EPIC Presup Roundtable Discussion

Presuppositional Apologetics and Upcoming Teaching Announcements

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and I am super excited to have this epic presuppositional apologetics conversation with my brothers here, who I will be introducing in just a moment, or they'll be introducing themselves in just a moment.

But just a couple of things real quick, just to give people a heads up, it's kind of ironic, we have an epic presuppositional apologetics discussion today, but I actually am gonna have J. Warner Wallace, who is an evidentialist, I'm gonna have him on my show tomorrow.

So we're gonna be talking about the evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus, the uniqueness of Jesus, and the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. So if people are kind of wondering, hey, what's up with that?

You're a presuppositionalist, why do you have an evidentialist on? Well, listen, presuppositionalists are very concerned with evidence as well. From our perspective, everything is evidence for God, but I think it's still very important that presuppositional apologists are able to kind of marshal the data within a consistent presuppositional framework.

So I think we're gonna learn a lot from J. Warner Wallace, despite our disagreements, I think we're gonna have a great conversation. So that's tomorrow at 5 .30 p .m. Eastern. Also June 7th, my online course on presuppositional apologetics will be starting.

I put a link in the comments there, if anyone's interested in signing up for that, you can do that, classes start on June 7th. Now, without further ado, I would like to ask all of my guests to unmute themselves, and we'll go in order as I see it.

We kind of look like a very disgruntled Brady Bunch situation here. I feel sorry for our parents, if we were all related, that would be pretty intense, but so we got a pretty good audience in, right? So I think this is a good place to start.

Sai, it's been a while since you've kind of been on the YouTube scene, so why don't you introduce yourself to folks who may not know who you are,.

And reintroduce yourself to folks who are very familiar with you. My name is Sai Tembrinkade, I'm from Canada, I was born and raised in a Christian home, and I had a passion for defending my faith, and I realized that most of my life I was doing it wrong, and by the grace of God, I was introduced to presuppositionalism, probably about 14, 15 years ago now, and just as excited today as I was about it back then, and yeah, thank you for having me on.

All right, well, I'm very happy for you to be on. Anthony, how about you? Who are you, man?

I am a pastor in South Carolina, in the Presbyterian Church of America. In that capacity, I serve with Metanoia Prison Ministries, which, as the name indicates, focuses on prisoners, but I also have a great love for evangelism, and apologetics, always have, since the time of my conversion.

I thought that everybody needed to hear this good news, quickly found out people didn't think it was good news, and wanted to argue against being forgiven of their sins, and granted eternal life, so I got interested in apologetics, and eventually presuppositionalism.

Awesome. All right, Brian, how about you?

Yeah, my name is Brian Knapp. I'm a contractor living in the Northern Virginia area, and I got introduced to apologetics in general, right after 9 -11 happened. I got involved in an online chat group, started debating easy stuff, like foreknowledge and free will, found out right away I was over my head, went to a local Christian bookstore, met up with a fellow who became a good friend of mine, introduced me to Bonson and Presupp, and at that point, we started a study group together, listening to his lectures.

He and I co-founded Choosing Hats, back in around 2005, I think it was, and at this point, I've just continued, you know, the usual hopping around Facebook, doing teaching at church, interacting with friends and family, and coworkers, that kind of thing.

Now, are you referring to Chris Bolt? Chris Bolt, yeah, so folks might know Chris as well, I've had him on the show a while back, so thank you for that. Matt?

Yeah, what? Who are you and why are you here? Sorry, long-term memory problem. Yeah, I'm Matt Slick, and I'm the founder and director of the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry, karm .org. Been working on it for, in October, it'll be 27 years, written numerous books, been on radio for 17 years, I do a lot of impromptu debates, discussions, and apologetics.

I'm on Discord, Clubhouse, many social areas, social media areas, working on articles all the time, working on books, and stuff like that. Generally annoying, and really just try and share the faith about the Lord Jesus Christ, and I definitely presuppose his truth, that when you argue from that perspective, the Trinitarian God, everything makes sense.

Nothing else does. Without him, nothing makes sense. You argue from that perspective, you're gonna do well. And so, there you go. Thank you.

Matt Slick actually is the closest to being omnipresent everywhere. Every, I'm on Discord, he's there. He's debating someone on Facebook, he's on YouTube, so he's definitely a busy guy, so.

Me, we, USA .life, I can go into a bunch of other ones, but yeah.

That's right. All right, Joshua, how about you introduce yourself now? I'm Joshua Pillows.

I am a musician. I played piano for most of my life. I'm an organist at a Lutheran church. I also compose, and teach, and perform as well. God saved me in March of 2016, and shortly thereafter, I was introduced to Greg Bonson, and in terms of apologetics, the rest is history.

He showed me the true biblical way, and I've been a presuppositionalist ever since. Thank you for that.

Would you like me to call you, when you're a pastor, I feel inclined to just say Pastor Jimmy, okay. All right, so Jimmy, why don't you tell folks who you are?

Yeah, I'm Jimmy. I'm a pastor in Southern California, in the L .A. County area. I've been pastoring about for 11 years. How I got into presuppositional apologetics was when I was in college. My pastor always took me out to just the area where all the crazy isms are at, and we set up a table, and we just evangelized, and I just realized after a while, after finding Greg Bonson, hey, this is the way.

Not only is it biblically faithful, but also as well, there's a lot of teeth, a lot of bite to a lot of worldviews. So ever since then, I've been interested in more, as a pastoral side, of teaching the Bible, and answering Bible contradiction on my blog.

And one of the things pre-pandemic was also just going overseas for theological training of pastors, usually in the context of underground churches where they might not be able to have access to come to the States for theological education.

Well, I'm super excited to see. There's just the wide background that God has just been able to impact all of you guys in similar ways, coming from completely different areas of ministry. That's pretty awesome.

Well, folks, you know who I am, so I'm not gonna introduce myself, and let's kind of jump right in. My first question that I wanna throw out to my group here is pertaining to presuppositionalism and evangelism.

So I wanna start with Sy. How has presuppositional apologetics helped inform how you do evangelism? And perhaps maybe give us some examples as to how you've been able to use that within that context.

Presuppositionalism in Evangelism

Well, for me, it's made a world of difference because now I talk about the God that I actually believe in. And I used to read a lot of C .S. Lewis, and he was quite evidential in his approach, but there's one quote that really resonated with me as an evidentialist, and I'm gonna read it for you.

There's nothing... Sorry? Okay. Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seemed to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I've just successfully defended in a public debate.

That's how I felt as an evidentialist, and I didn't know why. And it wasn't until I became a presuppositionalist that I realized why, it's because I wasn't talking about the God that I believed in. Because in church, I worshiped a certainty.

But out in the world, we're taught to defend a probability. God is not a probability. So for me, it's just a matter of honoring Jesus Christ as Lord when I defend my faith. The more that I do this, the more I get away from the philosophy, but I talk about the certainty of God's existence, the certainty of people's need for Him for salvation.

And so for me, it's made a world of difference because when I would defend my faith, I would get these arguments shoved down my throat, and I did not know why. It's because I was misrepresenting the Lord that I adore.

And for me, that has made... Like, I mean, that's why I'm still as excited today as I was when I learned about this 14 or 15 years ago. And for those of you who aren't familiar with me, if you go onto YouTube, there's a film called How to Answer the Fool.

And that's basically really in my earlier stages, it's more philosophical, but it's a musing of this apologetic out on the street where we do not apologize for the existence of God. We talk about the certainty of God's existence and present Him to believers and unbelievers alike.

Excellent, excellent. Now, Anthony, obviously you've done evangelism. I've seen you kind of team up with vocab Malone and you guys are talking to the black Hebrew Israelites and you work with doing evangelism with Muslims and things like that.

How does presuppositionalism kind of come into. How you interact with some of those groups and maybe give us an example of what that might look like?

Yeah, so one thing to keep in mind is when it comes to say Jews and Muslims, they're not uniform. Jews aren't a monolithic group. In fact, I've met quite a number of Jewish people over the years, lived in an area where there were a lot of Jewish people.

My wife is a converted Jew. She came to Christ prior to our marriage, obviously, but most of the Jews I've ever met are atheists and agnostics and so you can't just take for granted because they're Jewish that they're even professing a generic God or much less the God of Old Testament revelation.

So that's one thing to keep in mind. And the same thing goes for Muslims. Muslims are all over the map. You have various conceptions of God and everything else in Islam, various conceptions. And so you have some Muslims who hold to what's called a Moatizali view with respect to God.

I won't try and get into all the details of this, but then there are the Ashari Muslims, the Maturidi Muslims. And here I'm talking about their doctrine of God per se, or in particular. And then you of course have Shia Muslims and so forth.

But one thing that's common to Jews and Muslims and quite contrary to Old Testament revelation is the assumption that God can't enter into his creation. And so that's really behind their opposition to the incarnation.

Central to Christianity is the belief that God became incarnate, dwelt among us, lived a perfect life, died an atoning death, rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven. And so without that possibility of God entering into his creation, then the incarnation is not possible.

And so one of the things that I would point out to Jews in the past, which really reveals that their ultimate assumptions are not confidence in Old Testament revelation, which is why, again, you can't just take for granted because they call themselves Jews, that they believe the Old Testament.

But I've presented Old Testament evidence, just copious evidence from the Old Testament that God has in fact entered into his creation on numerous occasions and in numerous ways. For example, God appeared to Hagar in Genesis 16, seven through 14.

There it's specifically the angel of the Lord, which is a theophany in the Old Testament. God appeared to Abraham in a very mundane way in Genesis 18, along with two angels who likewise appeared as men.

They even ate with Abraham. God also appeared in more majestic ways. For example, Ezekiel's vision in Ezekiel one, where he sees the glory of the Lord. And it's so overawing that Ezekiel keeps using terms like likeness and as, because he can't bring himself to think that he's actually giving you a fully accurate description of what he saw.

But I presented.

So I apologize. So the key point for you, and when you're talking with Jews and Muslims, is that you identify their presuppositions as not really being based upon the authority that many of us take for granted, we think is their authority.

So like the Jew, we think of the Jews as like, oh, you believe in the Old Testament, but a lot of Jews don't look at the Old Testament and its authority in the same way that we do.

Right, they're reading it through post-Christian apostate rabbinic lenses. Post-Christian apostate Judaism is not Old Covenant religion. It just isn't. And if we listened to Jesus in the New Testament, we would understand that.

Jesus didn't think that the Jews of his day worshiped the true God. It wasn't like they had the true God minus Jesus. There is no God apart from Christ, right? If you don't have the son, you don't have the father either.

And that was what Jesus pressed upon them. So here though, here's where it gets into the specifics of presuppositionalism. So no matter what you present to a Jewish person, they'll find some way to excuse believing it, taking it for what it says.

And I'll just cut past some of the excuses here and observe that one of the things that I bring up with them is I say, okay, so you do believe that God has revealed himself, right? And they'll say, well, of course, right?

Muslims believe that God revealed himself to Muhammad. The Quran is viewed as his speech. In fact, it's viewed as his eternal speech. The Jew believes that the Torah was given by God. And so the question I ask is if God can't enter into his creation, he can't interact with his creatures, then how is it possible to speak of having a revelation from God?

Now the Muslim and the Jew will do something similar, but the Muslim will say something like, well, it wasn't given to Muhammad directly from Allah. It was given to Jabril, which is the Arabic for Gabriel.

And then Gabriel in turn gave it to Muhammad. But all that does is push the question back a step, okay? If God can't enter into his creation to interact directly with Muhammad, then how pray tell does he speak to Jabril, right?

If Allah is so transcendent that it precludes his interaction with finite creatures, then it's just as much impossible for him to communicate with Gabriel as it would be for him to communicate with Muhammad.

So you would run a reductio at that point. So a reductio ad absurdum. Assume the position and what they say about Allah and kind of say, if that's true, then look what results. That's kind of a, you kind of went into kind of like a tag sort of thing.

And that we can kind of see how nicely that fits in to kind of a presuppositional framework speaking with Muslims. Now I wanna move on to Brian, because I want you to unpack that a little bit more as we move along.

So we wanna give a little teaser for folks. We'll jump into more of the details there. But if anyone's interested, I actually had Anthony on and we have a two hour episode where he uses presuppositional apologetics on Islam and Judaism.

So you guys definitely wanna check out that episode. Very, very good discussion there. Thank you for that, Anthony. Oh, what about you, Brian? What is your evangelistic experience been like in terms of applying presuppositionalism?

Do you think about it a lot? Are you always trying to be intentional about being presuppositional in how you present issues or does it depend on the context? What does that look like for you?

So for me, it took me a number of years to figure presupp out. I found myself because my audience, as it were, the people I was interacting with were spread over the internet. It was mostly online debates.

I didn't have the same experience as I did later on where I was interacting directly with people. And one thing I found I was doing was that I was constantly allowing them to pull me back into their worldview.

And what I think I kind of realized at that point was, I'm a Christian, I believe God exists, I believe the Bible's true, I'm gonna act that way, right? So I had studied presupp for a while, but it wasn't really until I made that realization that I started to use it.

And from an evangelistic perspective, for me, it just makes all the difference. Bonson talks about one of the benefits of presupp and tag is you don't have to stay up to date on all the different latest technologies and science and all these different things, not to put down anybody who spends time learning those things and can answer questions in that area.

But at the end of the day, everybody has to answer the same questions, right? And so the last year and a half, especially I've spent interacting with a number of different Roman Catholic friends of mine.

And I was a little nervous going into that because I thought, well, you know, they worship the same God, I guess, you know, there's debate over that. How is a presupp approach going to work? And I found I knew very little about Roman Catholicism.

But the more I learned about that, the more I was challenged to go back and learn more about, you know, reformed Christianity. And for me, that's been the greatest, I think, boost in my belief and my faith is once I started to put presupp into practice, it forced me not to spend my time in looking at the latest fad or the latest technology, but just to go back and learn more about scripture, learn, you know, the origins of the Christian faith, look and see how it's changed over the years, go back and read the early Christian fathers, those kinds of things.

So for me, it's a constant call to know what it is that I'm defending. You have to know Christianity. Even for people who you have a minimal interaction with, they're always going to hit you with one or two questions that maybe you haven't had before.

And so having a good, solid understanding of who God is, who you are and why he has us here is really, really important.

All right, thank you for that. Yeah, excellent. Matt, I know that you have extensive experience in evangelism. I remember the first time you shared, the first time you knocked on someone's door and you were concerned that they would think you're a Jehovah's Witness.

And the first thing you said was,.

I'm not a Jehovah's Witness. And the person who opened the door was a Jehovah's Witness.

First time I opened my mouth to witness, I blew it.

That's awesome. So, okay, so how has presuppositional apologetics informed the way you do evangelism in the context that you've done it?

Well, evangelism, it always depends on the context and the person I'm talking to. If it's an atheist, it's different than a Catholic, different than an Eastern Orthodox, different than a Unitarian or a Oneness or whoever.

And so you also, I've always got to find out where they're coming from. And atheists, it's a different category of atheists. I really enjoy talking to atheists, agnostics. But with theists, well, let me put it this way.

With both groups, with any individual, I always try and find out what their terminus is. I call it a terminus or what their ultimate is. What is the very basic thing that is, you can't go beyond or anything greater than what they hold to.

For example, in Catholicism, the terminus with them is the church. Now, they'll say it isn't, but the church has the final authority and everything, et cetera, et cetera. So the scriptures are subordinate to that, even though they say it's not, but it is.

With atheists, what is your terminus? If they're gonna say the God of the Old Testament is wrong for doing ABC, I'm gonna say, well, then you're presupposing a universal truth value about a moral condition.

What justifies that? And I often ask them, what must be in place in order for your assertion to be valid? What's a universal truth? You're applying certain things. So I'm always going back to find out what the ultimate or what I call the terminus.

With us Christians, the terminus is God himself. There's nothing beyond God, nothing greater than God. He's a standard of good, standard of truth. And so if we wanna define what good is, we have to look to God.

So for example, really fast, when I'm talking to atheists, they'll say, how do you know God's good? And I just say, well, he tells me he is. And I don't have to say much more than that. Well, how do you know that's true?

Well, because he is true. That's what his definition, that's what it is. And you know what I'm waiting to do is, as you know, we've talked about this. I'll often ask when during debates, I'll answer questions very succinctly with minimal information, because I want them to give me more information so I can find out how much rope they're gonna give me to hang them with.

You do that very well. You do that very well. I've seen it. I am slick, you know, so I get a little up to my name. But I love talking about it, love doing it. And more and more lately on varying chat systems, I am learning more about how to apply presuppositional apologetics to varying topics.

But I'll tell you one thing, just think of, you know, for those who are listening and don't know how to do this, just think of an onion. What must be in place for that layer to be there? Well, the previous layer.

Well, what must be in place for that to be there? The previous layer. They'll say something's good or bad. Well, what must be in place in order for it to be good or bad? It's as simple as that. You just dig down, you find the terminus.

And as you open the onion,.

The atheist begins to cry and our mission is accomplished. Unless it's a blooming onion.

That's right. That's right. But yeah, and so that's what you do. And what I like to do is ask them questions and then they help me open that onion up and they hand me the rope. And it's very easy to do and that's it.

Now, I hope folks who are listening don't get frustrated. My question originally was presuppositionalism and evangelism, but it's important to recognize that evangelism and apologetics are so closely linked together.

So I'm pretty sure that any of these gentlemen who when they're doing evangelism, they don't start with all of these things. I'm sure they start with the gospel and depending on the context, they will engage in various objections or if there aren't many objections, they kind of take it another route.

So just to throw that out there, it's not that you're equating evangelism with apologetics, but they're very closely linked together. Joshua, now you are a musician and have you been to seminary at all?

For like maybe two months, I was enrolled in Whitfield Theological Seminary with Greg Talbot, I think. But I have no formal education beyond that. After about a month, I was just like, I don't have time or the commitment.

To do it at that point, so. Now, the reason why I asked that is because presuppositional apologetics, it sounds complicated when you say it. If someone kind of hears it for the first time, but it can be used by anyone.

And so your background, you think of like, I'm a musician. Yet, because you have studied the scriptures and you studied presuppositionalism, even with that kind of that background that doesn't seem related to like, I'm an apologist and I'm a musician.

Well, you're a Christian, so you're an apologist. But you were able to, without even formal training, be able to put these principles in place. And I think that's excellent because the Apostle Peter commands us to all do apologetics.

It doesn't matter if you're a scholar or you're a musician. So I think that that's pretty cool. So how about for you? So how do you incorporate your presuppositionalism in evangelism? What does it look like when you have an opportunity to share your faith with someone?

Well, surprisingly, I've only ever used the apologetic probably one time in person. And that was with a former friend. And it was very cordial, and we left on good terms. And I, as Brian said, I stayed committed to the Christian worldview on the Bible as my foundation.

But most of, or I guess the rest of my evangelism has been online. I'm very introverted. I'm very reclusive. I like being alone. So I'm not gonna be on the street. Like I'm really nervous right now. There's just too many people in this room.

No, I'm just like, I like being alone and in my thoughts and reading and writing music and whatever. So you won't really find me on the street every weekend, preaching the gospel or something. But most of it has been online.

And just to piggyback off of what others have said, you just stand on the Christian worldview. You never waver from it. The Bible is your ultimate authority. It's your foundation by which you know everything else.

And so I've done most of my evangelizing online. And I'd be the first to tell you that I am, I fail 1 Peter 3 .15 so much because of just how snide I can get in my attitude and pride just creeps in. And I'm just, I'm so bad in that regard in terms of not following that commandment.

But yeah, in terms of applying presuppositionalism, it's basically just been all online and following faithfully.

I did hear someone say that the internet is the new mission field. Now, obviously we don't want to exclude being face-to-face, but I mean, the reality is, if you're going to reach people with a message, the internet is just an amazing place to do that.

And I've heard, I've experienced people because of watching a debate or because of watching an evangelism video or something that Cy or Anthony's put out or Matt or whoever, that's actually, God has used that.

So that's not better or worse than doing it in person, but I think it's a good balance for us to have there. All right, now, just to throw this out here, I'm not going to do this with all my questions where we go through one by one.

After this, we're gonna take a quick excurses to take some questions in the comments, and then we're gonna reshift the conversation. It'll kind of be a little bit more free-flowing. So I just wanted to throw it out there.

All right, Jimmy, what about you? As a pastor, how does presuppositionalism apply to the role of a pastor and how you do evangelism within the context that you're in?

Presuppositionalism in Pastoral Ministry

Yeah, for many years, pre -2020, I would often be on college campuses, evangelism. So it actually, I feel, more than any other projects, once I became committed to presuppositional apologetics, I felt my confidence in the word of God has increased, and that actually allows me, I think, practically, tactically, I just always share the gospel.

Just focus on that. I feel maybe the analogy is almost like, I was a prior Marine myself. When a Marine goes in, they're not blowing up everything in sight, but then it's just as you're going along, when you encounter objections, then you deal with that at hand, but you're not wasting everything.

But at the same time, you also know, okay, this is what you have in terms of your arsenal in Christ with presupp. So I think the other thing for me in the role of pastor, and I know some of you guys are pastors here too, even to multiply what we're trying to do, because we could only live our life so long, and I've benefited from each one of you guys, by the way, online, from scene size video, Anthony Rogers with your teaching on Old Testament, Matt Slick, when I was a young kid, I remember messaging you, you used to be on AIM, answering my questions, choosing hat with Brian Knapp, and Josh, even as humble as he is, man, he's a beast in the reformed presuppositional apologetics group, sometimes dealing with the objections and stuff.

So I think we want to multiply what we're doing, is also I feel it's also opportunity to disciple guys to say, hey, here are the objections, but let's take a big macro level look at the worldview level of how do we deal with answers and objection for discipleship?

I think that's probably going to be more later on some of your questions with that.

Well, excellent. Thank you for sharing that, man. And yeah, I think the big picture is important because our ministry as Christians is not just apologetics. I think the beauty of presuppositionalism is that it is just a specific application of biblical truth to the realm of defense, but it is actually an all encompassing thing.

We are presuppositionalist in our marriage, we're presuppositionalist in the context of our church or how we interact with others, and we're presuppositionalist when we are applying it to, as Dr. Scott Oliphant has said, applying it to the realm of unbelief.

It's one of my favorite definitions of apologetics. He says, Scott Oliphant said, I don't know if it's original to him, but he said that a Christian apologetics is the application of Christian theology to unbelief.

And I think that's just a beautiful way to sum it up there. All right, let's take a quick excursus to take a couple of questions here. And I'm just going to throw it out there. If anyone, I'm going to put it up on the screen.

If anyone wants to take a stab at it, I'm just because one person answers doesn't mean someone else can add to it or maybe bring out something that might be helpful to the person who is asking it. So here's a question from Kayla Henderson.

She asks, what is the best way to answer an atheist who insists we've evolved to morality? So the idea that morality comes from evolution. So anyone could just jump in and take a stab at it. I'll jump on it.

Okay. I think one thing to do is to realize that there is in fact some sense of morality that we could agree has evolved. In other words, people's subjective view of what's right and wrong changes over time.

But the existence of these individual subjective moral standards does not mean there's not an objective absolute standard. And at the end of the day, you have to ask the question, well, why should I follow that, that particular subjective standard?

And the only real answer is with Christianity, which is an objective standard, where you follow it because it's objective, right? Because it applies to everybody. That's part of the definition. So I would just push back on them.

And I know evidentialists and other types of apologists do this as well. You know, why should I follow your particular subjective standard? Yeah. Anyone else?

Yeah, I would say actually, so I rarely get into the topic of morality with the unbeliever, because what you're doing is granting them the ability to argue morality. You're granting them the tools of logic and reason that belong to God.

But if the argument happens to start on the topic of morality, I will say, well, what if one group evolved to have a certain type of morality and another group evolved to have a different type of morality?

How do you decide between the two? That itself cannot be evolution. Like I would ask, is the morality of killing Jews better than the morality of killing Jews? Or is it different? Now, to be a consistent atheist, you would have to say that that morality is just different, not better.

Because when you say one morality is better than another compared to an absolute standard, and you can't have that without God. Very good.

Matt, did you want to say something? I saw you were... Oh, yeah. I discuss the issue of morality with atheists all the time, and there's different ways to deal with it. In the context of evolutionary morality, I'd say, well, then how do you know from your perspective?

I'd do an internal critique. I'd say, how do you know from your perspective that morality a hundred years from now is the right morality and it contradicts us today? If you have a system that ultimately can be self-refuting, then you can't have evolutionary morality be applicable in all situations.

And I'll ask them, I'll say, is it true that statements are either true or false? You know, two plus two is four, or five plus five is 38. And you know, true and not true. And they'll say, yeah, the statements are true or false.

You know, the law of excluded middle. And so I'll ask them, is this statement true or false? It is always morally wrong for anyone to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure. It's a standard question I've asked.

I used it in my debate against Dan Barker, and he couldn't get out of the problem. But if the person were to say, yes, it's true, then he's asserting a universal moral absolute. But how can you do that in an evolutionary sense, since evolution does not necessitate any absolutes?

If he says it's false and he's defending the idea it's okay to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure, which means there's a moral absolute attached to that. How can they say that?

So either way, they lose. What this is doing is showing that they cannot defend their position that evolutionary morality doesn't work. And besides that, it necessitates moral anti-realism, which we could talk about, because what must be in case for moral anti-realism to exist?

You know, no God, no universals, no one and many. You have all these things, and you could just dismantle it. I do this regularly on chat rooms with people, very slowly with atheists. I ask them questions, lead them down a road, and just show them that they're arguing themselves into a corner.

And I say, now let me give you the truth is, if God exists, a Trinitarian God, and then go in and give them the answer.

Okay, thank you for that. Anybody else before we move to the next question? Yeah, here's one.

Someone tell me how atoms theorize about themselves. I mean, how is it that atoms in motion somehow come to these theories of morality? You know, rocks don't have theories of morality, or trees or anything, but humans do.

So how does an atheist, you know, rectify that problem? We have consciousness, but now he has to explain that in terms of atoms in motion. So how does that work? So, I mean, even the grand metaphysical picture, it's even just worse.

How do you get atoms in motion to come to intelligible, you know, moral beings, and then able to theorize about your own morality?

You know, I deal with that when there are materialists, and I ask them, are you a materialist? We then define it. So you believe the physical realm is all there is. Okay, well, then that means your physical brain is limited to the laws of physics and chemistry, right?

Good. How does one chemical state that leads with another chemical state in the brain produce proper logical inference? And then whatever answer they give me, I just respond by saying, oh, your brain made you say that.

And from then on, you know, they don't have any way to go because they cannot demonstrate any universals from that sense and the truth values. Yeah, so materialism is the undergirding principle, and materialism ultimately is self-refuting because it casts doubt on its own validity.