EPIC Presup Roundtable Discussion

Revealed Apologetics

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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

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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

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Jay 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

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Jesus, the uniqueness of Jesus, and the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

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So if people are kind of wondering, hey, what's up with that? You're a presuppositionalist, why do you have an evidentialist on?

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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.

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So I think we're gonna learn a lot from Jay Warner Wallace, despite our disagreements, I think we're gonna have a great conversation.

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So that's tomorrow at 5 .30 p .m. Eastern. Also June 7th, my online course on presuppositional apologetics will be starting.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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?

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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

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I was doing it wrong. And by the grace of God, I was introduced to presuppositionalism probably about 14, 15 years ago now.

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And I'm just as excited today as I was about it back then. And yeah, thank you for having me on.

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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

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Presbyterian Church of America. In that capacity, I serve with Metanoia Prison Ministries, which as the name indicates, focuses on prisoners.

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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.

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So I got interested in apologetics and eventually presuppositionalism.

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Awesome. All right, Brian, how about you? Yeah, my name is Brian Knapp. I'm a contractor living in the

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Northern Virginia area. And I got introduced to apologetics in general right after 9 -11 happened.

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I got involved in an online chat group, started debating easy stuff like foreign knowledge and free will.

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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.

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And at that point, we started a study group together listening to his lectures. He and I co -founded

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Choosing Hats back in around 2005, I think it was. And at this point,

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I've just continued the usual hopping around Facebook, doing teaching at church, interacting with friends and family and coworkers.

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Now, are you referring to Chris, Chris Bolt? Chris Bolt. Chris Bolt, yeah. So folks might know Chris as well.

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I've had him on the show a while back. So thank you for that. Matt? Yeah, what?

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Who are you and why are you here? Sorry, long -term memory problem. Yeah, I'm Matt Slick.

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And I'm the founder and director of the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry, karm .org.

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They're working on it for, in October, it'll be 27 years. Written numerous books, been on radio for 17 years.

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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.

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Generally annoying and really just try and share the faith about the Lord Jesus Christ.

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And I definitely presuppose his truth that when you argue from that perspective, the Trinitarian God, everything makes sense.

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

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And so there you go. Thank you. Matt Slick actually is the closest to being omnipresent everywhere.

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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.

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MeWe, USA .life, I can go into a bunch of other ones, but yeah. That's right.

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All right, Joshua, how about you introduce yourself now? I'm Joshua Pillows. I am a musician.

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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.

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God saved me in March of 2016. And shortly thereafter, I was introduced to Greg Bonson.

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And in terms of apologetics, the rest is history. He showed me the true biblical way, and I've been a presuppositionalist ever since.

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Thank you for that. Would you like me to call you pastor? If you're a pastor, I feel inclined to just say

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Pastor Jimmy. All right, so Jimmy, why don't you tell folks who you are? Yeah, I'm Jimmy.

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I'm a pastor in Southern California in the LA County area. I've been pastoring about for 11 years.

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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 evangelize.

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And I just realized after a while, after finding Greg Bonson, like, 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, a lot of worldviews.

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So ever since then, I've been interested in more as a pastoral side of teaching the

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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

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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 some other ways, coming from completely different areas of ministry.

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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.

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My first question that I wanna throw out to my group here is pertaining to presuppositionalism and evangelism.

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So I wanna start with Sy. How has a presuppositional apologetics help inform how you do evangelism?

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And perhaps maybe give us some examples as to how you've been able to use that within that context.

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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.

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Lewis and he was quite evidential in his approach, but there's one quote that really resonated with me as an evidentialist.

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And I'm gonna read it for you. There's nothing, sorry. Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist.

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No doctrine of that faith seems to be so spectral, so unreal as one that I've just successfully defended in a public debate.

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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

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God that I believed in. Because in church, I worshiped a certainty. But out in the world, we're taught to defend a probability.

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God is not a probability. So for me, it's just a matter of honoring Jesus Christ as Lord when

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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.

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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.

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It's because I was misrepresenting the Lord that I adore. And for me, that has made...

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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

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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.

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We talk about the certainty of God's existence and present him to believers and unbelievers alike.

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Excellent, excellent. Now, Anthony, obviously you've done evangelism. I've seen you kind of team up with vocab

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Malone and you guys are talking to the black Hebrew Israelites and you work with doing evangelism with Muslims and things like that.

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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?

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Yeah, so one thing to keep in mind is when it comes to say Jews and Muslims, they're not uniform.

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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.

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My wife is a converted Jew. She came to Christ prior to our marriage, obviously.

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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

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Jewish that they're even professing a generic God or much less the

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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.

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You have various conceptions of God and everything else in Islam, various conceptions and so you have some

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Muslims who hold to what's called a Moatizali view with respect to God.

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I won't try and get into all the details of this but then there are the Ashari Muslims, the

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Maturidi Muslims and here I'm talking about their doctrine of God per se or in particular and then you of course have

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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.

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And so that's really behind their opposition to the incarnation.

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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.

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And so without that possibility of God entering into his creation, then the incarnation is not possible.

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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

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Jews that they believe the Old Testament. But I've presented Old Testament evidence, just copious evidence from the

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Old Testament that God has in fact entered into his creation on numerous occasions and in numerous ways.

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For example, God appeared to Hagar in Genesis 16, seven through 14.

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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.

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They even ate with Abraham. God also appeared in more majestic ways.

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For example, Ezekiel's vision in Ezekiel one where he sees the glory of the

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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.

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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.

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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

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Old Testament and its authority in the same way that we do. Right, they're reading it through post -Christian apostate rabbinic lenses.

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Post -Christian apostate Judaism is not old covenant religion. It just isn't. And if we listened to Jesus in the

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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

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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.

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And that was what Jesus pressed upon them. So here though, here's where it gets into the specifics of presuppositionalism.

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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.

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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

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I say, okay, so you do believe that God has revealed himself, right? And they'll say, well, of course, right?

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Muslims believe that God revealed himself to Muhammad. The Quran is viewed as his speech.

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In fact, it's viewed as his eternal speech. The Jew believes that the Torah was given by God.

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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?

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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.

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It was given to Jabril, which is the Arabic for Gabriel. And then Gabriel in turn gave it to Muhammad.

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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?

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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.

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So you would run a reductio at that point. So a reductio ad absurdum.

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Assume the position and what they say about Allah and kind of say, if that's true, then look what results.

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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.

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Now, I wanna move on to Brian, cause I want you to unpack that a little bit more as we move along. So we wanna give a little teaser for folks.

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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.

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So you guys definitely wanna check out that episode. Very, very good discussion there. Thank you for that, Anthony. Oh, what about you,

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Brian? What is your evangelistic experience been like in terms of applying presuppositionalism? Do you think about it a lot?

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Are you always trying to be intentional about being presuppositional in how you present issues or does it depend on the context?

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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

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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.

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And one thing I found I was doing was that I was constantly allowing them to pull me back into their worldview.

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And what I think I kind of realized at that point was, I'm just gonna,

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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.

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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.

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But at the end of the day, everybody has to answer the same questions, right? And so the last year and a half, especially

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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

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God, I guess, you know, there's debate over that. How is a presupp approach going to work?

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And I found I knew very little about Roman Catholicism, but the more I learned about that, the more

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I was challenged to go back and learn more about, you know, reformed Christianity. And for me, that's been the greatest,

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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

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Christian faith, look and see how it's changed over the years, go back and read the early

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Christian fathers, those kinds of things. So for me, it's a constant call to know what it is that I'm defending.

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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.

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

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All right, thank you for that. Yeah, excellent. Matt, I know that you have extensive experience in evangelism.

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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

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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

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Jehovah's Witness. First time I opened my mouth to a witness, I blew it. That's awesome.

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

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When evangelism, it always depends on the context and the person I'm talking to. If it's an atheist, it's different than a

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Catholic, different than an Eastern Orthodox, different than a Unitarian or a Oneness or whoever.

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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.

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I really enjoy talking to atheists and agnostics. But with theists, well, let me put it this way, with both groups, with any individual,

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I always try and find out what their terminus is. I call it a terminus or what their ultimate is.

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What is the very basic thing that is, you can't go beyond or anything greater than what they hold to?

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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.

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So the scriptures are subordinate to that, even though they say it's not, but it is. With atheists, what is your terminus?

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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.

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What justifies that? And I often ask them, what must be in place in order for your assertion to be valid?

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What's the universal truth? You're applying certain things. So I'm always going back to find out what the ultimate or what

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I call the terminus. With us Christians, the terminus is God himself. There's nothing beyond God, nothing greater than God.

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He's a standard of good, standard of truth. And so if we wanna define what good is, we have to look to God.

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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.

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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.

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And what I'm waiting to do is, as you know, we've talked about this. I'll often ask, during debates,

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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.

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You do that very well, I've seen that happen. I am slick, you know, so I get a little up to my name.

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But I love talking about it, love doing it. And more and more lately on varying chat systems,

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I am learning more about how to apply presuppositional apologetics to varying topics.

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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.

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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?

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The previous layer. They'll say something is good or bad. Well, what must be in place in order for it to be good or bad?

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It's as simple as that. You just dig down and you find the terminus. And as you open the onion, the atheist begins to cry and our mission is accomplished.

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Unless it's a blooming onion. That's right, that's right. But yeah, and so that's what you do.

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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.

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And it's very easy to do and that's it. Now, I hope folks who are listening don't get frustrated.

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My question originally was presuppositionalism and evangelism, but it's important to recognize that evangelism and apologetics are so closely linked together.

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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.

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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.

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So just to throw that out there, it's not that you're equating evangelism with apologetics, but they're very closely linked together.

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Joshua, now you are a musician and have you been to seminary at all?

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For like maybe two months, I was enrolled in Whitfield Theological Seminary with Greg Talbot, I think.

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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.

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Now, the reason why I asked that is because presuppositional apologetics, it sounds complicated when you say it.

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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,

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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,

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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.

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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.

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So I think that that's pretty cool. So how about for you? So how do you incorporate your presuppositionalism in evangelism?

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What does it look like when you have an opportunity to share your faith with someone? Well, surprisingly,

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I've only ever used the apologetic probably one time in person. And that was with a former friend.

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And it was very cordial, and we left on good terms. And as Brian said,

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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.

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I'm very introverted. I'm very reclusive. I like being alone. So I'm not gonna be on the street.

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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.

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So you won't really find me on the street every weekend, preaching the gospel or something. But most of it has been online.

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And just to piggyback off of what others have said, you just stand on the Christian worldview.

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You never waver from it. The Bible is your ultimate authority. It's your foundation by which you know everything else.

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And so I've done most of my evangelizing online. And I'd be the first to tell you that I am,

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I fail 1 Peter 3 .15 so much because of just how snide

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I can get in my attitude and pride just creeps in. And I'm just,

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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After this, we're gonna take a quick excurses to take some questions in the comments and then we're gonna reshift the conversation.

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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?

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Yeah, for many years, pre 2020, I would often be on college campuses, evangelism.

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So it actually, I feel more than any other projects, once I became committed to presuppositional apologetics,

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I felt my confidence in the word of God has increased. And that actually allows me, I think, practically, tactically,

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I just always share the gospel. Just focus on that. I feel maybe the analogy is almost like, I was a prior

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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 to have, but you're not wasting everything.

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But at the same time, you also know, okay, this is what you have in terms of your arsenal in Christ with presupp.

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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.

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And I've benefited from each one of you guys, by the way, online from scene size video,

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Anthony Rogers, with your teaching on Old Testament, Matt Slick, when I was a young kid, I remember messaging you used to be on AIM, answering my questions, choosing hat with Brian Knapp.

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And Josh, even as humble as he is, man, he's a beast in the reform presuppositional apologetics group, sometimes dealing with the objections and stuff.

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So I think we want to multiply what we're doing. It's 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?

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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.

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And yeah, I think the big picture is important because our ministry as Christians is not just apologetics.

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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.

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We are presuppositionalist in our marriage. We're presuppositionalist in the context of our church or how we interact with others.

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And we're presuppositionalist when we are applying it to, as Dr. Scott Oliphant has said, applying it to the realm of unbelief.

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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

29:01

Christian apologetics is the application of Christian theology to unbelief. And I think that's just a beautiful way to sum it up there.

29:09

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,

29:14

I'm going to put it up on the screen. If anyone wants to take a stab at it, I'm just because some 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.

29:25

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?

29:33

So the idea that morality comes from evolution. So anyone could just jump in and take a stab at it.

29:41

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.

29:52

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.

30:06

And at the end of the day, you have to ask the question, well, why should I follow that, that particular subjective standard?

30:12

And the only real answer is with Christianity, which is an objective standard, where you follow it because it's objective, right?

30:20

Because it applies to everybody. That's part of the definition. So I would just push back on them.

30:26

And I know evidentialists and other types of apologists do this as well. You know, why should

30:31

I follow your particular subjective standard? Yeah. Anyone else? Yeah, I would say actually there are no atheists.

30:40

So I rarely get into the topic of morality with the unbeliever because what you're doing is you're granting them the ability to argue morality.

30:49

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,

30:56

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?

31:02

How do you decide between the two? That itself cannot be evolution. Like I would ask, is the morality of killing

31:09

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.

31:17

Not better. Because when you say one morality is better than another, you're comparing it to an absolute standard and you can't have that without God.

31:24

Very good. Matt, did you want to say something? I saw you were... Oh, yeah. I just discuss the issue of morality with atheists all the time.

31:33

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?

31:40

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 at a contradicts us today?

31:49

If you have a system that ultimately can be self -refuting, then you can't have evolutionary morality be applicable in all situations.

31:56

And I'll ask them, I'll say, is it true that statements are either true or false? Two plus two is four or five plus five is 38.

32:04

And true and not true. And they'll say, yeah, the statements are true or false.

32:10

The law of excluded middle. And so I'll ask them, is this statement true or false?

32:15

It is always morally wrong for anyone to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure. It's a standard question

32:21

I've asked. I used it in my debate against Dan Barker and he couldn't get out of the problem.

32:26

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?

32:37

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.

32:44

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.

32:53

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 and no

33:01

God, no universals, no one in 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.

33:11

I ask them questions, lead them down a road and just show them that they're arguing themselves into a corner.

33:17

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

33:24

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.

33:32

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.

33:40

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.

33:47

So how does that work? So, I mean, even the grand metaphysical picture, it's even just worse.

33:53

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

34:01

You know, I deal with that when there are materialists and I ask them, are you a materialist? We then define it.

34:06

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?

34:13

Good. How does one chemical state that leaves with another chemical state in the brain produce proper logical inference?

34:18

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.

34:30

Yeah, so materialism is the undergirding principle and materialism ultimately self -refuting because it casts doubt on its own validity.

34:38

Okay, all right. I use that argument with Clarkians. Don't open up that can of worms.

34:47

One other thing that I'd throw in here is just the arbitrariness of the statement. I take it that the statement's elliptical.

34:53

It means what is the best way to answer an atheist who insists we evolve to believe in morality or believe that there's an objective morality?

35:02

How do we know that on the assumptions of the evolutionists? Do we know that?

35:07

I mean, is that something we know archeologically? I mean, for example, if we look at the archeology, the record of man, what we find are dead bones and artifacts left over and so forth.

35:22

You know, we might find evidence that people murdered somebody in the past, but that's not proof that they believed that murder was okay.

35:29

It just demonstrates the fact that somebody murdered. People murder today, right? But assume, you know, the question assumes that we've evolved to believe in morality today.

35:38

So if we can murder today when we believe that there are objective moral norms against that sort of thing, then if we found evidence in the fossil record or something like that, that somebody was murdered, that wouldn't prove that they didn't believe it was wrong to murder.

35:50

I mean, I just don't know how you can demonstrate this kind of claim that we evolved to believe in morality.

35:56

In fact, all the evidence from human history suggests that human beings have always believed that there's some moral standard.

36:04

And usually when you do find somebody engaging in a murder or something like that or any other infraction of accepted norms, they're usually not suggesting that there is no objective standard, but that there's some special reason, right?

36:22

Why they could do that. Why this is not really a violation of that norm. At the end of the day,

36:29

I think the question or the statement is just arbitrary. Also, they don't live by their own philosophy because survival of the fittest would be the best moral system.

36:39

That's right. I'll take what you have at a gun. Sorry, Slim Jim. That's cool. Yeah, on top of that,

36:45

I think even the question already provides its own acid that blows itself up. If it's atheism, then the world came about by really chance.

36:53

That is, there's non -intentionality of a person directing. And if that's the case, it's like Van Til says, the sea of chance.

36:59

It's like the analogy I like to do oftentimes in campus evangelism is if you were to see a stop sign that landed in front of you when there was a big hurricane that blew it and it randomly by chance landed 90 degrees perfect, would you actually stop and look both ways and obey that stop sign?

37:15

Now, it came by chance, even if there was a sign, but the sea of chance itself destroy and reduces even the need for you to be prescriptive and for us even to follow, to obey, to begin with.

37:26

So however sophisticated it is with the model of evolution or whatever, but by the very own metaphysics that it insists on an atheistic worldview where it's non -intentionality, randomness, and chance,

37:37

I think it actually is the acid that self -refutes or destroy the possibility, meaningfulness, and intelligibility of morality.

37:45

Excellent, thank you for that. Brian, I want you to take this question. Maybe you could start with this question and then other people can chime in.

37:51

I'll give you a nice hard one here. Some preceptors say that we have to make an argument that is absolutely sure, and sometimes we'll say absolutely certain, not a probabilistic argument.

38:02

They say that a probabilistic argument would give an excuse before God, any thoughts? Yeah, I think

38:10

I understand what the question is. I mean, in the end, there is no excuse before God regardless of the type of argument we make.

38:19

I think what preceptors are saying is that it is most faithful to scripture to argue for God as a certain existent being because that's the way he presents himself.

38:33

And given the nature of who God is, as our ultimate authority, as the one who created us, as the one that we ground intelligibility in in the first place, it doesn't make sense.

38:45

I'm trying to remember how Van Til puts it, but essentially it's an affront to God to say that he just most probably exists.

38:54

So it's built into the precept method itself to argue for a

39:00

God that does exist, not wishy -washy general theism, not just some sort of a

39:06

God or some sort of a being that has the ability to create or provide us with a moral standard.

39:13

It's the entire Christian worldview. And what comes along with that is that God does in fact exist, and we know it, and we can be sure of it.

39:22

All we have to do is look into scripture to find that. All right, very good. And we would even argue that it is the reality of the triune

39:31

God of scripture that gives intelligibility to the very concept of probability. Probabilities presuppose certainties, and that certainty must be rooted in the

39:40

God who created, and everything that occurs within creation falls out in accordance with his providential plan and purpose for everything that he's created.

39:49

God is the metaphysical foundation for all derivational facts and how they behave.

39:55

I think that's a very important thing to keep in mind. Thank you for that. I don't know if anyone - I was gonna say that. It looked like you were about to say it, but I was like, you know -

40:01

I was gonna say the same thing, almost word for word. I had it written down here. That's right. You are smart.

40:07

Well, I learned from this guy named Slick, it's I, Anthony. I think

40:13

I learned a little bit from everybody here. All right, so let's, I mean, there's so many questions, actually.

40:19

I might just continue to go through here, and then we'll pop back out to jump into what

40:24

I wanted to originally talk about, but there are a lot of questions here. This is good. There's a question here by Arthur Bear, which

40:30

I just removed from the screen. This is in regards to metaphysics. Okay, now, real quick.

40:36

You might be, some might be wondering, well, wait a minute. What's up with all this philosophy? Like, I get it, and I actually resonate very much with what

40:43

Sai says, that when we go down too far the philosophical path, we can kind of lose focus on what's important.

40:51

However, I do think, as people are trying to understand presuppositionalism, these questions arise, and I still think that there is value in pursuing them, as long as we don't take all of this philosophical talk and allow that to overpower really what we're supposed to be doing, which is proclaiming the gospel.

41:10

So I do think that there needs to be a healthy balance there. So for our purposes here, I think these are good questions to entertain, but for those listening and going out and using this, you wanna have a balance there.

41:20

It's about the gospel, not about all of this side stuff, but it's good to know it, and there's always a context in which it might become appropriate as well.

41:27

But here's the question, Arthur Bear. This is in regards to metaphysics. Yes, the Christian grounds his or her metaphysic in that it's been revealed by God.

41:36

But if you guys could discuss why a person who also claims the same thing, why is that person wrong?

41:42

So if someone has a revelatory metaphysic, my God has revealed the nature of reality.

41:48

Now you have two asserted revealed metaphysics. How do we break the tie, so to speak?

41:56

So that is an open question to anyone who wants to tackle it and anyone else can piggyback and chime in as well.

42:03

Well, I've dealt with it many times. Okay. I just ask them, okay, so your God does this?

42:08

Yes, okay, let's describe your God. Give me the attributes of your God. Let's go through. Is he omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent?

42:14

They'll say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then we'll get into the idea of defending the Trinity out of personhood and out of the static mind issue that I talk about and some other things.

42:23

I'll show that they have inconsistencies. A lot of times what happens is they'll actually describe the Trinitarian God. They just don't wanna say he's a

42:28

Trinity. And I'll say, well, that's what we believe. And I won't go too deep. That's what we believe. So how is he any different? So you have to show a distinction and then they have to justify the distinction.

42:37

It gets a little more tricky, but that's all I do. And it takes five or 10 minutes going back and forth.

42:42

And that's how we do that, distinguish between them. Because if anybody's gonna say it's the same attributes of God, then it is

42:48

God. But if it's a different attributes, then we have to justify that those attributes are possible.

42:53

And then it gets down into Unitarian sense and there's problems with Unitarianism. And then you get into that apologetic there.

43:00

Okay, great. Anyone else? I find that it's often atheists who posit something like this in order to try and trip you up.

43:06

So the first thing that I always say, at least you're not an atheist. Yeah. And I say, are you saying that you have to posit at least a

43:14

God in order to make sense of these? And they're very reluctant to go that way because they're professing atheists. But I also stick to the truth that the

43:21

Bible says they know the God. And so rather than getting into the philosophy of it, I say, well, there is only one

43:28

God and the Bible says that you know who that is. Very good. Anyone else? Yeah, I'll throw in that.

43:35

Number one, if you look at the world's religions, whether we're talking about ancient

43:40

Greece, Rome, the Nordic gods, whatever you wanna talk about, in these systems, you either have something that's ultimate but impersonal or you have personal beings, but they're not ultimate.

43:55

I mean, that's just the way it's always shaken out in history. The only exceptions to that are in the context of what some would refer to as the

44:04

Judeo -Christian tradition, right? Obviously, I've already spoken to the fact that I reject any notion that Jews today are in fact worshiping the

44:13

God of the Bible and as well Muslims, but they are at least aping that.

44:19

They're suggesting that this is the same deity. And so in one sense, I mean, just in terms of those claims,

44:27

I mean, when we look at the world's religions, again, you don't have the notion of an absolute God in them unless you're talking about Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and all of them are laying claim to biblical revelation as the foundation for this.

44:41

And so we need to get into the nuts and bolts of that to see who really is being faithful to that revelation.

44:47

But then here, just since I already broached one avenue of tackling this, I would point to the fact that these religions don't really teach the same conception of God.

44:57

Their God created a world. It's like, to me, it always, just to give a very simplistic example, it's like somebody building a house, but building it in such a way that he's excluded from it, right?

45:11

It's like, I don't know, he builds it and then puts locks on it, but doesn't have the keys to the building. Or that's just how

45:19

Judaism and Islam sound to me on a very basic level. Their God made a world that he can't really interact with.

45:25

And that being the case, again, I don't know how they can talk about having a revelation from God given the kind of God they're talking about.

45:34

They say it's the biblical God who revealed himself, but their God can't reveal himself in principle since his transcendence precludes him also being imminent.

45:45

Yeah, excellent. I just wanna put this quote up here. I think that's super cool. This one's for you, Cy, it's not a question, but how to answer the fool is part of, because one says, how to answer the fool is part of my biblical ethics course that I teach to my high school students.

45:58

Every year, I get raving reviews from my students for the course. Cy has played a big part of that. So I think that's excellent.

46:05

God is using that in various contexts. They're an excellent teaching tool. So thank you so much for that.

46:11

Praise God, I've been communicating with him in the YouTube chat to know that he's a dear brother, and I hope to even maybe be able to join him at his church in the not too distant future.

46:22

Awesome, very good. He has his real name on there, so I won't use it, but he's a dear brother, and I'm very humbled and encouraged by those words, and indeed, all glory goes to God.

46:32

Now, you sound perfectly clear, Cy, but you're frozen. So I was like, wow, I didn't know he was a ventriloquist.

46:37

He was like talking, but his lips weren't moving. So I don't know if it's something with the camera there, but there you go, there you go.

46:43

I was like, that's impressive. He's like, I'm a boiler operator and a ventriloquist. All right, this one is for, let's give this one to Jim, and anyone else can chime in if there's more to say to this.

46:59

So Joel says, since the Bible is our ultimate authority, how can we effectively start from it if we don't have a, quote, perfect Bible?

47:09

Statements of faith state only the originals as inspired when we don't have them.

47:14

So how would we interact with that? It's a good question. That's a good question. Oh, I don't know how to answer it.

47:21

King James. I'm kidding. King James? Yeah.

47:28

I often get this question from King James only, so I was wondering if that works. Sorry for cutting you off, go on. No, you're right.

47:34

I see that often online. Among those that are within the camp that consider some presuppositional, it becomes a whole discussion of, is it

47:42

King James or only majority texts? I don't think I have the time right now to answer everything in a few minutes, and I think some of the other brothers do.

47:50

Online, I do have a series where I go over Old Testament textual criticism, where I even had my kids in our church join in of just how is it we piece in together, where I have them write things down.

48:02

I bring in my own kids just because my kids could misspell things, because I need some variants where there's mistakes. But then

48:07

I have one of the guys go out of the room, and then when we come back, I have the one person that's out. And then also, in my church, it's multicultural.

48:14

I have one guy in Spanish, another guy in Chinese, and then we have this where we bring it all together, and people could still piece this grocery list thing.

48:23

I don't wanna go into too much details. I think, number one, we do believe in light of confessions, the various ones, and as Christian with the

48:31

Word of God says that the Word of God is self -evidencing, and it is there. And I think the textual critical thing, there's nothing like it.

48:38

Even for myself, when I like reading old Eastern classical texts where there's a critical edition,

48:45

I think sometimes when you see just the amount of textual criticism there is in terms of manuscript and families,

48:50

I think it's amazing. I think those that are pastors here would attest to that. When you're preparing exegetically for your sermon, when we do the textual criticism,

48:57

I always look at the variants just for my own preparation. Just incredible until you see how much it is.

49:03

Again, I don't wanna go too much into this thing, but I think the biggest thing God's Word reveals that His Word, Isaiah 40, verse eight,

49:11

His Word is forever eternal. So we do have this, we can reconstruct it, but also realize in different areas, because of our sinful nature, people might have some slipping of grammars and various issues.

49:22

I think other sources, I think Anthony Rogers has debated this with Islamic context and I think Matt Slick has written quite a bit and even dealing with tackling things.

49:31

I just wanna just plug our fellow brothers. I think Matt has a very, and you can correct me if I'm wrong,

49:36

Matt, I think last time I checked, you have a very big section on your website on King James onlyism, which touches on the whole textual critical issue.

49:45

Yep, I didn't write it though. Luke did. Luke, hey, but it's on the site. I mean, it's excellent. I had to give the information on it.

49:52

And so, yeah, it's good. Excellent, that's right. Okay, so this one is for Josh. I want Josh - Can I put one thing in on this real quick?

49:58

Go for it, go ahead. Yeah, go for it. So one way of thinking about this, we say that the

50:04

Bible's our ultimate authority and without it, a person has no foundation for their reasoning.

50:10

The revelation of God, right? We believe the Bible's self -attesting, but it's not just self -attesting in the sense that it claims that, but that its content is self -attesting, meaning that if you reject the worldview revealed in the

50:22

Bible, then you in fact leave yourself without any, grounds for your reasoning and everything else.

50:30

And that being the case, I mean, we have the Christian worldview, even if let's say there's a textual variant, right?

50:36

If I were to take the book of Philemon out of everybody's Bible, I don't think that it would fundamentally alter how any of you believe or go about living the

50:45

Christian life or anything else. I'm not by any stretch suggesting that it doesn't belong in our Bible. It wasn't supposed to be there or anything like that.

50:52

I'm just saying, it's not as if the, there being a variant fundamentally affects the

51:00

Christian worldview. And that's because of the nature of the revelation that God has given. He so revealed himself in his word in such a way that even with a variant, the truth is always still there.

51:13

And one thing I'd say, just in terms of, I think, comment was made about the Old Testament. One of the things that I found to be remarkable that I don't think a lot of people sufficiently are aware of or appreciate, at least with respect to the

51:25

Old Testament, is if you were to take away all of the

51:31

Masoretic vowel pointings, which are post -Christian, the

51:36

Masoretic text from which our Old Testament is translated includes what are known as vowel pointings. Those are all put there by post -Christian

51:43

Jews. That's not, the prophets, Moses and the prophets didn't use vowel pointings.

51:49

They simply wrote inconsonants. And a person familiar with the Hebrew language would understand what vowels belong there.

51:58

If you strip away some of those Masoretic vowel pointings, many of the variants actually go away.

52:06

And so if you were to compare, I hope I'm not losing anyone, but if you were to take, let's say, a

52:12

Masoretic text from today, which has the vowel pointings added by the Masoretes, and you took out those vowel pointings, the consonantal text that's there, and you compared that to, say, the

52:22

Dead Sea Scrolls that we have from before the time of the Masoretes, the uniformity there is remarkable. I mean, it's just, it's incredible.

52:29

And often the points of variant that arise from those vowel pointings, it reflects an anti -Messianic bias, right?

52:37

That's why you can look, for example, at the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament into Greek, which was done before the time of Christ.

52:46

You often find that the rendering of the Septuagint reflects a more Messianic understanding of the

52:51

Old Testament. Why? Because they were reading a different text? No, often it's because they're just looking at the consonantal text and reading it in the most natural way.

53:01

So for example, in Psalm 22, it says, they pierced my hands and my feet, right?

53:09

That was the way it was naturally understood as read by an ancient Jew. The Masoretes couldn't tolerate this sort of thing, so they would add vowel pointings that make it look like gibberish, because they don't want it to say, they've pierced my hands and my feet.

53:21

So bottom line is just that there's a great deal of uniformity across the manuscript tradition when you recognize something like this.

53:30

Now that doesn't mean all variants go away, but I do think it's important. Hey Eli, can I jump in real quick?

53:36

Yeah, absolutely. I just wanna say that there seems to be an assumption that you have to have perfection in order to have it be an authority.

53:45

And I would say you don't. Even if it were a perfect text, we as humans are not perfect.

53:52

So when we read the Bible, we're going to introduce a subjective element and we're not always gonna read it exactly correctly.

53:59

But we can say that because of the content of the Christian worldview, like Anthony mentioned earlier.

54:05

And this goes back even to the earlier question why you can't just argue that somebody else's

54:10

God also revealed a worldview to them. You have to look at the content. What is the content of the

54:16

Christian worldview? And that's what evangelism is, right? You're sharing the gospel and you're sharing what's behind it.

54:22

So I would say perfection is not a requirement for authority. Thank you for that.

54:28

Yep, perfect. One last thing. Go for it. Something to think about with people. I think you guys are gonna have a good time with the next question, but go ahead. You finish this one up and we'll,

54:34

I'll let you guys tackle our next one. I think you'll have fun with it. All right, well, one of the things to look at is the originals are inspired and they're perfect because they're originals.

54:44

And the copies aren't always perfect but they don't have to be perfect. It's functionally similar to the translation of one language to another.

54:53

So Greek into English or Spanish into English. They don't have to always have perfect equity in everything, but yet, because of the nature of inspiration inherent in the words by God's work in any language, even in the copying transmission, we have what

55:11

God has intended for us. Even though there's not an absolute perfect transmission, and that's a fact, but it's not 99 .5

55:19

% textually pure and identical. If you're gonna look at that and say, well, that's not perfect, therefore you can't trust it, is the same thing as saying, well, you translate it from one language to another language, therefore you can't trust it.

55:29

But that doesn't work. They have no problem with the translation issue, but that they do with the other, and that's an inconsistency on their part.

55:35

Sure, thank you for that. I hope you guys don't mind. I was gonna go a certain route, but there are so many good questions that allow you guys to kind of share your different perspectives.

55:42

So we're just gonna go through them if that's okay. And towards the back end, I'm gonna give each and every one of you an opportunity to briefly refute something that I'm going to present to you.

55:51

So that'll be helpful. So someone can kind of see how does this apply here? How does this apply here? How does presupposition apply here?

55:57

So we'll save that to the end. We'll give precedence to the questions here. Excellent questions.

56:02

Now, I would like to start with Josh. If you could answer this question, and then everyone else can kind of leap on it.

56:09

First, I want Josh, and then I want Jim's more pastoral take on this sort of question when you're dealing with it within the church.

56:16

But then everyone else is free. Now, our next question is feminism, okay? So how does one use a presuppositional approach to engage feminism?

56:27

So a lot of people will think like, yeah, okay, presuppositional apologetics. It works cool when you're talking to an atheist, but what happens when you're like, you're talking like a feminist and like the

56:35

Bible comes up and you're kind of trying to interact with them and kind of share a biblical perspective? Because presuppositionalism applies to anything that we can speak about, how would you begin speaking with a feminist,

56:47

Joshua, who takes certain positions that are known, that feminists are known to take?

56:54

If we can define feminism with the more negative connotation, I know there's a form of feminism that doesn't take that kind of extreme and they kind of, the bad feminists have hijacked the term and so everyone gets lumped into that category.

57:07

But how would you deal with someone who comes from a very feministic perspective, you know, the sorts of things that they say, how would you engage that from a presuppositional perspective?

57:20

Well, I mean, it would depend on what they mean. My feminism, there've been like 5 million different types. But I mean, it really just boils down to how they make sense of their arguments, whatever they may be, good or bad.

57:34

I mean, if we go back a hundred years and you wanna call the good feminism, you know, the right to vote, just to get to the nerve of the point, how do you make sense of the act of voting?

57:45

Or today it's like women's rights and abortion and stuff like that. How do they make sense out of morality and their worldview?

57:52

How do they make sense out of human dignity and reasoning and things like that, given their approach?

57:58

And it doesn't take long to just slice and dice their worldview because it really is, it's not just morally depraved, but it's just irrational altogether just being anti -Christian.

58:10

There's really not much more to it. You just let them speak into the mic. I like how you brought up the issue of ethics because a lot of these issues that feminists bring up with respect to women's rights and equality, a lot of those are ethical issues.

58:25

And so we can actually use the standard presuppositional clip that has pretty much become a meme.

58:34

By what standard? If women ought to be treated a certain way, what standard are you using?

58:41

If the feminist claims to be Christian, then we use scripture. If the feminist claims to be atheistic, we can just keep on appealing to a standard that they don't have any objective foundation for.

58:50

So I think that's a good connection to kind of bring that ethical issue in. How about you, Jim? How would you address this in terms of teaching the people within your church how they could engage with gentleness and respect, but with a presuppositional firmness on the issue of feminism?

59:06

Yeah, I think that's a good question. I think first and foremost, because we are presuppositional, it is important that we have a biblical view of male and female, of gender roles.

59:17

This will be mining a lot of Genesis 1 to 3 and everything even post -fall, various passages.

59:25

I think for me, this is where, because this discussion is also about the context of how presuppositional apologetics contribute.

59:31

I know there's other various apologetics that emphasize natural law and even natural theology.

59:38

That's a whole different discussion about how is a reform view in using that look like.

59:44

I'm not gonna go into this too much, but I just wanna point out that at least a crude version of natural law becomes a problem because there's actually, like Josh says so beautifully, there's various kinds of feminists.

59:56

Everyone is individual. But I think the movement right now is there's been three different waves. And a third wave, feminism, is actually where we get transgenderism.

01:00:04

I actually think it's the logical step when we say that in light of, I think I would recommend even

01:00:10

Karl Truman's latest book about the rise and fall of the modern self, where he talks about because of technology, the discussion about what is human nature becomes very malleable.

01:00:19

So I think for me, this is where in rise of these new challenges, that actually has given me more confidence to be presuppositional in the sense that our biggest argument is not just only from nature, but ultimately from what's

01:00:30

God's intentionality for male and female and various genders is, and interpret that in light of God's word.

01:00:36

So I think first and foremost, at least for me pastorally, I often would begin saying, we gotta begin with God's word.

01:00:42

And again, to do the precept thing, if not that, then by what standard you go by? And then we critique from, is it the individual and various things?

01:00:51

And even the problem of subjective morality, or if it's just only merely social convention, et cetera.

01:00:57

I think the other aspect, I think is also, I think it's important, this is more the pastoral element, is importance for all of us to live it out, especially as our world gets more darker.

01:01:08

Christian sexual ethic is very important that we modeled that in terms of abstinence when we're single before we're married, and when we're married, just chastity and even love.

01:01:17

I also think, I know sometimes you hear people say the cliche, love is an apologetic, but even then the love must be interpreted in light of biblical lens,

01:01:26

God's way of what true love is, et cetera. But nevertheless, I think it presents a real challenge to unbelieving worldview when they see it actually modeled within the family.

01:01:36

So I think those are the four points that I just summarized. Number one is just point out the nature versus technology tension that they have.

01:01:42

And also even taking to this logical conclusion, this third wave feminism where we're at, where if it's all fluid, then we have this incredible thing where women, actual women are actually being at risk when you have things like, you could define whatever you want, and then to have people that were formerly male, born male in female prisons, and just the fruit of that ideology is where we don't wanna go.

01:02:03

Also pointing that out. All right, excellent. Thank you for that. I think a good place perhaps to start the argument is with the question, so why do you hate

01:02:11

God? That's an interesting route, man, because I've seen you use that before, and it definitely moves the discussion right where it needs to be.

01:02:21

It cuts through a lot of the nonsense, and they might deny it, but then you could point out by their beliefs and what they state, how it's actually an affront towards God.

01:02:33

But of course you do this with love, mind you. And one of the reasons that I use that approach is

01:02:39

I remember, I think I shared this with you, Eli, once, but I was out evangelizing a park, and I heard this guy, he was doing pre -sup, and he'd learned stuff from me.

01:02:48

He was talking with this guy for about half an hour using all the philosophical arguments, and it made me wanna puke because he sounded just like I sound.

01:02:54

And then he was kind of running into trouble with these philosophical arguments, and he called me over and he said, you know, Si, I'm having some trouble with this fellow here.

01:03:02

And my question to him was, so, sir, why do you hate God? Of course he said he didn't hate God, but then the conversation took a whole new direction.

01:03:10

And that's also, I believe, on my website on the audio section where we have that conversation. But it does sound kind of like in your face, but if you can do that, that's one of the things about being in person too, that you can look in the person's eyes.

01:03:25

And, you know, I was gonna mention that to Joshua earlier as well. He says that a lot of these conversations he does online.

01:03:30

One thing that I found that the difference between doing it in person and online is online is far too easy to duck questions.

01:03:38

You know, because you could ask a killer question and then they don't respond for a day or two. But when you're face -to -face with the person and you ask that person, if you say to a person online, so why do you hate

01:03:50

God? They don't have to respond to that. You don't look in their eyes. But if you can do that in person with love, and of course there is a place,

01:03:57

I mean, I cut my teeth with all these arguments online, but I ended up not really becoming frustrated, but it was an annoyance that people would just would avoid questions.

01:04:07

And of course, you know, they're stewing while they've avoided this question and they've done it for a reason as well. But it just, you know, conversationally,

01:04:15

I think that face -to -face, it's much harder for them to avoid the question that you asked. They don't have time to evade and, you know, think behind the keyboard before they're coming up with an answer.

01:04:26

Any thoughts, Brian, on that? You wanna add anything to that? Yeah, it's interesting. Over the last week or so,

01:04:32

I've been having a discussion with a Christian lady who's a friend of mine regarding a right to abortion, women's right.

01:04:41

And we went back and forth a little bit and I just tried to understand, you know, just ask some of the basic questions.

01:04:47

Is the unborn child human? You know, and then after about two iterations,

01:04:52

I said, so, you know, you keep using this term, right? We have a right to do this. We have a right to do that. Where does that right come from, do you think?

01:04:59

And at that point I said, I believe, you know, God gives us rights by virtue of being image bearers and went through and explained the biblical perspective on children and that.

01:05:12

And she came back and said, the answer to the question, where do rights come from? She said, well, they just are.

01:05:20

So - They're just that way. They just are. And so I thought, you know, there's a million different ways to respond to this, but I just came back and said, well, what if I said, you know,

01:05:29

I have the right to make sure that no unborn children are killed. And if you ask me where that comes from,

01:05:35

I say, it's just my right. The idea was to show the total arbitrariness of that kind of a position.

01:05:42

Excellent. I usually add, how do you like your argument now? That's right.

01:05:49

So I think to the question and looking for what, you know, from a

01:05:55

Christian biblical perspective, what is it they're assuming that's not consistent with scripture and just dig down, drive down on that and be sure to share the biblical perspective, you know,

01:06:06

Bonson and Van Til both talk about the two -step approach. So here's my answer if Christianity is true.

01:06:13

And even though she says she's a Christian and I believe she is, she's not holding a

01:06:19

Christian position, a biblical Christian position. Excellent. Just a word to the listeners here.

01:06:25

If you guys are enjoying this conversation, I sure am. I love to hear the answers of each of these gentlemen. They're doing a great job. If you're finding this useful, you know, do me a solid, like the video, share the video as well.

01:06:35

If you think there are other people who might benefit from this conversation, I think the fact that we're covering such a wide variety of topics really gets to allow people to see how presuppositionalism can really be applied to everything, even to feminism, interestingly enough.

01:06:49

So if you do that, that'd be greatly appreciated. Now, here's a question. It's really hard and it's for Anthony Rogers, okay?

01:06:56

What do you say, and we can get kind of a brief, succinct answer to this, because this comes up a lot. What do you say to a

01:07:02

Muslim who tells you we worship the same God? To the Muslim, it's Allah, and for the Christian, it's the

01:07:07

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So how would you respond to that? You're on mute.

01:07:17

I think your mic is off. He probably gave the best answer he ever gave, and we can't hear him.

01:07:24

I gave a short answer, which is no, we don't. Okay. And the long answer is the

01:07:30

Quran is adamant that the God of the Bible is not triune. In fact, when, you know, attempting to refute the idea that God is triune, it doesn't even get the trinity right.

01:07:40

So on top of not being triune, the God of Islam is ignorant, right? He rejects what the

01:07:46

Bible reveals about God and in the process miscasts it.

01:07:52

So, you know, what kind of a God is that? It's certainly not the God I worship. Sure. And, you know, again,

01:07:58

I mean, the Quran, now you have to distinguish between what the Quran claims it's doing and what it actually is doing.

01:08:05

It makes the claim that it's speaking from the same God, but in the course of it, ends up saying things that are decidedly contrary to what

01:08:16

God says in scripture. One easy example. I mean, the God we believe in sent his son into the world and he sent his son into the world to die for our sins.

01:08:26

Surah 4, 157 of the Quran says that Jesus didn't die on the cross. And that fundamentally affects everything that we believe as Christians.

01:08:36

And it ends up revealing a very different God than the God of scripture. One example,

01:08:43

I mean, just thinking of the love of God, for example, if we just want to talk about attributes, scripture speaks of God loving his enemies.

01:08:50

That's what was happening when he sent Christ to die for his people. He was dying for his enemies. There's no such notion in the

01:08:57

Quran. Allah doesn't love anyone except those who have allegedly earned or merited his love.

01:09:04

And again, that's just not the God of scripture. So would we also say also that Islam, Allah, if we were to say, are they the same?

01:09:11

Well, in order to be the same, there needs to be a one -to -one correspondence between what Christians believe about God and what

01:09:17

Muslims believe about God. And ontologically, we believe in a triune God, which is completely not a one -to -one correspondence to what

01:09:24

Muslims believe. So you can't worship a Trinitarian God and then another group worship a

01:09:29

Unitarian God and say they're the same God, even though they are robed within the context of similar stories like God revealing himself to Abraham and these sorts of things.

01:09:39

Would that be correct? Yeah, yeah. And one thing to remember, look at John 8. I alluded to this earlier.

01:09:45

Jesus did not speak to his Jewish contemporaries as though they were worshiping the same

01:09:51

God. He did not believe that God was their father in that fundamental sense that is all important.

01:09:59

They weren't worshiping that God. Jesus said their father is the devil, right? So sure, those

01:10:04

Jews would have said, we're worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Old Testament. And Jesus said, no, you aren't.

01:10:11

Yeah, thank you. Matt, go ahead, I'm sorry. Go on,

01:10:17

Matt. Oh, one of the things I like to do with the Muslims is say your God is true.

01:10:23

Is the Old Testament true? Did Abraham talk to the true God? Yes. Well, the word

01:10:28

Yahweh is used 6 ,517 times in the Old Testament where God says, I am.

01:10:34

That's his name. I just ask him, well, if you have the same God, how come your God doesn't identify himself? How come he doesn't call himself the

01:10:41

I am? Why is it that in all of the Quran, he does not do that? Can you explain that?

01:10:47

So what I'm doing is putting him on the spot and showing at the same time they're not the same one. Okay, okay.

01:10:52

Simon, do you wanna answer that? Who are familiar with my work, you'll know that I'm very reluctant to call an atheist an actual atheist.

01:10:59

I call them professed atheists. I characterize what they call themselves.

01:11:05

They're not really atheists, they're professed atheists. Somebody called me on this years ago and they say, well, aren't the

01:11:10

Muslims an actual professed Muslim? And they're exactly right. We have no problem saying professed atheists, but we don't say professed

01:11:18

Muslims because according to the God of the Bible, according to these Muslims know the

01:11:23

God, but they're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness. But I very rarely, if ever, do I hear people address them that way.

01:11:29

And I was talking with a man who was a missionary in Ghana and he's actually in Brazil now.

01:11:35

He'd found this apologetic online through some videos and he was so excited. The next day he went to the place where they buy water in Ghana and it's always surrounded by Muslims.

01:11:44

And the first thing he said to them is, your Quran is false and you know it. He said, some of them got very angry with him.

01:11:51

Some of them laughed. He said, one man came up to him and he quietly said, can you tell me more about Jesus? So we have to emphasize that this is a reformed apologetic.

01:12:00

And there's two types of people in the world, there's goats and there's sheep. Goats who will spend an eternity in hell and sheep who will spend an eternity in heaven.

01:12:06

And one thing that the Bible does not say is that goats become sheep. Jesus didn't make sheep hear my voice, we give them sheep food.

01:12:13

And according to the Bible, the Muslim knows the true God, but they're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness. I think we have to take that approach quite often that just like they're professed atheists, they're also professed

01:12:23

Muslims. All right, our next question is going to be for Matt and Brian only, so that we can kind of move through them and then we'll kind of group some other guys to answer some other questions.

01:12:35

You guys are doing an excellent job, by the way. And even I'm learning some stuff too. So excellent, excellent job.

01:12:40

Here's the question. Someone says, I don't believe the Bible was written by God, just men. And you say, what do you say,

01:12:48

Matt? Oh, there's lots of things I could say. I could do this, but it doesn't work.

01:12:55

Oh yeah, well, how about that? Yes it is. They were done. I said, well, why do you believe that? Whenever anybody makes an assertion,

01:13:01

I like to say, demonstrate that the assertion is valid. I want to hear them. I call it handing me rope.

01:13:08

I'm going to hang them with it. Because they don't serve the true and living God, because they deny the true and living

01:13:13

God, then ultimately anything they say must end in self -reputation and self -contradiction, period.

01:13:20

So what I do is I just say, okay, let's work with it. And I have a reputation, believe it or not, of being very patient, step -by -step, very slow going through with people, writing things what they say and say, look,

01:13:33

I'm going to try and trap you right now. Is that okay if I try and do this? And they'll say, yeah, go ahead.

01:13:39

And even atheists will say, I enjoy talking to you. And I'll say, okay, well, if you say this, you said this, you said that.

01:13:45

Now, how do they both work? So a lot of it is art and just getting down there and dealing with that.

01:13:52

But if they say, well, how do you know it's the word of God? And I say, I'm going to say something as tough as, well,

01:13:57

Jesus says, my sheep hear my voice, John 10, 27. And so we know it's the voice of God because we're his sheep.

01:14:04

All I'm doing is presupposing the truth of God's word. I'm not defending it, though I can, because there's ways to do that.

01:14:11

And sometimes I do that in a large room and I'll share information and a lot of people are listening. And then that's what I'll use it as a teaching tool.

01:14:18

But that's what I'll mainly do. Jesus said that, and that's why. Are you disagreeing with Jesus? Yeah, excellent.

01:14:25

How about you, Brian? How would you speak to that? I would say, why do you hate God? There you go.

01:14:32

I knew I'd get a thumbs up from Si. Well played, well played there, Ryan. This is really tough because it's extremely much out of context, right?

01:14:41

But a couple of things. If somebody says, if somebody makes the assertion, it was just men that wrote the

01:14:50

Bible. God wasn't involved, right? So they've made a claim that something is true.

01:14:57

Something about the Bible itself. At which point I would drive and say, well, let's talk about that.

01:15:03

If somebody says, I don't believe the Bible was written by God, so what they're stating is a belief they hold.

01:15:09

Their claim is about the belief they hold, not the content of that belief so much.

01:15:15

And so I would say, well, I believe God inspired. In other words, I would counter with my own belief in the hopes that it would lead to something more than just saying,

01:15:25

I believe this, I believe that. And at that point, again, it really depends on the opportunity that I may have to continue that conversation.

01:15:37

There's so many things it depends on, but I don't know that I would just come right out and try to hammer them over the head per se.

01:15:46

I wanna develop the conversation a little bit more with them. All right, excellent. That's helpful. This question is for Josh and Jimmy.

01:15:56

Okay, here is a question from Reginald. To say that God is the necessary precondition for intelligibility, causal connections, et cetera, just raises the question as to why precepts then just reassert the claim to support it.

01:16:10

Now, there's so many different things that are wrong with this assertion, but let's address it.

01:16:17

Is that what we do, Joshua? Are we just saying God is the necessary precondition? And when someone says, well, why is that the case?

01:16:24

And we just kind of just repeat ourselves. We kind of, we had a little string. We just have like little cool sites and bruggen

01:16:30

Kate phrases that we learned from watching Ants of the Fool. It's like, how do you know

01:16:36

God's the necessary precondition? Why do you hate God? Why do you hate God? Let me go through my flashcards and get the answer there.

01:16:43

That's right. So how would you address that question? I've never seen presuppositionalists just reassert the claim.

01:16:51

I think what they mean is they reinforce the claim by elaborating theologically, expositionally from scripture, the metaphysical truths of God.

01:17:01

Why is it that God makes sense of this or this or this or whatever? And then we appeal to scripture, his word, and we lay out the metaphysical picture of the

01:17:09

Christian worldview as to why that's the case. And then if he objects to that, then we'll just keep the conversation going.

01:17:17

But at base, it's not just a reassertion of the same claim. We elaborate on it.

01:17:22

We explain, this is our worldview. This is how we can make sense out of these preconditions. But now how do you make sense out of these preconditions?

01:17:30

And then that's when the conversation just keeps going. So it's not just a reassertion. It's more of a reinforcing, and the two are not the same.

01:17:38

Okay, excellent. Jimmy, you wanna share your thoughts there? Yeah, beautifully stated.

01:17:45

I do appreciate, Josh, with all that you've written online in some of these philosophical discussions and even others.

01:17:53

I think the first part, I wanna go even with this question, is if they're even understanding in light of this question, what do we mean by precondition?

01:18:01

What we mean by precondition, maybe another word of saying it is, what is the prerequisite for any object of a human experience, whether causality or whatever else?

01:18:10

What must be true ahead of time in order for this truth, X, or whatever you call it, must be the case?

01:18:17

So I think in light of this, I wanna first mention about the nature of proving things in terms of precondition.

01:18:24

Another way of phrasing it is transcendentally. Its very nature of that might not be the same way as perhaps some direct claims or certain things.

01:18:33

If I could give an example, the laws of logic is a precondition for even rational discourse, right?

01:18:39

You're assuming the laws of identity, laws of non -contradiction. But when someone comes up to you and say, I don't believe in the laws of non -contradiction, you don't prove it by assuming it's not true.

01:18:50

You're just saying, no, it's true, but showing if this is the case, what does it look like if you wanna totally reject it? So the nature of that,

01:18:56

I think, if that could be an analogy, is I think this is what we're doing is there's a two -step process that, at least what

01:19:03

Vantil is trying to do, is saying, okay, this is what we, it's self -evidencingly true, but if you reject it, let's look like, in your worldview step in, what does it look like?

01:19:14

Real quick question, I think precept, we're not actually doing just only merely asserting. I think what we're having is the confusion, maybe, is we're talking about a whole worldview.

01:19:24

Sometimes people ask if it's, whether or not it's circular. I like to often mention as an analogy of a circuit board.

01:19:30

A circuit board, in order for it to work, it must be circular where it's connected to the battery. If it's totally straight line, then obviously there's no power, or if it's not connected, that's like an analogy of arbitrariness, then it's also a problem.

01:19:45

So I think what we're showing is when we're having this discussion, we're trying to show that the whole thing is a biblical view of ontology of God, a biblical view of ethics, and a biblical epistemology, and showing this whole thing is robust, and cogent, and coherent, that it is the only thing in light of triune

01:19:59

God and what he's revealed in scripture that could explain things. But everything else in their worldview, they don't have the battery to even support the circuit, and their wiring is all messed up and everything else, because of 1

01:20:10

Corinthians 1, if those that reject, where's the debater of this age? Excellent, thank you so much for that.

01:20:16

Post -Tenebrous, if we - We say in scripture, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, and somebody says, why?

01:20:24

And we say, well, that's just the way it is. God says that he's the beginning of knowledge, and if you reject it, your worldview is reduced to absurdity.

01:20:30

But the question isn't really why. I mean, when somebody says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, and they ask why, well, that's what the

01:20:35

Bible says. God is the beginning of knowledge, and if you reject that, you can't make sense of any knowledge claim that you make.

01:20:41

But that second part right there, Cy, is the answer to the question. The second part you just gave is the reason why we're not simply asserting.

01:20:49

It's not just a bare assertion. No, that's fair. Right, the proof of it is what you just said. Reject it, and look what happens.

01:20:56

Yeah, I don't think that's really an answer to the why question. I think it's just stating fact, and justifying with scripture, because it is the case that God is a necessary precondition for knowledge.

01:21:07

Why? Why is that the case? Well, in a way, yeah, because you can't make sense of anything unless you start there.

01:21:13

Sure, sure. All right, Post -Tenebrous Looks asked the question, is it true that you can be a presupp and also an evidentialist?

01:21:21

If you guys don't mind, I'd like to jump on this one here. The answer to that is no. You can't be a presuppositionalist and an evidentialist.

01:21:30

Now, we need to make a distinction between presuppositionalism as a methodology and the utilization of evidences.

01:21:38

So when a presuppositionalist uses evidences, he's not ceasing to be presuppositional, or we use evidences within a consistent presuppositional framework.

01:21:48

We cannot be presuppositional or presuppositionalists and also employ a completely different apologetic method that's based on a different foundation.

01:21:59

So you cannot be an, for example, I had Hugh Ross on, maybe many people might know who Hugh Ross is, and we had a great discussion about creation and stuff, but he actually wrote an article on his website, and he actually told me in conversation, he said, well, you know,

01:22:14

I think presuppositional apologetics is a good thing to have in your tool belt, but sometimes you need to use evidential apologetics.

01:22:21

And sometimes he talks about the practical use of using these different methods when in fact you can't use consistently different methods.

01:22:29

You have to use evidences that is in a way that's consistent with the method you're working from.

01:22:35

So no, you can't be a presuppositionalist and an evidentialist, but that's not to say that you can't use evidences as a presuppositionalist.

01:22:43

I hope that that makes sense. If anyone wants to add to that, feel free to. Jesus used evidence.

01:22:52

He said that Thomas, John 10, 27, he says, take your finger, put it in my hands, take your hand, put it into my side.

01:22:58

Now, you see, he goes, now be not unbelieving, but believe. So Jesus used evidence in support of the necessity of belief.

01:23:10

To that, I normally say to the person, I say, if you can do miracles, go for it. And on top of that, even then,

01:23:18

I think for presupp, we're about the philosophy of evidence that interprets all that. So in light of the

01:23:24

Old Testament view, what Matt Slick provided a scenario that even sometimes evidentialists bring up, I would also even say that metaphysically, what makes that possible is in light of Proverbs, the eyes that see and the ears that hear is the

01:23:37

Lord that has made it. It's not a randomness of chance. I mean, if that's the case, that's almost, if all our senses is randomness of chance in atheistic worldview, you're nothing more than playing with dice, right?

01:23:47

You just happen to say, hey, I wonder what's two plus two? Is it four? And you just answer it by rolling a dice.

01:23:52

And you would say you would not truly have knowledge to justify true belief if it's all the randomness, but it's

01:23:57

God that's made all the senses. I think in terms of evidence, I actually think the presuppositional view makes better sense, and it's much more conscious to be faithful of God.

01:24:06

I like what Matt Slick gave the analogy, like it's a bunch of onion. At the very core, we cannot, the fear of the

01:24:14

Lord, what Matt Slick is driving is that we cannot ever question that it is Christ and the truth of the

01:24:21

Christianity. And all facts do not exist independent of any other context.

01:24:27

So the fact of Christ's resurrection is because of prophecy, his deity, his self -proclamation of resurrection, et cetera.

01:24:35

So I always like to tell people, if you have a fact you wanna justify as something, as an evidence, that's fine.

01:24:42

I don't have any problem using evidence, but I'm gonna put it in the overall context, which requires a presuppositional worldview.

01:24:49

You get into that in the consistency. So absolutely. Yep. This is a great question here, and this comes up a lot.

01:24:55

And unfortunately, I'm a teacher, and I can't answer this question because it does pop up a lot when people are interested in presuppositionalism, and they wanna teach it to younger people.

01:25:06

Eric says, I'm a ninth grade Sunday school teacher for my 11 plus young men and women. I'm a reformed

01:25:12

Calvinist and have been studying precept for about a year. The church is led by a pre -mill Arminian, says

01:25:17

Arminian, but pre -mill Arminian. Is there a curriculum you all would recommend for my ninth graders?

01:25:24

God bless you men, and thank you for doing this. If anyone wants to speak to that, or maybe not a curriculum, but a resource that might be helpful for younger people.

01:25:33

If you have any ideas, shoot it out. If not, we apologize, Eric, and we need to move on. How do

01:25:39

I answer the fool? How to answer the fool? Well, hey, yeah, that's a great,

01:25:44

I mean, I'm glad you actually said that because how to answer a fool is video.

01:25:50

Sometimes seeing visuals and like how this looks like in conversation is one of the best ways you can teach young people because people in our generation today are very visual.

01:26:02

And to actually see what it looks like to defend the faith using this method, I think a teacher can show those videos and show clips and create conversation based on what is

01:26:13

Si doing in this video? Why does he ask the question that he asked and have discussions? You can use that even if you don't have kind of a spiral notebook with a curriculum from this day to that day, all the way until you get to the end.

01:26:25

So that's a good recommendation, how to answer the fool. Anyone else? Okay, all right.

01:26:34

So here's a question thrown out to everyone. This is from the sire. What are the fake

01:26:39

Greg Bonson, as many people know him, what would you say about someone that denies anything is right or wrong?

01:26:45

So, you know, we say by what standard the person is just like, there's no such thing as right and wrong.

01:26:51

So ha, take that presuppositionalist. How would you respond to that? You should watch the Stein debate where Bonson says, he pulls out a gun and says, okay,

01:26:58

Dr. Stein, make my day. Is there a God or not? And now he has him where he wants him. Because if he says, oh, you can't shoot me because there are moral absolutes that's wrong, then

01:27:08

Bonson wins the debate because he's proven God exists, there are moral absolutes. But if he says, oh no, there are no moral absolutes, there's really nothing right or wrong, and he shoots him and he dies and he wins the debate anyway.

01:27:18

So it's just absurd. Okay, all right. Thank you for that. I can also point out that that person is not living their life consistently with that particular position.

01:27:28

And that's a big part of presupp is to talk about the problem with being inconsistent.

01:27:35

It's not just that you don't have your ducks in a row per se, it's that you're not living what you say you are living.

01:27:42

Or if it were the case that there were no rights or wrongs, then you getting morally indignant about this particular thing that bothers you, there's no reason to do that.

01:27:51

So I think you can quickly drive them to an irrational position. If they go to my website,

01:27:59

I address some of those contradictions, but I mean, you could just simply say, is it right that there are no rights or wrongs?

01:28:05

You know, it's just a self -contradiction on the face of it. But if they go to my website, prooftheygottoexist .org, you know, there's a point and click thing that deals with these types of contradictions.

01:28:15

One of the things I'll do is I'll just ask them, I enjoy the discussions. So what must be the case such that there is no universal moral ought?

01:28:24

Because that's what they're saying. They deny a universal moral ought. Okay, what must be in place in order for that to be the case?

01:28:30

If you can't produce such a worldview and justify it, then your assertion is unfounded. What I'll do is

01:28:36

I'll do this kind of a thing with a room full of people. I want them to hear the futility of that statement.

01:28:42

And then when they're giving me more rope, nail them all the more. But it's just that what condition must be the case in order for their statement to be true?

01:28:50

And it's just one of the basic things I do. And it's very powerful, very effective. And then you find out, or they'll find out that their statement is just basically arbitrary and doesn't work at self -refuting.

01:29:01

And then say, now let me introduce you to the absolutes found in the Trinitarian God. All right, very good.

01:29:07

The sire also asked the question, I think this might be fun or it might be boring if we all agree, where do any of you differ on presuppositionalism?

01:29:16

So we all agree that our foundation as presuppositionalist are the same.

01:29:22

And we would basically use in some context, a kind of or sort of transcendental form of reasoning.

01:29:29

But is there anything that any of you like to emphasize a little more than the other person or maybe you have slight differences or maybe someone secretly is a presuppositionalist of the more

01:29:39

Greemian flavor or Clarkian flavor? Anybody wanna give that one a shot?

01:29:45

Well, sire just asks, why do you hate God? I like to get involved in the conversation.

01:29:52

I'm a Clarkian, why do you hate God? Yeah, why do you hate God? So I think people think sire's a brilliant apologist.

01:30:00

He just knows one question. Why do you hate God? And he just, that's it.

01:30:06

But no, I would just say that there's a difference there. And we have certain emphases and certain talents and stuff.

01:30:14

I like to do stuff, believe it or not, for the benefit of the crowd listening. And so I like to go into more particulars a little bit and be a little bit more consistent because not everybody likes the answer, why do you hate

01:30:26

God? Not that it's not a good one, but to go into, you know, just different strengths and weaknesses.

01:30:32

Sure, sure. Now this is an interesting question. How should I respond to the objection that because of my schizophrenia,

01:30:39

I can't trust my own perceptions that contradicts the belief that I could know reason and logic for certain because of God's image?

01:30:48

How should I respond to the objection that because of my schizophrenia, I can't trust my own perceptions that contradicts the belief that I can know reason and logic for certain because of God's image?

01:31:01

I'm not sure if the question makes sense, but if you can kind of jive with what he's asking or she's asking, how would you interact with schizophrenia and the issue of certainty and logic and reason?

01:31:15

Well, I would start saying the reality of God's existence and logic is not dependent on whether or not you have schizophrenia or do not have schizophrenia.

01:31:25

And so you need to understand that the truth of this statement presupposes the universality of the laws of logic, which is independent of what you are.

01:31:33

Therefore, you can know truth, even though your schizophrenia might get in the way of really accepting and believing it.

01:31:40

And so what I would do is try and set a pattern apart from their schizophrenia of the universals that are there and already from that position.

01:31:49

That's one of the ways. Anybody else? I think

01:31:54

I'll jump in real quick. Just with our church, we do have a high... I go to a small church and I think this video

01:32:01

I'll probably share with some of our guys. We do have a high population of those with mental disability and various challenges.

01:32:09

Pastorally with those that are schizophrenic, I often mention that even just this question presuppose that we're in a fallen sinful world.

01:32:18

So Genesis, I think empirically, sin is very real and the brokenness in our world.

01:32:24

And it really fits in with the gloves of scripture as interpreting all this. So even with that,

01:32:30

I often pastorally just mentioned that all of us, even believers that people would say is right in the head, quote unquote, like socially speaking relatively in that cultural or social context.

01:32:41

Even then we often have various challenges of things that we don't believe correctly about ourself. We could be prideful.

01:32:48

We could assume our capability higher. So I think in light of this, the commonality of everyone with or without schizophrenic is we live in a fallen world.

01:32:57

And in light of a fallen world, I often will try to emphasize pastorally, this is where we got to hold to the gospel.

01:33:03

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I do think in light of even this question, when the reality and what's not reality is something that goes back and forth easily.

01:33:13

I also wanna say God's common grace, besides the word of God, is also sometimes often the community within the church also as well, that we're there, that we're also sounding board for what's our view of various people or things that they wanna do or things.

01:33:28

I think this is where God's common grace is the word and also with the fellowship. That's all based upon a biblical worldview.

01:33:36

Excellent, thank you so much for that. That's interesting, because that's a difficult question to kind of address.

01:33:42

I mean, we don't really think of mental disorders and how we kind of interact with that from an apologetics perspective.

01:33:49

So thank you for that. Scott Terry, thank you so much for your $10 super chat. Scott asks, seems there's a huge divide between pop presuppositionalist and academic

01:33:58

Vantillianism. If so, why and how do we work on bridging the gap

01:34:05

Joshua, why don't you take that question? I think you're very familiar with the more academic side of Vantillianism.

01:34:12

And of course you've interacted with what we typically see online and things like that. Yeah, I have seen this firsthand online.

01:34:20

It's nothing belligerent in any sort of way, but there is definitely a divide between what you would see precept used on the street as opposed to in some sort of formal educational institution or whatever.

01:34:35

The divide would obviously be from the intellectual aspect of it. If I'm gonna witness to my neighbor,

01:34:42

I'm not gonna go into some sort of big Kantian transcendental sort of exposition and how

01:34:48

Vantill drew from Kant. I mean, he's not gonna know any of that. But at the same time, that stuff is crucial because that's where Vantill derived his apologetic from.

01:34:58

And so in terms of bridging the gap, I mean, it's really just a matter of context and focus.

01:35:04

I mean, not everyone is called to be an academic. And so that doesn't detract from people witnessing on the street presuppositionally.

01:35:13

And if you're more academically inclined, that doesn't give you the right to just attack those who are not as academic as you are in terms of Vantill's apologetic.

01:35:22

Because at the end of the day, we're still trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to witness to a lost world. And so, yeah, that's basically just what

01:35:30

I would say. Now, Anthony, ooh, go ahead, I'm sorry. Do you wanna add to that?

01:35:35

Well, not if you're about to ask me a different question. No, well, I was gonna say, yeah,

01:35:41

I think one thing that might be involved in this question is the difference between somebody merely saying, you know

01:35:49

God exists, you know the Bible is his word, and what Vantill would do and actually demonstrate that, right?

01:35:57

He would actually, he's not just making a claim, and that's often what some people think is going on when presuppositionalists are doing this sort of thing on a street level, right?

01:36:06

We're just asserting over and over again, you know God, you're without excuse. We might say that, right? But that's more or less, at least for me, to provoke a discussion.

01:36:15

It's sort of like, that's what I think what Cy is doing when Cy says something like, why do you hate God? I don't think he just plans to say you hate

01:36:21

God and then walk away or something like that. He's trying to push the discussion along to some degree.

01:36:28

Maybe he would be more short than somebody else. Matt has mentioned that he likes to get into larger discussions, but I think that might be part of the thing.

01:36:37

And I remember years ago, it was interesting. You guys have probably all read, or certainly are aware of, maybe you didn't waste your time on, but Dawkins' book, right?

01:36:47

The God Delusion. And I remember it was interesting. In that book, he actually makes the claim that people are really atheists underneath.

01:36:57

They know that there is no God. And that sounds like what presuppositionalists are saying, right?

01:37:03

It's almost like he's reversing the claim. He's saying, no, you really know in your heart of hearts, there is no

01:37:08

God. Well, when Paul makes that statement in Romans 1, and he says that this is foolish, he then goes on to talk about, among other things, the fact that God, as a judicial response to this, delivers people over to their foolishness.

01:37:25

And so, for example, those who exchange the glory of the incorruptible God to worship that which is not

01:37:33

God, it says that God, as a punishment for this, gives man over to his own depraved heart, right?

01:37:41

To do things that shame himself, right? He gives man over to exchange the natural desire for the woman, you know, and so forth.

01:37:49

Well, what's interesting, and I just, you know, more could be said about this, but I found it extremely interesting that as you're reading

01:37:55

Dawkins' book, guess what Dawkins actually chooses to spend time defending in his book on atheism?

01:38:03

He's defending, you know, homosexuality in the book. And so, but here's the point, right?

01:38:10

Paul's talking about, he's talking about people suppressing the truth, and as a consequence of this, God gives them over to foolishness in their interactions with one another.

01:38:19

And here's Dawkins trying to claim that people in their heart of hearts are atheists.

01:38:25

He can't do something similar and say, you know, there's no teeth to what he's saying, right?

01:38:32

He can't prove that the Christian is presupposing atheism. Right, when I say it's wrong to murder your neighbor or take his car, how's he even gonna begin to try and prove that I'm presupposing atheism?

01:38:47

Right. But then in his very book, he actually argues that hand in hand with atheism is this idea of, you know, sexual perversion, you know, which

01:39:00

Paul says is part of the proof that, you know, God has given people over to foolishness.

01:39:06

I just found it somewhat, I mean, there's a more sophisticated, robust observation that can be made concerning this, but certainly people ought to at least scratch their head and say, why in the world does he suddenly start breaking out defending this in a book that's about atheism?

01:39:22

Sure, sure. Yeah, very good. Now here's a question for everyone and you can kind of chime in.

01:39:28

Anyone could randomly chime in here. What is the best or toughest argument against God you've heard?

01:39:35

Now, I know we're presuppositionalists. You can't argue unless you start with God.

01:39:41

I get it, I get it, but don't play yourself. You know that at some point, you had an interaction with someone and they brought something up and you were like, that's a good point.

01:39:55

I need to think about that a little bit. So let's not pretend that we've never been almost stumped.

01:40:01

So if you've almost been stumped, I'm not saying that you didn't have an answer eventually or you found a way - I don't know what you're talking about,

01:40:07

Eli. Yeah, right, right, right. You know, we wanna be humble and admit our own shortcomings.

01:40:12

Has there ever been an argument? And by the way, if you say no, that's totally fine because I've heard some horrible arguments that people think are so awesome and I'm just like,

01:40:22

I don't see it. But has there ever been an argument that has been presented to you that really -

01:40:28

Welcome back, Sai. I'm probably having some technical difficulties there. You look good there. The question is, have we ever confronted a super tough argument against God that, just to give

01:40:41

Sai some context, he just came in. We know that as presuppositionalists, you can't argue without God as a foundation, but has there ever been something that someone has presented that really gave you pause and like, huh, how can

01:40:52

I address that? Anyone, it's open to anyone. Feel free to share. It's the toughest objection against God you've ever heard.

01:41:01

Well, you know mine. Well, why don't you share? Because I've dealt with it at length. Yeah. It wasn't aimed at Vantill, but the criticism was by Barry Stroud.

01:41:13

And so basically, well, we start with Christianity and we show how God is the necessary precondition for the intelligibility of human experience.

01:41:21

And so we lay out, you know, the metaphysical scheme of Christianity and give it to the unbeliever and say that if you reject this position, you're reduced to absurdity.

01:41:28

You can't make sense out of anything. Then, well, you know, a wise unbeliever might say, well, hold on.

01:41:34

You haven't proven that God is actually real. You've only proven that we have to believe that God exists and we have to believe these propositions in the

01:41:42

Bible. And therefore that we just have to believe that Christianity is true to be rational, but you haven't actually proven that God actually exists and that he's really real.

01:41:50

And that, you know, this all isn't just some grand illusion or whatever. That stumped me for the better half of a year.

01:41:57

Eli, I have to tell you, that's why I've written like three papers on this thing. The way out of it was to just take a step back and realize that, well, hold on.

01:42:08

Everyone has their own presuppositions. And so the criticism comes from a secular point of view.

01:42:14

It assumes implicitly that we're all stuck in our egocentric pictures. It's some sort of Kantian divide where we can't really know what's outside of us.

01:42:21

So we have to prove that. We can't just say that God exists and that's what we start with because that's not the default position.

01:42:28

But of course, that's what's being taken for granted, isn't it? Because he's assumed that that's the default position. We start with the metaphysical picture that we're in touch with the external world, that we're in touch with God directly, with the scriptures and so forth, that we have knowledge of God.

01:42:42

And so that criticism just takes for granted that that metaphysical picture where we don't know for sure is the default position, that that's true until proven otherwise.

01:42:52

And so basically it just amounts to a big begging of the question or special pleading, if you will. And so that's what

01:43:00

I had to struggle with for a long time. Basically that we're dealing with worldviews, not just beliefs, but we're coming to the table with different views of reality itself, not just what we believe cognitively internal to us.

01:43:12

Okay, excellent. Thank you for that. Here's a question. We're gonna start wrapping things up.

01:43:19

I'm gonna get to some of the super chats, but there are a couple of questions I wanna make sure we hit. I wanna get the super chats.

01:43:24

There's just two of them here. And then there's a really good question that I think will be helpful for people to see how a presuppositionalist might address it.

01:43:31

So Jacob, thank you so much for your $5 super chat. Jacob asks, what is your thoughts? And if you don't have any background in philosophy, that's fine.

01:43:38

We can answer the question as best we can. Well, what are your thoughts on Kant's one and only proof for God's existence?

01:43:45

It has here work slash argument. And do you think this was any motivation in Van Til? So maybe a little bit on the role of Kant's argumentation as it relates to what

01:43:54

Van Til was trying to do. I don't know, maybe Brian or Joshua or anyone else who feels comfortable addressing that.

01:44:01

Well, the better answers are given. Let me make an observation really quickly.

01:44:06

I think others are probably more sophisticated philosophically than I am. I would just observe this.

01:44:12

Van Til believed that Kant was right in the sense that you need to have a precondition of intelligibility.

01:44:22

But he believed that Kant's answer was wrong. Kant's answer was wrong.

01:44:28

He got it all fancy. Kant's answer, he couldn't have done it. So he believed it was the right question but the wrong answer.

01:44:35

And interestingly enough, if you read Van Til's writings, Kant is the person that he considers himself most antithetical to in terms of something like human autonomy.

01:44:44

He thinks that Kant was the epitome of the pursuit of autonomy.

01:44:52

Kant epitomized this better than anyone. So those that like to just dismiss Van Til as being

01:44:58

Kantian have kind of, they've missed something fundamental, I think. Anyone else wanna jump on that one?

01:45:05

Yeah, Jacob, I think I answered your question in the chat. I don't know if you read it or what. I've never heard of Kant's one and only proof for God's existence.

01:45:14

Kant categorized God into the numeral category. He exists outside of our immediate phenomenal experiences.

01:45:20

So we can't really know who or what God is. We can believe that God exists as what he called a postulate of practical reason, meaning that we can't really prove that God is real but we have to still believe that God exists for the practical purposes of everyday experience.

01:45:38

So I'm not sure what this proof that Kant was arguing for as it relates to God's existence is unless I've just overlooked something in my studies of Kant.

01:45:47

But as far as I know, Kant created such a divide between the phenomenal and numeral that we just can't know what or who

01:45:54

God is. Okay, all right, thank you for that. Now -

01:46:00

If I could just jump in just real quick with that part. Go for it, Bill, go ahead. I know sometimes there's objection to precept that we're

01:46:07

Kantians. I mean, there's all kinds of things against precept, right? I've even heard, you guys perhaps have even heard that presuppositionalists were postmodern, which is kind of strange, the movement, the timing of that, and even when

01:46:17

Vantil. To me, I think part of even the role of Kant and even

01:46:23

Vantil is, again, there could be much more deeper in this.

01:46:28

I think there's also the context that Kant really influenced a lot of Western philosophy since his time period.

01:46:35

I mean, even every other major philosophers from there, even David Hume talk about like he woke up from his dogmatic slumber from interacting.

01:46:43

So I think we must make a clear distinction between grasping what

01:46:49

Kant is trying to say and then responding as a Christian with some of the categories that he's laid out with some of that language with 18th century, early 1900s idealism in interacting with Kant versus actually us being

01:47:04

Kantians. So I think that's part of that. That was the language of even the way he was trained in philosophy.

01:47:11

But again, you really see he's, even from all of his work, he's trying to put everything in a biblical view in understanding the context of contemporary philosophy as he was interacting and older philosophy as he was understanding from a

01:47:25

Christian worldview. Okay, thank you for that. I'd like Sai and Brian to take this next question.

01:47:31

And this is a good question and anyone could chime in after that, but how does one use presuppositional apologetics against one who says we have the wrong canon?

01:47:40

So you might, so this is a question that can deal with, for example, how do we use presuppositionalism against the

01:47:47

Roman Catholic or the Eastern Orthodox or anyone? Now, I know Sai often says, well,

01:47:55

I'm by the grace of God, God uses me to preach the gospel and to defend the faith and God has used you in a very awesome ways, but I'm just a boiler room operator.

01:48:06

And that is the specific reason why I ask you this question because chances are you probably don't have in -depth study in canonical issues.

01:48:14

Now, maybe you have, but I wanna ask you so to show that you don't necessarily have to be in -depth studied in this area to give a biblically -based presuppositional response.

01:48:26

So to your best ability, if you were speaking with someone who says, hey, you have the wrong canon of scripture, how do you deal with that based upon your presuppositional perspective?

01:48:37

And maybe, and maybe I'm assuming too much and maybe kind of a limited knowledge of canonical studies.

01:48:43

I can give you a specific example of how I deal with Roman Catholics. Because very often when

01:48:50

I'm on the street, doing evangelizing, I'll have a Roman Catholic come up to me and they'll thank me for what

01:48:57

I'm doing. And I'm actually gracious with them. I say, I really appreciate that you come up and thank me for this, but do you understand that your church teaches that I'm condemned to hell for what

01:49:09

I believe? And they kind of look at me puzzled. I say, yeah, I believe in salvation by faith in Christ alone. And your church teaches that if you believe in salvation by faith in Christ alone, then you're anathema.

01:49:21

And that's what I believe. And so, I don't get into the canonicity issue.

01:49:27

I think there's gotcha answers, but again, I'm mostly concerned for their soul.

01:49:33

So, and the interesting thing about that is a lot of Roman Catholics that you meet on the street, when you say that you believe in salvation by faith in Christ alone, they say they believe that as well.

01:49:42

They don't know that their church teaches that that's anathema. So, I like to meet them on that level and tell them what

01:49:48

I believe and how their church teaches that I'm cursed for it. And if they really believe that, then they need to study what their church teaches and get out of that church.

01:49:55

Sure, sure. All right, how about you, Brian? I would say, why do you think I have the wrong canon?

01:50:03

And this depends entirely on how the question is phrased, but I would eventually get them back to that same point.

01:50:09

I mean, the way it's worded, how do you press up against somebody saying you've got the wrong canon? So, they're telling me or they're saying, why do

01:50:16

I think, you know, how do I know I have the right canon? I mean, the corpus of scripture, the entire writings of God, I ultimately know in the same way the

01:50:30

Roman Catholic knows, in a sense, and that is based on faith. This is something

01:50:35

I think that we overlook. And that is, at the end of the day, and Bonson says this very clearly in his lecture series on the transcendental argument, we accept the authority of scripture from God.

01:50:49

It's entirely based on authority. And Van Til says the same thing, that philosophers will say, wait a minute, you're just accepting this on authority?

01:50:57

That destroys your whole philosophy. And he comes back and says, no, this is the only salvation for philosophy as a whole.

01:51:05

So, it ultimately comes down to what we talked about before, and that is the content of the canon, the content of the revelation.

01:51:13

So, when somebody starts to ask you questions about the content of the revelation, where you're comparing the content of your revelation, as it were, against theirs, that's where you need to find out a little bit more about who they are and what their revelation is.

01:51:29

Now, as a Roman Catholic, you know, I think we know the majority of what their canon is, and we know, hopefully, what their different interpretations of that are.

01:51:40

And at that point, we can talk about the question of authority. But it really is, it's a question of comparing content, right, if, put it this way, if Protestantism is true, then this follows.

01:51:55

If Roman Catholicism is true, then this follows. It's always the comparison of your worldview against their worldview.

01:52:03

Right, I thought this is, thank you for that. I thought this was a funny comment. Just shoot them with your canon, and then they'll know it's the right one.

01:52:13

That's awesome. All right, go for it.

01:52:18

Yeah, one of the things that Van Til often used to say is that the foundational authority for Christians, this is just one way he used to express this, is the self -attesting

01:52:29

God speaking through Christ in scripture. That's our ultimate authority. The Christ who speaks in scripture doesn't affirm the apocryphal books of the

01:52:40

Roman Catholic Church or the additional or more confused collection of books found in Eastern Orthodoxy.

01:52:46

Eastern Orthodoxy actually is not as consistent across the board as some people might think.

01:52:52

Different canons among Eastern Orthodox people. But anyways, Jesus didn't affirm that canon.

01:52:58

So Jesus speaking in scripture affirmed the canon that Protestants believe today. So there's nothing inconsistent presuppositionally with us affirming the canon, we do.

01:53:11

Excellent. All right, can I add one more thought? Sorry. Yep, go for it. Go ahead and go for it. Sorry, Matt. You can go right after Jimmy.

01:53:19

Okay, yeah, just real quick. I think we have to make a distinction between recognizing the canon and determining the canon.

01:53:26

We in the church, the human responsibility part is recognizing. This ties in earlier to even some of the different views of textual criticism.

01:53:35

I think you often see those that are apocryphal were never accepted geographically in various places.

01:53:43

You see them in various, especially some of the really weird ones, like including Book of Enoch, you see, for instance, it only exists like a

01:53:51

Sudanese version or Ethiopian version and only one really good copy or they're only localized in a small locale for various reason, for various local agenda or ecclesiastical agenda of the area.

01:54:04

So I think we need to recognize that, but Matt Slick, you were gonna say more. Yeah, I get this a lot from Catholics and I just say what you just said a little bit differently, but it's the same thing.

01:54:15

I say the canon is established by God as soon as the first pen wrote, the first part of the

01:54:21

New Testament, for example, it was already inspired. And we know this because Jesus said, my sheep hear my voice,

01:54:27

John 10, 27. He's our authority. And he doesn't say that the church determines the canon.

01:54:34

If anything, it's the canon that gives the foundation for the church's existence, the declaration of bishops, elders, apostles, prophets, and scripture is what they base it upon.

01:54:44

So the church is not in authority over the canon, nor does it have the authority to determine the canon. It only recognizes the canon because the church is comprised of the sheep who hear the voice of God.

01:54:54

And they say, oh, that's scripture. They don't say, I'm determining it's scripture. They say, we're recognizing it as scripture because of the sheep of God.

01:55:03

The Roman Catholic church, and I do a lot of talking on it, what it wants to do is say, it has the superior authority over all things and salvation must be in the church, through its sacraments, through everything that it establishes.

01:55:16

And it is the one that will determine what the Bible is because it wants to submit the scriptures to its authority and ultimately put it under its own ecclesiastical feet.

01:55:26

Very good. By the way, interjection, one of the favorite things that I learned in dealing with Roman Catholic was from Matt Slick.

01:55:33

And the question that he will ask them, he'll say, is Jesus sufficient for forgiveness of your sins?

01:55:39

Yeah. Say yes. And then he'll ask if they'll pray with him. And he'll pray to Jesus for forgiveness of sin.

01:55:46

And often they won't do that because they, you know, he'll expose that they don't believe that Jesus forgiveness of their sins, that they have to go through a priest.

01:55:55

But I love how he sets them up for us. He asked him that question. Then he says, ask if he'll pray with them. And of course, if they say they will,

01:56:00

I mean, Matt can talk about that as well, but then he'll pray with them for forgiveness of the sins and ask them, do you believe that your sins are forgiven now and then show the contrast between that and what to do.

01:56:10

Right. Excellent. Excellent. All right. Well, this would not be an epic discussion if we didn't creep up to two hours.

01:56:16

So we're going to wrap things up here. You guys did an excellent job. I'm looking at a lot of the, I can't even, we can't even get to all the questions.

01:56:23

We'd be here forever. This has been a super fascinating conversation. A lot of people are finding it beneficial and a lot of people actually like the format with multiple people here.

01:56:34

And I hope that everyone feels like they got a fair shot in terms of answering questions and sharing their thoughts.

01:56:40

I tried my best to kind of move around as best I can. It can be difficult, but I've enjoyed this a lot. So let's wrap things up.

01:56:46

And I just want to go to each one of you in a minute or less. Okay.

01:56:52

Ready? Cy, I am an atheist. Refute me. I don't believe in God.

01:56:58

One minute or less. That's what the Bible says. Unpack that for us. You know, it's funny because I've been, this one woman, she's from Pennsylvania.

01:57:08

She has evangelism on the street with her husband. And it's happened to her twice where a professional atheist has come up to her and says,

01:57:13

I'm an atheist. And she says, no, you're not. And they kind of, yeah. And her jaw dropped to the floor because she thought she'd have an extensive argument about trying to refute the fact that they're not atheists.

01:57:25

But you know, it's as simple as that. I just say, that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says we know there's God. And now what's going to happen?

01:57:32

Tragedy in their life. Are they going to come and argue philosophy with them for six hours or the one who got to the heart of the issue?

01:57:39

That by the power of the Holy Spirit, by the grace of God, they're going to come to the person that spoke the truth to them and wasn't by their argument.

01:57:47

All right. Thank you for that. Anthony Rogers, I'm Ali Dawa. Ali Dawa is here, man. He just came into the chat and he goes, hey,

01:57:54

Anthony, you don't know anything, bro. Islam is the truth. How can you, how would you,

01:57:59

I can't do an Ali Dawa impression. But if you could refute, if you had one minute with Ali Dawa who said,

01:58:07

Islam is true. How would you in a minute or less unleash an attempted refutation of Islam within that span?

01:58:18

Well, there are any number of ways to do that. I could either point to the fact that if the Quran is what it claims to be, the revelation of the

01:58:24

God that I described earlier, who has created a world that he's forever locked out of, then the

01:58:30

Quran can't be what it claims to be. And therefore we have no reason to believe that the God it talks about is the

01:58:35

God who is. But I could also point to the fact that the Quran in numerous places, surah three, three, surah five, over and over again, speaks of the

01:58:44

Old and New Testament scriptures as given by God. And not only as authoritative when given, but in the possession at the time of Muhammad, in the possession of Jews and Christians, and even requires that the

01:59:00

Quran requires Christians to, not that it's authoritative over us, but for the Muslim, it's authoritative.

01:59:06

It says that Jews and Christians stand on nothing unless they stand on the scriptures that were given by God and judged by them.

01:59:14

In fact, Muhammad in the Quran, one of the fascinating things about the Quran is that Muhammad is often subject to doubt, and those doubts are apparent in the

01:59:23

Quran. The Quran is supposed to be Allah's direct speech to Muhammad and from Muhammad to others.

01:59:30

Well, in surah 1094, addressing Muhammad, Allah says to him, if you are in doubt about what we have revealed, ask those who were given the scriptures before you, meaning the

01:59:42

Jews and Christians. So I always tell people, and in this case, I'd say to Ali Dawa, you've come to the right person.

01:59:48

Your God told you to come to me and ask me if you're in doubt, if what

01:59:53

Muhammad was disclosing to people is true, and my answer to you is no, it's wrong.

02:00:00

And if you say that you can't trust me, well then, your God gave you bad advice.

02:00:06

Your God told your prophet and you by implication to come to people like me. And if you can't come to people like me and get a good answer, then you've gotten bad advice.

02:00:16

Your God is not in the business of giving good advice. Excellent. Those are my simple approaches.

02:00:23

There's more sophisticated things we can say. Sure, sure, excellent. All right, Pastor Jimmy, okay.

02:00:29

Here's a question that I heard. Someone who was criticizing presuppositional apologetics and presuppositionalism, the argument was that it is not pastoral because it does not take into consideration the genuine doubts that believers struggle with.

02:00:44

If you, Pastor Jim, are so certain of the Bible, what does that say about me when

02:00:49

I do not feel certain? I'm struggling with doubt. There must be something wrong with me. So, how do you interact with a person struggling with doubt within the church and they see you coming off as so certain of the

02:01:03

Bible and they're saying, I don't have that certainty. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. What's going on?

02:01:08

How can you speak to that from a pastoral perspective in 60 seconds or less? Yeah, in 60 seconds or less,

02:01:14

I would say encourage them to read the Bible and I'll probably open the Bible and go with them through the gospel. Just seeing the

02:01:20

Old Testament, how it points towards Christ, all its various messianic prophecies, all its beauty about its description about God's grace and salvation with systematic theology, and even also, as well, biblical theology, how it marches towards the cross, and even also mention, even going further, even just saying about the biblical view of sinfulness is so real that their doubt and their struggles, that believer struggles from books like the

02:01:43

Psalms, Scripture account for that, and yet in all of that, God is growing us even through that, making sure that they're really a believer, making sure that they are from that to say,

02:01:52

Scripture is what you need as your journey with your doubt, with all of this. Excellent, very good.

02:01:58

I like you, man. I just met you. I gotta have you back on. We gotta talk some more. I like your passion, man.

02:02:04

There's a genuine, I mean, I love all you guys, but there's a genuineness that comes across in when you share, and it just,

02:02:10

I love that. All right, Matt, okay? Ready? No. I am a

02:02:16

Roman Catholic. And you've been lying to me this whole time? You know your problem. I'm role -playing, right?

02:02:23

I am Hispanic, a lot of Hispanic, they're Roman Catholics, you know? So I'm role -playing. I am a

02:02:28

Roman Catholic. The problem with you, Matt, is that you have the wrong authority.

02:02:34

You are not part of the correct church. You could quote your Scripture, Matt, but it's our church that gave you that Scripture, right?

02:02:43

Without mother church guiding you, bro, you would be lost, you are lost.

02:02:49

I mean, Matt is a Presbyterian, and James White is a Baptist. Look at all the division that you guys have.

02:02:56

In 60 seconds or less, how do you precept a Roman Catholic who comes from that angle?

02:03:02

Go for it. Well, they're always affirming the authority of the Catholic church.

02:03:07

And I just turn it on them. I say, how do you know the Catholic church is true? That's it.

02:03:14

Preceptitionally, by the impossibility of the contrary. It is the God's authority in the church.

02:03:19

There's no other higher authority. So - Where'd you get that documentation? Where'd you get it from?

02:03:26

I do this all the time with them. I just say, they say, I just ask them, well, where's that founded? And they don't wanna go to the

02:03:33

Scriptures and say that's where they get it. They don't wanna do that. And I'm always pointing to the Scriptures. That's what happens.

02:03:39

I have this kind of conversation pretty frequently, two, three times a month. It's pretty common.

02:03:45

And you just wanna get them to believe or not to believe, but you want you do. We just wanna get them to, well, what are you talking about?

02:03:51

What authority? Where'd you get that? How do you know the Catholic church is true? Because you feel it, it doesn't work. Because the Catholic church said so, then how do you know it's true?

02:03:58

Well, because the Bible says, now we're talking. So which is the authority you're gonna go to? And then they'll say, well, you interpreted this or that.

02:04:06

And I'll say, how do you know what interpretation is the right one? Since the

02:04:11

Roman Catholic church has only officially interpreted, I think 11 verses in 2000 years.

02:04:17

So how do you know you're interpreting the Roman Catholic church correctly? Well, because we just read it according to what the

02:04:25

Scripture says. I usually at that point go to Luke or John. I'm saying that's a reply to the Roman Catholic.

02:04:30

I know. If they're asking us about, I'm not supposed to jump over the question. No, I get that too.

02:04:38

I think what Brian is getting at is, if a Roman Catholic challenges your interpretation of Scripture because you don't have the authority, it's like, how do you know that's the right interpretation?

02:04:46

Well, when Rome proclaims doctrines authoritatively, you still have to exegete

02:04:51

Rome's authoritative declaration. And not even Roman Catholics agree on everything that Rome says. That's right.

02:04:57

That's right. Just take them to Luke 11 35, Jesus wept. And I say,

02:05:03

I'm gonna interpret this. I'm gonna interpret it. My interpretation is that he wept.

02:05:09

Okay, he cried. So do I need authority to get that right? Am I right? They'll say, yes. Okay, well, then

02:05:15

I need authority for that? No. Well, let's continue with this. Right. That means what you just pointed out there, the reality is that because the word of God is in human language,

02:05:23

God has seen fit to make human language a sufficient mechanism to convey his truth. And we're able to talk about that language and understand it.

02:05:31

I like that. Now, Jesus wept is theologically important because it emphasizes his humanity.

02:05:37

So they can't just say, well, only in areas of theology because that's also a theological truth as well.

02:05:43

You'd also take it in Romans 14 five, which says one man regards one day above another and other regards every day alike.

02:05:48

Let each man be fully convinced in his own mind. If we're supposed to subject ourselves to the authoritative interpretive methodology of the

02:05:56

Roman Catholic Church, then why does Paul say that Romans 14 five? He wouldn't say that if your position was correct.

02:06:03

So can you please interpret that verse for me? And as soon as they start, it's over for them.

02:06:09

Okay. All right. Thank you for that. Joshua in 60 seconds or less. Okay. I don't need presuppositionalism.

02:06:16

I'm an evidentialist. You're the only one that's gonna get this one. I do not need your presuppositional foundation for knowledge.

02:06:27

I can start with direct acquaintance. David, is that you?

02:06:37

Sorry. Sorry, Andrew. If David ever watches this, I love you. And you know, I love you. I'm never belligerent against you or anything.

02:06:46

Yes. You're muted, Eli. I don't know what you said. All right. So direct acquaintance.

02:06:52

I don't need presuppositions. I'm directly acquainted with my experience. So no presuppositions.

02:06:57

And so presuppositionalism is false when it appeals to a circular foundation. I have a non -circular foundation.

02:07:03

Direct acquaintance. Go. Congratulations. You've just subjectivized everything that you just said because it's your direct acquaintance.

02:07:11

You have 8 billion other people in the world to go through with their direct acquaintances to what really is and isn't true.

02:07:19

Yeah. I mean, there's really nothing else to it. That's basically a foundationalist approach where, well, I hold to these presuppositions and I have to hold to them because that's what makes discourse rational.

02:07:29

Like, you know, nature is uniform or my senses are reliable or whatever. But I can't justify them.

02:07:35

I just have to presuppose them. Well, I mean, I don't have to say anything else at that point. I mean, everything's just subjectivized to your opinion.

02:07:41

So who cares? I have an objective reference point that his name's God and I can make sense out of, you know, the intelligibility of human experience objectively, not just subjectively according to my direct acquaintance.

02:07:54

So according to your position, you've just subjectivized everything. You've spoken to the mic too long. You've hung yourself. You've reduced yourself to absurdity.

02:08:01

So my work's done in that regard. Now let me show you the Christian position and show why you need my position, why you rely on my position in order to reject my position.

02:08:10

Excellent, very good. And Brian, you get the cherry on the top. There's no such thing as a conversation, discussion on presuppositionalism without this question.

02:08:23

I imagine it was somewhere in the comments, okay? How would you respond to the irrefutable objection to presuppositionalism?

02:08:32

But it's circular, bro. There you go.

02:08:38

It's circular. How can you hold to a circular apologetic that's redonkulous? Go ahead. Okay, well, presupp is not circular.

02:08:47

Arguments are circular, right? So if I'm going to make an argument and I'm going to assume the thing that ends up in my conclusion, then that's circular.

02:08:57

There is what's called epistemic circularity when we're talking about the wider circle or as opposed to the vicious circle, the, what's the term,

02:09:05

Cy? The - Virtuous. Virtuous circle, right. So I would say that not all circularity is fallacious.

02:09:15

And here's why, just going back to what Joshua said from the perspective of everybody is starting with presuppositions, even if they say they have something like direct acquaintance or something else that allows them to escape that circle.

02:09:30

And we can go to scripture to show that. It is the nature of the way God created us and our limitations as compared to him, that we cannot be autonomous.

02:09:42

So we don't get the luxury of arguing without that circle.

02:09:47

So would you make a distinction between reasoning in a circle and arguing in a circle? Is that an important distinction to make or?

02:09:56

Well, I mean, in other words, as a presuppositionalist, we're reasoning in a circle in the sense that we're presupposing the

02:10:02

God they were arguing for, but our argument is not. Let me clarify this by saying, as a presuppositionalist, as an apologist, according to scripture, we're called to give an answer for the hope that's in us, right?

02:10:16

That doesn't always require proving God, right? So the whole idea of circularity doesn't even necessarily enter into the kind of circle of conversation unless we go there right at the beginning, which a lot of people do, or the person that we're talking with eventually gets to the point, well, how do you know the

02:10:33

Bible is true? And it's fair to say because God revealed it on authority to me. And then if they keep pushing, sure, at some point, we're gonna get to our most basic foundation.

02:10:43

But as long as we are presupposing scripture and we're not trying to prove it from a neutral perspective, we're arguing presuppositionally.

02:10:51

We're not giving up our belief in the truth of scripture and it's always informing our answer and we are not shy about that.

02:11:00

That's what makes a presuppositionalist. Eli, if I may interject here. Sure. I'm not gonna explain it all.

02:11:05

This will be a cliffhanger if we ever do this again. And I think it was Scott who asked the question or addressed the fact that there are educated

02:11:14

Vantillians of any of your street Vantillians. I will tell you right now that there are three distinct types of circular reasoning involved in presuppositionalism.

02:11:22

I'm not gonna get into it, but there are three different types of circular reasoning and all of them are different and all of them can be addressed individually.

02:11:29

But I'll just leave that out there. There are three different types, all different in nature and all have their own explanation and all of them are completely rational.

02:11:36

I'm just gonna say that. Come on, man. All right, well, that's a good little hangover. Types of people that raise the objection.

02:11:44

If an unbeliever says it's circular, I say, what's wrong with that? Exactly, it's subjective. Yeah, and if it's a

02:11:50

Christian that says it's circular, you'd start saying, R .C. Spruill, I love R .C. Spruill, but he would say he starts with human reason.

02:11:56

How do you know that's valid? Well, it's from God. The difference between us and that is that we do not see the rest of the circularity when people, for some reason, do not see their own circularity.

02:12:08

Yeah. Everybody presupposes conditions that they assume to be true by which they then argue.

02:12:14

Everybody is circular. We just ask them, well, which worldview can account for the circularity and make sense of the presupposition?

02:12:21

Hey, there's one of them. There you go. He's like, you wanna hear the next two?

02:12:26

You gotta wait. Yeah, you gotta wait till next time. I just want to tell each and every one of you guys,

02:12:33

I appreciate so much that you guys have given me so much of your time for this awesome conversation.

02:12:39

I hope that you guys enjoyed this conversation, and I know a lot of people have found it super helpful, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

02:12:45

I appreciate each and every one of your ministries, what you guys are doing, especially for some of you guys to have more content out there, to be able to see how

02:12:53

God is using that in so many different ways, and each one of you has blessed me in different ways as well, so I appreciate you as partners in ministry, brothers in Christ, and I love you guys, and I appreciate you guys.

02:13:05

Thank you so much for coming on. Bless you, Eli. Thank you, Eli. Thank you for having us. Ladies and gentlemen, if you've enjoyed this discussion, click the like button, share it, re -watch it.

02:13:16

I'm actually gonna take some segments of this and make shorter videos so that people can kind of hopefully get to a specific question that they wanna hear in isolation.

02:13:25

So thank you so much for listening, guys. This concludes our epic precept conversation.

02:13:30

Until next time, I'm gonna plan one in the future, an epic Calvinist discussion. That should be fun as well.