Theology and Apologetics Seminar Part 3

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 believed. 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.

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 an actually 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, you know, 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 it 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 fellow 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 the beam balance 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, the whole Bible could be a fraud. I doubt that. Your opinion that you raised 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 opinions.

It is also your opinion that people are sinners based on your opinions and 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 falling. 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 it 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 them and read them again, you could identify element after element after element that is directly based upon what we just said.

Their thought system, it 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

Schaefer 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 and 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.

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,

Schaefer 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 more 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, you'll notice it goes around 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 this goes around 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, 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 with man. He presupposes the ontological question.

Remember I mentioned the ontological question, ontology? What is the ontological question?

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 the 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 a 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 to us,

I mean, hey, if Jesus Christ rose from the dead, guess what? He's right. 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 it 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, 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, well, 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.

It makes no difference. There's no absolute. It 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. Have you ever seen Back to Freedom and Dignity?

Have you ever read it? 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 1965 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 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. Manon, the French physicist, as I recall, chemist, who basically, after 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 nationalist 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 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 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? 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, 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, he's called Novel Guns. That's all

I need. Might makes right. Whoever has the biggest force, right? That's how it works. Scary.

B .F. Skinner. Any of you familiar with B .F. Skinner? Heard of him? 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, et al., you ran into 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 we 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. Now, we see how this ends up working, basically, by looking at the mindset of the modern man.

And again, I'm basically following Schaefer right now, so if you've read him, we're 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 world view, 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 upon 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. He knew he was in trouble because he started talking about 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 a machine. Man's just part of the system. He knew he was in trouble.

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 did 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?

It doesn't work. You see, 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. 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 know who John Cage is? John Cage is a musician whose music is completely designed to reflect this.

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 playing, 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 presupposition, which means there's no meaning to life.

And so his music was attempting 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.

They didn't appreciate this, but in reality he was the one who was being consistent to 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. 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. It doesn't make any difference, does it? He realizes he can't stay down here.

So he jumps up here. No reason for doing so. There are a lot of examples and since some of you have already read the book,

I'll let you go ahead and look at it because it talks about it. I'll mention one other.

Bernard Berenson, a Renaissance art expert, was known for the fact that he really was not a moral individual.

He stole another guy's wife when the other guy died and he married her. But even though they were married, they were allowed to go out and have any type of activity they wanted to with other people and everything else.

And he basically, whenever anyone would chide him for his immoral behavior, would basically say, well, hey, we're just all animals and I'm just utilizing my animal desires and it's no big thing.

I'm just realizing who I am and what I am. And yet, when it came to modern art, he said, he found that modern figure painting in general was not based on seeing, on observing, but on exasperation and on the preconceived assumption that the squalid, the sordid, the violent, the bestial, the misshapen, in short, low life, was the only reality.

So he would rip modern artists for expressing the bestiality and violence of man, because in Renaissance art, that wasn't done.

And yet, he himself lived on the very same basis of the art that he despised.

He couldn't stay here. He can't live down here. No one can. No one can. You can't live down here.

The downstairs has no relationship to meaning. The upstairs has no relationship to reason. Since man has gotten rid of God, he can no longer draw a circle and say, here's the tether point,

I can relate everything to that and I have a unified field of knowledge. He can't do that anymore, so now he's got two.

Upstairs, downstairs, and no way to get between the two other than just simply jumping across with no basis for doing so.

No meaning and no reason. If you want a reason, then you have to go upstairs. If you want to have,

I mean, you have to go downstairs. If you want to have meaning, you have to go upstairs, but they're not related to one another.

Now, a couple more things I need to throw out before we can tie all this together and talk about what all this has to do with the subject of apologetics itself, though I think you've obviously seen many of the important aspects of it.

I see, as Schaeffer sees, two orders of creation. The personal and the infinite.

Under the column of the personal, you might put man, animals, plants, things like this.

But between man and animals, put a big chasm. Just put chasm.

Because man is personal, animals, plants, machines are not. On the side of the infinite, all you have at the top is

God. On the side of the personal, by the way, put God at the top. God, man, chasm, animals, plants, machines. On the side of the infinite, you have

God, chasm, man, animals, plants, machines. I think it's important that we realize this. A lot of people are a little bit confused in that, for example, some of the posts that I read you that people have given to me, underlying some of the things they're saying is, if I am to say that I know anything truly, their assumption is

I must also know it exhaustively. In other words, if I am to make a true statement about God, they're assuming

I must know all there is to know about God. That is a false assumption.

And these two created orders help to understand. On the personal side, God and man are personal, and we are separated by a great chasm between that and the animals and plants and machines.

And because God is personal, then God can communicate propositional truth to us. And therefore, we can know truly, though, because on the other order of creation, there is an infinite chasm between us, who are finite, and God, who is infinite.

Because there is a difference we cannot know exhaustively, that does not change the fact that we can know truly.

Because God reveals himself. When God reveals himself, then we can know that what he has revealed is true, even if we do not know everything there is to know about God.

Understand what I'm saying? Saying that you have a true knowledge of something does not mean that you have an exhaustive knowledge of something.

It would be impossible for us as finite beings to have an exhaustive knowledge of the infinite being of God.

That obviously just doesn't fit together, it doesn't work. Schaefer said,

I would suggest that a serious question would have to be faced as to whether the reason why modern men reject the

Christian answer or why they often do not even consider it, is because they have already accepted with an implicit faith the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.

In other words, what he's saying is that the reason that many people reject the

Christian message, reject the preaching of the cross, is because they already have their wisdom.

Remember what Paul said? And their wisdom is naturalism has the answers.

I can find the answers on my own basis. I don't need God's revelation.

I am not a dependent being, I am not a finite being in the sense that I am completely dependent upon God and his revelation for my knowledge.

I can do it myself. That is the presupposition, that is the area that we must address.

That we must address if we are going to communicate with the people of our century. You see, the kids coming out of school today have experienced a revolution.

Schaefer liked to put it this way. Our generation today is 400 years away from the last generation.

Because you see, from the Reformation on, those generations had assumed the same thing.

Thesis, antithesis. Now it's all changed. You want to know why there's a generation gap?

Because we don't even think the same way anymore. We don't think the same way anymore. They're 400 years apart.

Some of our older folks are still operating upon the basis that was given to us in the Reformation.

And now, no way. No way. There's a 400 year difference between the two. So examining presuppositions, examining the foundation upon which a system is built, absolutely has to be the first thing you do.

Now remember last week I said that's not the only thing you do. That's not the only thing you do. But you've got to start there.

Evidential apologetics that ignores the presupposition can present all the facts it wants.

But it'll never be able to find the common ground upon which those facts can be interpreted in the same framework. Because you're standing on the presuppositions of Scripture, and they're standing on the presuppositions that they're an autonomous man, and you're not going to talk to each other.

Or if you do, they're going to take everything you say, and man, what do they do with it? I mean, you heard some of those posts.

I am not a sinner, never have been a sinner, and never will be a sinner. Well a person saying that is obviously standing on a very different ground than I am.

They obviously have a very different view of themselves as man than I have of them as man. Very much so.

Now there's a problem here though. And I think this is brought out well in both

Van Til and Schaefer, the two books that I signed. And that is this. Every book, people don't do that.

Most people that I encounter anyways are coming from the direction of these folks that I read their posts are coming from.

What you've got to start off with them doing is, if you start off talking about and using all our wonderful Christian buzzwords, well you need to repent and be saved.

They look at you like, what planet did you just land from, friend? Because you're not communicating to them.

You're not. And if you look at the New Testament, you find that Paul communicated to the people to whom he was talking to.

When he talked to the Athenians, he didn't talk to them the same way he talked to the Jews. He talked to them on their level.

He proclaimed the gospel to them where they were. The first thing we've got to do is we've got to start, let's say they're pretty far over here.

They're really good folks. They love their family. They talk about meaning in life and stuff like that.

In other words, they are extremely inconsistent with their own presupposition. You know what you've got to do with them? You've got to push them over here.

Carefully, because it's painful. You've got to, by questioning, push them toward the logical outcome of their own thinking.

You love your family? Why? You see, the only reason someone could possibly say they love their family based upon naturalistic presupposition is that, well, if I love my family, they'll probably stay with me and that'll be better for me and I'll probably have more children and therefore create more genetic replication of myself and live a longer life.

In other words, they have to have a completely self -centered and totally selfish reason for loving. It's the only logical way.

But a lot of people don't do that. They love because they love people. They'd do anything for somebody else, but that betrays this.

They're living up here because they're admitting that there's something more to them that causes them to love.

It's still there. So you've got to start pushing them toward that. What you've got to do is you've got to get them to start examining the basis upon which they've built their system.

See, far too often, I've been guilty of it and all of us have been guilty. We come to a person and we look at their system.

Okay, their system's built out here and they have built a very nice, complicated system and it's all built onto that.

It makes plenty of sense and you know what we do? We come along and we start talking about this. Well, you can talk about that forever.

You're not going to get anywhere. You've got to start down here. Let's look at that. Because you see, this may be perfectly logical given this, given the presupposition.

And you've got your system over here and this doesn't fit in your system. Because you've got a different basis. Well, that's fine.

I understand that, but you need to understand that too. You don't start up here. You come down here.

And that normally takes a lot of very careful, gentle questioning. Schaefer mentions in his book, they had one girl come to LaBrie who attempted to commit suicide in this process.

One. Out of all the years, one. But it could happen. You don't get into the mind frame of, ooh,

I've got a new surgical instrument here called presuppositional apologetics. Watch what I can do to this guy. You know, and you go, hey, you think about what this means.

Push them all the way over to the other side and they come to their own logical outcome and they go, wow,

I have no meaning. It's got to be done carefully. It's got to be done lovingly.

As Schaefer would say over and over, it's got to be done in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. You're talking about surgery here.

You're cutting away their own fantasies. Because you see, the farther they are away from here, the more they're living in a fantasy.

Because they're being attacked by reality. The reality of their own manishness. The reality of their own meaning.

The reality of their own worth. Of the world around them. They're living in a fantasy world.

You start pushing them away from their fantasy world and there's not too many people like that. Do you know some of those posts are rather nasty about me?

They didn't like me. Yeah, I know. It wasn't because... I mean, if you look at the posts,

I'm normally a very nice guy. It doesn't make any difference. You're calling me a sinner? That's fighting words, boy.

Want to go out behind the house? That's good thinking. This is why.

You're making them uncomfortable because you're pushing them in that direction. Once you've pushed them in this direction, once you've explained to them, hey, wait a minute.

This is what you're assuming. And therefore, you see, on the basis of their assumptions, my

God can't exist. My God cannot exist on the basis of the assumptions of an autonomous man.

You cannot have an autonomous man and a sovereign God. It doesn't work. That is a contradiction in terms.

It just doesn't work. You cannot have a man that is without law, that is the ground of his own being, that is not related to God, and a sovereign

God. It doesn't work. So you see, if you're talking to someone who has that basis, and you never address that basis, you never even point out to them that they have that basis, they're never going to believe what you have to say.

They just can't without being existent with themselves. And you know, that's another danger.

I think one of the reasons, you know, we talked a couple weeks ago about the sovereignty of God, and a lot of you pointed out, man,

I get the most violent reactions from Christians in my Bible study department when I assert the sovereignty of God.

And you thought, boy, that's strange. No, it's not. You know why? A lot of those same

Christians were evangelized on a method that never even talked to them about the foundations of their thoughts.

And they're frustrated. They're attempting to build a Christian house on naturalistic basis, and it doesn't work.

And God is having to, can you imagine trying to go into a house and rebuild the foundation without tearing the house down?

Not easy. Not easy. And that's where they are. And so when you start coming along saying, oh yeah, look at all these passages about the sovereignty of God, they go, whoa, wait a minute, don't step on my ground.

I'm autonomous. God's free, I'm free, and boy, he ain't half as free as I am. This is exactly where they're coming from.

That's part of the reason. Part of the reason. And we talked a couple weeks ago, or the last time we talked, about the very fact that the acceptance of the

Lordship of Jesus Christ does touch on this area. Because when we come to God as helpless sinners, we are in effect admitting our creatureliness and his uncreatureliness, and the fact that we are in a situation where we need to be in the right relationship with him.

And if you haven't admitted that you are a creature, that you are a sinner, or that God is who

God says he is, well, it can cause some real problems. One of the big areas of debate between the two apologetic systems is the evidential apologetic system assumes a common ground between the

Christian and the non -Christian. It assumes you have a common ground that you can then start building your case upon.

Start with something real basic and start building it up. Van Til is very clear about the fact that if you begin on their ground, yeah, you will have a common ground.

And you may be able to build your house, but it's not going to be a Christian one. It may be half

Christian and half naturalistic, but it's not going to be a truly Christian one. That's what

Roman Catholicism has done. Roman Catholicism is a mixture of pagan religion and Christianity, very clearly.

Most of us, I would assume, are aware of that. Part of the reason is, it's built upon the same foundation as natural man.

And the only way you can do that is to mix the materials, shall we say.

You can't build a pure house on that foundation. The same thing happens with us.

If we start with the wrong foundation, remember the first thing I said, the first night we started was, you must define your theology before you ever begin your apologetics.

Because your apologetic method will be determined completely by your theology.

And if you come up with an apologetic method and then twist your theology to fit your apologetic method, you're going to end up changing your very belief that you're attempting to defend.

And yet that's exactly what, for example, Romanism has done. And unfortunately, that's exactly what a lot of conservative

Christians have done. They have changed the Gospel to make it more palatable than natural man.

And so doing have abandoned the very foundations of the sovereignty of God upon which the whole thing is placed. The whole thing is built.

The result is a church full of Christians, maybe

Christians, who knows, who cannot address the issues of the world that face them, cannot really make sense out of the

Word of God, simply due to the fact that what they've got doesn't have the whole thing. And so sometimes you have to engage in a renovation project.

You never notice how sometimes you renovate a building, you knock most of it down. That's not fun.

And normally the person who's undergoing the renovation project doesn't enjoy it either. Some of you may have been undergoing some of that over the past couple of weeks.

It took me a long time, I know that. We don't like to give up cherished ideas, but we must always be willing to have the master builder working on our house, remodeling us.

Because when I start putting up my fixtures, sometimes they aren't the ones he plans.

So we must be open to this allowing things like this to happen. Now you say, that's all neat, that's all great, presuppositions, great, super.

What do you do after that? You may get a person to say, I haven't seen that before, but yeah, you're right.

I was assuming a lot of things that I was just taking for granted. I'm willing to let go of those assumptions,

I'm willing to look at what you have to say. You can't just stop there.

You might get done reading this stuff and go, hey great, all I gotta do is show someone where the presuppositions are wrong. They go, yeah you're right, gosh

I hadn't noticed that, that's neat. So what do you have to offer? That's where, that's why

I said last time, I don't think it's a case of evidential versus presuppositional apologetic.

I think it's both. It's just simply in order. You start with the presupposition.

Once you have examined that subject, once you have looked at the presuppositions, once you have pointed out the differences so the person is able to interpret facts in your realm, that's when, that's when you start into the evidence.

That's when you need to know the word. That's when you need to be able to answer questions.

Because you see, you start talking to some of these folks, they're gonna say, oh, okay, well what about this on your basis?

I mentioned that one atheist fellow who talked about presuppositions, he knew. And if we're gonna be intellectually honest with ourselves and honest with the word of God, then we should have no objection if someone comes up and says, okay, fine, you say

God's sovereign, what about this? Now they need to, if they're gonna do that, they need to be fair enough to allow you to answer on your own assumptions.

Because frequently what they'll do is they'll say, oh, on your basis such and so and so, now you explain that to me on my basis. And I go,

I can't. You can't. There's no way to do that. I mean, they're asking you to pull something out of your house and put it into theirs and make it fit.

It doesn't work that way. And you can point that out. But the point comes at which you then have to start dealing with the evidence.

You must. You must start with the presuppositions first, but then you start doing that. And boy, the questions fly fast and furious.

This is where you start getting exceptionally practical. And if there, honestly folks, if there was no practical application of anything you ever hear someplace, forget it.

Ain't a whole lot of use to it. And I don't want the time we've spent together to be just simply all thinking about eternity and time and all this neat stuff out there and a completely different world than going down and turning on your car and driving into McDonald's or something like that.

That's the real world. If this is that relationship with the real world, I have wasted the electricity of running the recorder because there's no sense in talking about it.

But there is sense in talking about it because of the fact that you can present a very, very good case for Christianity once you've examined the presuppositions, once you've examined what people are thinking about.

Now, where do some of the questions come from? The most common questions that I have encountered have not been in areas such as theodicy, which is the subject of evil.

How is God's rulership over the world? How do you explain evil in relationship to that?

The most common questions I've got have been pretty concrete ones. What about the Bible? What about the

Bible? What about the different translations of the Bible? What about supposed contradictions in the

Bible? That's the biggest one. And if we are going to assert that we do have a revelation from God that gives meaning to all this field of knowledge, we had better know that revelation pretty good.

That's part of the reason that Schaeffer got in trouble with his own denominations, the fact that his teaching presented a view of Scripture a whole lot higher than his denominations were.

And there were a lot of people in his denominations that didn't appreciate that. Schaeffer got involved in that nasty stuff about,

Oh! How old -fashioned! You know? Yeah. We've got to be able to answer questions about those things.

We've got to. Because if we're going to assert a revelation of God that actually has these answers, then we need to be able to look at passages in the

Scriptures that are supposedly contradictory. Some of you have read, had the unfortunate pleasure of reading, our little booklet entitled,

Letters to an Anti -Theist. The reason I say the displeasure or the unpleasure is simply due to the fact that most of those who have read it who are

Christians, I know Linda did, basically said, That guy is a jerk! You'll read my debates with an atheist gentleman who is interesting, shall we say.

He publishes a monthly periodical called, Biblical Errancy. And it is filled with, as Dr.

Robert Morey said, every conceivable possible, every possible or conceivable flaw of logic known to mankind.

And he's exactly right. It is. Truly unbelievable. But that stuff is floating around out there.

It's everywhere. Recently I started getting a thing called The Frontline. Frontline Theological Newsletter or something like that.

It sounded really interesting, you know, in the first couple issues. I noticed the editor's name was the same name as this free thinker atheist that I knew from this other publication over in California.

So I started doing some checking into it and found it was the same guy! I mean, it was masquerading, at least it seemed to me to be masquerading, under false pretenses of being an actual

Christian publication. When he started following it, he was starting to get more and more into well, maybe that isn't the case.

And as each issue has come, it's become more and more negative toward Christianity, but it's obviously meant to sort of drag a person along.

And that material is being picked up by, for example, cult groups. You know how

I first got in contact with Biblical Errancy? A guy sent it to me and said, a lot of the Mormons in my area are picking up on this information.

What do you think about it? That's how I got in touch with it. The first time I ever had the supposed contradiction of Acts 9, 7,

Acts 22, 9 thrown at me was not by an atheist, it was by a Mormon missionary. Because of the fact that Mormonism, of course, has to attack the scripture, because it adds to it and downgrades its authority.

So it has to. So the practical aspects still remain.

Even after you say, you know, you thought, hey, if I get all this down, I won't have to worry about it. No, yes you do. You still do. Sorry. It's all still there.

After you've gotten all this down, you've gotten all the theology down, you still need to be involved in the practical application of evidential apologetics, and that would include some fantastic studies of such things as the

Resurrection of Christ. A new book just came out entitled Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

A debate on the Resurrection of Christ. There's a debate between Gary Habermas of Liberty College and Anthony Flew, a well -known skeptic.

And it was actually a debate that was judged by two professional debating team judges, panels, and so forth.

And Habermas won on both counts, published by Harper and Rose, not even published by a

Christian company per se. And it's fascinating to listen to these two go at it.

And it's also fascinating to notice where they run into this stuff.

Because they don't necessarily directly mention it, because they're debating a historical event. But it comes out so clear in Habermas' cross -examination of Flew.

Because most of Flew's statements are based upon presuppositions that say the miraculous cannot happen.

And the reason Habermas won is that he was able to demonstrate that Flew did not provide sufficient evidence for why the miraculous can't happen.

I mean, you're just assuming it. You can't prove your assumption. And Habermas was able to say, hey, there is solid historical evidence that this did take place.

And if you just don't automatically assume the miraculous can't happen, then you're going to have to deal with it. But you need to deal with things like that, and you need to deal with the supposed contradictions.

And you do need to get into such areas as theodicy. It's a toughie.

I've got a book in my library called The Atheist Debater's Handbook by B .C. Johnson. I mentioned it in the letter that I wrote to the fellow that some of you hopefully have read.

I recall realizing before I debated Jim Lippard, a local atheist, on the dividing line,

I knew that he liked that book, that I'd seen him quote from it more than once. So I figured I might want to know what this book is about before I debated this fellow on live radio.

So I began looking through there, and the main thing I centered in on was theodicy, the problem of evil, because I knew that was one of Lippard's favorite subjects to discuss.

He mentions in there, and we can discuss this now, he mentions in there a situation.

He says, a house burned down last night. And a six month, nine month old baby died in the flame.

Now the question is asked, could we possibly call a person good who had the ability to keep the baby from dying in the flame?

If there was someone standing outside the window, saw the house on fire, could easily, the window was open, could just go in, hadn't gotten into the baby's room yet, take the baby out and save them, and didn't.

Just stood there and let it happen. And listened as the baby screamed and cried and died in the flame.

Could you call a person like that good? Then he says, given what

Christians tell us, God could have saved the baby. Put out the fire, did anything he wanted to do.

Prevented the fire from starting. Miraculously deliver the baby through the flame. I mean, we're told in Daniel that the three children of Israel walked in the furnace and it was seven times harder than it should have been.

And they live. So how can we call God good if he doesn't save the baby?

Very common. How can we? How can we? Normally, the objection to God is normally sort of put in this situation.

We assert a few omnis here. God is omnipotent.

He has all power. And God is omniscient.

He has all knowledge. And we say that God is all good.

And then we say, the fourth thing is, evil exists in this universe.

And therefore we come out with some logical conclusions. If evil exists, one of three things is true.

Either evil exists, God knows it exists, he doesn't like it, but he can't stop it, therefore he's not omnipotent.

Or God is all good and he has all power, but he doesn't know evil exists. He's not omniscient. Or God has all power and he knows evil exists, but he's not all good because he doesn't know how to stop it.

So which one is it? None of the above, but why is the question.

The same writer, B .C. Johnson, went on to give some more examples. For example, he said, why couldn't

God have caused a heart attack in Adolf Hitler and saved millions of people?

Six million Jews and millions of gypsies and all these other people that were wiped out by Hitler, aside from just simply the loss of life involved in World War II, aside from Hitler's atrocities.

Why not? That's where I got my clue. And you may recall from my letter, you may recall from what

I said to Jim Lippert on the radio when this was brought up. I said, how do you know that the baby who died in the fire wasn't the next

Hitler? How do you know that there were not six men who died, as I mentioned in the letter, in a bombing raid on Dresden during World War II, that if they had not died would have taken over the world and killed 66 million people instead of six?

How do you know? How do you know that God is not already actively curbing 99 % of the evil in this world?

How do you know? You have no way of knowing because even if he was, you wouldn't see it, would you? No, you wouldn't.

How do you know? You see, the assumption that they're making to prove that God doesn't exist, that God exists.

You start with these three. Now, one of the main problems I have with this is it forgets that despite the fact that God is all good, he is also all holy.

I have problems with the one -sided views of God that forgets about such things as wrath. We've already mentioned that.

But you see, they assume God is omnipotent and God is omniscient and therefore we prove that he's not. That's the problem.

Because you see, if you can put yourself up on this basis and admit that God is omnipotent and he's omniscient, you're going to have to admit he's eternal as well and that means you're going to have to start getting down to actually dealing with, hey, wait a minute, maybe

God sees some things that I don't. You see, what man is attempting to do here is he's attempting to take

God and put him on his microscope slide and say, God, we have this standard of good up here.

Remember first night? First night I talked about this. We've got this standard of good up here, God, and it exists outside of you.

And you have to conform to it. Remember what

I said? Good is good because God says it's good. I read one of the posts,

I didn't read it tonight, but I read one in which an atheist said the very thing. He said, wait a minute, if you say that the ground of morality, the ground of good is

God, then you make what is good and what is evil a whim of God.

Now how did I express that first night? Capriciously. And what did I say? I submit to you that an absolute being cannot be capricious.

But we should not be scared of saying good is good because good is related to God.

We should not be afraid of saying that. But we are. You know why? Because we're still living over here.

That doesn't make sense over there. And we know that the world is not going to like that. Not going to like that at all.

So in answer to this question right here, we've already looked at some of the possible answers, some of the things that need to be taken into consideration.

If all time is instantaneous to God as we discussed the first night, is evil defeated?

No. That's why God can say in the scriptures this is what's going to happen in the end times because God's sovereign, he's in control, and evil's been defeated.

Boiling it all down, getting down into the depth of this whole thing, and believe me, I don't claim to have all the answers for, you know, someone called the radio program once when

Dr. Bullock was on, my Christian apologetics professor, and asked what is the source of evil?

How did evil come about? Dr. Bullock, love his soul, and I then had an exceptionally cerebral discussion about the whole thing.

I probably didn't know any good at all. But it did me a lot of good because I liked what he said. If you ask the question where did evil come from, you are asserting that evil exists ontologically.

That evil has being in and of itself. You're almost attributing personality to evil. Satan is evil.

He is not evil itself. See the difference? Evil is the description of the perverseness of the created nature of Satan.

And so when someone asks where did evil come from, I have to say

I don't think that evil exists separate from the creation of God.

You hear what I'm saying? I don't think I'm going off on some deep end. I'm being orthodox. You can't trap evil.

You can't measure evil. You can't weigh evil. Evil is not a thing. It's a description.

Someone just said adjective. So what we must ask is how did

God's creation deviate from what would seem to us to be the perfect fulfillment of its intended purpose when it was created?

It sounds like a lot of philosophical mumbo -jumbo. We're asking the question where did evil come from is a philosophical question.

And I can't avoid answering it in the same terms in which it is asked. The Bible doesn't come out and say someplace this is the ontological origin of evil.

Just like it doesn't say this is a creed for y 'all to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity.

It doesn't do that. It's never designed to. So when we ask the question where did evil come from I think the farthest

I have gone to this point in my life is to say that what

I can affirm is that when the Scripture discusses God's use of evil and we looked at a number of those instances where God used the evil acts of men to his own benefit and we looked at a bunch of them.

The main thing Scripture points out is man's intention in doing this evil thing was wrong and God's intention in utilizing it was right.

So in other words there is a difference of intent, a difference of will between God who utilizes the evil act of man and the evil man who does it, who thinks by doing so that he is somehow getting past God.

And God sort of goes, why don't these people learn? And he even utilizes their own evil to his good.

All things work together for good. I mean the biggest example we used was the cross of Christ.

No one would argue that it was evil what mankind did to Jesus Christ. And yet as the church prayed in Acts chapter 4 they did what you had determined would happen from long ages past.

They just simply were reacting to that which you had said would happen. They were doing what you planned they would do.

The point was though it was evil for the men to do that God utilized that evil. I think I mentioned to you when we first started talking about this

Calvin has a whole section on this in the institute. Fascinating reading. Not easy but fascinating reading.

What I'm trying to say is up to this point in my life I can affirm that and if you absolutely dig down to saying, but if God created all things, he's sovereign over all things if God is what you've described him as being why does evil exist?

And when you boil the whole thing down I guess the best thing I can say is the outcome when you come out the other side of that timeline from our perspective, and I can only speak from our perspective which is why

I think I can't fully answer the question because I can only speak from this perspective when you come out the other end the result is better than it would have been had

God not done it the way he did it. Does that answer all your questions? No. One of them walls that I keep talking about.

I think we've Calvin said over and over again, we've got to be careful here it is not good to tread upon those issues where God's word is silent

I don't like that. I've told you that over and over again I as a man do not like coming to a point where I have to say well,

I guess I can't follow that line any farther because I've run into a brick wall God's word does not reveal to me anything farther than that and so I've got to stop here.

I don't like that. I naturally rebel against that. But I'm learning.

Slowly but surely I'm learning. Still taking me a long time, but I'm learning.

Some of you might be saying, you know I wish you hadn't told me about these things

I was very blissful in my ignorance because now I'm going to be thinking about this for the rest of my life.

Yeah, yeah, I know I know I've been thinking about a lot of them for a long time and I have more time to think about them than most of you do

Huh? Well That's based on my breathing.

Gee, I'm in trouble now I was referring to people such as you that work in businesses where you've got phones ringing all the time, you're playing on computers, doing things like that and you don't have a whole lot of time for theological reflection or philosophical cogitation you don't have a whole lot of time to sit back and do that or to read books written by people who have done so and are sharing with you their thoughts and things

But I think especially for those of us involved in this ministry and I'm not trying to single anyone out and say this has nothing to do with you because obviously if you're here you have the same interests but especially for those of us who are actively involved in proclaiming the gospel to 20th century

America whether we be involved in talking to people involved in cults like many of us are or just simply the people out there

I think it is just simply downright intellectually honest of us to face the questions that logically come from our own teaching.

I think one of the weaknesses of the proclamation of the church in America today is that most of the people,

I hate to say it, many of the people who are most easily seen proclaiming the gospel are most easily seen as well who have never thought through the ramifications of their own beliefs

I'm speaking of quote unquote the easy evangelism seen on many television stations people will very very flippantly in a cliche form say things and then when confronted by honest questions from 20th century man who just doesn't understand how we can really believe this because they're working on a completely different set of assumptions yet in honesty and maybe this might be nice people say but doesn't that mean instead of getting an answer that demonstrates that the individual proclaiming the gospel has thought it through has addressed those issues, has really examined their belief, they get cliches back and you wonder why they're disillusioned cliches aren't going to cut it and we are never going to be able to in ourselves really answer these questions unless we are brave enough, maybe that's the word, brave enough to face up to them to look at them and say okay let's look at it, let's examine it.

Now the problem comes in when a lot of people, there are a lot of Christians who realize that and yet they're not aware of this stuff not aware of presuppositions as they attempt to deal with these questions and these issues on the wrong basis and they don't come out with the right answer they come out with no answer at all and then they're shattered, they're crushed, they're confused, they don't know where to go when was the last time you heard a sermon in your church on presuppositions, you know it just doesn't happen all that some churches it does,

I'm glad for that but in a lot of the mainline denominations that used to be known as denominations that would stand for the word of God and would stand for the gospel today in many of those pulpits you've got little more than a social club and you've got people that are staying in the very same presuppositions that they used to commit and I talked to you about process theology and how it's taking over in certain areas, things like that completely based on naturalistic basis, completely that's all there is to it.

Any questions? Yeah? Now did you say the completely rational and logical?

Right, rational in the sense of given his presupposition.

I would not say rational in the true sense of rational being conforming to this in reality his presupposition means he can't conform to this in actuality he has to be irrational but unfortunately as you'll see in Schaefer he uses, and sometimes it isn't very clear on it though I caught it, he uses rational in two different rational can be used in many different ways

Dr. Bullock said Christianity is rational it is not rationalistic so having said that, the atheist living down here does not or whatever it happens to be who is to say that I cannot do that?

Well, naturalism is definitely definitely not what, naturalism provides no basis for law and order if that's what you're saying.

Few of them have ever thought that through few of them have ever carried it out to its logical conclusion even though I talked to an atheist just recently about 5 feet from where you're sitting for about an hour just walked in and we had a talk and that was one of the things

I brought up I said look, if you're a law and order person you're a law and order person because you're borrowing from my system to be a law and order person don't get me wrong,

I'm not saying that everybody who's down here is hiding behind bushes with axes waiting to murder people, just for the fun of it

I'm not saying that, many of these people down here are kind individuals, loving individuals, patriots all but they're inconsistent, they're irrational to be that they have to jump up here and they have no reason to do that that's what

I'm pointing out they're living in a tension, they're living in a contradiction they are a walking contradiction to themselves that's why

Francis Crick can say hey abortion, euthanasia, infanticide genetic engineering, forced sterilization, why not?

in fact, the film that I'll show next week emphasizes that very thing the presuppositions upon which law and government are built requires that understanding but we have gone away from those things and therefore it really struck me the contradiction our society lives in when my son was born those of you who know, know that my son was born 7 weeks early so he was premature now we went to a hospital and they had machinery and they had trained individuals my baby was cared for, he had oxygen, he had the right drugs and he had constant care and it cost money, lots of money and I'm still paying for it, and the government got to pay for it too there are certain things the government picks up about those things you could have gone down the road to the next hospital and aborted the same baby who had no physical problems at all legally, wait a minute and yet people say we don't want to be a drain on the society this baby is not wanted, so kill it the government paid a lot of money to help my son stay alive when he had a problem and yet perfectly healthy babies are getting killed right and left did you hear they pushed the frontier back farther than ever before just recently a baby was born man,

I think it was only what, 4 and a half, 5 months I mean it was the earliest they've ever been able to keep a baby alive was just recently

I think it was 14 ounces at birth and it keeps going back, and back, and back and you realize if it keeps going back, guess what's going to happen the beginning and the end are going to run together which is scary in and of itself but the point is, our society is schizophrenic it's schizophrenic, it'll pay money to keep my baby alive and somebody else can go in and get government aid to have theirs killed doesn't make any sense it's schizophrenic that's because it doesn't have a tether point, it's relativistic no right and no wrong, absolute absolute that's more of a preconception than a presupposition true evolution, yes without going into Mormonism the whole subject of evolution is a fascinating one that I have no intention of addressing at the moment yeah,

I understand what you're saying in fact, it is somewhat interesting you might ask the question how does all this relate to dealing with people who already have religious ideas a faith structure think about Mormonism, for example, since it was brought up many of us know

Mormonism fairly well what kind of presuppositions do they have presuppositions, the way

I'm using it, are extremely basic for example, they believe in God they believe in revelation from God despite the fact you can edit it a lot but the point is, they believe in revelation from God what

God? a God who is absolute? no way in fact, there is no difference between the being of man and the being of God there's no absoluteness, no tether point that's inconsistent the thing falls apart,

Mormonism is philosophically bankrupt polytheism is absurd philosophically, let alone biblically that's what makes it wrong just simply from a logical and rational viewpoint polytheism is absurd either

God exists or he doesn't, it's not God's that's so very clear that's one of the reasons you won't find in my experience, a great number of philosophical

Mormons who remain orthodox Mormons most of the