method.

That's why it's so important that we delve into these things and pull them out explicitly and apply them to the philosophical approach of the transcendental argument and presuppositional methodology.

Now, okay, so I have one question, and then I have, if I don't forget it, okay.

Okay, so let me make a statement here. So because the god of Islam cannot ground the one and the many, then the god of Islam cannot ground and be the necessary precondition for predication.

If he's not the grounding and foundation for predication, then he's not the grounding for intelligibility and knowledge, since all of those presuppose predication and the unity and plurality of reality, okay?

So wouldn't that, and I think this is part of the genius of this, wouldn't that then spill into a critique of every deity posited that is not triune?

So if someone were to say, man, you guys have been spending so much time on Islam, well, what about the Jehovah's Witness God? Well, the

Jehovah's Witness God, the Jehovah's Witness religion denies the trinity, and so they are in the same boat as the

Muslim with regards to being unable to ground both unity and plurality, and hence predication, and hence sentences, and hence communication, and a whole bunch of other things.

So without going into all these other religions, really the trinity and the metaphysical context that it creates for us refutes every other perspective, because every other perspective that's not triune is unable to provide the preconditions for what we're talking about here.

Would that make sense? Correct. And again, I'll readily grant that we're still flying at 30 ,000 feet, right?

I don't have my Qur 'an in front of me. There's more details, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But yeah, that's why

I mentioned that bottleneck that I did at the beginning in terms of what you can teach in your Sunday school class to a baby believer, which is the trinity, the person of Christ, and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And by the way, understand how closely those encircled the gospel, which is what we're after in all of this anyway, that someone would turn from their sins and trust in Jesus Christ, the

Savior and Lord, right? The one who gave his life for us and rose again. And so yes, you're right.

When you look, it's amazing. It's almost as though there's a satanic conspiracy behind these false religions, right?

Which there is. So when you look at Islam, when you look at Mormonism, when you look at Jehovah's Witnesses, you can study the same themes to approach those, whether it's the explicit dogmatic features of scripture and systematic theology itself to teach the doctrine of the trinity, the person of Christ and salvation, or whether you're looking at the hypothetical argument, in other words, putting yourself on their rejection of our authority to refute it that way.

In fact, again, with Mormonism, you see that they try to accept the authority of the

Bible. And so you can use the Bible to refute their view, or you can step over onto their rejection of our view and argue how philosophically this does not work out.

With Mormonism, it winds up being a type of, it appears to be polytheistic, but it's not, it's actually atheistic and naturalism at the end of the day when you really get down to the details of that view.

But yeah, so you can approach these in the similar fashion. The closest thing,

I think, in theory is Islam, and yet that's where we need to start is to say, look, what

I'm trying to say is this more clearly illustrates what we're saying in a presuppositional approach or in the transcendental argument.

This more clearly illustrates what we're trying to say than does atheism. Atheism is way out there.

They're not even close. They're not even in the ballpark, atheists or not, because they're not even thinking about these different topics.

By the way, we can also pull this back to the issue of authority. When you present the

Bible, when you say you're a Bible -believing Christian or whatever, you'll often get the objection, well, what about all these other world religions that have these different books and things too?

There is no other world religion that claims the same things about revelation, the revelation of God, as Christianity does, and it's that authority that glues all of this together for Christians.

Not even the Quran pretends to be something like what the Bible is, because the

Quran is not a revelation of Allah. The Quran simply tells us what to do.

It tells us what to say. It tells us what to believe. It tells us how to act. It's not a revelation of the character or nature of Allah in the way that the

Bible is, and that's quite apart from the historical particularities that are presented in scripture versus the

Quran and that sort of thing. When you find Jesus in the Quran, he's not the

Jesus of history at all. There are simply these arguments that are essentially rejections of the

Jesus of the Bible. When you find the Trinity in the Quran, they're ahistorical. In fact, and I'm sure you're aware of this, we won't get into it, but Muhammad was actually quite confused about what exactly the doctrine of the

Trinity was. He had the persons wrong. It appeared to early

Muslims that Mary was a part of the Trinity, and so there are these difficulties like that where the

Quran is pulled apart from history. The Quran and the Book of Mormon may be the closest things we have to something like a

Christian revelation in theory or the way that they set it forth, but understand that when we're talking about these supposed competing religious worldviews, we're not talking about anything like Christianity.

You don't have an authoritative revealed sacred text in Hinduism or in Buddhism or in Confucianism or in Taoism or in any of these other types of religious worldviews.

Again, that's why this topic is actually interesting to me because I like to look at those competitors that seem to be closer like a

Pure Land Buddhism or like Zoroastrianism, these ones that people present as being most like Christianity.

It's interesting to pick those examples out and then to get as close as you can in their details to figure out how do these differ from our claim as far as the authority of Scripture, as God's revelation, the

Trinity, and the person of Christ, and then salvation. How do these things work in these views?

They're all distinctly different from Christianity and they all mess up in the same areas. That has philosophical implications.

That has problems for them in terms of providing the transcendental preconditions of intelligibility.

All two things, and they're kind of not related, but I want to ask them. What if someone were to say in the

Unitarian conception that God is absolute unity, but he has multiple thoughts?

If his thoughts eternally exist with him, then you have unity, God, absolute unity, and particularity,

God's individual thoughts. Perhaps a Unitarian God can still ground the one in the many because these things both are eternal.

How would you respond? Yeah, so without getting into a lot of detail, the quick and easy answer, and I've had someone suggest this before with Allah actually, they said, what about the 99 names?

Well, they are not the ontological or the personal equivalent to what we want to say about the

Trinity. As far as one God who eternally exists as three persons, and each person is

God. So when I say is God there, we're talking about ontology as well.

This gets into the doctrine of perichoresis. This is why it's important that we know our scripture.

It's important that we know the history of the Christian church and what people who are smarter than us and people who have, who make up a bigger majority than us, what they've said about these different topics.

I don't think that you have a co -ultimate unity and plurality simply by positing thoughts of a deity or something to that effect.

In fact, even when you look at something like John 1 .1, so Lord willing, I'm preaching on John 1 .1 this coming

Sunday, and I make the point in there that you see in Genesis 1, of course,

John is piggybacking off that, but he's going behind the beginning of Genesis 1.

So in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In John 1 .1, you have in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was

God. Well, you see the word of God in Genesis 1. God said, let there be light.

Well, there's his word. Now you see that concept developed throughout the Jewish canon, right?

Throughout the Hebrew canon of scripture there, you see that the word begins to take on these personal attributes.

It's personified, but even that is not as explicit as John puts it in John 1 .1.

In the beginning was the word and the word was with God. The word is pros there and it actually has a type of personal intimacy there.

They're facing one another and the word was God. So there's an ontological reality there that's not picked up even in the personification of something like the thoughts or the word of a deity.

Okay. All right. Very good. And so real quick, summarize. If you're talking with the atheist and you successfully argue that the

Christian worldview is the necessary precondition for knowledge, logic, intelligibility, whatever, and you work through that to show that this is the case.

If you demonstrate that Christianity is a precondition, you've demonstrated that Christianity is the only precondition since its exclusiveness is part of the package.

Okay. Number one. Number two, if you've done that, then by default, all other non -Christian worldviews are falsified because if it is one, it must be the only one.

And so therefore you could establish the truth that the Christian worldview is the only one by demonstrating that it is a one.

And so you don't have to inductively go through every single worldview perspective. Okay.

So now when someone says, cool, well, what about religious perspectives? Then you point them back to the point you already made.

I demonstrated that it is one. And so it follows that it's the only one. And if it's the one, then all of these other views are false.

However, I'm doing this speedy so that we can, you know, summarize. I want to make sure I understand it. But let's suppose we want to engage in those specific religious perspectives.

Then we ask the question, do these religious perspectives such as Islam, can Islam provide the necessary precondition for intelligibility, logic, whatever?

Well, we know that Allah is absolute unity. And so he cannot ground unity and plurality. And therefore he cannot ground predication in which he cannot ground communication, which presupposes predication, so on and so forth.

Any other worldview that rejects the Trinity will lack the capacity to ground oneness and manyness, which is a necessary precondition for intelligibility.

Right? Okay. So this is all summary very quick. That can be applied to any worldview without a

Trinity. But of course, that is a broad overview, which we're not even going to pretend that you don't have to go into the details.

You do. It's not just the simple, right. You know, when someone says, what's the presuppositional response to the Jehovah's Witness?

Well, it's not, you know, the presuppositional, it is not like a silver bullet that when you shoot it, the opponent, no, you have to go into the details.

So you're gonna have to do a little bit more legwork in terms of actually going through this with somebody. All right. But just as a broad overview, that's how it is applied to all of these different perspectives.

All right. Now I want to take the time now to go through some of the comments here and see if we could address some things that are popping up in people's minds with regards to some of the things that you've said.

And then with that, we'll wrap it up. And then I have another show today at three o 'clock with Gary DeMar to talk about the apologetic legacy of Greg Bonson and Bonson's new book against all opposition.

All right. So for now, we're going to go into the comment section and we'll put them up on the screen and see if we could address some of those things.

All right. All right. Let's see here. Well, someone asked a very subjective question, but I guess we could we could give our opinions.

Right. Jesus Garcia says, did Greg Bonson win the debate with Gordon Stein?

My answer is I think he did, although I would agree with you that he probably had more work for him to fully bring out the case.

But that's my opinion. Yeah, I think persuasively and rhetorically, it's unquestionable that he won that debate.

A separate question might be, did he actually prove what he set out to prove? I would say that he did.

I don't think he addressed every single particular objection that could have been made against his argument because there are time constraints in the debate.

And his opponent, frankly, had never seen this before or anything like it, nor had most people. And so.

So, yeah, I think that I think he he won the debate. OK. All right. This is a comment here, but I think it's interesting.

Perhaps we could address it here. Cannot pronounce the name, so I do apologize. But this person says, hi,

I am a Vedic presuppositionalist, more precisely from the Hare Krishna movement. How would how would you respond to a

Hare Krishna who claims to be a presuppositionalist? How would you begin to explore that with the person?

Yeah, well, the first thing I would say is without my materials in front of me and without having refreshed myself on that particular variety, the

Hare Krishna movement and whatnot, my fear is that I would not be fair to you, whoever that is asking that question.

If you're watching, I would not be being fair to you if I were to just address it off the top of my head.

But I would call your attention back to that bottleneck that I mentioned as far as the Trinity, as far as the person of Christ and as far as salvation by grace through faith alone.

And so particularly with regard to Krishna and as you would put it,

Lord Krishna, I would compare and contrast what we're trying to say in terms of Jesus Christ and Krishna, because I don't think that Krishna can can provide the self -attesting lordship over creation and provide the metaphysical preconditions that we would need for intelligibility as one who encapsulates and knows the one in the many the way that the trying

God knows the one in the many. So I think that's an interesting question there.

I don't think I've given you a very good answer, but I've given you some direction on how to begin to answer that.

Maybe sometime in the future, I might write something up on this. It is a question I've come across before, though.

So a very good question, and I appreciate you listening. Sure. And I'd like to point people to the apologetic usefulness of what you just did there.

Again, presuppositionalism tends to be a very aggressive apologetic approach because it is attacking entire worldview foundations, but you do not want to make the mistake of becoming too ambitious and think you can answer every question because you have the presuppositional approach.

It's very important to admit, well, you know what? That's a great question. I need to look into that. So there's great apologetic value just in the first part of your question there.

And there's good application with regards to the stuff you've mentioned throughout the latter part of this discussion to apply to the

Hare Krishna. Ask questions. I mean, I'm with Chris here. I don't know the specifics of what they would believe on various points, but one major difference, again, which

I've already mentioned, is the nature of revelation in that view. Representatives that I've seen of that particular position are very subjective in the way that they approach reality.

It's not an objective revelation, authoritative revelation from a God who is distinct from creation.

And so maybe start there. Right. Very good. Someone's asking, is Ayala, that's me,

Reformed Baptist or Dutch Reformed? In my personal theology, I am more in line with Reformed Baptist.

So I do apologize. I don't know what you are, Chris. He probably wouldn't have came on anyway.

You're a Reformed Baptist? Forget about this. I'm not coming on your show. So yes, I'm more of a

Reformed Baptist. Someone asked the question, can you help me explain this for somebody who doesn't understand worldviews?

I don't know what you're referring to with regards to this, but if someone doesn't understand worldviews, how would you explain it to them,

Chris, so they would understand? It's really funny because there are academics right now who are really upset by this entire concept of worldview, and they're trying to link it back to Hegel, and they're trying to link it back to idealism, and the

Weltanschauung, and Kant, and all these different things. Look, let's ditch the language.

Let's just not even talk about worldview. It's really funny because in both academic circles and on just in colloquialism, in just common sense type talk,

I'll just simply say, I'll talk about the way that a person views the world. And I mean, that's just defining the term in terms of the term, right?

And so I won't mention worldviews with people who have never heard that word worldview. And with academics who object to the concept, and I happen to know that they do,

I'll just say, well, let's talk about the way that this person views the world. And that's it.

So you don't have to use the lingo. Concept -wise though, we're always doing this, okay?

So there are things that you believe about the Trinity. There are things you believe about Jesus Christ. There are things you believe about salvation.

There are things you believe about what is real and what is not real, about what is right and what is wrong, about what is logical and what is not logical or illogical.

Who are you? What are you? What makes up your identity? You have answers to each and every one of these questions.

And the answers to those particular types of questions is what constitutes a view of the world or a worldview.

All right. Very good. Someone has a comment here with regards to Alex Malpass's perspective on the disjunctive syllogistic aspect of presuppositionalism.

And it's okay if you don't know what Alex Malpass's critique is. I'd have to look it up again. I am familiar with it and I have engaged it a little bit a while back, but I would need a little brushing up.

The person makes a statement here. I don't think Alex was denying the dichotomy between Christianity and autonomy.

He was simply stating that there might be a mysterious autonomous worldview that can account for these things.

What would you say, Chris, as to the possibility of that? Do you think it's possible from a presuppositional perspective that there may be some mysterious autonomous worldview?

Does that give kickback to our statement that the

God of Christianity is the necessary precondition? No, I think it begs the question against what we've said, actually, because in the transcendental exchange of worldviews, in the nature of the case, one or the other is the case.

And so if Christianity is the transcendental worldview, the way that you were summarizing it earlier was helpful.

I would just simply say it like this, and it sounds odd, but when you look at the way that transcendentals work, this is the case.

If Christianity is sufficient, then it's necessary. If it is sufficient, then it's necessary.

There are theological and philosophical reasons for that. For example, Christianity presents itself in terms of itself as being the necessary worldview.

And so if Christianity is sufficient, that is, if it doesn't contain logical contradictions, if it does correspond to objective reality, if creation is consistent with its claims and that sort of thing, if it's a workable worldview, a livable worldview, these types of worldview criteria, if Christianity is those things, then it's sufficient, right?

To suppose that it's not sufficient is to suppose that it's not necessary.

To suppose that it is sufficient is to suppose that it's also necessary because it contains within itself that claim.

In other words, if we were to say, well, it can't be necessary, then Christianity contains a contradiction, you see, and hence it cannot be sufficient.

And the net contradiction is that it claims to be the only one, but there happens to be this other one over here that's also one, but they can't both be only, you can't have two only exclusive necessary preconditions because that's a contradiction.

Right. And so then you can do it philosophically as well. Actually, I think you just did in terms of the transcendental exchange of worldviews, how these things work.

One or the other is the case in the nature of the case, because we're setting up this dichotomy, but a mysterious autonomous worldview that can account for these things, there are at least three problems with this.

One, if you're an atheist or an agnostic, okay, I'm simply not going to listen to you when you posit a mysterious autonomous worldview because that mysterious autonomous worldview is in conflict with the worldview you actually hold.

So in terms of the practicality of the apologetic exchange, you've lost at that point.

You understand? You have to ditch your atheism, agnosticism or whatever, and adhere to or search for this autonomous worldview.

But when you're trying to adhere to it, when you're stipulating it, or when you're searching for it, you have to be standing somewhere.

You have to be working in terms of some other worldview, okay? And so you've lost in that manner.

You've also lost in that typically these worldviews that are proposed are contradictory to atheism, agnosticism, et cetera.

So that's a little bit, I think I've conflated those two, but anyway, you'll work it out. But the other issue is that again, from the

Christian worldview, God makes this claim. He says, I'm God, there is no other. I don't know of another

God. And so metaphysically and epistemologically, in terms of Christian worldview, it's

Yahweh, that's it. There's one God. There is no other God. So a Christian cannot propose, well, isn't it possible that?

No, it's not possible that. Not in terms of the Christian worldview, not if the Christian worldview is true.

Okay, let's suppose the Christian worldview is not true. Now let's suggest the possibility of a mysterious autonomous worldview.

Well, I would simply ask, how are you appealing to possibility itself when things like possibility and laws of logic and modal logics and all of these sorts of things are contingent upon a

Christian worldview? If you can't provide a positive account for how the worldview you actually hold accounts for these things, then you've lost the debate at that point.

You've lost the discussion. You can't utter these things about possibility and maybe there's a mysterious autonomous worldview out there without already presupposing that Christianity is true, in which case there is no mysterious autonomous worldview out there.

That's right. So if you're positing a possibility, well, maybe this worldview can do it. You're implicitly granting that the current worldview you're standing on doesn't do it.

And so you don't even have a foundation for positing the possibility. And you can just ask, do you hold to this hypothetical view?

Well, of course they don't, right? But if they do, we know it's false because they just made it up. It's like, well, this is mysterious.

If it's mysterious, how do you know about it? There's a whole bunch of different problems with positing that. Of course, it's usually posited as a hypothetical to falsify the notion that Christianity is the only one, right?

But there's more work that has to be done there. Someone has a question here or a statement. Give a simple example for talking to Jehovah's Witnesses about the

Trinity and Jesus, if that's possible. And you can keep it as brief and concise. We don't have to go into the whole background here.

Yeah, I hope I get the references right. So if you look in Hebrews, there's a popular passage there talking about your throne,

O God, is forever, that sort of thing. A lot of folks go there. Don't go there. It's either right before or right after it.

I can't look it up right now. But there is this claim about the Creator.

And it's going to be, when you look, even in the

New World Translation, as I understand, it's going back to, I think it's Psalm 102.

I could be wrong about that. Maybe it's 120. I don't remember. Anyway, when you go back to that passage, it's very clearly talking about Jehovah being this

Creator. But then when you go to the New Testament in the Hebrews text, it's applying it to the

Son. So Jesus is actually Jehovah, which goes against the

Jehovah's Witnesses view and opens the door for our Trinitarian doctrine. Another instance of this, I believe it's

John 12, when John is talking about Isaiah seeing his glory, talking about Jesus Christ.

And when you go back to the text that he's referencing, he's talking about Isaiah 6. And so there, again, it's

Jehovah, it's Yahweh, but it's Jehovah used there. And so it's identifying, again,

Jesus Christ with Jehovah of the Old Testament, if we're using their language and their scheme there.

So Jesus is Yahweh. The God of the Old Testament is not different from the

God of the New. Jesus is that God. He is the Great I Am. He is Yahweh.

He is Jehovah. All right, very good. Anthony asked, can you define predication?

I mean, I could, I don't mean this ugly, but I guess I could Google it. Explain what you mean by it.

I'm sure, I'm sure they just mean when you were talking about the triune God being the necessary precondition for predication, they're probably saying, well, what do you mean by predication?

I think we went over it in the video. Basically, the ball is blue. You're predicating something of the ball, right?

You're saying something of the ball. You're saying something of something else. And so philosophically speaking, linguistically speaking, it applies across the board there.

The issue is that you can't even give utterance to these things. You can't have intelligibility or render things intelligible apart from the existence of this triune

God in which exists a co -ultimate unity and plurality.

And so you're really looking at plurality in this concept of predication.

You're saying something about something else. I hope that's helpful, but I don't mean anything different,

I don't think, than what you would find in philosophical literature or even in the regular use of the word and language.

Right. And if they go back to watch the beginning, I think we went over it in detail. I think he came in after we -

Oh, I see. Yes. Now, I think this is fun here. Brenda says, this dude is completely insane.

I don't know which dude they're referring to, so maybe it's me. So you can take comfort in that it's not necessarily you.

Problem of the one and the many again. But Brenda also states, by the way, blue is not a universal.

And I think I know what Brenda's talking about here is when I was trying to recap what you were trying to say with regards to predication,

I explained that the ball is a particular thing and we predicate blueness of the ball. And I said that the ball is a particular and I applied a universal to the ball.

Now, I'm happy to be corrected here. I was just saying it really quickly, but do you get what this person is trying to say?

When I say the ball is blue, it seems to be that they think I'm applying a universal to a particular.

Yeah. I think that Brenda is misunderstanding something I said there, which may be my fault.

So I was simply suggesting the hypotheticals of the way that we approach these different things.

So some people do believe that blue is a universal. Some people believe it's particular. Some people are nominalists, right?

They're realists. Some people believe in abstract objects. Some people don't believe in abstract objects. I understand that all of those different views are out there.

I understand that you assume or even argue for one of those particular views. My point is that each of these types of questions and the answers to them are instances of the way that we're approaching this topic of the one and the many.

Right. Okay. Brenda also says here, and I think it's helpful to return to this, he is wrong from the beginning.

He doesn't understand Alex Malpass's criticism of what he's talking about. You simply don't have a true dichotomy.

And I assume the true dichotomy that we do not have according to Brenda is the P or not P. So if we posit

P or not P, the Christian worldview or the non -Christian worldview, that's not a true dichotomy. Which is funny because that in and of itself is a rejection of the

Christian worldview with regard to this topic that I went through. Right. I went through the entire canon of scripture and talked about this in terms of biblical theology, systematic theology, and particular texts, which we could go into in more depth.

And then we can look at it philosophically. A book like Roy Klauser, is that correct? The Myth of Religious Neutrality.

He goes into this in a great deal. So this just looks like, with all due respect, this looks like a mere assertion here.

You simply don't have a true dichotomy. You want to say, well, I do have a true dichotomy. I'm not sure what the particular objection is or the argument there.

Other than I would say, it looks as though to me, you've simply packed, this claim can be understood or construed in terms of the non -Christian rejection of the

Christian claim that it is a dichotomy. Right. Okay. Daniel asks, what is the philosophical term to describe logic being grounded in the nature of God?

And could you talk on that differentiated from divine conceptualism or is it not? I don't know if you understand the question.

Maybe when you're speaking of conceptualism as these universals being concepts within the mind of God, is logic something like that?

I mean, I'm not sure if you're understanding specifically what this person's asking. Yeah, I think that logic is actually created based on sets of consistencies that obtain in the mind of God.

And so human logic is analogous to the thought of God as it were.

Okay. And so our logic is not God's logic. Scripture essentially says this, doesn't it?

It says that our ways are not his ways. Our thoughts are not his thoughts. He is the creator and we are the creatures.

And we need to be careful to always keep that distinction in mind, the creator creature distinction.

And so our systems of logics are a close approximation.

And I want to be a little bit firm, more firm than that, I guess. But our logic is not quantitatively or qualitatively the same as God's, even though it is analogous to it.

So we're not talking about univocity here, where our logic is the same as God's thought, but we're not talking about equivocation here either to where our logic and God's are completely unrelated.

They're related by way of analogy, which yet again is at the core of Van Til's project.

We want to understand his project as explicitly Trinitarian, as relying heavily upon this idea of analogy, and also as relying heavily upon this concept of what he calls paradox, which

James Anderson would construe as merely, what is it? Merely apparent contradictions resulting from unarticulated equivocation in the use of our terms and whatnot.

So I don't know how much that helps, but I would, I know that Eli used the term,

I would avoid as much as possible the idea of logic being grounded in the nature of God, which strikes me more as actually a

Thomistic approach to these sorts of questions. I know what he meant by it, but yeah.

All right. You're doing great, by the way. I do appreciate it. The question here, how do you respond to Dr. Craig's criticism that it commits a logical howler?

Yes. I'm so thankful that this was asked. So this claim is made in the

Five Views on Apologetics book, edited by Stephen Cowan, I believe was the name. And yes, this is interesting.

So Craig says that presuppositionalism commits this logical howler of circularity, of begging the question, of Petitio Principi.

And the last time you had me on, Eli, I actually addressed this a little bit, because one of the most popular objections to presuppositional apologetics is this circularity, supposed circularity.

But another one of the most popular objections to presuppositional apologetics is that we consistently fail to formulate the transcendental argument.

Well, those two claims, those two objections are inconsistent with one another, because if you cannot formulate an argument, then you cannot pin that argument down as being logically, fallaciously circular, right?

So those objections are at odds with one another. You need to go with one or the other. So let's go with Craig's here, that presuppositionalism commits a logical howler.

The problem is that presuppositionalism is an apologetic methodology. It's not an argument per se.

The argument of presuppositional apologetics is the transcendental argument, which Craig later on in that chapter, he says that a greater than Bantill is here, and that is

Alvin Plantinga. And Craig actually commends to his readers the transcendental arguments developed by Alvin Plantinga.

Well, if the transcendental arguments developed by Alvin Plantinga, and if transcendental arguments in general are not guilty of this supposed logical howler, then why would you charge presuppositionalism with committing that logical howler?

I think what Craig fails to differentiate between there is a broad epistemic or epistemological circularity, which is common in philosophical literature.

Thomas Morse talks about it, William Alston talks about it and others. He fails to differentiate between epistemic or epistemological circularity and logical circularity, which is in fact logical fallacy.

I would not suggest that we use logically fallacious reasoning or argumentation.

I think we should avoid it. And I'm not sure, and this is a bomb to drop at the end of this comment, but I'm not sure that frame was particularly helpful in that regard in his response in that book.

Okay. All right. How are you doing so far? I'm fine.

Yeah. All right, cool. I'm fine. You're fine. I didn't want to respect your time here. All right. Someone asked, what would be the transcendental approach to binatarianism unless it would become an intertextual discussion at this point?

I just want to say real quick that we discussed this specifically in the Brandt -Bacherman interview. Yes. Definitely will revert you to that interview.

But if you have some words to share there, go for it, Craig. Yeah. And that's essentially what

I'll do as well, except I think there's more to be said. Of course there is. But yeah, no,

I think it does become an intertextual discussion. And so I'm glad he suggests that because that's where we begin.

You would say, well, what about, depending on which person of the Trinity we're denying here, we say, what about this person?

What about that person in terms of the scripture? Because if we're basing the binatarianism on that authority.

Now, if we're basing it on something else, that's a whole different story. But there is also a philosophical argument for a

Trinitarian view as opposed to a binatarian view. And by the way, there's a philosophical argument for a

Trinitarian view as opposed to a quadrennitarian view as well.

And I would simply point you to the beginning of Brandt -Bacherman's book for that. Now, I don't recall all the particulars of that, but he's talking about the necessity of having a personal context for this relation between these two other persons and that sort of thing.

And so Brandt -Bacherman, and I'm going to make this explicit, and I don't know that anyone really has yet, but there have been objections to presuppositional methodology based on this very question, based usually not on binatarianism, but on quadrennitarianism.

And I would say that Brandt -Bacherman in the very first few pages of his book actually presents us with a natural theological, a dogmatic use of natural theology, a natural theological response to that question to show why the

Trinity is necessary, that it necessarily is three and not two and not four, but three persons in the

Trinity. So that has sweeping implications for some of the objections that have been brought against presuppositional methodology.

So I think what he's after here is to say, well, we have the one and the many, we have unity and plurality if we posit simply two persons, but we have to remember that we're not just talking about a philosophically naked worldview here.

We're talking about a worldview that's based on the content and the authority of God's word. Now, if we want to step off that, then we need to ask the same questions we've already asked.

Like where does this idea of possibility come from? Where does this idea of the binatarian God come from?

Where did these different ideas come from? Yeah. All right. Very good. Brenda asks again, my objection to what you're saying is you're simply wrong.

Okay. Don't you understand? You're simply wrong. Come on. I'm just kidding. And by the way,

Brenda, I know Brenda's asking a bunch of questions, making comments, and I do appreciate it. And it's people like Brenda.

I don't know who she is, but I think these type of questions when asked sincerely allow us as Christians and apologists to clarify and to find better ways to explain what we're trying to say.

So I'd really do on a serious level do appreciate these questions and I appreciate you, Chris, taking the time to kind of plow through some of these.

So let's take a look here. She says, you do not have a true dichotomy with the P or not P. The negation of Christianity is not atheism.

There are not only two worldviews. What is she missing there? It seems that she's missing something that you went over before.

Yeah. And I mean, I appreciate that as well. I'm not perturbed by this or anything like that, but I would just point out,

Brenda, my objection to what you're saying is that you're simply wrong. Saying that I'm wrong is not an objection.

It's just saying that I'm wrong. Right? So if we're in disagreement, then each of us believe that the other person is wrong.

Right? So we're on equal ground at that point. Right? And so that's not the objection.

Now, in your next sentence, you say you do not have a true dichotomy. That may be a stated objection.

My problem is in seeing what the reasoning is behind this objection, because I've submitted to you, biblically speaking, the dichotomy.

Philosophically speaking, if you state Christianity in some type of propositional form, so if you say

Christianity is the transcendental worldview, if you deny that, if you negate that, it would be not

Christianity is the transcendental worldview. Okay? And so that is a dichotomy.

That's binary. Right? And so I'm not sure what the logical objection is to that unless you use some type of multivalued logics or something to that effect.

But even there, I don't think it would apply to such an explicit and clear instance of the law of excluded middle law of contradiction.

And what you're not rejecting, you're not rejecting the reality that there are people who come from multiple worldview perspectives.

There are multiple worldviews. Right. Yeah. But yeah, these are different flavors of the same underlying thing.

Yeah. So we're talking about these broad categories, even though you have Islam, Mormonism, atheism, whatever version you want, they all have one uniting feature that sufficiently allows us to umbrella them under the category non -Christianity.

Yeah. Right. And so when she writes the negation of Christianity is not atheism, I agree.

Right. That's actually what I've been saying. So the negation of Christianity is not

Christianity, it's non -Christianity. Okay. Of which atheism is one variety, of which agnosticism is one variety, of which

Islam is one variety. Those are non -Christian. Unless you want to submit that atheism is not non -Christian, but that would strike me as extremely odd to say that atheism is

Christian. No, atheism is not Christian. It's non -Christian. And so you do have a dichotomy.

You have Christian or non -Christian. So if she can explain to me how atheism is not non -Christian, then

I'm willing to listen. Otherwise, I'm not sure of the objection. And there's a differentiation, important one between non -Christian and not

Christian. Yeah, that's true too. Important there. So Simon asks, why must the

Christian worldview be the only one that can account for the laws of logic? Why not theism in general? I think

I just direct you to the entire program. I'm not sure if he came in late. That's all right.

Or if we did a really poor job, but one of the two must be the case, I think.

But anyway, why not theism in general? Again, because theism in general does not posit a co -ultimate one and many or unity and plurality as is posited in the

Trinitarian or explicitly Christian understanding of God. And you can get into a lot of different particulars with this as well.

Even if we get into some of the issues that I mentioned in response to a question,

I think, about this principle of analogy or the analogical revelation of God.

Even when we get into some of those questions and concerns, I think we have some more specific answers to why not theism in general.

All right. We're almost done. We just got a few points here and then we'll wrap things up. And a couple of them are from Brenda. I hope you don't mind.

A lot of people are interacting with what she's saying here, but I think they're good things. She says, it does not follow that if Christianity is consistent, that therefore it is necessary.

That is a coherent epistemology. How would you respond to that? Yeah, I think we addressed this earlier in the program too.

In fact, I mentioned that many people do understand Vantill or Vantillian presuppositions as presenting this type of coherent epistemology.

And Vantill explicitly rejects that. I think in practice as well, implicitly in other words, and so should presuppositionalists.

So, no, I agree. It does not follow that if Christianity is consistent, that therefore it's necessary. For example, and this is where I cut myself off earlier, actually.

Suppose we have a worldview, we'll label it P with the letter P. Okay. So there's worldview

P and worldview P is constituted by this claim, P. Now, can you demonstrate for me the inconsistency in the worldview

P? And the answer is no, you cannot. Because it only consists of that one proposition,

P, which the content of which is simply P. There's no contradiction there at all.

The problem though with worldview P is not in terms of contradiction or lack thereof.

The problem with worldview P is that P does not provide a basis for human intelligibility or predication.

If someone only believes P, then they can't believe anything else. They can't believe in P as distinct from anything else.

They don't have any basis for language, any basis for science, any basis for logic, any basis for morality.

They have no basis for anything. All they have is that. And so that's correct what Brenda is saying.

You can come up with middle earth and create different languages and races and everything in middle earth and have this beautiful worldview of sorts.

It just doesn't match up to objective reality. Nor does it provide the preconditions of intelligible experience.

No, we are saying that Christianity in terms of it being the authoritatively revealed religion, with a

Trinity and the person of Christ and salvation by grace through faith alone, with the inerrancy of the authority, the infallibility of God's word, the fact that God has revealed himself to us.

We believe that through receiving that by faith, we have the salvation not only for our souls, but that presents for us the salvation for philosophy itself, for human intelligibility, for predication itself.

Christianity is necessary. And we would make the argument that Christianity is necessary because of the impossibility of its opposite.

If you stand on the opposite view from Christianity, you cannot account for logic or science or morality or human dignity or identity or any of these other things, language and mathematics.

You cannot account for these different aspects of human intelligibility and the possibility of predication.

And so, yeah, we're not arguing that just because Christianity is consistent, therefore it's necessary. We're saying that if Christianity is sufficient to account for these things, then it's necessary in terms of the transcendental exchange of worldviews, but also in terms of its own theology.

Right. And you could disagree with that, but then that's where the debate has to happen. That's the argument.

Right. That's right. Someone's asking, could I have Michael Butler on? I wish, if we could find him. Yeah, he was in Virginia.

He moved to Georgia and then he kind of dropped out of the scene. So yeah, yeah. I was in contact with someone who was a personal friend of his, but I haven't heard back.

So I do understand he would be an interesting guest to have on. I'm going to skip through.

Someone asks, Mr. Ayala, how about inviting Dr. James White? I have. He's done one of the past episodes where we,

Molinism. Okay. And let's see here.

Okay. I think that's all the time we have today. I'm going to be going on with Gary DeMar at 3

PM. So if you guys are completely bored in quarantine and you don't want to go outside, stay tuned.

I'll be back on in just under 20 minutes. With that said though, Chris, I think you did an excellent job.

I know there's so much more that we can cover. Obviously as a broad overview, I would encourage people to look more into these, the details of this, because apologetics is not a simple kind of, you give an argument and everyone just falls down.

I don't know what to say. There's going to be disagreements on every point you just made. In fact, that's been expressed in many of the comments.

Apologetics is work. You need to study. You need to be in prayer. You need to think about these things. You need to be honest when a valid criticism comes your way and think about those things.

So, but I think Chris has given us a lot to think about and definitely

I will be going back and listening. Like I said, I tell the people all the time, I'm one of those people who listens to my own show.

Sometimes I can't pay attention as much as I'd like to what you're saying, because I'm kind of focusing on the side chat and a bunch of other things.

So I thought you did an excellent job. I appreciate your time and thank you so much for going one hour and 40 minutes with me.

That was no problem. And I hope it was good for you as it was for me. No, it was great.

All right. If I have, if I have one minute, I'd like to say a few things real, just lightning fast. Is that okay? I would encourage the listeners to go back and look for my discussion with Bocab Malone on the topic of Islam in particular.

I use the same grid, but I think I go into more of the specifics of, of interacting with that worldview.

I did reference in this discussion, that book by Roy Klauser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality.

So check that out, check out also James Anderson's book. Why Should I Believe Christianity or Why Should I Believe Christianity is

True? He addresses some of the issues with competing worldviews that are more explicitly Christian in the way that they're construed.

Of course, James R. White has done a great deal of debates with Muslims, as well as with Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons from a presuppositional standpoint, using the dogmatic approach that I outlined.

There was one other book I was going to, oh, Daniel Strange has written a book, Their Rock Is Not Like Our Rock.

That is the method I would endorse. That book's a little bit difficult to understand. It needs some more practical application,

I believe, but that's good groundwork if you want to understand comparative religions from a Vantillian type perspective.

And then check out my own book as well, The World in His Hands, A Christian Account of Scientific Law and Its Antithetical Competitors, because I do go in and deal with the specifics of Islam in relation to the problem of induction at the end of that book.

So hope everybody will check this out. Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.

If you haven't subscribed to the Revealed Apologetics YouTube channel, please do so. Definitely appreciate the likes and the shares so that more people can avail themselves of this content.

But that's all for today, and I will see you in 15 minutes. Take care and God bless.