Theology and Apologetics Seminar Part 3

The Difference Between Evidential and Presuppositional Apologetics

The last time we were together we briefly began to introduce the subject of apologetics. I basically gave you a definition of the differences between evidential and presuppositional apologetics, and explained to you how those dovetail with what we've discussed concerning theology, concerning the nature of God, and soteriology, and everything else we have studied, and how we must start with examining the basis upon which a person thinks.

This week I want to start by looking at some passages of scripture out of 1st Corinthians. You have them on your first handout on the back page. The first there are a couple more of the first handout over on this table.

But I'd like you to think and you know given what we've already talked about relevant to presuppositions, things like that, I'd like you to listen to what Paul says in 1st Corinthians chapters 1 and 2, and think about what is behind what he is saying.

Verses 18 to 21 Paul says,. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

Now here he begins a discussion of the differences between what he calls the foolishness of God, which obviously isn't to be taken in such a way as to say that there is foolishness with God, but he is speaking from the human perspective.

The preaching of the cross is foolishness to mankind. I'll give you some examples of that this evening. But he talks about the the foolishness of the message of the cross in comparison to the power of God and what is in reality, if he wasn't using a term, the wisdom of God.

Notice verse 21,. For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him. That's very interesting. This fact that the world through its wisdom, through its rationality, through its thinking cannot come to a true knowledge of God is part of God's wisdom itself.

I think that goes back somewhat to what we were saying last time when I talked about why I have problems approaching a person completely on an evidential basis to simply lay out the facts in front of them and say, well hey, it's obvious, isn't it?

I think part of the reason is, and part of my strong disagreement with the Roman Catholic natural theology, the idea that man can, by his reason alone, come to a true knowledge of God, is that it bypasses the fact that God has revealed himself.

Revealed himself in Jesus Christ, revealed himself all around us. I think this is what Paul is sort of referring to when he says,. For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased to the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believed.

He doesn't stop there. Look at verse 25. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Verses 27 and 28. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world, and to despise things, and the things that are not, to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.

Verse 29 continues on. There is a strong dichotomy in what he is saying here between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God. They are two separate things in chapter 2, verse 6. We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.

No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden, and that God destined for our glory before time began. In the last passages we'll look at right now, verses 12 through 14. We have not received the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.

This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

The Wisdom of God Versus the Wisdom of the World

Now, if our apologetics is to be preeminently biblical, then we must understand that we are dealing with God's wisdom and man's wisdom, and the two do not mix well. Let me give you some examples. I've talked to you all about the fact that I spend actually a fairly decent amount of time doing something called BBSing, which is using my computer to tie into computer bulletin boards and talking to other people.

You leave a post, someone else leaves a post and replies, and a lot of people read your post and some reply, some don't. I went through a number of my posts today, some of them I got yesterday, some I got last night, some were from six or eight months ago.

I'm going to spend some time reading you some of the things said by the individuals I have encountered, and none of these that I'll read you are from Christians. So as I'm reading these, I want you to try to think back over the things we've said and think about what we've said about the fact that we believe that God is the central reference point of all that is, that life has meaning because God is created as such, and that there is an absolute truth because there is an absolute God.

Think about this and try to relate it to what you're hearing from these people who are not Christians. You may be surprised at some of the things they say. Sometimes we are so locked up in our own little Christian circles that we don't run into the world enough to know what in the world they're saying out there.

Others are not in that situation, but listen to what they have to say. First one, what is true for you is not true for others. You are as subjective as the rest of us, and while you believe you have found objective reality, so do millions of other folks with different ideas.

In other words, please do not assert that your version of truth is truth. The first truth, small t, second capital T. This is absurd. It's your belief. By the way, well then he goes on from there. Next one, I assume that when you refer to mankind as sinners, you refer to the concept of original sin and not to the miscellaneous infractions that we commit throughout our lives.

Try as I may, I have trouble dealing with this. It seems illogical for all of mankind to be held accountable for the sins of the first two of our kind. Does the Bible give any insight as to how God justifies this?

If God is justified in this sort of action, are we not equally justified, for example, in punishing the offspring of a murderer? After all, they came from the same flesh as the sinner, just as we did from the original sinner, from a gentleman who directly says he is an atheist.

If it is possible for morality to be grounded in God's nature, then it is also possible for morality to be grounded in nature's nature, i .e., an atheistic objective morality. How do you know that God has not made child molesting good?

You are making a lot of assumptions there. What is the mechanism by which a subjective being can obtain objective knowledge of the state of God's moral beliefs? Your answer clearly presupposes acceptance of a particular set of Christian dogma.

That's from an atheist. Pretty interesting how clearly he can see that. In a recent message, you confirmed that your belief is that God designed man and woman. Of course, I had always assumed that to be your belief, but it is timely to see it so stated by you.

Inclusive in that design would have to be our nature. Specifically, it would contain functional limitations within which we must operate, limited by our physical and mental design. We know that we are relatively unbounded in terms of the types of behavior we can exhibit.

I assume Adam and Eve are similarly free to behave as they pleased and chose to sin. However, it is obvious that the behavioral whim does not bring about a profound change in one's nature, nor does it initiate a genetic mutation to pass on to offspring.

God had to be aware of this aspect of his design, and logically would conclude that, like Adam and Eve, some would sin while others might not. The point is, our nature did not change when Adam and Eve sinned.

It simply remained as God had designed it. This one's interesting because this fella is probably the most radical atheist I've ever encountered. Imagine, if you will, all the pain and suffering that has transpired since man came upon this sphere.

Well, you can't really. None of us can't even imagine one millionth of it, but give it a try. Now then, I accuse God for all of it. He knew it would happen and is therefore directly responsible for it, and there has been a lot.

Now imagine the fun that has taken place in the same period and put it on one side of a beam-balanced scale, and the hurt on the other side, and oops, no comparison. I hereby sentence God to 20 human lives, the first one in Nicaragua, the second in Iran, the third in India, etc.

Let the dude see what a sharp world he has created. Let him eat dirt like the rest of us. Now, all we've got to do is figure a way to capture that elusive entity. Any suggestions? From another person, you then admit the possibility that there isn't a God, that Jesus Christ isn't real, that the whole Bible could be a fraud.

I doubt that. Your opinion that you raise to the divine is that the Bible is the Word of God, but that is only an opinion. Either it is a divine opinion or it can be wrong. If it can be wrong, then you have no absolutes.

You need a course in logic. The difference between 40 ,000 and 400 ,000 is not dismissed because you wish it so, and it's quite reasonable to expect a God that has given His Word to protect it from typos, which quite easily can make conceptual errors.

This person, by the way, we had had some exchange concerning textual criticism. It is you who don't follow your logic to a conclusion consistent with your premises. You, on the other hand, call me a sinner, and that is not your right.

And just because you have a religious belief that calls everyone a sinner doesn't give you the right to use that terminology on others who don't agree with you, and expect them not to be insulted. Believing in a God doesn't free you from the bonds of common decency.

I am not a sinner, have never been a sinner, and will never be a sinner. So if you don't insult me anymore, I would appreciate it. Same person, the inescapable logic that you fail to see is that your opinions and beliefs are merely opinions and beliefs and not absolutes.

They are opinions that the Bible is the Word of God, opinions that Jesus Christ is the Savior, opinions that there is a God, and have no more weight than anyone else's opinion. It is also your opinion that people are sinners based on your opinions in the above stated items.

So no bullpucky about you don't say it, you don't say it, the Bible says it, because it is you who says the Bible is truth, in all capitals. Well, the Bible says it too, but to believe something is true because it says it is true is simply following.

You have a right to your beliefs, opinions, but do not have a right to claim absolute knowledge nor to lay those beliefs on others. Personally, I don't claim in sacrifice, I don't believe in sacrifices of animals, people, or sons of God as doing anything of value, even assuming such occurred.

Assuming the Bible is correct, then men are sinners, but most of the world doesn't make such an assumption, and for myself and those of us who don't agree with it, I suggest Christians quit calling us names, insulting us and expecting us to bow our knee to the bullpucky they throw in the name of their beliefs and opinions.

Christians often ask why some people find them so undesirable. Now you know, you bring it on yourself by name-calling. Interesting. I'll skip over this one. The next one I got just last night, in fact.

Listen to this. Also, please understand fully, I am NOT now and never will be a Christian by any definition, I know, but I will not and cannot accept just one path to God. I see God as being total love and forgiveness.

I see God as realizing that we're just meager little creations of his, struggling just to get along and the rest is his incredible creation, and as someone, lousy word in this use, who understands our failings infinitely better than we understand our own.

I personally see God as accepting freely the Muslim, the Hindu, the Christian, or the Pantheist. How would you respond to these individuals? There were common elements in all of them, even though the people, I know most of those people, of course I didn't give any names, ranged from individuals who are computer programmers and things like that, to one of the people is a gay transsexual.

So pretty well cuts across all the broad spectrums of individuals you're going to encounter. But I think if you have followed along with what I've said over the past couple of meetings, a lot of what I said about the autonomous man, the lack of absolutes, relativism, and everything else came shining through bright and clear in what you just listened to.

And if you had an opportunity to sit down with him and read him again, you could identify element after element after element that is directly based upon what we just said. Their thought system follows, I'm sure all of you have read Hegel, yes I'm sure you all have.

If you haven't, don't bother. But up until Hegel, and in fact how many of you've read the Schaeffer book that we assigned, The God Who Is There? Okay good, a couple of you have. All right, then you'll be familiar with this.

Up until the middle 1800s and then the early 1900s in the United States, most of culture functioned on this understanding. Thesis and antithesis. Okay, in other words, we functioned on the assumption that either something was right or it was wrong.

You either have the thesis or the antithesis. Either murder is right or it is wrong. Thesis, antithesis. That there is an actual truth. In other words, we functioned as if truth had real meaning. Because it was based on this.

True, false, simple. Through a line of individuals, eventually culminating in Hegel, this ended. This ended for philosophic thought. Basically what you had is instead of this straight line, it turned into basically a triangle.

And now what you have is synthesis. Instead of something being right and wrong, well it just all depends. Just all depends. There's no real right and wrong. There's your right and my right. And you know, it doesn't all fit together so black and white as you might claim to think that it does.

The reason for this, and this is, you know, Shaver points out, when men were just up here and they weren't Christians, they were irrational. In other words, given their own lifestyles and their own beliefs, they had no reason to be up here.

Because they left God out of the picture. And the only way you can have this, the only way you can have a moral absolute, is if you have a moral absolute to which you can refer. That's God. You leave God out of the picture, scrap this.

You don't need it. So up until this period of time, even though many people in Western civilization, notice I'm really keying in on Western civilization because not too many of us travel the world, even though this has things to say about all sorts of philosophy and things like that.

But specifically in Western civilization, European and American civilization, your people up until this period of time lived up here, but for no particular reason. This is actually logical given the rejection of God and his role in the universe.

Because, you see, relativism is the only thing you can end up going to when you've decided there is no absolute point to which you can refer anything to anyway. So of course, if you follow this along, you'll notice it turns into a big circle.

Because if you now take this one and you put a thesis here, then the next synthesis goes up here, then here, and you'll notice it goes around in circles. And it does. You can do that. You can sit there and say, okay, now here's the resulting synthesis of these two, so I'll take another one and bring it up here, and then here's the synthesis, and it goes around in circles and things like that.

It's completely relative. It's all dependent, all of this is completely dependent upon man and his thinking. Once you get stuck on a foundation like this, hey, you know, it's whoever's got the greatest number of degrees after their name that I guess wins the debate.

Because there is no actual truth to which you can refer. You can't say anything is right or anything is wrong. Now, Schaefer says in his book, and I like this definition, it's probably the best I've ever seen, humanism, in the inclusive sense, is the system whereby man, beginning absolutely by himself, tries rationally to build out from himself, having only man as his integration point, to find all knowledge, meaning, and value.

So man starts as man. He presupposes the ontological question. Remember I mentioned the ontological question, ontology? What is the ontological question? It is what is, what is the being of man? And so man supposes he answers that.

He doesn't really answer it, but he just simply assumes he is sufficient in and of himself to be the basis of his own knowledge, his own being. He is autonomous man. And so he just goes out from there.

When in fact, that's the question we have to ask. If God exists, that completely changes how we view ourselves, and will therefore completely change what we do with the rest of this stuff. That is the basic presupposition that we must examine.

Because a person operating on a different set of presuppositions, you can show them all the facts in the world you want, and if they're doing this, and you're doing this, guess what? You are not going to talk to each other.

You will not communicate. Because he takes the fact, and instead of, you know, you present a fact. For example, one of the same people that I quoted, I mentioned something about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Now to you and me, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is exceptionally important. And it's, you know, to us, I mean, hey, if Jesus Christ rose from the dead, guess what? He's right, you know? I mean, sir proved his claims by doing things like that.

We think that way. That's fine. Presented this person, I said, so? What does that prove? Because see, they're working on this. You know, so he rose from the dead. That's nice. Pretty wild. Is he in Guinness?

Is he in, you know, any of those books? Did they apply? I mean, that's all I meant to them. Because you see, they're not here. They're down here. They take that, and they attempt to interpret it on the basis of themselves, rather than on the basis of an absolute being such as God.

And so it's just, you know, it's like shooting a .22 at a tank. It bounces off. Okay? Now, when you get stuck in this, and I mentioned this to a smaller group of you a couple of months ago. Well, actually it was longer than that.

The dangers of relativism. This creates relativism. This whole system has no absolute to it at all. Last week I talked to, I mentioned it in the handout, the green handout. If you read the letter that I wrote to this atheistic gentleman, he said in his letter to me, he says, I know that I cannot condemn Hitler, because I have no moral absolutes.

Why should I condemn him? See, he had thought this through. He had realized he can't condemn Hitler, because there's no evil or good to him. There can't be evil or good, because there's nothing to which you can refer those words evil and good.

You can't refer them back to something that gives them meaning. Evil and good to him are completely relative terms, and since everything's relative, there isn't any meaning to it. Now, don't get me wrong.

People here still use words like good and evil. The vast majority of them have just never realized that they don't have any meaning anymore to them. They assign meanings to them, but to do so they must take this irrational leap that has no basis in their own system, and assign meanings of good and evil to something.

And that's why, if it gets to a point where something that before they've assigned to be evil, all of a sudden that sort of sounds sort of good to them, they can just change the meaning. Makes no difference.

There's no absolute. Doesn't make any difference. But anyways, Schaefer brings up in a book that I wanted you all to get a chance to read, but somehow seemingly it's out of print, a little booklet, I guess, called Back to Freedom and Dignity.

Any of you ever seen Back to Freedom and Dignity? Have you ever read it? It's great. It really is. Basically what he does is he brings up a number of modern Nobel Prize winners and people like that and their theories and what they're working on, such things as genetic manipulation and things like this, and demonstrates how our culture, the entire Western world, is basically going down the tubes for the simple reason that we have no foundation left anymore.

How are we supposed to address questions such as, should you be allowed to genetically manipulate your child before they're born? How can you answer questions like that if you have no foundation to stand on in the first place?

How can you answer questions about euthanasia and infanticide when you have no foundations upon which to stand? He brings out some blood-chilling facts, to me anyway. He talks about Francis Crick. You're all familiar with Crick and Watson, the discoverers of DNA back in, I think they got the Nobel Prize about 65 or something like that, somewhere back there.

Doctors Watson and Crick were the ones that broke the DNA code, discovered the shape of the DNA molecule, which of course has ushered in the entire era of genetic engineering and things like that. Dr. Crick is an interesting individual, atheist to the core, very anti-christian, but back in 1971, so we're looking at nearly 17 years ago now, he gave a talk which he entitled, Why I Study Biology.

And to boil things down a great deal, basically what he said was that, first of all, our society must get away from the idea that all men are created equal. He said that, you know, back in the days of revolution, that was a good idea, but that just simply isn't biologically feasible anymore.

He said that soon a small group of people, i .e. the government, must control two things. Who has babies and what babies are born. In other words, forced sterilization and genetic engineering. The only hope for an enlightened society to survive the challenges that the year 2000 and beyond present.

Now, we shudder to think of such a thing, but in actuality, what Crick is saying is perfectly logical given the humanistic presupposition. Given naturalism, what he's saying makes plenty of sense. I mean, if we go here, if we forget about the being of man, think for a second what naturalism means about what man is.

Man is a machine. That's all he is. He mentions in there Dr. Menard, the French physicist, as I recall, chemist, who basically after, you know, all his research into genetics, basically says man is a chance spin on the roulette table.

He might have been, he might not have been, we just happen to be here, it's all chance. And see what naturalism says is man is the result of the impersonal plus time plus chance. You want the answer to all life's questions from a nationalistic viewpoint?

There it is. There it is. Think what that means. No meaning. No meaning. There can be no meaning in a system like that at all. None at all. No worth. Human life, what's it worth? It's the impersonal plus time plus chance.

The individual has, there certainly can't be anything such thing as individual rights or worth. Man is a machine. In this system, in the naturalistic system, you know, if people truly believe that we simply arose by chance, random genetic mutation, by a natural selection, I know enough about natural selection to know that whatever is best for the organism, i .e. whatever whatever results in the organism having the largest number of viable offspring, is the best thing for that organism.

And there is no basis upon which a naturalist could possibly say that I would be wrong to do everything I could to spread my genes all over Phoenix, Arizona, to make sure I had the greatest number of offspring, because I would be ensuring the passing on of my genetic makeup.

That's what they do in the wild. So why not? Why not do that? I mean that's what naturalism says. You see, this then gives rise to some people saying, well, but see, we live in a culture. Oh really? So in other words, my value is determined by my worth of the culture?

That's exactly what they're starting to say. Look at what we're doing with abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. What is the overriding element in all those things? Well, we don't want you all to be a drain on the culture.

You know, I mean our society, you know, I mean your worth is determined by how good you are to the society. You know, when we have a machine, we have a computer system that goes out of date. We can no longer buy software for it.

It's no longer worth anything. What happens to its value? And pretty soon you trash it. You junk it. It's not worth anything to you anymore. Right? Well, that's what man is. So if you no longer have a use or a worth to the society, out you go.

Get rid of you. And on what grounds can anyone possibly say I'm wrong? If you say I'm wrong, you're assuming my system. Because you're claiming there's a right and wrong and there's an absolute. You can't do that.

You can't do that. And so when Crick says, hey, we need to determine who has children, it's very clear that he would not allow any of us to have them, because we're crazy enough to believe in God. If Crick can get 51 of the vote, that makes him right.

Because right and wrong is determined completely relatively. So when he gets 51 of the vote, or maybe only 30 of the vote, and all the guns. That's all I need. Might makes right. Whoever has the biggest force, right?

That's how it works. Scary. B .F. Skinner. Anyone familiar with B .F. Skinner? I don't know of almost any teacher that I know of that hasn't read Skinner. I mean, his theories are all over the American educational system.

For Skinner, man is exactly that. The impersonal plus time plus chance. And your personality, your makeup, everything is a completely determined thing. In other words, all you are is a blank slate written upon by your genetics and your environment.

That's all there is to it. There is nothing man-ish about man. There's nothing that transcends the simple machine. You're simply a machine programmed by your genetics, your upbringing, your environment.

That's it. Nothing more. In fact, his book was called Beyond Human Freedom and Dignity. These ideas of man having worth, man having dignity, need to be scrapped if we're to survive into the next century.

And you will find his theories being put into practice in schoolrooms across this nation, and in Europe as well. That's what you have when you have relativism. Now, let me point something out. If you read Van Til it all, the first chapter that really caused you problems was the chapter on the unity of the one and the many.

And that is Van Til went into a discussion of the fact that philosophers have for centuries been attempting to correlate the fact that we know that we live in a universe, a one universe, and yet we see many particulars.

There's the podium, there's me, there's you, there's a lot of individual things. And how do they relate to one another? This is the problem of the one and the many. Now, we answer that question by relating them all to God.

That's what gives them meaning. Since you have no central reference point, every philosophical system will tip one way or the other, either emphasizing the unity of all things, therefore destroying the individual, or emphasizing the individual, thereby destroying the unity.

So any system will go that direction. And we see how this ends up working, basically, by looking at the the mindset of the modern man. And again, I'm basically following Schaefer right now, so if you've read him, where's basically, everybody got this?

Where it's basically explaining what he had to say in the God who is there. Man has a two-story universe now, basically. Down here he has the rational and the logical. And I say rational and logical only on the basis of his own presuppositions.

Down here he has only the particulars. He has no purpose, no meaning. Man is a machine. Man is dead. Man has no life. The rational and the logical, the scientific, there can be no meaning to it because there is no unifying factor to any of it.

Just the rational and the logical. But man cannot live down here. Man cannot consistently live here. You know why? Because to live down here is to deny who you really are. See, man knows there is something more to man than just simply this.

No meaning. Machine. We know it. We cannot live down here. But since there is no unifying factor to the naturalistic life, to the naturalistic worldview, what we've done is we've divided things up and we live schizophrenically.

The 20th century man lives schizophrenically. I'll basically call it faith in the world sense, not in the biblical sense. This has nothing to do with faith biblically. Or maybe I should just simply put non-rational.

Mystic. Existential experience. The final experience. The first-order experience. It's the emotional and things like that. Up here we try to have meaning. We talk about words like love and God and worth and things like that.

But in reality, to jump from here up here, this person has no basis on which to do that. None at all. None at all. Some of you may have heard my debate with Dan Barker on the dividing line during the summer.

Dan is an atheist. He is a former fundamentalist preacher. Now he's with the Freedom from Religion Foundation. And we started talking about these things. And he started talking about how, you know, he says, well, you know, he knew he was in trouble.

Okay, I can't remember exactly how, but he knew he was in trouble because he said, he started talking about, well, you know, the main thing that you Christians are wrong about is that you divide up the living from the non-living.

The man from the universe. You see, in his system there's no way to do that. Man's just, man's a machine. Man's just part of the system. He knew he was in trouble because, now wait a minute, he says, I'm not a complete reductionist.

He says, because I believe that man has a mind and I believe that man can experience love and beauty and things like that. Wait a minute, Dan. How'd you get up here? He was just down there, makes a leap up there for absolutely no reason at all.

None at all. There's no reason for love from here. There's no reason for a natural person to love. Where did love, personality, emotion come from? How do you get personal from the impersonal plus time plus chance?

Doesn't work. You see, he could not, he could not be consistent. If he was consistent, he'd stay down here and he would simply say, man is a part of the system, that's it. That's it. But he doesn't. He just got married recently.

See? He knows what love is, at least some type of love. So he can't stay down here. The man's extremely intelligent. He can't stay down here. He has to jump up here. He has no way around it. He can't be consistent with his own presupposition.

You can see this in many, many different people. For example, John Cage. I was talking to Mike once about John Cage. John Cage is a musician of sorts. If you've ever listened to his music, you know why I say that.

How many of you ever, you know who John Cage is? John Cage is a musician whose music is completely designed to reflect this. Okay? So in other words, John Cage would do such things as he'd have two conductors in front of an orchestra.

He'd put a wall between them and give them different music. And then they'd direct the orchestra. And it would just be a mass of sound. There would be some times when he'd take a bucket of knives, forks, and spoons and stuff, throw it into a grand piano, and have a chimpanzee bang on the keys.

He would use yarrow sticks to just cast them down, and however they ended up laying, that's the note he'd use. Total randomness. All chance. No meaning. In other words, what he was trying to do is he was trying to be consistent with his own presuppositions, which means there's no meaning to life.

And so his music was attempting to to reflect that. The story is told in Schaefer about one time when he was bowing to the audience after they had played one of his selections. And all of a sudden he began hearing a terrible hissing noise behind him, and he turned around to discover that it was the musicians that were booing him.

You know, I mean, they didn't appreciate this, but in reality he was the one who was being consistent. The man's presuppositions. The musicians weren't. The musicians were used to order, and beauty, and meaning, and the problem is, unless they were Christians, they had no reason for believing in that stuff without making an irrational jump up here.

But not even John Cage lived consistently with his presuppositions. Not even he does it. Because Schaefer tells the story, and that's what I love about Schaefer, is he gives you the, he points these things out.

Cage was for a while living with some people who lived in a certain area of the country. There were mushrooms everywhere. And he became fascinated with mycology, the study of mushrooms. Which is sort of a smart thing to do if you're going to pick mushrooms, because you don't know what you're doing, and you're not going to live very long because there's a lot of poisonous ones.

In fact, he is one of the foremost amateur mycologists in the United States now. He has one of the biggest libraries on mushrooms there is. But think about that. Think about that. When John Cage goes out to pick mushrooms, he doesn't do it randomly, does he?

Oh no. Because if he were to do so, John Cage wouldn't be around very long. He can't be consistent. If he was consistent with his music, he would not have a massive library of books on mycology. Just go out there randomly.