Mormons try to Critique Presuppositional Apologetics

3 views

July 29, 2022

In this episode, Eli and Jeremiah Nortier of “The Apologetic Dog” respond to an attempted Mormon critique of presuppositional apologetics.

00:02: Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and apologies if my face looks really big.
00:09: I'm kind of losing perspective of how close I am to the camera. It looks really big where I am. Well, happy to be here.
00:16: I'm looking forward to having this discussion. This is actually the topic here. We're gonna be critiquing a critique of presuppositional apologetics.
00:27: And it's very interesting because I was looking at some of the backlog of some older shows that I've done.
00:34: I actually have a similar kind of show. I should have put it in the description, but if you want to look it up on the
00:43: YouTube channel, it is entitled A Metacritique. A presupper critiques a guy critiquing a presupper.
00:53: Okay, so we're kind of doing another metacritique. So we are, I've invited my guest,
01:01: Jeremiah Nortaire. Nortaire, he's gonna correct me later. I'm just gonna call him
01:07: Jeremiah. That's easy. I have a brother, his name is Jeremiah, so that's easy. But, or I can just call him the apologetic dog as he is known.
01:15: So, but he's gonna help me critique a critique of presuppositionalism. And I think what makes this discussion,
01:23: I think, useful is that this critique is actually coming from some
01:29: Mormons and not just any old run of the mill Mormons from judging from the video, which
01:35: I had the pleasure of watching just one time through. The gentleman seems to be philosophically inclined.
01:44: And so I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to kind of take some of the criticisms that he had of presuppositionalism and then hopefully kind of incorporate how we might answer those criticisms as presuppositionalists and also apply a presuppositional methodology to the
02:02: Mormon position. So, and this is important because a lot of people who have a passing understanding of presuppositional apologetics often think it works well and good with like the atheist, you know, like kind of the run of the mill, you know, metaphysical naturalist, kind of the empiricist, right?
02:20: We kind of have those kind of critiques of empiricism and naturalism, but it doesn't really work against the
02:26: Mormon or the Muslim or things like that. And I think this would be a good opportunity to show the flexibility and wide ranging application of the presuppositional approach to apologetics.
02:36: So I'm very much looking forward to kind of interacting with the content here.
02:42: So without further ado, I don't have any future upcoming interviews. I kind of do, but I'm afraid to mention the names because I haven't locked them in yet.
02:52: So, you know, when I reach out to people, there are certain people that I'm really excited. I'm like, should I announce this on the show?
02:58: What if they decline? You know, sometimes there are some people. So I have some people on the fence who may join me in a future episode.
03:08: And I'm super excited about that. One person that I can mention, but there's no date locked in, but the person that is connecting me with this other person told me to reach out to them at the beginning of August.
03:20: There may be a good chance that I'll be getting Pastor Jeff Durbin on and that'll be super cool.
03:27: So stay tuned for that. I have to reach out to, you know, the middle man, so to speak, but I'll keep you informed with respect to that.
03:35: So looking forward to that, if it happens, God willing. Without further ado, let me introduce the apologetic dog,
03:43: Jeremiah, whatever your last name is. Nortier. Nortier. Why did I forget that? That was super easy.
03:48: Oh my goodness. How you doing, man? I'm doing wonderful. I've had an awesome day.
03:55: I've been looking forward to this ever since we connected last and man, I'm super pumped.
04:00: Well, I'm super pumped to have you back. There was a lot of positive feedback that I got from our previous show together when we dealt with the
04:10: Church of Christ and what the issues and the problems were with that, what we understand to be a cult.
04:16: And there were a lot of positive, of course, you have the people who disagree and will criticize, but there were a lot of positive comments and people who were very grateful that we covered that topic because there really isn't a lot of information out there in terms of doing apologetics and engaging in responses to their position.
04:37: But at any rate, thank you so much for coming on and we're gonna jump right into this. Let's pop this up here.
04:45: So I apologize, that's gonna maximize, that won't all be there in just a few moments, but actually let me remove this here.
04:53: Well, Jeremiah was actually the one who shared this conversation with me, this video out there.
04:59: Was this something you knew was coming out? Did someone throw this video in your direction and said, hey man, how do you respond to this?
05:05: Or is this something you just kind of stumbled on and said, hey Eli, check this out? What was the context for this conversation between these
05:12: Mormons? So Robert Boylan is one of the Mormons that runs a
05:17: YouTube channel called Scriptural Mormonism. And this is really neat because I felt like their video was specifically catered to me,
05:26: Eli. I actually debated the other Mormon three years ago on the gospel truth.
05:32: And when we interacted over the phone, we understood that he had a heavy philosophical background.
05:38: My understanding was more theological driven. And so we didn't know what to debate on, on the gospel truth.
05:45: And so we eventually landed on a different worldview discussion, a discussion of different worldviews.
05:52: That way we could kind of have the best of both worlds colliding together. And we debated, it was more of a really good structured discussion.
06:01: Marlon was moderating and he chimed in with questions. But we covered a ton of different topics like what is the gospel?
06:09: We talked about Galatians 1 in connection to Joseph Smith. That was real interesting.
06:15: We talked about the Trinity, which I introduced the problem of the one and the many, and we went into it really good.
06:22: Very charitable guy, Joseph Lewall is his name. And so we debate, we were the longest debate on Marlon's channel for a long time.
06:30: We debated for three and a half hours. Wow. And it was awesome. I loved every second of it.
06:36: And so from that debate, Robert Boylan reached out to me. He has more of a theological mind and exegetical bent, it seems like.
06:44: And so we hit it off. We got through the initial throwing snarky rebukes at each other.
06:50: And we're like, hey, we can have some mutual respect and sharpen one another. And so he actually had me on his
06:55: YouTube channel, Scriptural Mormonism and interviewed me about Reformed Baptist theology.
07:01: And he just set me up T -ball questions to just explain things from our perspective.
07:06: I actually wore this shirt. So this was kind of to give him a shout out. And I did wash it since then.
07:13: So he had Joseph on to critique Reformed Presuppositional Apologetics.
07:21: And so I'll follow Robert a little bit. So when I saw this, I thought, oh my goodness, I cannot wait to see what they said.
07:28: And I bet sometime in the future, me and Joseph will have a round two to discuss a lot of these things.
07:34: Oh, excellent. And I got, what was the gentleman you debated? What was his name again? Joseph Laywall.
07:41: Laywall, and that's on the Gospel Truth. Yeah, a long time ago, about three years or so. All right, yeah,
07:46: I'll definitely check that out. Folks, if you don't know the Gospel Truth, that's the YouTube channel over there.
07:52: Marlon Wilson runs that channel, excellent channel. If you wanna dig your teeth into some good debates and there's some really good ones on there.
08:01: So I highly recommend if you haven't subscribed to his YouTube channel, you should go over there right now and do that.
08:07: All right, well, first, before we kind of interact with the video, we do have some timestamped segments here.
08:13: And I will inform the audience what we're looking for in each of these timestamps. So Jeremiah was so kind to send me an out.
08:21: He's much more prepared for this than I am. He sent me the video and I was like, dude, let's get together and respond to this video.
08:29: And I didn't get to watch the video until like earlier today. And this guy's sending me outlines and I was like, gee whiz.
08:35: So he did most of the work for me, but there are 12 timestamped sections that cover various issues that come up.
08:45: And we're gonna kind of go in that order. So I'll let people know what each of those timestamps are titled and what the issue is going to be covered there.
08:53: And we'll play the video clip and interact with it. So I hope you guys, those who are presuppositionalists and wanna learn kind of how do we respond to some of these more technical criticisms,
09:03: I hope that this is very beneficial for you. Also, as we will be critiquing Mormonism, we love
09:09: Mormons. We violently disagree with them. Obviously, from our perspective, Mormonism is a cult.
09:16: It's actually, from our perspective, it is the quintessential cult, that when we go to churches or we're speaking and we speak of, you know, beware of the cults,
09:25: Mormonism is usually what pops in people's head. It is not a separate
09:30: Christian denomination or anything like that. It denies central features of the gospel. And this should be obvious to my regular listeners, but there is a difference between disdaining doctrine and disdaining people.
09:43: We love Mormons and we pray for the salvation of Mormon people. So they are fertile ground for evangelism.
09:52: If you have the courage to confront them lovingly and engage in conversation with them.
09:57: So I think this is a very important topic to cover. All right. Well, without further ado, let me find the timestamp here.
10:05: I'll share the screen here. Let's see if I can go here. And we are at three minutes and 50 seconds.
10:15: So for those who are curious, our first section, by the way, and Jeremiah could attest to this, this
10:23: Mormon gentleman, the main guy that's being interviewed does a really good job explaining presuppositional methodology.
10:30: I was impressed. I know Jeremiah was impressed that he kind of explained it much better than like a lot of our classical and evidentialist brothers who disagree with us.
10:40: So a pat on the back, you know, not my back, but this is my hypothetical patting him on the back.
10:46: Good job for trying to understand our position. Ultimately he fails, but that's okay.
10:51: He did do a good job. And I think that he was genuinely trying to understand. So do you want to speak to that at all,
10:58: Jeremiah? Yeah, I have a lot of respect for Joseph. Very sharp individual.
11:05: When we debated, I was taking notes and mental notes and thinking even after the debate,
11:10: I want to go back and make sure I understand him a lot. So something I really appreciate about Joseph is
11:16: I really do see him as someone that can sharpen me. And he's super kind and respectful.
11:22: And so I think it allows for really good discussion. And so I just, I think he's a really smart individual.
11:28: And I hope that as we bring out a lot of these things, I think when we talk about issues of the gospel and salvation, it's not an intellectual issue.
11:38: It's a heart issue. And so he's just a really good example of someone who I think is very, very smart. Sure. All right, well, thank you for that.
11:46: Okay, so our first segment's gonna cover the three minute and 55 second timestamp between three minute and 55 seconds and four minutes and 45 seconds.
11:54: So we'll play that clip. And the question that is gonna be addressed is what is reformed presuppositional apologetics?
12:01: And then after that, we'll make any necessary comments and then take it from there.
12:06: All right. What is reformed presuppositional?
12:28: Yeah, so it's an approach, I mean, very broadly, it's an approach to Christianity and to knowledge claims within the kind of Christian tradition, right?
12:37: More specifically, as you say, it's a kind of apologetics, right? And so it's, yeah,
12:43: I'm going to approach it and it rests on the kind of background, certain sets of epistemological and ontological commitments really are what characterize what presuppositionalism is.
12:51: Epistemology relates to theories of knowledge and truth and ontology relates to the nature of being. And so it's commitments in how we know things and what exists, essentially, is what
13:00: I'm saying. I say that it rests on epistemological and ontological claims. But it's also a claim about how apologetics ought to be done based on those epistemological and ontological claims, primarily epistemological.
13:11: So you'll... All right, I'm gonna stop right there. Let's see here.
13:19: So, so far, how is he doing? He did a really good job. Like, he understands that a worldview is comprised of many tenets, right?
13:29: You got ontology, epistemology, and really, we really do get into morality or ethics or value theory, but he understands that those components make up a worldview.
13:41: And so the thing that I want to stress to our audience and the other presuppers out there is this is not just something that philosophers have made up and we're like, man, it works.
13:55: Let's just use it and see how sophisticated we sound. As Christians, we really believe this is the method that the
14:02: Bible teaches. Now, like you rightly said, we can understand any given evidence within the proper worldview of how to interpret the evidence, right?
14:12: What was it? Was it Van Til that says there's no such thing as brute facts, there are only mute facts, right?
14:18: There's always a context in which we interpret anything. And so just a few key scriptures to,
14:24: I would say, gives us the parameters, gives us the ground to say, hey, this is biblical.
14:30: I love Proverbs 1, verse seven, that says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
14:36: Fools despise wisdom and instruction. And so the very beginning of anyone's epistemology needs to begin with a reverence for God, right?
14:46: Trusting in Him as the precipium of all truth. And the second part of that verse says, and fools despise wisdom and instruction.
14:55: We could say, if you deny Yahweh as your starting point, then your knowledge, your epistemology is going to be reduced to absurdity.
15:04: And so kind of piggybacking off that, that's Proverbs 1, verse seven, but in Proverbs chapter nine, we see a kind of an extension.
15:12: So I'll kind of read this real quick. Do not reprove a scoffer or he will hate you. Reprove a wise man and he will love you.
15:19: Give instruction to a wise man and he will still be wiser. Teach a wise or righteous man and he will increase in learning.
15:27: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
15:33: And so knowledge of the Holy One, I believe this is set in the framework for the coming Mashiach, the coming
15:39: Messiah. And so this kind of, I think the apostle Paul understood this in Colossians two.
15:45: He talks about how all the treasures of knowledge are found in Jesus Christ. And that's where he gets into don't be taken away by human or worldly philosophy, anything that rivals the knowledge of God.
15:58: And so last thing I wanna say, Eli, John 17, 17. Jesus says, Father, sanctify them in the truth.
16:05: Your word is truth, right? So the word of God is transcendent and actually is truth.
16:13: So that sets the bar. Everything is judged in light of God's word. Right, and that can be inferred too by the very concept of God, right?
16:22: So we can talk about these worldview issues within like highly philosophical vocabulary. So if I wanted to define a worldview, as a network of presuppositions not verified by empirical science or anything like that, and in terms of which all reality is interpreted, that sounds philosophical, but a worldview is just that.
16:40: As Christians who believe in a creator, that creator created everything and defines those things.
16:47: And so our worldview is informed by how God has created and defined things and how he's revealed it to us.
16:54: So we can talk about these issues with philosophical language, but we're really talking about basic categories that can be drawn from principles in scripture itself.
17:04: And you said a key word there, God who has revealed himself. Yes. So we're gonna get more into this later, but we're not constructing a hypothetical option.
17:14: We're talking about something objective that can be demonstrated because God in fact has revealed himself.
17:20: Right, very good. All right, so let's do this again here. Let me find this. So what is reformed presuppositional apologetics?
17:28: He kind of defined it, okay. I don't have any issues with how he defined it. Before we move on to the next part, is there anything you wanna add to that?
17:37: Do you think he defined it okay? Yes, I actually do want to add one more point.
17:44: So we're talking about presuppositionalism and a really good book I would like to encourage our viewers to look into is
17:51: The Five Views on Apologetics. Awesome book. You had evidentialist, you have a classicalist, you have
18:01: William Lane Craig representing the classical apologetic view. Jonathan Frame represents the presuppositional view.
18:07: Jonathan, I've never heard of him. I'm sorry. I was like, maybe you guys are friends.
18:13: That's very kind of awesome. No, that would be awesome. That would be awesome. I would go with John Frame, but I guess not. John Frame, he had an awesome quote.
18:20: He said, the most fundamental point to presuppositionalism is the application of Sola Scriptura to apologetics.
18:27: When he said that, I thought, I'm locked in, right? Excellent, all right.
18:34: Our next portion that we're gonna be discussing, it's gonna start at the seven minute and five second mark.
18:40: Presupp is not academic. This came up a couple of times. And on the one hand, he said something to the effect,
18:48: I'm not trying to be disparaging to presuppositionalism, but he kept bringing up the fact that apparently it's not academic, which
18:56: I thought was interesting, but that's fine. He's kind of correct in a sense that it is not the majority position to be sure.
19:04: You do have academics who are somewhat presupposition within that kind of vein, but let's listen to what he has to say here.
19:13: So we are at the seven minute and five second mark.
19:18: Let me just get there. Apologetics and Christianity.
19:29: And as you said, it's really, it's a reformed thing, and it's an online thing, right? So you'll see it used primarily by Calvinists and again, primarily online.
19:36: So one thing to note, and I don't mean this disparagingly, it's not particularly an academic thing.
19:43: So you're not going to see, for instance, academic philosophers for the most part endorsing presuppositionalism.
19:49: It's not a live option for hardly anything. So, you know, it's published about, so for instance, Anderson and Welty have a paper in philosophy of Christianity.
19:58: Okay, let's stop there. All right.
20:06: Do you have any comments there? Yeah. So it's interesting. He's like, it's not academic, but then he kind of qualifies it's not the majority.
20:16: And I'm over here saying, that's fine. We don't need to appeal to the majority in order to say that if it's well accepted or not, the majority still has to deal with all the same problems of philosophy that has been dealt with over the past few thousand years.
20:31: And so another book, I hope we can plug a lot of books to encourage. Sure, yeah, absolutely. You've already been encouraging a lot of people, but Jason Lyle, I think he's one of the smartest men
20:42: I've ever heard and one of the most humble men. I loved his book, The Ultimate Proof of Creation.
20:48: Because when he's, he has two chapters that are dealing with logical fallacies and it is some raw data.
20:54: It's hard to get through right there. And if you go to those chapters, he actually says, hey, if you skip these two chapters,
21:01: I won't tell anybody and you can just kind of move on. But those two chapters are invaluable because they're talking about logical fallacies.
21:08: And when you appeal to the majority, that doesn't give you truth, right? And in that chapter on this logical fallacy of appealing to the majority, you got to deal with the substance of what any majority or minority actually deals with.
21:21: So sure, he may be right that a lot of professional academic scholars aren't presuppositional.
21:27: I would actually argue and say everyone is presuppositional. Yes, yeah. That should be the next book.
21:33: You remember R .C. Sproul wrote how everyone's a theologian that says everyone is presuppositional.
21:38: That's right. And one of the tasks of the presuppositionalist is to point out that everyone is presuppositional. Actually getting to everyone's foundation and say, see, you had a foundation too.
21:48: So you're not doing anything much different than we are. You're just standing on the wrong foundation. And what
21:53: I appreciated about this Mormon fellow, I don't know his, I forgot his name. Joseph. Joseph, that's right.
21:59: What I appreciated about this portion, he said that this has nothing to do with the truth of the position.
22:05: And that's correct, right? So if someone were to say, oh, this isn't really academic. Well, that has no bearing as to whether it's true.
22:11: And that's really what we care about. What's interesting though, he says that you only find it online. Isn't like 90 % of our access to this stuff is online.
22:20: So that doesn't say anything, right? I mean, it's like, yes, 90 % of what I do, my apologetics is online.
22:27: If I was a PhD philosopher, most of my stuff would still be online because that's where I leaned. I mean,
22:32: I'm sure I probably write and publish stuff also, so I don't see, that can kind of be understood as kind of a, oh, it's online, so it's not really taken seriously.
22:42: You must've found it on Wikipedia. Yeah, yeah, something to that effect. Also, talking about presub not being a live option, that again is,
22:52: I need to hear specific argumentation, right, if it's not a live option for people, right? I've read a lot of academic critiques of presuppositionalism that are just, they're horrendous.
23:05: It's not even, I'm not even, I don't have a PhD myself, and I've read PhDs criticize presuppositionalism and made elementary mistakes that are quite embarrassing.
23:16: So that really doesn't matter much to me. And also Mormonism, they take Mormonism itself. That's not a live option for most philosophers either.
23:23: Not many academic philosophers take Mormonism very seriously. That doesn't mean Mormonism is false, but again, we have to deal with the specific claims though.
23:32: And what I appreciate about Joseph is that he does try to do that in the video there. You have any other comments there?
23:39: Yeah, the internet's actually a really good thing. This is a product of the time that we live in, and I bet you read those academic papers from the internet.
23:47: And so that just speaks to the access that we have to everything. So when he says it's an online phenomena, we're over here like, this is a product of the day that we live in, and I'm sure you're wanting to put your content out there.
24:00: So when Joseph, he did a video rebutting the Kalam cosmological argument because it undermines
24:08: Mormonism. They have an infinite regression of gods in it. They look at time as going back into infinity.
24:16: So there's a lot of problems, and I'm just saying he uses the internet to actually present his case.
24:22: And so the internet is not a bad thing. That's actually a way to let people think more deeply on these topics.
24:27: And he wasn't suggesting that it was, but he brought it up a couple of times, and I know people can get the impression, oh, it's just a thing online.
24:34: And again, it's not just a thing online. I mean, look at the work that Apologia Church is doing. I mean, they're doing street evangelism, not just Apologia Church, other churches as well, that of course are reformed, which
24:45: I appreciated that he was able to recognize the connection between presuppositionalism and reformed theology.
24:52: But yeah, just because most people access it online doesn't mean that it's not being done on the streets as well.
24:57: It is being done on the streets, and it is being done academically, although it's not the majority, but that's really irrelevant to the truth of the position.
25:06: But all right, let's continue here. So, ooh, this is my favorite one here, okay? So this is the portion here where presuppositionalism,
25:17: I'm reading a comment here. We'll get to the comments later. By the way, if you have any questions, preface your question with questions, and we'll get to them towards the back end of this episode.
25:24: So please, I encourage you guys if you have any questions. But by what standard? Okay, this is the presuppositional apologetic meme, and I'm going to look directly into the camera and say,
25:38: I don't care. It is a valid question, and you do not alleviate your responsibility of answering that question by simply hand -waving it away, calling it a meme.
25:52: Now, our Mormon friends did not do that. I'm just speaking generally. People who take that as, oh, by what standard?
25:59: Yes, we're going to ask that question, by what standard? I think it's a very important question. But let's play the clip here, and we'll interact with it.
26:07: Let's get back over here. And 17, okay.
26:20: Okay, there we go. That's good. Right, right, the idea is that's a bad thing. If you're born into the
26:25: Christian world, you... And then along with that, again, you hear a lot, it's a bit of a meme,
26:30: I think, as well as being a serious claim by some preceptualists. They'll say, by what standard, right?
26:36: You'll say, you know, I believe X, Y, Z, and they'll say, by what standard, right? By what standard do you believe that? It's like a
26:41: T -shirt. I don't want to come across as disparaging for you.
26:47: I struggle to see how preceptualism can be made to be sophisticated and plausible, especially along these subtle lines.
26:57: When you say things like, by what standard, it's not a good argument, and we can get into why. Okay, so there are a couple of things we could say here.
27:06: All right. I think Robert goes on to say, and hopefully you will tell us by what standard we can judge the claim by what standard.
27:13: And they both kind of laughed. And Joseph was like, I might be a little on the presuppositional side if we talk about it in those ways.
27:19: Yeah. Now, do Mormons ever argue for morality, like things being objectively moral?
27:26: Do they ever use the standards of morality? What is their position on that?
27:31: So we can bring this, we can talk about now and we can bring it up later because they actually talk about that.
27:36: Okay. Because Robert was asking Joseph there later, he says, okay, usually in everything that we disagree with, maybe there's a kernel of truth.
27:45: And he says, is there anything you like about presuppositionalism? And he basically goes into, like transcendental arguments are valid, right?
27:52: There's many things you can make a transcendental argument, and we make the transcendental argument for the
27:58: Triune God. And so with that, he was talking about how we can utilize a transcendental argument for morality, right?
28:07: And I noticed classical apologists will do the same thing like William Lane Craig. Sure. And it's such a good point to say to a professing atheist that says, we asked the question, so why do you treat one another with dignity?
28:23: Why do you believe in absolute right and wrong? It sounds like you're borrowing from our worldview, right?
28:29: Being made in God's image and so forth. What Joseph said was really interesting there, and we can kind of bring it back up later.
28:36: But he says, some Mormons argue that way, he prefers not to, because really they deny
28:43: Sola Scriptura and the perspicuity of scripture, it's clearness, right? And they would say, you need the inner witness of the
28:51: Holy Spirit to confirm that it's true, right? The burning in your bosom. And then they also have a living prophet to kind of help with that.
28:59: So he says he prefers just to say not to use a transcendental argument whatsoever when it comes to truth.
29:07: Okay. And so what are we, when we say by what standard, what are we asking?
29:13: I didn't get the connection where he says, I can't see how this can be taken as serious argumentation.
29:20: That just, I mean, I'm listening to it and I'm like, wow, like, okay. So, okay, the no standards, that's the opposite, right?
29:27: So by what standard? Oh, that's just a silly question. Okay. So then no standards, like how do we reason?
29:34: I mean, there are standards of reasoning. I mean, if I were to debate this individual and I were to start talking gibberish,
29:40: I mean, is he not going to hold me to the standards of reasoning and logic? I mean, if he says, hey, you can't say this because that's illogical, he's literally just showing this is the standard you should be using and look what happens when you don't use the standard.
29:55: He just as well can summarize and say, by what standard are you saying this? How can you make sense out of what you're saying?
30:00: What you're saying is nonsense. So by what standard is not particularly presuppositional? I mean, yeah,
30:07: I guess, I mean, presuppositionalists tend to use it because we're trying to emphasize foundations and presuppositions, but anybody can say that legitimately.
30:15: I don't see how this is any way connected to the sophistication or lack thereof of presuppositional argumentation.
30:22: Do you get that feeling when you heard that? Yeah, it struck me as odd because I think he understands, but it's really easy,
30:31: I know he wasn't trying to do this, but to disparage a position you don't agree with because later he does articulate his own standard, which is a form of the cogito, the
30:40: I think, therefore I am, but, and I don't want to give it all away, but he says something very presuppositional later.
30:49: So I like what you said, no matter what you say about by what standard, you're not going to escape the ramifications of how you view truth.
30:58: And so Eli was thinking, on one hand, is by what standard just so simplistic where some people have just have dismissed it and maybe we can come back and say, okay, fine, we'll say it a different way.
31:09: What is your theory of truth? How do you judge things to be true? That's ridiculous,
31:15: Jeremiah. I can't see how that can be at all, sophisticated argumentation to ask those questions.
31:21: To say that in response to what you just said, what is your theory of truth? And I said, yeah, that's not really sophisticated.
31:29: You're basically just saying, you're saying that by what standard is silly, then it's also silly to say what's your theory of reality or what's your theory of knowledge or any of it.
31:40: That's literally what by what standard, we're just asking by what standard do you do, right?
31:45: We wanna identify whether the person is being arbitrary or inconsistent or something like that.
31:53: So I thought that was very interesting. Now, I do wanna say that the phrase by what standard can be misused and it has been misused by many popularizers of presuppositionalism.
32:04: It's kind of akin to when people will say, well, how do you know? Oh, well,
32:10: I know because, well, how do you know that? Well, how do you know that? And they just keep going and going and people will interpret presuppositionalism as just this infinite, how do you know methodology?
32:19: And it can come across that way if presuppositionalists argue that way. But there is a distinction to be made between presuppositionalists, individual presuppositionalists and presuppositionalism as a methodology.
32:34: Those are two things. A friend of mine who is not presuppositional, Jonathan Pritchett, Dr. Jonathan Pritchett over there at Trinity Radio, he's told me personally, and I've heard him say on his channel, he says that I love presuppositionalism, it's certain presuppositionalists that I can't stand.
32:52: And I could resonate with that because there are certain individuals who will just repeat these phrases and it really doesn't help because they're not using what the phrase is trying to get across, they're not using it in the way that it's meant to be used within a presuppositional framework.
33:08: Do you have any comments on that or are you just in full agreement that we can move on? Go for it. I'm in full agreement because what we're really getting at is what is your theory of truth?
33:17: How do you ground epistemology? I believe epistemology is king.
33:22: How do we know what we know? And you can't just arbitrarily assert things. It has to be consistent, and we will get to this, has to be consistent with your metaphysics or your ontology.
33:33: Well, wait a minute, is consistency a standard that we should be, you see what I'm saying? So by what standard, right?
33:40: Are you holding us to the standard of consistency that question is just getting at those foundational issues.
33:45: So I don't see how it speaks to the sophistication of - And the value theory question, should we hold one another to consistency, right?
33:53: Well, that goes into a full orbed world view type of question. Yeah, excellent.
33:59: All right, now we're gonna get into some juicy stuff, okay? So when I say juicy, we can potentially go into some pretty deep waters, but I'm sure
34:09: Jeremiah doesn't mind. The next issue that we're gonna address is the claim Trinitarianism is essential to presuppositionalism.
34:18: And I think Joseph said that that's just flatly wrong. And we will hear what he has to say in just a moment here.
34:26: Let me find the clip. Dude, your timestamps, dude, this is so helpful.
34:33: Thank you. I got you, Eli. Oh, you do, man, I appreciate it. All right, let's see here.
34:42: 21, oh, it was 21. You mentioned Apologia earlier. Me and my buddy,
34:50: Trey Fisher, we're gonna be at ReformCon coming up in October at Apologia. It'll be
34:55: October 27th through 30th kind of in preparation for the Reformation, you know?
35:02: Yeah, yeah. Hopefully I get to meet a lot of the guys. Koltish will be there, that podcast and YouTube channel.
35:10: So I'm looking forward to that and just encourage anybody that can come, be a part, to sign up or at least look for it all as it's released online.
35:18: That's awesome. All right, thank you for that. All right, let's play this clip here. Yeah, and again, this is something
35:25: I wanna touch on again later, but the idea that Trinitarianism is essential to presuppositionalism, I think is just flatly wrong.
35:33: And so I think, yeah, sure, you could have like a Muslim presuppositionalist. And you know, in principle, you can have a lot, but they say presuppositionalist, you just have to argue about it differently.
35:40: Just like the Muslim would have to argue something differently. Often you'll hear that Trinitarianism is absolutely essential to presuppositionalism.
35:48: I think that's just not right. And I'll explain why people think that and why I think it's wrong. All right, we're gonna stop there.
35:56: Let me get back over here. Do -do -do -do -do -do. Okay. Were you able to see that video?
36:03: I didn't see it on my end. Earlier, I was able to see a few of the clips that she brought up. So I don't know what the audience was.
36:11: I see someone say the video wasn't up. Oh, I see Shannon Herring in the chat.
36:18: Okay, so let's see here. So I'm sorry if someone says they didn't see the video, maybe they can give a heads up so that I know.
36:27: I can probably give you a heads up because I can see when you don't play it on my side as well. Okay. All right, so he suggests,
36:34: Joseph says Trinitarianism is essential to presuppositionalism. That's just flatly wrong.
36:40: So what's wrong with the claim to be flatly wrong?
36:46: I love Joseph and I think he's a super smart guy. Yes. But I think he's missed a core element of presuppositionalism.
36:55: Everyone is a presuppositionalist. We all have preconceived ideas and lenses in which we see and interpret the world around us.
37:02: So the idea is everyone's a presuppositionalist. Everyone has basic presuppositions. And so on one hand, he's right.
37:09: You don't have to be a Trinitarian to claim to be a presuppositionalist. I've heard you talk about Jay Dyer, who's
37:16: Eastern Orthodox, right? Well, he would be a Trinitarian, but he wouldn't be reformed, right? So there would be a question of consistency there.
37:23: But yeah, the whole point is getting people to think about their own worldviews because we're about to do that internal critique.
37:32: That's really what's around the corner when we're asking questions about by what standard or what is their theory of truth.
37:40: As Van Til said, right? We want to be, and this is not just, Van Til did not just teach this to Christians, but that we also want to bring this awareness to unbelievers is that when we're engaging on believers, we want to bring them and ourselves to a point of epistemological self -consciousness.
37:56: We want to be epistemologically self -conscious. We want to be aware of our theory of knowledge, aware of our theory of reality, and aware of the consistent relationship between them.
38:09: And of course, we do not think that unbelievers have a consistent relationship between them, and that's why we want them to be aware of their own foundations.
38:16: So that will help us have a better opportunity to point out those inconsistencies and in like fashion, welcome the internal critique.
38:24: And we normally don't get to this in debates, right? I mean, if you think about this, when you see presuppositionalist debate, they typically are critiquing the unbeliever's perspective and asserting their own perspective.
38:37: And I guess in my experience, it doesn't seem like the unbeliever ever gets to the point and says, all right, well, fine.
38:43: How do you account for this? It's almost like they just assume that Christianity can't account for it. So they don't really, but I think this is a key point, right?
38:51: It's not the issue of simply pointing out inconsistencies in someone's worldview. How does the
38:56: Christian worldview actually account for these, we call them the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience?
39:03: But go ahead, if you wanted to add onto that. Yeah, so presuppositionalism is getting at worldview versus worldview, right?
39:12: And so the only way to have a meaningful conversation at this point is to do the internal critique and invite them over to where we're at to go into the basement, our foundations and show them how wonderful God is, the
39:26: God of truth, right? And so that's really key. And this reminded me of my debate with Joseph about three years ago, because we were having that discussion, how
39:37: I do account for things, right? Going to the scripture saying, well, in my worldview, God has spoken,
39:44: God has revealed himself. And he would say things that struck me as odd. He just says that you're being very internally consistent.
39:52: And I'm like, uh -oh, we're talking about worldviews. And if I'm the one that's being internally consistent, that is the truth that everything else is borrowing from.
40:02: But he would come back and say, I don't think I need to do an internal critique. And I'm saying the very nature of our conversation necessitates internal critique.
40:10: Otherwise, any critique that he has is an external critique. And we'd ultimately say, well, that's a misrepresentation of what we were saying from the very get -go.
40:20: You're muted, Eli, I think. Sorry, I accidentally unplugged my mic.
40:28: Can you hear me now? Yes, good. So let's answer the question before we move on. Trinitarianism, is it essential to presuppositionalism as we use it?
40:39: Well, everyone's a presuppositionalist, right? So on one hand, okay, you'll like this.
40:45: On one hand, no, you don't have to be a Trinitarian to be able to do presuppositionalism.
40:52: However, I would say everybody is made in that triune God's image. Okay, I would say that, right, so as Christians, it's impossible to be a presuppositionalist and not a
41:06: Trinitarian. I would say Trinitarianism is essential to a coherent presuppositionalism that actually accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish, namely demonstrating the truth of the
41:15: Christian worldview. But in essence, generically speaking, I would agree with you, we're all presuppositionalists, but we're not all consistent.
41:24: I mean, because if our worldviews lack the adequate ingredients to make knowledge intelligible and to account for intelligible experience, then there are problems there, right?
41:33: So yeah, there can be Muslim presuppositionalists, but they're not presuppositionalists in the way that it matters, right?
41:45: Because they don't have a worldview that actually pays the rent, so to speak, as Dr. James Anderson once said. You can claim, you know, the
41:52: Muslim could use a transcendental argument, but can their worldview pay the bills on that?
41:57: So from my perspective, I would say that the Trinity is essential to presuppositionalism if we're understanding presuppositionalism as Christians.
42:05: I don't think any non -Trinitarian successfully uses presuppositionalism when they try to do that, when they try to use it.
42:13: But, okay, yep, go ahead. So like going back to Proverbs 1 verse 7, the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge.
42:21: Well, who is Yahweh? How has he revealed himself? Well, he is triune. And so when we do that internal critique, we're gonna get into the deeper philosophical problems that really only the
42:32: Trinity can properly account for, right, and adjudicate and transcend this profoundly unified and diverse world, right?
42:41: So absolutely, for the tag argument to be successful, it needs to be grounded in the triune
42:47: God. All right, thank you for that. All right, so here's a common one. Conflation of epistemology and ontology.
42:54: I've heard this one over and over and over again. Did a video or two on it. I think
42:59: I have a snippet where I interviewed Dr. Jason Lyle, and I have a video where I address this as well.
43:06: There's also a really good article by Dr. James Anderson on analogical thoughts where he writes on this as well.
43:13: So again, none of this is new, all right? When someone says, oh man, you know, it's the ontology and epistemology conflation, you know, aha, look, we got you.
43:21: These are like old things that don't make presuppositionalist wince one bit, but people still use them.
43:29: Now granted, if people think that our responses are not sufficient in answering the objection, like that's fair, but it really, it doesn't,
43:38: I lose no sleep over it because every time I hear the critique, it just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what we're saying as presuppositionalists.
43:46: But let's hear the objection nonetheless here. All right, so that is at 22.
43:56: While you're finding it, Eli, I think I've heard atheists say, oh, you're confusing the map for the place.
44:02: Yes. And I've heard Matt Dilhunty bring that up. I've heard Tom Jump bring that up before, which
44:09: I know you've had interaction, and I've enjoyed listening to him because I can tell he speaks with confidence, but like you said, he tries to get away with philosophical murder with some of the things that he says.
44:24: Yes, I agree. All right, so let me, let's not open that can of worms. Anyway, all right, let's go.
44:31: Yeah, and again, this is something I wanna touch on again later, but the idea that Trinitarianism is essential to presuppositionalism,
44:39: I think is just flatly wrong. And so I think, yeah, sure, you could have like a Muslim presupposition.
44:45: And in principle, you can have a lot of, Sorry about that. I think it went back. So 2203, here we go.
44:53: So presuppositionalists often see that view as being totally, based on totally inexorable deductive arguments, right?
44:59: These are unavoidable consequences. And so that's not how pretty much any professional philosopher approaches arguments of philosophy, right?
45:07: So it's like Peter Van Avergaard has a great line about kind of disagreeing philosophy. And now it's, you know, so often philosophers are gonna think that the argument's gonna be irresolvable, more or less.
45:17: But, you know, certainly, almost all are gonna, you know, kind of admit that, sure, I think my arguments are right.
45:23: I think they're more likely than not. I think I have reasons to why I think they're right. But it's possible to rationally believe otherwise.
45:32: Okay, I'm going to stop here. I don't know if that sounded confusing. Did you hear the ontology epistemology conflation claim there?
45:41: I believe he said it maybe towards the beginning because in my notes, there was a big chunk. Okay. He did say something that did catch my attention.
45:51: He referred to, I don't know if he, maybe I misheard him, but did he suggest that the transcendental argument is like a deductive argument?
46:00: I do not recall. I think he's in the chat. So if you wanted to send him a question, I'm sure he would.
46:06: Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, Bonson didn't, I mean, you can formulate, you could have deductive arguments with transcendental premises, which is fine, but it's typically not formulated in a deductive argument.
46:18: It's usually, what is it? Oh my, disjunctive syllogism, something along those lines.
46:26: But okay, so do presuppositionalists conflate epistemology and ontology? Why don't you explain for us what the actual claim is and maybe share your thoughts on it?
46:35: So I've thought about this a lot. A lot of it, I've listened to a lot of the interviews that you've done, and I think we can distinguish between ontology and epistemology, just like me saying that.
46:48: But any epistemological claim exists within a metaphysical ontological framework, meaning you're assuming a type of worldview.
46:59: And so I actually love the analogy of the map and the place. We can distinguish between the one, between them.
47:06: One is descriptive, but that map exists in a real world. And so when we're talking about truth, it assumes your ontology, your epistemology, and your value theory.
47:19: They all lean on one another. And so here's the big point that I wanna make, is if you try to divorce your epistemology from your ontology, you are begging the question.
47:31: You're not grounding your epistemology in anything. And so when analytic philosophers, when atheists like Tom Jump try to say, well,
47:39: I don't need to give you an ontology. I can just have a consistent epistemology. I'm like, no, you can't. You are assuming a worldview that you yourself cannot pay the bills for.
47:49: And I'm here to tell you that you're borrowing capital from somewhere else, and I know where. All right, well, thank you for that.
47:58: I think he clarifies. Let me get this comment up here. He says, I mentioned the conflation argument only to speculate as to why some preceptors think
48:05: Tagg is totally certain. I explain my reasoning further. Yeah, so he said something along the lines of like, most philosophers don't argue that way.
48:12: They'll say, oh, these conclusions are more plausible, or they're more reasonable. And that's quite frankly, because they're starting from fundamentally autonomous and neutral categories, which we would disparage as presuppositionalists, right?
48:26: So if that's what most philosophers argue for, like, yeah, then I would say most philosophers start from an unbiblical starting point.
48:32: It's fine, right? One of the reasons why people reject presuppositionalism is because it's very dogmatic, but I would say that's positive, right?
48:41: It's dogmatic sort of argument, and we think it goes through. So it might be philosophically humble to say, well, we're not gonna go for certainty.
48:51: And in some respects, that's appropriate, but the transcendental arguments don't go for probability.
48:56: They go for transcendental necessity. Something's true by the impossibility of the contrary, right?
49:02: So yeah, so thank you for that clarification, Joseph. Appreciate it. Do you have any other thoughts before we move on to the next clip?
49:09: I just wanna reemphasize, your ontology has to be consistent with your epistemology, and your epistemology is resting somewhere.
49:18: And so you can't do a hard separation. They are interdependent on one another.
49:25: So you gotta give an account for an entire worldview. This is why in my debate with Joseph about three years ago,
49:33: I was reminding him that he's thinking in these categories of one in many categories, and you have to be able to account for that.
49:41: And he would mainly come back with a philosophical argument, kind of trying to say that we're entitled to the laws of logic.
49:51: And he makes a case, which we're gonna get more into this. I don't wanna give it all away. But he says, we are entitled a priori for the laws of logic.
50:00: And when we start asking what the laws of logic are, then we're asking about the ontology of that.
50:07: And so you have to be able to give an account for that. And so my point is that you have to have both, right?
50:16: That's part of a worldview. Right, so he clarifies here. He says, you still have to have reasons to think the premises in a tag argument are right.
50:24: I struggled to see how supporting those premises could also be totally certain. Again, it seems to me to think that he thinks that the transcendental argument is like this deductive argument that requires defenses of premises that include non -certain defenses in the truth of those premises.
50:41: And that's just not necessarily the case. And even if I did have the transcendental argument in a deductive form, so that we have a deductive argument with a transcendental premise, the way you defend the transcendental premise is exactly the way we would defend it if we didn't have it in a deductive form.
50:57: So for example, if knowledge is possible, the Christian worldview is true. Knowledge is possible, therefore the
51:02: Christian worldview is true. The transcendental premise is the first premise. How do I know that if knowledge is possible, the
51:08: Christian worldview is true? That defense comes in that transcendental argument.
51:14: Deny it, and we will demonstrate that you need to presuppose it in order to rationally deny it.
51:19: And that will engage right where we want them to, want the issue to be is that worldview comparison, internal critiques to demonstrate and illustrate the proof.
51:30: Yeah, go ahead. Something I wanna add is, so we were getting into this a while back, and I told him you have to ground, you have to ground the laws of logic.
51:41: Otherwise, you sound just like an atheist that wants to just say, well, I can't conceive of another impossibility of logic working if I were to try to argue against logic,
51:51: I'd have to use logic, therefore I'm entitled to them. And I'm saying, not necessarily. Your experience is not universal.
51:59: It's not infallible. You don't know of another experience that may nullify everything that you think you know.
52:05: And so he said, that's fine, because all the transcendental argument does is say you need a transcendent being.
52:12: Mormonism has that, so it works. And it's like, okay, now we're getting closer, because atheism, to me, fails.
52:19: It's at the very bottom of the barrel. And so the whole point in engaging apologetically with the
52:26: Mormon is you do wanna get to the scripture. I think that's where you're gonna really be able to kind of expose the different worldview analysis.
52:36: But that is to say that you do have to appeal to a transcendent being, but that's not all
52:41: Tagg does. We're talking about a very specific kind of God who has revealed himself.
52:47: Sure. All right, thank you for that. All right, our next point we're gonna be dealing with is the statement, we can't make sense of the world without the
52:55: Bible. And he says that that's nonsense, to which I would actually somewhat agree with him with qualifications.
53:04: I think he's critiquing there kind of a sloppy presentation of presuppositionalism, or perhaps an unqualified form of presuppositionalism in terms of which the statement is thrown out there as a general principle and it's not expanded upon.
53:19: So let's get this back up here again, and I will get that segment in just a moment here.
53:27: All right, that is at 2757. All right, 2751, let's do there.
53:41: As far as it goes, I disagree for the most part, but I'm not gonna disparage that. There's kind of a second line of thinking that I find much less plausible.
53:50: In fact, I can't even really work out a particularly coherent notion of what's being said here. And this is the claim that in order to make sense of some particular feature of reality, it's not
54:02: God we're presupposing, but it's the Bible or the kind of the biblical worldview, when they say that, they basically mean kind of certain beliefs about God.
54:09: But to say that we can't make sense of the world without the Bible, and you'll hear that, that's a claim made,
54:15: I think it's nonsense, right? It's not like people who exist before the Bible was written couldn't make sense of the world, right?
54:21: So you'll hear that line, but I'm not gonna spend any time on it because it is just nonsense, right? I think sometimes people say it and they don't mean that.
54:26: Other times people say that and they mean that, and they're absolutely flatly demonstrably wrong, right? Yeah. All right, let's stop there.
54:36: All right, what has he got right and what has he got wrong? Okay, what he's got right is we're not saying that you need the 66 books of the
54:47: Protestant canon, otherwise the world you think you live in just reduces to absurdity.
54:53: Because when you go back, backward in time, yeah, we didn't have the same kind of Bible that we have today, right?
55:01: So he is right in a sense that we've not had the same Bible since the very dawn of time.
55:07: That's what he's got right. And so it can come across that way when someone says, we can't make sense of the world without the
55:13: Bible. Now, either what someone is meaning to say or ought to say is we're talking about the
55:22: Scripture produces a necessary worldview. Now, Scripture is not just like every book that we see sitting on a shelf, right?
55:32: It claims to be the very word of God. All Scripture is God -breathed.
55:37: And so now we're talking about something totally different. And so, and you've talked about this in your previous episodes.
55:44: I know Greg Bonson has mentioned this. But when you go back to progressive revelation, what we're getting, which
55:51: I really think the fundamental point of Sola Scriptura is, is that you've always had a witness of God.
55:57: You've always had the word of God being able to give context to the world that we live in.
56:02: So guess what? That's always existed. Even before we had ink on a page, even before Moses at Mount Sinai with the law,
56:11: God has always given us a witness of himself. Even pagans on the other side of the world, they have general revelation that testifies to the creator.
56:21: And so as God has revealed himself more, we've been able to strengthen and understand with precision certain knowledge claims, right, understanding who we are in light of who our creator is.
56:32: Right. And that's why I often say my starting point is, as a
56:38: Christian, my starting point obviously has within it a biblical foundation, right? But I like to say my starting point is
56:45: God and his revelation or the triune God and his revelation. And that word revelation can encapsulate revelation that of course includes scripture and or of course includes any kind of revelation prior to scripture.
57:00: And I would argue that natural revelation and special revelation were present at the beginning of creation.
57:06: So you have all different types of special revelation of which the written special revelation is a particular kind and obviously a very important, fundamental, essential kind but we would never just say in the kind of a bare statement, you know, without the
57:19: Bible, we can't make sense of anything. That needs to be explained. There's a sense in which that's true in a sense but that sense needs to be drawn out more specifically.
57:30: And I think in the comments, he kind of admitted, yeah, that's a pretty sloppy way that some people, so he says here, appreciate that.
57:38: I definitely see the, you need the Bible argument as being a sloppy presentation of precept. Yes, I'd agree. Neither of you would make an argument like that.
57:44: Yes, and that's why we wanna make a distinction between criticizing presuppositionalism and presuppositionalists.
57:51: There are presuppositionalists who say that. There are presuppositionalists who will say by what standard ad nauseum.
57:58: There are presuppositionalists that will say, how do you know? How do you know? How do you know? How do you know? How do you know? How do you know? How do you know? But that's different than presuppositionalism and I think that's important.
58:08: Yeah. All right. Did you have any other comments there before we move on?
58:13: Yeah, there's a slight mediation. We're making great time, by the way. I'm very impressed. I thought this was gonna go much slower, but.
58:20: I've noticed a lot of classicalists will disparage precept in the same way. Like, oh no, what are you gonna do back before the completion of the canon, right?
58:30: And I'm left with saying, we're talking about the worldview scripture gives us.
58:36: And so I think that's super important. So real similar to by what standard, maybe that's just too simplistic.
58:43: Maybe we gotta do a better job explaining what we mean. So when we say we can't make sense of the world without the Bible, talking about the worldview it produces.
58:51: Yes, and I wanna clarify that. I don't think that by what standard is too simplistic. I only think it's too simplistic when you're speaking to philosophically sensitive people who are saying, well, what do you mean by that?
59:03: But in a generic sense, if I'm out on the street, I'm not gonna be like, what is your epistemological found?
59:09: People are gonna run away from me. They'll be like, what the heck, bro? I would say by what standard is completely appropriate when you are talking to your friend on the porch who is arguing against your
59:21: Christianity and starts making moral statements and he has no foundation for that.
59:27: It's appropriate to say by what standard do you judge something to be moral? I think that's completely appropriate.
59:34: Now, if you're talking to someone like Joseph or you're talking to some kind of hardcore evidentialist who is more analytically minded, he's like, well, what do you mean by what standard?
59:42: You might have to unpack that, but I do think it's appropriate given some context. Great point. Okay, all right, let's see here.
59:51: Ooh, okay, so the problem of the one and the many being the perennial problem of philosophy is a bizarre claim because it just hasn't.
59:59: The problem of the one and the many is just no problem at all. And the reason why it's no problem is because no one's writing on it.
01:00:07: So clearly if no one's writing on it in the academic literature, it's not a problem at all. So there you go.
01:00:14: Let's find the clip there and then I'll let you kind of share your thoughts on that. Is that okay? Absolutely.
01:00:21: Okay. I love your Greg Bonson photo in the back you got going on, Eli. Oh, well, thank you.
01:00:27: His face is blocked out, but what are you gonna do? Okay, 31, 51,
01:00:38: I'll do 47, here we go. Okay, so that's the basic line of research lists.
01:00:45: We've kind of already identified a couple of problems. There is some conflation sometimes of kind of epistemic and metaphysical modalities.
01:00:54: I think another significant problem for the set of claims. So the idea is that you can go.
01:01:00: Whoops, sorry. It's 51, you got it. You have kind of a relatively classical monotheism.
01:01:06: It looks like you can get all that. So why do many, perhaps most preceptive lists insist that you need Trinity? Well, generally what they'll do is they'll give the tag.
01:01:14: They'll say, in order to account for logic or reason or the intelligence of the world, you have to presuppose God. And then they'll say, and this is from Bent Hill, this is why they get this.
01:01:22: One of the perennial problems of philosophy is the problem of the one and the many since the Greeks. And then all the way down today, it's just like philosophers have been trapped under this essential problem of philosophy.
01:01:32: And how do you account for the problem of the one? So basically, how do you account for multiplicity and energy in the world? How do we account for both those things?
01:01:37: And they say, oh, well, the Trinity, because it's three in one. And so we've solved that problem and you get Trinitarianism for free because it solves that problem.
01:01:45: And that's why I say it just doesn't make sense to me to claim that Trinitarianism is essential to presuppositionalism.
01:01:53: Okay, let's stop there. Okay. All right, so what are your thoughts there?
01:02:04: Yeah, another book plug time. John Frame, because I don't know him personally as Jonathan.
01:02:09: Jonathan once told me in a conversation about the problem of the one. I was like, man,
01:02:16: I didn't know you were like chill with him. You know, I was like, whatever. Excellent resource. Wrote a history of Western philosophy and theology.
01:02:25: Gets into the history. And I wanna give Joseph some credit here. He did mention there are pre -Socratics that did get into this problem, this question of what is reality?
01:02:37: Is it ultimately one? Is it water like Thales said? Is it air? Is it some other atomistic force, right?
01:02:45: That's just one principle. Or you got other philosophers that said, no, everything's in flux.
01:02:51: Everything is changing. There is no principle of unity whatsoever. And so I think
01:02:57: Joseph even realizes, okay, this is actually a big time philosophical question.
01:03:02: And this is where I don't wanna psychologize like he mentioned in his video or speculate, but I think secular philosophers gave up, right?
01:03:12: That's why you don't see it in contemporary philosophy anymore because how would you solve such an incredible problem? I just wanna put this comment.
01:03:18: So this is Dr. Bolt, Chris Bolt, Christopher, Christopher Bolt, I'm gonna, Gregory Bolton, Christopher Bolt and Jonathan Frame.
01:03:28: I'm gonna do that forever now. And I think he kind of highlights this perfectly. He says, it's discussed explicitly, but also implicitly in every problem of philosophy.
01:03:38: So even if you don't use the one in the many wording, it is a problem, an explicit and implicit problem in every issue in philosophy.
01:03:47: So, but yeah, piggybacking on what you just said there. What did you say the last point you said before I rudely interrupted you?
01:03:53: No, you're good. I was just saying that it's just not true. I'm speculating why contemporary modern philosophers don't talk about,
01:04:00: I think they gave up, right? Because the bigwigs that came from before them were always overemphasizing one or the other.
01:04:07: And the whole point of showing John Frame is you got a scholar who has wrote on it and it's not just on the internet.
01:04:14: So I just, I wanna encourage people that, I love Joseph, I love Robert, but don't just take their word for it.
01:04:21: Don't take my word for it, go explore. You probably will have to use the internet to do that and that's okay. Well, there's a really good book by Rush Dooney literally called
01:04:30: The One in the Many. It goes into a lot of the reasons why this is important. So there is some material out there.
01:04:36: I wanna plug also your interview with Anthony Rogers. Y 'all talked about for almost two hours.
01:04:42: I listened to it today to freshen up a little bit, but y 'all discussed the problem with one in the many. That dude is a beast,
01:04:48: I have to say, Anthony Rogers. Yes, I really enjoyed that. I don't think I've ever done a short interview with him.
01:04:54: We usually go pretty long. All right. Now, apparently you have this one highlighted.
01:05:00: You really wanna address this particular one. So the claim here is three in one is not essential to the solution to the problem of the one and the many.
01:05:13: I think that's an interesting statement there. Let's hear what he has to say and then I'll let you interact with it, okay? All right.
01:05:21: Okay, let me get the time right now. I keep going to the wrong spot. 33, 39. 33.
01:05:27: We're gonna do 33, 30. Just get a nice running start. Okay.
01:05:33: Vaguely classical conception of God. You know, that works. You can do presuppositions. So the second problem with this kind of trinitarianism is this kind of gap between the tag argument or the kind of basic presuppositionalist line and Christianity.
01:05:51: Because if you get trinitarianism, sure, like you roughly have Christianity at that point. You know,
01:05:58: I'm happy to admit that like, if the tag argument is right and if the solution to the problem of one and many is most likely, that's evidence for Christianity.
01:06:06: Specifically because Christianity is kind of the main live option for most people that says that we have this kind of three in one.
01:06:13: But the idea, and this is why it's important that these are actually separate issues, the tag and the problem of one and the many.
01:06:22: What presuppositionalists are generally trying to do is conclusively rule out all possible alternatives.
01:06:28: So they're trying to say the only possible worldview is the Christian one.
01:06:34: And again, this is kind of physically trinitarian, classical one. And the problem is that claim is too strong for what the argument can be doing.
01:06:43: Because you can't rule out in principle all alternatives if you have to be relying on the problem of the one and the many, this particular solution, to rule out these alternatives.
01:06:52: Because the fact of three in one is not essential to this solution to the problem of one and the many. If all you're trying to say is that the solution depends on there being multiplicity in one, you can have a binitarian view of God, you can have just the father and the son, say.
01:07:04: And that would be equally not ruled out, right, by this kind of tag presuppositionalist line.
01:07:13: And so it's now a live option compared to Christianity. So let's say a religion arises that says there's 101, this very complex view of God where there's 100 persons in one being, and then it has this, whatever, all sorts of other claims.
01:07:27: Maybe it's roughly Christian, but how does it say that? Now that view is equally plausible according just to the presuppositionalist line, to the presuppositionalist, to his own position, right?
01:07:38: And so that's not enough. Basically, the presuppositionalist is always gonna want to say that they can rule out all alternatives, and you can't if you're relying on the problem of one of the many, because there's no reason to think that a
01:07:48: Trinitarian view is the only way they can solve it. So if you're trying to say that in principle we can rule out all alternatives, you can't do that,
01:07:53: I think essentially is my point. And so there's a gap problem. Again, I'm not saying that it's not evidence for Trinitarian Christianity, because if these arguments go through, sure, that is like the one that's currently alive.
01:08:05: All right, we're gonna stop right here. Now, you know what your problem is,
01:08:10: Jeremiah, okay? Here's, and I mean this, and I'm glad Joseph is in the chat here, and I hope we can, if he did watch some of my past episodes, sometimes
01:08:22: I do impressions of a hypothetical interlocutor. So here's my impression.
01:08:28: So Jeremiah, you know what your problem is, bro, all right? Your transcendental argument is too strong.
01:08:36: You need to back up. It's too strong of a claim. And so when
01:08:43: I heard that, I was a little taken aback. I mean, the transcendental argument is you're arguing for the necessity of something.
01:08:52: So like, how can you back up on a transcendental argument? Like it's trying to go for the whole kit and caboodle, or as Bonson said, the whole enchilada, right?
01:09:02: It's not a strong claim, it's a transcendental claim. The very nature of transcendental claims is that you're trying to demonstrate some proposition by the impossibility of the contrary.
01:09:12: So no, I don't think it's too strong. I think it's as strong as it needs to be, given that we're giving that sort of argumentation, a transcendental argument.
01:09:21: But what say you to some of his statements there? All right, you notice on the notes
01:09:27: I sent you, I have a short response, and then I have a more in -depth response. I'll give you this one. Folks, Jeremiah highlighted this one.
01:09:33: He was like, I want to dig into this one. But go for it.
01:09:40: You can go for it, and I will remain silent. I've heard, here's the thing. I've heard all of this before.
01:09:48: And Bonson actually addresses every single point here. So like our responses, and of course,
01:09:54: Bonson would probably do it much more sophisticated and with more clarity, but none of these things are new, and all of these things are addressed somewhere.
01:10:03: In Bonson's either his lectures or his books. So this isn't anything that we're being innovative and trying to like the new generation, giving new answers to these.
01:10:12: These are all addressed in Van Til and Bonson, and I think are answered sufficiently. But why don't you share, and Bosterman, by the way.
01:10:21: Bosterman perhaps is the only exception where he addresses this particular issue with expanding on what was laid out by Van Til and Bonson.
01:10:30: So go ahead, why don't you share your thoughts? Yeah, I have a preliminary thought before I get into the short response, because I already know where Joseph's underlying worldview, by what standard he judges everything else.
01:10:43: He's quoting analytic philosopher, Hilary Putman, who says, if you can't conceive of an alternative, then we're entitled to use the laws of logic.
01:10:53: So in his mind, if you can't conceive of an alternative, that's grounds. And so in Joseph's mind, he can conceive of a bininity, quadrinity, all the way to a one
01:11:03: God that exists in a hundred persons. So in his mind, it's not persuasive to him.
01:11:10: And I'm saying that's fair. We just have to move the conversation in terms of that. So we'll get more into that, because he describes more of why he feels entitled to the laws of logics as a
01:11:20: Latter -day Saint. So the short response, this is actually got brought up in our debate about three years ago.
01:11:26: For one, I just wanna encourage people, go listen to that debate. I had a blast with Joseph, one of the most respectful, kind people that I've had the pleasure of interacting with.
01:11:35: He seems really cool. I would totally go out and grab some food and hang out with him. And he has an accent, so it's unfair.
01:11:43: He's already smart, and now he sounds way smarter with the accent like that. So this got brought up when we talked about the
01:11:52: Trinity, because he rightly was asking me, our side, how would we account for divine simplicity in the
01:11:57: Trinity? It doesn't seem to mesh there. I think if you have the proper categories of God's eternal being, and then you have personhood, we understand that you can't divide the essence, right?
01:12:10: He has a subsistence. That is, we're talking about a different aspect of how God is personal, but you can't divide the being of God.
01:12:17: So anyway, we got into that. And so we quickly started talking about the Trinity. And then I brought up, like any good preceptor, talked about the one and the many, right?
01:12:28: And so when he says, you know, what about these other conceptual ideas of a quadrinity, bininity?
01:12:34: I said, what Van Thiel would recommend us do is we're talking about the God who has revealed himself.
01:12:41: So as you're stepping into our worldview, that God has spoken, right? Objectively right here, right?
01:12:48: And we can obviously look into - Not as a hypothetical. That's the key. Right. That's the key.
01:12:54: Not as a hypothetical. Actually. And you have to do an internal critique of our worldview.
01:13:00: So to just say, you can come up with a hypothetical, we're just watching that fly past us saying, external critique, right?
01:13:05: It's a misrepresentation of what we're actually saying. And so that's the short response. We're not coming up with hypotheticals.
01:13:12: What's imperative to our worldview is the sovereign triune God who has spoken, who has revealed himself.
01:13:19: That's the short response. And I think you can get a lot of ground moving in a conversation with that alone, right?
01:13:26: So do you wanna add anything to that before we go on? I think it's great. It's important to keep in mind that our worldview posits a concrete
01:13:33: God, not an abstract hypothetical God. I mean, that is our worldview that God has spoken.
01:13:45: I think it was in the debate with, I don't know if it was Bonson's debate with Stein or Edward Tabash, where I think he asked something to the effect of like, how can we have a
01:13:55: Bible that has all throughout all these years has been translated so many times and we can trust that the words that were spoken back then are the words that we have today.
01:14:05: And Bonson was like, has Dr. Tabash or Mr. Tabash been asleep at the wheel? Given the truth of the
01:14:11: Christian worldview, God has revealed himself, right? Now you don't have to believe that as the skeptic, but that's the
01:14:18: Christian worldview. If you're gonna internally critique a worldview, you need to internally critique it, hypothetically grant its truth and then show on its own ground it doesn't work.
01:14:29: But if you're gonna hypothetically grant its truth, then you need to hypothetically grant that within that worldview, God himself is not a hypothetical abstract concept.
01:14:38: He is a God who's actually revealed himself in time and space and has given us his word, so on and so forth.
01:14:43: So yeah. That internal critique, we're wanting to show a logical contradiction.
01:14:49: Yep. We're wanting to show if we grant that X is true, then therefore X is false.
01:14:56: So that's the whole point of internal critique is where we share common ground, not neutral ground as we, oh, another book plug,
01:15:07: Always Ready, right? By Gregory Bonson. Gregory, because we're buddies.
01:15:12: Do you know his middle name? Are you a true fan? No. No, I was gonna cheat, but it's not on there.
01:15:21: Are you, it is, it's, I think it's Lyle. Gregory Lyle. I did not know that. I think it, let me double check.
01:15:28: So you can continue speaking. Let me double check. Yeah. I don't wanna be that guy. Well, Bonson speaks of the sin of neutrality.
01:15:33: Now, to Joseph's credit, he did a good job of saying there's no neutral ground in a presuppositionalist, right?
01:15:42: And he's right, because we look to Romans chapter one, we look to the scriptures that tell us that the unbeliever is walking in the futility of their mind, right?
01:15:52: Fools despise knowledge and wisdom. And so we're showing how that reduces to absurdity by showing logical contradictions, given their own standards, if I can use that term, by what standard.
01:16:06: So as I'm moving, Eli, to my longer response, another book plug. This is by far the most challenging book that I've ever read and the most rewarding.
01:16:18: This is by Brant Bosserman, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox, subtitle,
01:16:25: An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til.
01:16:31: And if Joseph is interested, I actually have a couple of interviews with him where we speak about this very issue.
01:16:36: And we do go through bininity and quadrinity and why they don't work. So if he looks through the older archive, just type in Brant Bosserman, Eli Ayala, Revealed Apologetics, and he can find that.
01:16:48: Two hours of just great content. It's long, but it's definitely worth the listen. But go ahead. Or look at our
01:16:54: Facebook messenger, Joseph. I'm sure I've sent you stuff over time. So absolutely wonderful interviews.
01:17:00: I would love to interview Bosserman, by the way. That dude's mind is just, you know, I do thank
01:17:06: God for men like Van Til and Bonson. And man,
01:17:12: I put Bosserman right there in the mix with those guys. I mean, just incredible. And such a pastorly heart too, man.
01:17:18: Yeah, he's helped me just even in personal conversation because we've interacted kind of like over the phone and he's just been so, he's very encouraging and very pastorly.
01:17:28: And man, I definitely encourage people to look at that book and also to check out our videos.
01:17:35: He's a great guy, so. Was it him that tried to argue persuasively for Presbyterianism to you?
01:17:44: No, no, no, no. I don't think that was him. I think I'd be scared to try to talk about that with him.
01:17:51: I'm joking, of course. So in this book, he argues that God necessarily must be one in three, right?
01:18:00: Not just kind of the sufficient argument of saying the God who has revealed himself is triune, but we can actually go further to talk in philosophical ways of saying, actually, the one in three is not arbitrary.
01:18:14: The three is not arbitrary, it's actually necessary. So I have a rough sketch, Eli, if I can try to explain why
01:18:22: I think that is. Sure, but I do recommend that people check out the book where Bosserman goes into greater detail, but go ahead.
01:18:30: Yes, and it's chapter nine. And I'll tell people, you gotta read it once, and then 10 more times, pray through it, take notes, because you can't get it the first time.
01:18:40: Like, it's just so much going on. And I don't know if this was Bosserman's dissertation, but the dude is so, so deep.
01:18:47: Yes. So you gotta have a dictionary ready as you're gonna go through it. And just to give a context that Bosserman actually,
01:18:55: I don't know if he was in a cult, or he had a family member that was in a cult that denied the
01:19:00: Trinity, and that actually spurred him into an in -depth study. So I think a lot of his rigor, obviously he's a very brilliant guy, but I think a lot of it was his desire to really dive into this issue that was an issue within his family,
01:19:14: I think, or something like, I don't remember the story, but it was interesting. Yes. Okay, here's my go at it.
01:19:20: And one day I'll talk with Bosserman to see how I can continue to understand this. But something we have to have in mind is we have a creator -creation distinction, right?
01:19:31: And so we learn many things about the creator as we observe the creation, right?
01:19:36: We would expect that, and it's biblical. And so the creation tells us many things about the creator.
01:19:42: We experience, I would almost say point number one, we experience temporal, personal relationships.
01:19:48: This assumes an eternal, personal being, okay? So this is really key as we kinda go through how a
01:19:56: Unitarian God does not work or pay the bills, how a bininity doesn't work, how the
01:20:01: Trinity does, and how a quadrinity doesn't, and then you can add any number past that and it's still gonna be the same problem.
01:20:07: So we experience, in this world, temporal, personal relationships. This tells us something about the creator that he must be eternal and a personal being.
01:20:17: We as humans, we possess limited knowledge, right? We have a limited experience here in the world, and we are plagued with the problem of induction, right?
01:20:28: And so meaning that we can be convinced of what we're experiencing and what we're observing, right?
01:20:33: But we cannot have certainty, okay? Now, there's a lot of argumentation that goes into that, but generally speaking, right?
01:20:41: Was it David Hume? Who was the philosopher that wrote on the problem of induction, Eli? That would have been
01:20:48: Bertrand Russell. Okay, yeah, Bertrand Russell. I think it's Bertrand Russell, yeah. Oh, there you have a number of people who wrote on it.
01:20:54: Yeah, but the idea is we have a limited knowledge and this subjects us to the problem of induction.
01:21:02: Now, this assumes that God would be absolutely omniscient and this would solve the problem of induction, okay?
01:21:11: So remember that first principle was we can learn many things about the creator from the creation, okay?
01:21:18: Just real quick. So yeah, so Bertrand Russell wrote on it and David Hume as well.
01:21:23: So if folks wanna check out Hume on induction or Russell on induction, there's information out there. Yes, and what's good is those are secular guys, not granting the
01:21:33: Christian worldview, recognizing this problem of induction, right? Not being able to get certainty, realizing that we are in a bind.
01:21:41: You either are gonna have to just assert an axiom and build up from there, and that's arbitrary at the end of the day, or you're gonna have to reason in a circle, circular reasoning, right?
01:21:52: Or you're gonna have to say A because of B because of C and goes on into infinity, and that's absurd.
01:21:58: There's no foundation to get where the point where you currently are or where you wanna go. But that is the futility of autonomous human reasoning, right, and you're subject to this problem of induction.
01:22:10: So with a few of those principles in mind, let's think about a Unitarian God, okay?
01:22:17: So we're talking about one God who is radically one person, okay?
01:22:23: Now, this would account for a necessary eternal being, right?
01:22:29: We're temporal and finite, and so this assumes something about the creator that he has to be eternal. A Unitarian God would account for that, but a
01:22:36: Unitarian God would fail to account for personhood. To be personal assumes another person, okay?
01:22:45: Now, one way to illustrate this is we cannot even conceive, I think Joseph would like this point, we can't even conceive of a world of only one person because you yourself are a personal agent trying to come up with this hypothetical.
01:22:59: So it assumes you and the world, you're trying to come up with one person. So I'm saying a
01:23:04: Unitarian God would fail the test of eternal personhood. Now, there's more application to this,
01:23:11: Eli, because loving relationships entail multiple people. And so this is something that I've seen theologians say of like Islam, Allah is
01:23:21: Unitarian. Well, he cannot eternally be love or any Unitarian God for that matter, because he could only express the attribute of love once he creates.
01:23:31: And so what's definitional to Christianity is God is love in 1 John. And we understand that that's been an eternal relationship of love, right?
01:23:40: But the point is Unitarian God can account for personhood. So now we would move to a bininity.
01:23:48: One God who exists in two persons. This would account for eternality. This would account for personhood.
01:23:55: Now, this next point is what took me forever, Eli, to grapple with. This fails the account for omniscience, justifying human intelligibility, because a bininity cannot ground knowledge.
01:24:11: Now, I wanna explain a little bit what I mean by that. And I've watched your interview with Fosserman a lot, and he did a good job of explaining it, but it took me a few times.
01:24:20: So when we look back to the created order, every person to person interaction, me and you, we have a context in which we are interacting and relating to one another, right?
01:24:31: Generally speaking, all human relationships are in the context of this created impersonal world, okay?
01:24:41: That's why we are subject to the problem of induction, is because of this impersonal context in which we exist.
01:24:49: Okay? So when we go back to the bininity, we ask the question, what context does person one and person two exist in their personal relationship to one another?
01:25:02: Bossaman rightly points out, it's an undefinable, indefinable void.
01:25:08: It's an indefinable, impersonal context. And so, this bininity would be subject to the problem of induction.
01:25:18: This would be like having the problem of humanity just raised up to the eternal level, and it doesn't work.
01:25:25: And I know that this won't be compelling to Joseph because he's Latter -day Saint. A lot, the majority of Latter -day
01:25:32: Saints believe in an infinite number of gods. So you have the problem of an infinite regress.
01:25:38: Anyway, Joseph takes a minority view that he actually believed there's an ultimate creator. And I'm like, that's awesome.
01:25:45: That's one step closer, in my opinion. But you get the problem that I'm getting at is, we're talking about the problem of induction.
01:25:53: You gotta solve that in order to actually be able to account for intelligibility, especially human intelligibility, because God needs to have a self -contained knowledge, an absolute omniscience.
01:26:06: The bininity would not do that because the context of person one and person two would exist in the context of an impersonal void.
01:26:15: So do you wanna say anything to that real quick? No, you're doing an excellent job, dude. Well, I've stared at Bosterman's little illustrations in his books, and I'm like,
01:26:24: I have to draw it myself and think through it, but they're good, they're good. Are you talking about ultimate contexts?
01:26:30: Yeah. Yeah, I highly recommend it. If you're up to it, I think if people who wanna go really deep into it, it's awesome.
01:26:38: But let me, I wanna cut this short because we're running out of time. I wanna get to some of the questions.
01:26:44: We won't get through all of them, but maybe some people have some, but I'll kind of go randomly and take maybe like two or three questions before we wrap up.
01:26:51: But let's make like an application question. So I'm gonna ask you a question and then we'll go into audience questions, okay?
01:26:57: So Mormonism, how would you begin to apply a presuppositional approach if you are sharing your faith and engaging in apologetics with a
01:27:08: Mormon friend or just some Latter -day Saints you meet on the street that they're evangelizing and things like that?
01:27:16: Yeah, because I wanna be very practical. I really wanna encourage people to go to the scripture because they actually grant, they say, we believe in the
01:27:25: Old and New Testament. So I think very practically, and I did this with Joseph and he was very respectful and it went really well.
01:27:33: The first topic that we talked about, encourage your audience to go listen to our interaction because it was charitable, it was respectful, but we really talked about all the big issues.
01:27:42: And the first issue we talked about is what is the gospel? And so I think this is very applicable,
01:27:48: Eli, is we need to be able to articulate the gospel of grace, a gospel of grace that's not merited favor, right?
01:27:57: Nothing that we could do, no amount of works, righteousness that we could accumulate would make us right before God.
01:28:04: And when you show them, for by grace are you saved through faith, that this is not of yourself, this is a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.
01:28:14: We're saying, look, this is faith apart from works. Defining what works are, this is the same apologetic
01:28:20: I would use with church of Christ, right? Is saying nothing that you do, not your Ergon, not your human accomplishments can ground your standing before God.
01:28:29: Because if you do, you're gonna be condemned for it because it's gonna fall short of the glory of God. And so as we were talking about James chapter two, about faith without works is dead,
01:28:40: Joseph said, this is a person to person interaction and you're being very internally consistent with that works as not being a foundation before God.
01:28:50: And so I'm just saying, let the gospel speak truth into people's lives, go to the scripture because with the
01:28:56: Mormon, they will appeal to that burning in the bosom. But which say, okay, if you're saying that's from the
01:29:02: Holy Spirit, I know we have a different view of who the Holy Spirit is, we know that the scripture is inspired by the
01:29:08: Holy Spirit. So what you feel is not going to contradict what the Holy Spirit has also revealed. You know what
01:29:13: I mean? And so I'm just saying, just be biblical in your understanding of the gospel and let
01:29:19: God give the increase. Sure, and just as a highlight, if someone just listened to your answer and this is at the tail end of like this broader philosophical discussion, we wanna keep those distinct.
01:29:29: We are interacting with more philosophically inclined criticisms and that's why, the majority of this interaction has been interacting with these kind of issues of ontology and metaphysics and things like that.
01:29:42: But generically, when you're on the street, witnessing and engaging in apologetics, we wanna bring people to the scriptures, right?
01:29:49: You don't automatically start talking about these deep philosophical concepts. It really depends on who you're speaking with and the average
01:29:54: Mormon or just average unbeliever you meet on the street, you're not gonna get into a lot of these issues.
01:30:00: But it is important to know because you never know, you might talk to someone who brings these things up and so always be ready, right?
01:30:06: You have to always be ready to go super deep or just right there on the surface where it's appropriate given the context.
01:30:12: So, all right, well, let's take a couple of audience questions. I'm only gonna take like three, only because it is getting a little late on my end and I just started work.
01:30:21: I am a full -time teacher and so I have to wake up super early.
01:30:26: So, all right. So question here, what about Christianity?
01:30:33: Do you know what Christianity is? Nope. Are you familiar with the Christianity objection? It sounds very strange to me.
01:30:40: Okay, well, Christianity is a hypothetical competitor to Christianity and that it is the same as Christianity in every single way except some key elements.
01:30:52: And so someone says, well, why can't a religion like that provide the sufficient preconditions for intelligible experience?
01:30:58: Are you familiar with it now? Well, yeah, well, it makes sense of what the point is and it sounds exactly like Tom Jump.
01:31:04: He's gonna try to mirror everything in this pantheistic worldview, right?
01:31:11: That just says, well, it's basically nature, but it's transcendent, but it's impersonal because that's kind of the whole distinguishing factor.
01:31:17: But we've already discussed this. This person would have to give us more information about that worldview, right?
01:31:27: And we're eventually gonna get to, okay, this transcendent being, how has he revealed himself, right?
01:31:34: And so I think you would go that route. We'd talk about worldview, Bible standard, because I think the biggest internal critique to Christianity is where has
01:31:43: God revealed himself? And with a longer conversation, I would continue to explain why
01:31:49: God must be one in three, not one in two, not one in four, and then onward.
01:31:54: So what we're actually talking about refutes literally everybody. Right, so that if Christianity does provide the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience, then it follows that it's the only worldview that does it because you can't have multiple worldviews that sufficiently ground necessary preconditions.
01:32:13: You can only have one, kind of like the Highlander. So if Christianity is one, then it's gotta be the only one.
01:32:19: Now, for Christianity, this hypothetical view, I always ask the person, do you hold to this view? What ground are you standing on when you posit a first Christianity?
01:32:28: By positing the hypothetical first Christianity, are you implicitly admitting that the worldview you currently are standing on is insufficient to provide the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience?
01:32:38: So then how do you ground the intelligibility of the hypothetical you're asking, right? So if you're saying, well, maybe this one over here, then you're granting that yours doesn't necessarily ground it.
01:32:48: So I could just challenge the foundation upon which you're standing when you bring up this hypothetical. Or I can do what
01:32:54: Jeremiah asked and say, well, we need to flesh out this hypothetical because it's detached from a broader worldview context.
01:33:00: You're just throwing out kind of a piecemeal hypothetical example where there's no broader interpretive grid to analyze it.
01:33:07: So we'd have to have that conversation. Something very practical. This probably gets right into this.
01:33:13: I've had a lot of college students that said, okay, what do I do when an atheist says, why should
01:33:20: I believe Christianity over Islam? Well, just like you did, you point out how they're seeing that atheism doesn't begin to provide an epistemology to adjudicate which one would be true and which one is false.
01:33:34: And so they are implicitly admitting they have to leave their worldview to ask, how could they know? And we're saying atheism could not let you know because it's wrong.
01:33:42: That's right. And so we do the internal critique with Islam and any hypothetical like the
01:33:47: Christianity. And then once we've done the internal critique and reduced it to absurdity, we then invite them to our worldview.
01:33:55: Right. It's kind of, you can like envision worldviews as kind of these bubbles floating in a vacuum.
01:34:00: To ask the Christianity objection is to assume that you can go outside of your bubble and float in the vacuum without a context and kind of in a neutral and autonomous way evaluate all of these different options.
01:34:13: And we're saying that you can't do that. You can't ask that question without standing on a foundation, right?
01:34:19: So I think that's an important point to keep in mind. All right. Truth Defenders says, does the
01:34:25: Mormon believe they carry anything like knowledge over from the pre -existence? Are you familiar with the
01:34:31: Mormon doctrine of pre -existence? I'm not too much. So I have nothing really to add to this here. Yeah, a little bit, mainly in my preparation.
01:34:38: I read a lot of Walter Walton's book on the kingdom of the cults.
01:34:46: That helped inform me of a lot. And then when I talked with Joseph, they have a different cosmology in every respect.
01:34:54: Because it's funny, when we were debating, Marlon chimed in with a question for Joseph. He goes, Mormonism has, you know, it's polytheistic.
01:35:02: That accounts for the multiplicity, right? But how do you account for the unity? Joseph's answer struck me as odd because it has to do with the pre -existence.
01:35:10: But they believe in a pluralistic monism, right? All is matter.
01:35:16: And so this is interesting because not only do you have an infinite number of gods, they believe in infinite matter, okay? So that renders all the gods to the problem of induction, by the way.
01:35:25: But yeah, everything takes these interesting forms from just matter.
01:35:33: You got gross matter. And I forget all the distinctions that they make. But I don't know what carries over from pre -existence over here.
01:35:43: And I know somebody like Joseph, it would not bother him one way or another because he's primarily philosophical -minded.
01:35:51: Okay. Robert Boylan asks Jeremiah, does he still hold to absolute divine simplicity?
01:35:57: How would this work for love, et cetera, when God's emotions are anthropomorphisms, not real, quote -unquote real, according to absolute divine simplicity?
01:36:07: So I absolutely hold to divine simplicity. And so a couple of things.
01:36:14: That doesn't mean that I've got it all worked out. I mean, did you just say I absolutely hold to divine? I see what you did there.
01:36:19: I couldn't see that, yeah. I'm learning from you, Eli, with some of those. There you go, all right. But this is how
01:36:26: I answered Joseph a long time ago. I've studied a little bit more on divine simplicity because I remember in preparation for that,
01:36:33: I knew me and Joseph would get into it, but I was just gonna say, look, whatever philosophy we come up with for divine simplicity, it has to bend the knee to how
01:36:41: God has revealed himself, right? God is who he is, right?
01:36:46: So when we start looking up, you can't cut God up into parts, right? He is absolute and immaterial.
01:36:53: And we gotta understand that man is comprised of parts. He is limited to time and space. And so here is the important thing for Robert, I'm sure me and him will talk about this later, is you have to understand analogical knowledge.
01:37:09: You have to understand that how we relate to God is analogical. And I think this is the harmony.
01:37:15: This is how God has revealed himself and told us who we are in light of who he is. We are made in his image.
01:37:22: We reflect many attributes of God. So there isn't a mission that I don't fully exhaustively comprehend what absolute divine simplicity would look like.
01:37:35: I know that that would entail that God would not have parts. But everything that we know, we are seeing through a glass dimly.
01:37:41: We know that God's thoughts and ways are transcendent, higher than our ways and thoughts. And so everything,
01:37:47: God has a absolute self -contained omniscience, which by the way, Robert is an open theist.
01:37:53: I hope to talk with him about that one day. And so I would hold the view that God is omniscient.
01:37:59: He absolutely knows everything. That's why I believe in absolute predestination, right? That God has decreed whatsoever comes to pass.
01:38:07: It relates to how God knows everything and then chose to create this world. And there's exegetical passages that I would say speak to that as well.
01:38:18: So what I'm getting at is we do not have a univocal knowledge of God relating to him.
01:38:24: This relates to divine simplicity. God is absolute. He's not cut up into parts like we are.
01:38:30: We relate to him. We are a reflection of who he is. All right, thank you for that. Spencer, thank you so much for your $9 .99
01:38:37: super chat. Spencer says, I can't believe you invited this jabroni back on your show.
01:38:43: I haven't heard the word jabroni in a very long time. Thank you for - Do you remember Eli? He called me jabroni last time.
01:38:50: Did he really? Oh my goodness. All right. He did. I thanked him for not mentioning that I smack my mouth when
01:38:59: I chew food and I always blame it on my braces growing up and he roast me to no end because of that.
01:39:05: That's awesome. He is the missionary in Japan that I told you. Yes, that's right. Okay, I do remember him.
01:39:11: Yes. Thank you so much for that super chat. I think this is a good stopping point. We are one hour and 39 minutes and yeah.
01:39:22: You have to have me back on because I talked about how the binary didn't work but I didn't talk about the harmony of the
01:39:29: Trinity and I didn't explain about how a quadrant doesn't work. So we just have to do this again. No, we gotta do it again.
01:39:34: I don't mind, man. I love having you on. And I thought you did an excellent job. And so there's a lot more.
01:39:40: I would encourage Joshua and what was the other guy's name? I'm so sorry. Joseph and Robert. Joseph and Robert.
01:39:47: There is a lot. I don't know his interaction with how deeply he studied the issue but every single objection you raise is in the literature not just online, but you can also find it online.
01:39:59: So I would encourage him to look into that in more detail there. And yeah.
01:40:06: Joseph, you gotta check this out, man. Yeah, I think you would enjoy it. And those video interviews
01:40:11: I did with the author there, Bram Fosterman. So Jeremiah, I'd like to thank you so much.
01:40:17: You did an excellent job and it's always a pleasure doing this with you. And I don't mind having you on a bunch of times in the future doing all sorts of things.
01:40:24: So I appreciate what you're doing. Folks, if you are interested in Jeremiah's content you can check him out at the, is it the
01:40:33: Apologetic Dog? Is that the name of your YouTube channel? Yeah, so you can go over there and check out the
01:40:38: Apologetic Dog, do him a solid and subscribe and check out his debate that he did on the gospel truth over there with Marlon Wilson.
01:40:46: And for those of you who have just been continually supporting Revealed Apologetics just by being here and listening, asking a question whether it's through super chats or subscriptions to the channel,
01:40:56: I greatly appreciate all of you's and our Mormon friends, we love you.
01:41:02: And we thank you, especially the individuals in this video doing their best to really represent our position as accurately as they were able to.
01:41:12: And of course we have some disagreements and some responses there, but we do appreciate the approach they took and really trying to understand the position.
01:41:20: So thank you for that. Well, without further ado, guys, that is it for this episode. I hope you guys have a good night, take care and God bless, bye -bye.