An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics 2 (Overview of Classical and Evidential Apologetics)

What Apologetics Is and Why Christians Practice It

An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics, Part 2, brought to you by RoarNoMore .com.

I want to do a quick review of some of the stuff we talked about last week before we get started. Does anyone remember what apologetics is? Can anyone give me a definition of that? In our context, it's defending the Christian worldview or the Bible, right?

Because that's where our faith is canonized. So how do we, in a public setting with people of other competing worldviews and religions and points of view that are different than ours, how do we have a reasoned discussion with them in which they come out of the conversation knowing that there is a God who is going to judge them, and Lord willing, we also get a chance to represent Jesus Christ and tell them about the way of salvation.

So how do you do that effectively? That's what apologetics is. Oxford Dictionary definition, we went over this last week. It says it's a reasoned argument or writing and justification of something, typically a theory or religious doctrine.

We went over a little bit of the etymology of the word apologetics and the courtroom analogy, what that was. And now we're just going to come to something else we talked about last week really quick, the prerequisites for defending the faith.

Prerequisites for Defending the Faith

Before we can even start to give a reason for the hope that is within us, there's a couple things that we need to already have down. Our hearts need to be right before God. We talked about, first of all, you need to be saved.

You can't defend your faith if you don't have that faith. That's why 1 Peter says it's the hope that is within you. We also need to be bold when we're defending our faith, not be intimidated. Verse 14 of 1 Peter 3 talks about that, not being afraid of what the unbeliever or nonbeliever says to us or what arguments they can give.

We can be bold and not be intimidated by that. Thirdly, we need to sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts. Does anyone remember, there are two main things we talked about in regard to that. Be a good example.

Don't let your witness override what your conviction is. Don't let your example of what you are as a Christian be in contradiction to the truth that you hold. I gave the example of if you're getting drunk and doing all sorts of things, participating in the worldly things, and then saying, oh yeah, but I'm a Christian and I'm going to give you a reason for why you should be a Christian, then you're kind of defeating yourself.

You're cutting off the branch you're sitting on. That was the first thing. The second thing, sanctifying Christ as Lord in your hearts, means that Christ is on the throne when we do apologetics. We don't take the position that we are Christ's defense attorney.

He's not sitting in the seat waiting to find out what's going to happen to him. While man is the judge, we're not put in that position. We need to put Christ in the position of being on the throne. Sanctifying him as Lord from the outset is what we ought to do.

That means we're not neutral. We are biased and we admit it, but we also admit that whoever is giving an argument against Christianity, they're also biased. They can't escape from that. They want to try to say that they're neutral or that they're looking objectively at the facts, but we know there is no such thing as objectivity, no matter what we're talking about.

If there is such a thing as objectivity, it would reside in what God says it is because he's the creator. So we don't give that up. Today, just about every apologist out there wants to assume at the outset that man is capable of reasoning apart from God, and that's just not the case.

We know that we have a fallen sin nature. We're not capable of doing that. So sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Fourth thing, we need to be ready. That means when? All the time, right? No matter what the situation is, we need to be ready for that.

The way I look at this is it's in the setting of a witnessing encounter. You're doing evangelism and someone asks you a question or gives an argument against what you're saying. That's when apologetics comes up.

I heard someone once talk about the verse that we went over last week in 1 Peter 3. Basically, they treat it as an excuse to not go out and evangelize because it says, be ready if anyone asks you. Basically, go around your daily life.

Don't make it obvious that you're a Christian, but if someone just happens to ask you, that's when you need to give a reason. I don't think that's what this is talking about at all. This is talking about you're in a witnessing encounter already, and then someone asks you while you're proclaiming the gospel.

So whenever we go out and do evangelism, we want to start with the gospel, start with man's sinfulness, the fact that he needs a savior, and then if they ask us a question or give us a challenge, that's when apologetics comes up.

So that's why it's important that we go over it. Fifth thing, have an attitude of gentleness to men and reverence to God. You don't want to try to be prideful with them because it was also translated as humility in other translations.

Don't try to start throwing out words that they don't understand or trying to make yourself out like you're really smart. Be humble about it. Try to seriously engage them on their level. That's what the spirit of gentleness is.

Reverence to God. Again, putting God in his place as the judge. The sixth thing is keeping a good conscience, and that goes back to what our lives are like personally. You don't want to go into an encounter with, obviously we all have sin, but we want that sin confessed before witnessing and so forth.

So that's kind of a brief review of what we talked about last week. We're going to talk about what's called meta-apologetics this morning, meaning not actually how to do apologetics, but the methodology behind it.

Classical Apologetics: Reason Leading to Faith

What kind of apologetics should we use? The reason I think this is important, it's a little bit deep, but the reason I think it's important is because almost, I guess I should say the majority of Christians do apologetics in the wrong way.

They reason autonomously. They think that man is capable of understanding things apart from God's revelation. So that's the way that they do things. And I know for me at least, it took me a little bit to understand a different way of doing that, a way that puts God in the judgment seat and Christ as Lord.

So we're going to talk about the different ways to do apologetics and then show, hopefully, why the presuppositional method is the right way to go about doing it. The first kind of apologetic that's out there, there's three major ones.

This is the first one. It's called classical apologetics. Some of you may have heard of that. Basically, Thomas Aquinas is probably the person that they go back to. He was a Catholic. He had five proofs for the existence of God, and he stole a lot of those actually from Plato and Aristotle.

It goes back to Greek thought. The basic underpinning of this whole system is that reason undergirds faith, that you don't start out with faith. You start out with your reason, and then you argue to faith.

We hear a lot, if you watch the news, every time there's a debate regarding Darwinism, how is it always framed? It's always framed as science versus religion, right? Any area of life, if we talk about faith versus reason, faith versus the scientific community, in the political realm this happens quite a bit.

A politician is not supposed to bring his faith. That's a personally held belief. We kind of have this two-tiered level of truth, that there's faith in one area, there's reason in another. Actually, to sort of give a visualization for this, we have faith, and that's kind of in the upper story, right?

And then we have reason. The way that we treat the lower story is that it's universal to everyone, right? Everyone has reason over them. Two plus two is four, no matter who you are. If you go to high school or college, the classes you take that involve reason would be like physics, math classes, all the classes that engineers end up taking.

They have a way of reasoning that has a right and a wrong answer to it. If you put two plus two is five, they're not going to mark you right and say good effort and build your self-esteem. They're going to say you're wrong, they're going to mark it down, and you're going to be in trouble.

Now, faith, though, of course, is not that way. It's subjective, right? In our culture, at least. If you go to an ethics class, in community college we had a required class, social problems in the world or whatever, and they have all these social problems, and we have to come up with solutions, and basically any solution you came up with, of course minus the right one, the one that God advocates, was considered correct.

And so that was faith. Faith is subjective. Reason is objective. We see in our culture a lot of things have moved from reason to faith. For instance, the study of law, right? It used to be something that was overall, there was a natural law theory or the common law.

There was a universal standard over everyone, and the job of the lawyer or the judge was to sort of discover that law, right? It wasn't to create it. It was to find out what it was. Of course, the Bible was really the main authority used from our English common law system.

Today, that's not the case at all. There's competing moral systems, and they're being codified now. In some places in Europe, of course, you have regions where there's Sharia law, and that's okay for them.

What do you kind of hear coming out of this? Post-modernism, right? That's kind of where we are today. Well, it started hundreds of years ago. It's not a new thing. It started with existentialism and a whole bunch of other philosophies.

But this is where we are today, though. We have faith, and we have reason. And faith can be personally held. Reason is held for everyone. So, yeah, basically, from the Bible's point of view, this doesn't exist.

The law of God, God's revelation to mankind, is over everyone. It's invariable. It's absolute. There really is no subjectivity. Now, someone could like the Giants, right, over the Jets. Someone could.

There is things like that, things that are not about ultimate issues. But no one can say that homosexuality is right, and then someone else say it's wrong, and they'd be both right in their assumptions.

One's right, one's wrong. In the case of the Giants or Jets, I'm sure there's people in here that probably think the Giants is right, and that's all there is to it. But, yeah, that wouldn't be the case.

So what they've tried to do is they've tried to take aesthetics and apply it and put it in the category of faith and treating moral issues like aesthetics, and you can't really do that. Anyway, so that's classical apologetics.

Classical apologetics is the idea that we're going to start here and get to here. So if I can just start with you with reasoning, I'll eventually argue you to faith. There was a friend of mine, actually, not too long ago, there was a discussion.

This was, I'm just going to admit, this was over Facebook, and these things can often be a little time-consuming and so forth, but I saw it was between an unbeliever and then a friend of mine, and what the unbeliever wanted to do was to give all the facts about evolution being correct and why Jesus couldn't exist and so forth and so on, and my friend's response was, well, let's take all the opinion out of it and just break it down to the facts.

Let's just go with the facts, and if we go with the facts, then you're going to see that my position is true. Now, the problem is, from the outset, he bought into this. He said that you're believing things on faith, let's cut faith out of it and just go with reason, but in the biblical framework, that doesn't work because the law of God, the revelation of God, is overall, it's invariable, it's absolute.

So everything comes down to a certain kind of subjectivity, but the only way it actually makes sense is if we place that reasoning in God, and that's the only way we can have any objectivity. So I don't know if that makes sense.

Basically, the only way to make sense of reality is to first assume that the God of Christianity exists. If you don't first assume that, you're left in a world that has no absolutes, and, of course, no one practically lives in that world.

They might say they do, but even the person who says that there are no absolutes still drives on the right side of the road, still wants a paycheck with certain numbers attached to it. You know, they still function in the actual world, right?

All right, so the classical apologist says, let's start with reason, let's go to faith. I'm going to read to you, this is sort of a summary of the position of classical apologetics. The classical method is an approach that begins by employing natural theology to establish theism as the correct worldview.

After God's existence has thus been shown, the classical method moves to a presentation of the historical evidence for the deity of Christ, the trustworthiness of scripture, etc., to show that Christianity is the best version of theism, as opposed to, say, Judaism and Islam.

William Lane Craig, who is a classical apologist today, is quoted as saying, this approach is comprised of natural theology and Christian evidences. Among its practitioners are such great figures as Thomas Aquinas, with his famous Five Ways of Demonstrating God's Existence and his appeal to the signs of credibility, which are miracles and prophecy, to validate Christian doctrines not demonstratable by reason alone.

So here's basically what that's saying. Start out with reason. Create an argument that gets you to blank theism. So you believe in a God now. Then after you believe in a God, build on that. Try to now prove that Christ is the true God.

So now you have Christ as the true God. So that's kind of like an addition to now your worldview. Now try to prove that Christ rose from the dead and gave you salvation, that the accounts of him rising are reliable.

Now you have Christ is the Lord and he also paid for your sins. He also rose from the dead. And keep adding things to it. This doesn't prove the whole Bible as a worldview. It proves it in bits and pieces.

So you can prove that Christ is Lord. That doesn't mean necessarily that the Old Testament is reliable. It doesn't mean that the writings of Paul we can trust. But at least they're to the position that Christ is God.

I think of mere Christianity. He starts out with the reason, and then he tries progressively to kind of build to the point that now you believe in the Christian faith. But it doesn't start out that way, right?

And by the way, I like a lot of the stuff C .S. Lewis writes. But his main argument, that's exactly what he's doing. And so what are some of the arguments that they'll use? Some of you have heard of these.

The cosmological argument. Anyone ever heard of the cosmological argument? I'm sure you've used it probably before in a more simple form. There's a creation. There must be what? A creator. You've all heard that, right?

And we've probably all used it on witnessing encounters. And it's not necessarily a wrong apologetic to use, but if it's used the way that the classical apologists try to use it, which is that you're a reasonable person, you're going to have to come to this conclusion, then it is wrong.

It's actually sinful. And let me show you why that is. If you start out with the belief that you look around and you see that things exist, therefore there must have been a creator, a very simple form of it, what are you assuming?

That you are capable of what? First of all, perceiving things. That your senses are reliable. You're also assuming that the laws of nature are invariable, that they're overall, that they're consistent.

You're assuming that everything... This is called the composition fallacy, but you're assuming that everything that you notice in life, like a car or a baby, they're all created, therefore the world must be created.

But I could take that same logic and say, well, there's people in a church, therefore the church is a person. It doesn't work, right? It's called the composition fallacy. And so there are some problems with this argument, but we've used it a lot, we hear it a lot, and it's common in the classical apologetic world.

And what they'll do is they'll try to get you to concede that there must have been some kind of a creator, but how do you know who that creator is? That could be Allah, for all we know. That could be the god of Mormonism.

That could be a polytheistic system that doesn't actually prove the god of Christianity one bit. I know Cornelius Van Til, which is where the presuppositional tradition comes from. He made the point once, you've heard the cosmological argument, you've heard the teleological, you've heard the ontological.

He went through all these arguments. He says, have you ever heard the toothpaste argument for God's existence? You're like, what, the toothpaste argument? Well, the beauty of the presuppositional way of doing apologetics is that any fact there is can be turned into an evidence for God.

Anything that actually exists can be turned into an evidence for God. And so it's actually even, there's even more arguments for the existence of God from the position that we hold that we're going to be doing an introduction to later on in this class.

So that's the first one, the cosmological argument. So there's a few of the problems with it. The main problem ultimately I have with it, though, is that it starts out with the assumption that man's senses are reliable and that his rationale is reliable.

What right do you have to assume that? Without God, you really don't have a right to assume that. All right, so the teleological argument, that's the next one. If any of you have taken philosophy, Plato has the world of forms and the world that we live in, right?

And what he said was that you can't get a perfect circle in this world. I could try to write on the board a circle, and there's nothing perfect about that. You can't actually do physics based on that.

It's just a representation of what? A perfect circle. I'm trying to represent to you something. That's what Plato did. He said that there's a world of conceptions where there's forms that are perfect, like a perfect circle, but in our world, things just aren't perfect.

And the telos was the purpose in everything, that everything was created for a purpose. The circle I just drew was created for a purpose of representing the perfect circle. So he has kind of this perfect world that kind of shadows the world that we live in.

The purpose of mankind is to shadow some kind of a perfect human. And you notice all the Greek gods, what are they? They're perfect humans. They're not all the statues. The muscles are perfect. The structure of the bones are perfect.

And so you see this in their art everywhere. That's what they believe. That was from Plato. It was this world of forms. And so the teleological, telos meaning the purpose, the idea behind something, the design of it, basically says that you see design and intricacy in the world, therefore God must exist.

You've heard that one. That's the simple form of it, at least. And it assumes that, again, the same things that the cosmological argument assumes, that man is reasonable, that we can see intricacy, and that our senses are reliable.

Basically that we can reason independently from God and then get to God. So same problems with that one. Another one, the ontological argument, I'm not going to go over that one too much because, frankly, it's not used much anymore.

It was used in the Catholic Church quite a bit. It comes from the world of forms that I just talked about with Plato and that if you can conceive of something that's really high and mighty, that it must exist.

That sounds really weird to our ears. But in the Catholic conception in the 1500s, this for some reason made sense to them. And there were a lot of arguments against it, even at the time. But it was also used a lot.

If you can conceive of a being that is self-sufficient, that created everything, that is the source of morality and everything else that we see in the world, then it must exist because there's forms, right?

Forms represent something perfect. So your mind can conceive of this being, therefore it exists. And that's not something we see anymore. Now, in the Catholic conception this worked. And that's actually one of the points that I want to make, is that throughout time as philosophies change, people don't change, but philosophies change, our apologetic tends to change with the culture.

And if that's the way that things are happening, is that really the way things ought to happen? Is God something that can be proven to man despite his philosophies, or does it have to change? Do we have a man-centered apologetic, where based on his culture we have to argue, or do we have a God-centered apologetic where we reason with man based on what God has already given us in his revelation?

So this is one of the arguments that has been kind of left to the side because it worked if you were a Catholic, but now it doesn't work. And actually it worked if you were a Catholic who accepted Plato as a prophet, I don't know what they would call it, a saint in the Catholic Church.

It's interesting, I don't know if you've heard of Galileo. Anyone heard of him? He made the telescope, and he kind of overturned the idea of geocentricity, I think, that the Earth was the center of the universe.

And atheists always love to bring this up, that the Church persecuted him because of his belief. And that's actually not true at all. It wasn't the Church that persecuted him because of what the Bible said.

It was the Church that persecuted him because of what Plato and Aristotle said. Because Plato and Aristotle were actually authorities in the Catholic Church at that time. They were viewed as men that got their ideas from Isaiah.

I don't know how they argue this, but from Isaiah and Moses. And they were Christians, basically, because they believed in God and they came up with these great proofs. So we left the ontological argument.

Evidential Apologetics and the Problem of Interpreting Evidence

Those are the three major ones that classical apologists use. And then we get into evidential apologetics. This is the idea that evidence undergirds faith, right? So classical apologetics, reason undergirds faith.

We start with reason, we argue to faith. Evidential apologetics, we start with evidence, and then we argue to faith. Evidence undergirds faith. Here's a quote from Matt Slick, who is an apologist. Evidential apologetics stresses evidence, such as miracles, fulfilled prophecies, etc., and uses reason to support them.

It uses reason to support them. So ultimately, they're actually still going back to reason, too. Because you can't actually interpret a fact without some reason, right? I don't see a huge difference between these communities, the evidentialists and the classical apologists, but they are different schools of thought.

A lot of the classical apologists will use evidential arguments and vice versa, so there is some overlap here. Let me read you this quote here. This is from a book called Five Views on Apologetics, and this is the evidential view.

The evidential method has much in common with the classical method, except in solving the issue concerning the value of miracles as evidence. Evidentialism as an apologetic method may be characterized as the one-step approach.

Miracles do not presuppose God's existence, as most contemporary classical apologetics assert, but can serve as one sort of evidence for God. It tends to focus chiefly on the legitimacy of accumulating the various historical and other inductive arguments for the truth of Christianity.

So here's an evidential argument for the existence of God. Christ was buried in a tomb. He died on a cross, and there were 500 witnesses. They were written in four Gospels, and we have other writings that are extra-biblical, like Josephus and Tacitus and Pliny the Younger and the Talmud, and all these other writings that we can go to and say, see, they even reference that there was a Jesus that existed.

Now, if you buy the idea that Jesus existed based on these historical fragments that we have, and then you also buy the idea that, based on, again, the eyewitness accounts, that he must have risen from the dead, therefore Christ is God, because no man can rise from the dead.

And so if he rose from the dead, and if you buy that that means he's God, then we can sort of smuggle in the whole of Christianity. Everything that Jesus endorsed is correct. And then we try to say, well, look, he endorsed the Old Testament.

He was the one that endorsed Paul's ministry, and so his epistles are accurate. And what do you see here? The same thing in classical apologetics. You're kind of building step by step, trying to get someone eventually to buy into your worldview.

But you don't do it one step at a time. It's really step by step, and that's why here it says it's a one-step approach. I don't know if that's quite accurate. It's actually really more like the classical approach.

It is multiple steps. Here's another one. You've heard this one a lot, fulfilled prophecy. What was that civilization that they found? It was the Hittites. They said it couldn't exist, the scientific community, and then they actually found it, and, well, the Bible must be accurate.

So what have you done? You've taken, well, the Bible is accurate in this one area, so therefore we can try to build on that to smuggle in the rest of the Bible. And that's another one, the fulfilled prophecy is concerning Jesus, that he came on time, all the other things.

The creationist community does this quite a bit with Genesis, trying. This isn't as historical, but this is a scientific way of looking at it, that we see evidence of a flood, right? That's evidentialism.

Therefore, the flood must be accurate. The Bible talks about a flood. Therefore, the Bible is accurate. The Bible also talks about Jesus and judgment. So we can accept it based on flood evidence. So I think we're all familiar with this line of argumentation.

That is the classical or the evidential apologist position. B .B. Warfield was one of them, John Montgomery, Clark Pinnock. Today, the popular thing today in Christianity is you have these classical apologists who use evidential arguments all the time, and they go back and forth.

I've seen a number of debates. One was with, I think it was another William Lane Craig one, where he started bringing out the teleological argument, everything has a purpose, therefore God exists. And then the person says, well, you know, that proves a God.

That doesn't prove your God. And then they'll say, well, you know, there are eyewitnesses to Jesus. Therefore, Jesus exists. And so it's kind of a, they kind of take both these arguments and use them, infuse them together.

So that's evidential apologetics, looking at the evidence to determine what is true. Now, what problem does anyone see here? Do rocks interpret themselves? Is there a label on a rock that says, I came from Noah's flood, therefore the Bible is true?

There's not. You have to use your reasoning to come up with that. Man's reasoning, of course, is flawed, so he can't come up with that. What happens is they have alternate, what we talked about, escape mechanisms last week.

They create an escape mechanism when you bring up an argument like this. Fossils on the top of Mount Everest, therefore, you know, the floodwaters must have covered Mount Everest at one time. That means the flood was over the whole earth.

Well, they'll just assume, well, Mount Everest wasn't there back then. It arose from an earthquake. And then the sea was over it at one point. Well, that's perfectly rational. It could have arisen at one point, right, through volcanic activity or whatever.

So they create an escape mechanism, and then they'll come back at you with something, and you create your escape mechanism, and you just go back and forth because evidence isn't really the issue. It's the way you interpret the evidence that counts.

That's why evidential apologetics does not work long term. They have to actually accept your evidence before you can actually get it done. To summarize, the evidential argument doesn't work. Classical apologetics don't work.

Presuppositional Apologetics and the Transcendental Argument

Let's get into presuppositional apologetics. All right, let's at least start it. Faith undergirds reason. Faith undergirds reason. Presuppositional apologetics. I'm going to read this first quote here.

Due to the noetic effects of sin, presuppositionalists usually hold that there is not enough common ground between believers and unbelievers that would allow followers of the prior three methods to accomplish their goals.

The apologist must simply presuppose the truth of Christianity as the proper starting point in apologetics. Here the Christian revelation in the scriptures is the framework through which all experience is interpreted and all truth is known.

Various evidences and arguments can be advanced for the truth of Christianity, but these are at least implicitly presupposed premises that can be true only if Christianity is true. Presuppositionalists attempt then to argue transcendentally.

That is, they argue that all meaning and thought, indeed every fact, logically presupposes the God of scriptures. So all the arguments that we just talked about are valid if you phrase them in a presuppositional way.

Some of you might know what a syllogism is. Basically, if you have two premises or more than one premise, if the premises are true, the conclusion is true. So all men are mortal. Aristotle is a man. Aristotle is mortal.

That's a syllogism. And these can, of course, get very complex. I'm just going to do a very simple one. Let's do the cosmological argument. Things exist. We also know that things began to exist. Everything that began to exist has an origin in something.

And then what's the conclusion based on these two premises? Therefore, everything that exists has a beginning. And then from that, you create another fact, and then you create your argument for God. Now, what's the problem with this?

You start with your premises and your reason to God. In the presuppositional way of reasoning, your first premise is God exists. That's why things begin to exist. And then your conclusion is also God.

It is a form of circular reasoning, but it's a valid form. It's a valid form of circular reasoning. Circular reasoning isn't actually a fallacy per se. And maybe that will give everyone incentive to come back.

Yeah. How can circular reasoning not be fallacious? It actually isn't, and it's the only way to reason. Every single worldview is a circle. If I said, I believe that reason is my authority, and someone says to me, well, give me some reasons to believe in that, and I say, well, I'll give you a reason to believe in reason.

What have I just done? Every worldview is a circle, and most people don't realize that. But we're going to make a distinction. There's what's called a wide circle and a narrow circle, or a circle that you can escape and a circle that you can't.

For instance, the idea that reason is true, I can't escape that, because in order to overturn the idea of reason is true, I have to do what? I have to give a reason for it. To overturn the idea that God exists, that the Christian God exists, I have to first presuppose that God exists in order to do it.

And that's the way we're going to be arguing. It's called a transcendental argument. It might be a little foggy right now, but everything's going to be cleared up next week. Everything. Yes. Secret things belong to the Lord, so I'm not going to claim I can explain those.

If you want, you have the notes, you can read ahead, and maybe some of that will explain some of your questions. But we have to end it now. Unfortunately, we're a little late.

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