The Existence of God

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I want to welcome you to week two of our overview of Christian theology and doctrine.
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And last week was our introduction to this topic, and so really tonight is the first real lesson.
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Even though last week was a lesson of sorts, it was an introduction to the entire series.
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Tonight is when we're really starting to dig into the subject that we're going to study, and that is the doctrine of God, the doctrine of theology.
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And as I said last week, we are going to take a systematic approach to the study of the Bible.
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And sometimes that is called systematic theology, but as I said, I didn't want to call it systematic theology because I was afraid no one would come with that name.
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So we call it an overview of Christian theology and doctrine, because that's what systematic theology is.
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It seeks to take a scientific approach to studying the Bible.
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We categorize what the Bible teaches in an attempt to be consistent in our understanding.
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One of the things that I think plagues the church the most in the modern day is people who have inconsistent beliefs about God and about the Bible.
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They haven't thought through what they believe.
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They haven't thought through what they think.
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I make this point a lot when people when people chide me about reformed theology.
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I have friends who are not reformed and and they'll say, well, I don't I don't understand how you can believe that God's the one sovereign over man's decisions and how God decides who's going to be saved and blah, blah, blah.
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And they say things like that.
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And I say, well, tell me how you pray for someone who's lost.
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They say, I pray God open their heart to believe.
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And I say, why do you pray that way? Because you don't believe that.
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You believe it's up to them.
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You believe it's their choice.
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You believe they're the ones who are ultimately going to open their hearts.
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You believe God's done all he's going to do.
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And ultimately, they're the ones who are going to make that final step that God did.
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Ninety nine percent.
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They still got to do their one.
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You know, that's consistent with your faith.
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Your prayer should be God.
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I know you've done everything you can do.
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So I'm going to go talk to Bob.
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I'm not going to pray about Bob.
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You've done all you can do.
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You see, that's inconsistent.
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And I'm not saying that I'm 100 percent consistent.
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I know as a fallible human being that I have inconsistencies, I'm certain.
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But my goal in my theology is to try to arrive at consistency, to try to be consistent with with what I believe.
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And not not only that, that it's consistent with scripture, but that it's consistent with all of scripture, not just one verse or one testament.
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A lot of people call themselves, well, I'm a New Testament believer.
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Not I don't want to deal with what that Old Testament has to say or something like that.
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We saw that last week at the debate.
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For those of you who came to the debate, several of you did.
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We went to a debate on the subject of homosexuality.
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And from the very outset, the debaters on the other side said we will not we don't want to discuss the Old Testament because we know what it says.
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And so we don't want to deal with that.
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We're only here to talk about the New Testament.
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And the the folks on our side, Dr.
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White, Dr.
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Brown, made the point.
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And they said, well, you know, that that demonstrates that you don't believe the Bible is consistent.
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If you can't say your position agrees or stands up to the scrutiny of both.
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So we want to be consistent.
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And as I said last week, systematic theology is sort of like it's a taxonomy of sorts.
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Taxonomy is the heart of science because the heart of science is categorization, putting things into groups, putting things into categories, understanding how things are consistent with one another.
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That's what taxonomy is.
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That's what systematic theology is.
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It's grouping things.
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And Dr.
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White mentions this a lot.
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If you ever listen to Dr.
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White talk about theology, he says most people make their mistakes when they start making category errors.
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For instance, you'll hear people talk about the Trinity and they'll say things like, well, God can't be three and be one at the same time.
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And the answer is, well, certainly he can if you're if you're talking about two different categories.
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God is one in essence or being and he's three in person and being is a different category than person.
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And so if I said God is one person who is three persons, then I would be being inconsistent.
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I would be giving a contradiction.
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Or if I said God is one being who is three beings, that's inconsistent.
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But I don't say that.
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I'm consistent.
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I say God is one being or essence or nature.
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But he's three in person and there is a distinction made between those two things.
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And this is and this is the history of Christianity is there is this attempt to be consistent in our faith.
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If you read the great creeds and confessions that go all the way back to the early church, you will see that there is an attempt to be consistent with what we believe.
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So I call us tonight to consider the value of being consistent in what we believe.
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And we're beginning tonight again with the doctrine of God.
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This is sometimes called theology proper.
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While all theology deals with God and his truth, theology proper deals specifically with God and his nature, God himself.
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It seeks to explain his existence, his attributes, his will, his decrees.
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All of those things are subjects that fall under the heading of theology proper.
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Sometimes it goes by the name patrology.
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Why do you think it would be called patrology? Yeah, that's right.
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The Greek word Pater is the word for father.
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And because there are two other distinct realms of theology, Christology, which is the study of Christ and pneumatology, which is the study of the Holy Spirit, we would say that this particular subject of theology is it can be defined as theology proper or patrology because it's the study particularly of the of the of the father.
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And yet at the same time, under theology proper, we do have the distinction of dealing with the Trinity as well.
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And so it doesn't limit itself to the father.
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But its primary goal is to understand the nature of the father himself.
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Our categories tonight or rather our categories for this study, this section of studies, which will be the doctrine of God, fall into five categories and you see them listed on your sheet.
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We have the existence of God.
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The revelation of God, the attributes of God, the names of God and the nature of God, which I put in your notes is a reference to the doctrine of the Trinity.
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You'll notice in your notes, I put an asterisk beside the first two, the existence and revelation of God, because that's the subject of lesson one.
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That's tonight.
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Now, whether we get through it all will be determined by the clock because I tend to get bogged down at times in certain things and I I stop and chase rabbits here or there.
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So I'll try not to do that.
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I'll try to bring us through to the end, but we'll see how that goes.
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So tonight, like I said, we're going to deal with the existence of God and the revelation of God.
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How many of you were here for our study of apologetics? We did this last year.
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OK, so about probably about half of you.
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So some of you were not here for that.
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And when we studied, does anybody want to tell the class what does apologetics mean? It's defending the faith.
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Apologetics is defending the faith.
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I mentioned this last week.
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I said systematic theology provides an apologetic because we know our faith, we can defend our faith.
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Right.
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That's what that's part of why we're doing this.
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And when I was teaching apologetics, I taught that there are multiple schools of thought when it comes to how to defend the faith.
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But the two primary that we dealt with were called presuppositionalism and what was the other one? Evidentialism, presuppositionalism and evidentialism are the two main schools of thought that we dealt with in our study of apologetics.
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Presuppositionalism and evidentialism are two different methods for defending the faith.
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Evidentialist says that we begin to defend the faith by saying to the unbeliever, we are on neutral ground.
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We are going to take the evidence and we're going to follow the evidence where it lies.
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That's the evidential approach to apologetics.
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We're only going to look at the bare evidence and by evidence we will arrive at the knowledge of God.
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The presuppositional approach says that it is impossible for a man to be neutral because all men begin with certain presuppositions.
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And because all men begin with presuppositions, we cannot simply use evidence to lead somebody to God.
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I tend to be a presuppositionalist.
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I tend to be this side.
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Now, that isn't to say that I never appeal to evidences, but I believe that no man is neutral.
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The Bible says this.
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The Bible says in Romans chapter one that all men know God exists and that all men suppress that truth in unrighteousness.
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So when I'm dealing with an unbeliever, it would be to me a foolish thing to say to the unbeliever, we're going to start on neutral ground because that's not possible.
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They've already got certain presuppositions that rely upon my worldview.
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One, they believe that evidence can arrive at truth.
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That's a presupposition.
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They presume that is true.
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They presume that logic and order and consistency are how you arrive at truth.
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One of the greatest lines in the history of debate was between Greg Bonson and Gordon Stein in the middle of the 1980s when I was but a wee lad.
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And they had a debate out in California on the subject of the belief in God.
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And Gordon Stein was the atheist and he was making the argument, you know, we don't know God exists.
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There's no way to know God exists, blah, blah, blah.
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And he said, I don't believe in anything that I can't quantify physically or materially.
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I don't believe anything is without substance.
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I don't believe anything that's without substance.
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And Dr.
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Bonson, he said, do you believe in the laws of logic? And he said, well, of course I believe in the laws of logic.
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And he says, well, where are they? Where's the substance of the laws of logic that you're appealing to for your very argument? And it's just a great line.
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If you go back and listen to the debate, the room kind of got quiet.
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So I don't believe in anything that's not, you know, that's immaterial.
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Laws of logic are not material.
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Do you believe in those? Yeah, shoot yourself in the foot.
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Again, a presuppositionalist would point to the fact that the Bible says no man is neutral.
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All men know God exists.
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All men will be held accountable for that knowledge.
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In fact, if here's our first one, I do want you to hear this.
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Somebody want to read? Who's going to be my first reader? Don't all run at once.
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Thank you, Adam.
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Will you read Romans 1, 18 through 23? I'm going to walk closer to you, not because I want to hear I want the mic to hear you.
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Yeah.
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Oh, it's the New American Standard Bible.
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It's very good.
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1823, please.
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Yes, sir.
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Well, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and righteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them.
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For God made it evident to them.
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For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse.
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For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened, professing to be wise.
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They became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and forfeited animals and crawling creatures.
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Thank you, Mr.
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Adam.
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I appreciate that.
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If you hear what he said in that text, he said, all men know God exists.
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And all men will be held accountable for that knowledge.
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It also says the unrighteous suppress that truth and that they claim that the suppression is an expression of wisdom.
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I don't believe in God, and thus I am wise for not believing in God.
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In reality, it's an expression of foolishness that the text says, it says, claiming to be wise, they became what fools.
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And how did they express that foolishness? Idolatry by worshipping the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.
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Amen.
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That one text leads me to be a presuppositionalist.
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It tells me that no matter how much evidence is presented to the unbeliever, as long as he is suppressing the truth, he's going to find a way out of the evidence.
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As long as he is suppressing the truth, he's not going to listen to the evidence.
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And as long as he is suppressing the truth until God sees fit to open his heart to believe, all I am doing is giving him information that he's going to reject and suppress.
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That doesn't mean I'm not going to give it to him.
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Doesn't mean I'm not going to present it to him.
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But I understand that I'm not on neutral ground.
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This is not some guy who's just out there wandering about hoping to run into God.
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This is a rebel against God, and he may not act like a rebel.
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He may act like a pretty nice guy.
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But in our hearts, we are sinful by nature, rebels against God, and it takes an act of God's grace to change our heart.
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And because of this, some may say, well, we never need to discuss arguments for the existence of God.
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I don't think that that's true.
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I think looking at the arguments for the existence of God are important because they bolster the faith that God has given us or they encourage us in our faith.
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I don't know about you, but even as a believer, I have times where I have to deal with with doubt in my heart on things and I have to struggle with with with with pain and suffering, just like others.
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Or when I see someone else who's going through pain and suffering and I and and I'm not above asking the question of why or how this can be, you know.
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So so so I think when we when we say our arguments important, yes, arguments not going to take an unbeliever and making them a believer, but an argument or a or a statement of fact about God can encourage the believer.
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It can bolster the faith of the believer.
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So the beginning of our study of theology proper is looking at the existence of God.
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What are some of the reasonable reasons, if I know the word, what are some of the reasonable reasons why we believe that God is there, that God does exist? And so that's what we're going to look at in our first part tonight.
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I think that there are some really good nuggets of wisdom in here.
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And again, I'll remind you, our textbook is the Moody Handbook of Theology.
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Sorry, too many papers there.
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The Moody Handbook of Theology.
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This is what we're going through as a textbook.
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And it's it's it's very helpful for me because it keeps my my teaching tied to a post, as it were.
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So we're going to look tonight at five arguments.
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Or reasons for the existence of God that have been proposed down through the ages.
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Some of these are hundreds of years old as far as the argument itself goes.
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The first one we're going to look at is called the cosmological argument, the cosmological argument.
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How many of you have ever heard the term the cosmological argument? OK.
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All right.
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Not a lot of you.
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Good.
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So that's that's good.
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We'll all learn together, then the cosmological argument.
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I'll read to you from our textbook.
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Logically speaking, the cosmological argument for the existence of God is inductive and a posteriori.
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That means, rather, that the evidence is examined and based on its conclusions we draw the or based on the evidence we draw the conclusion that God exists.
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The term cosmological comes from the Greek word cosmos, meaning world.
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The argument is based on the fact that a cosmos or a world exists because something cannot come from nothing.
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There must be an original cause.
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That is the reason for the world's existence.
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A man, a man wears a bull of a watch.
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I have no idea what that is, but that's in the tech.
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They may know what a below the wristwatch is.
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Is that expensive? OK, I'm a man wears a wristwatch, a Timex.
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Yeah, although he has never seen the watchmaker, the fact of the existence of the wristwatch suggests there is a Swiss watchmaker who made the watch.
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The cosmological argument says that every effect must have a cause.
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Ray Comfort, one of my favorite evangelists, a man that I truly respect and admire, uses this argument a lot when he is out sharing the faith because he will be talking to an unbeliever or somebody who says, I don't know if I believe in God.
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And he'll say this simply.
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He'll say, do you see the building right there? And the person will say, yes, I see the building.
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He said, you know what that building is.
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It's evidence of a builder.
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I don't have to have ever met the builder.
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I don't have to have ever seen the builder.
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I don't have to have anything but the building to prove to me that there was a builder.
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The building itself is testimony of a builder.
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And he goes on to say creation is testimony of a creator.
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I had that same conversation, you know, learning from Ray and others over the years.
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I was sitting in a hospital room with a man who was a proclaimed atheist.
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And I was sitting in the room and it just struck me because I knew this man was a learned man.
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He was not an ignorant person in any way.
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And we were talking about the existence of God.
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He didn't he didn't like my preaching because I preached on hell and he heard me preach on hell.
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He didn't like that either.
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But we were talking, having this conversation back and forth.
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And I just looked out and I said to the man, I said, how do you know that building? Because we could see out the window.
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I said, how do you know that building had a builder? And he said, because it's there.
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And I said, you're here, you are testimony.
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To God's creation, that's the cosmological argument, that's a simplified version of it, but essentially it's based on the idea of there's a Latin phrase ex nihilo, nihil fit.
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That Latin phrase ex nihilo, nihil fit means out of nothing, nothing comes.
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Out of nothing, nothing comes.
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Ultimately, the argument is this.
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If there was ever nothing, there would still be nothing because nothing produces nothing.
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If you take a jar with nothing in it, you put it on a shelf for a million years.
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When you go back a million years later and you open it up, it's still going to have nothing in it because nothing comes from nothing.
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That's the argument ex nihilo, nihil fit, out of nothing, nothing comes.
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And thus that means there had to be something if there is still something.
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If there was ever nothing, there would still be nothing.
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I know that sounded a little confusing, but that is the cosmological argument.
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Creation itself is testimony to a creator.
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And one of the things, one phrase I've used in the past is an uncaused cause.
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Because God is not an effect.
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God is not caused by something else.
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Everything else is an effect.
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The universe is an effect.
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Even the very argument of the Big Bang theorist is that the universe banged out of something.
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A bang is an effect that causes all kinds of other effects.
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All right.
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And so this argument simply says that the existence of God is necessary.
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The existence of a creator is necessary because creation makes it so.
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That's the cosmological argument.
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Moving on to the second argument.
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Oh, by the way, let me just say this about that.
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I won't make you read this one, but if you want to go in your mind, go to Genesis 1.1 with me.
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What does Genesis 1.1 say? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
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Right.
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The great thing about the Bible is while it does give us a lot of it gives us a lot of tools for making a defense for the faith, it never once tries to make a defense for the existence of God.
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It simply assumes that God exists.
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The Bible doesn't doesn't argue for God's existence.
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It assumes it.
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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
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And that's where it starts.
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There is no argument.
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It just is.
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And so why? Because creation is.
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Creation is the proof of the creator.
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The next is called the teleological argument.
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The teleological argument.
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This comes from the word telos, which means end or goal.
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Telos means end or goal.
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I'll read from our text.
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The teleological argument may be defined as order or useful arrangement in a system implying intelligence and purpose in the organizing cause.
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The universe is characterized by order and useful arrangement.
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Therefore, the universe has an intelligent and free cause.
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The world everywhere evidence is intelligent, purpose and harmony.
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There must be a master architect behind all of this evidence.
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The psalmist sees the magnificence of God's creation in the universe and recognizes that it testifies to God's existence.
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I need two readers.
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Come on.
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OK, Miss Sharon, would you read Psalm 8 verses 3 and 4? Or who else will read for me? OK, Noah, would you read Psalm 19 verses 1 to 4? So turn with me if you want to read Psalm 8, 3 to 4, 3 and 4.
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And the son of man that you care for him.
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Thank you.
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Psalm 8, 3 and 4.
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When I look at the heavens, I see the work of your hands.
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I see what you have done.
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And it's testimony of your handiwork.
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Now, Psalm 19 goes right along with this.
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I'll let Noah read that.
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The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
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Day to day pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge.
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There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard.
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Their measuring line goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.
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In them he has set a tent for the sun.
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Yeah, in him, in them he has set a tent for the sun.
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That's talking about the fact that the very sun itself is constantly going across the sky.
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And I know the scientists would say, no, no, no.
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The sun is where it is and we're going around the sun.
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But from a visual standpoint, we see the sunrise.
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We see the sun cross the sky.
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We see it go down.
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That's the picture that the psalmist is using.
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And he's saying this is testifying to the glory of God.
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The heavens declare the glory of God and they are testifying of his power and his handiwork.
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And I said this in a sermon about a few months ago.
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I said the sun is almost like a preacher.
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The sun is constantly, every day, all day long, one, you know, one half of the day on our side of the planet, one half of the day on the other side of the planet.
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But it's constantly testifying 24 hours a day to the existence of God.
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It's the it's the testimony in the sky that God exists.
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And it has purpose and it has design.
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And we're just as far as we need to be from it to have the temperature that we need and liquid water that we need.
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And all of the things that are necessary for life and the ability to continue living are part of this grand design.
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And our bodies demonstrate design.
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That's what the teleological argument is, is that there's design and we can see it.
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I want to read some more from our text.
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It says God's harmony is observed throughout the universe and the world.
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The sun being ninety three million miles distance is precisely right for adequate climate on Earth.
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The moon's distance of two hundred forty thousand miles provides tides and a proper level.
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The Earth's tilt provides seasons.
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A conclusion is clear that God, the master designer, has created a magnificent universe.
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The alternative that the world happened by chance is no more possible than than than that.
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A monkey being able to create the work of Shakespeare on a typewriter by haphazardly playing on the keys.
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Years ago, I was I was on a canoe trip with the youth.
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So it tells you how long ago it was, because it was back when I was working with young people and it was back when I was willing to get on a canoe.
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Those days passed, but I was I was on a canoe trip down a river.
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It was actually Swanee River.
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And as we were going down the river, I looked across onto the side of the bank, which was covered with sand.
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And I noticed a bench looked like the bench that we used to have here out in front, like a park bench type thing.
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Had somebody had put a bench there? I have no idea why.
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Maybe they just dumped it out of the back of a truck or maybe somebody placed it there to sit and look at the river.
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I don't know.
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But somebody had placed a bench on the on the on the shore there.
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And and and as I was going down the river, I looked at it was weathered.
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It was beaten up pretty badly.
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But the outline of the bench was very clearly noticeable.
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And I immediately thought about the teleological argument.
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I don't know if that's how your mind works, but that's how mine immediately I thought about the teleological argument, because as I was looking at the bench, I said, you know what? There's no process of erosion or sedimentation or wind or rain or anything else that would have created the screws that would have fashioned the hinges of the where everything connected and nothing natural would have created something that demonstrated such obvious design.
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No process of nature would have created something of such magnificent simplicity and yet still purpose and design.
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That's what tell us is purpose.
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It's design.
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It's the reason there's a reason why this is.
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We look at the universe, we see no guided hand.
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How? How could a person look at the universe and see no guided hand? That's what the unbeliever has to say.
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I'm looking at the universe.
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I don't see any I don't see any guided hand in this.
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This is all happening by the miracle of chance.
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Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul wrote a book called Not a Chance.
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If you ever get a chance to read it, you're interested in reading on this subject.
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His whole his whole book is the argument that there's the people who say the universe happened by chance is it's the greatest fool of them all to say such a thing.
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You're having to work overtime to suppress the truth, to look at the universe and say it just happened by chance.
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And one of the websites that I read a lot posted this.
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We instinctively make these connections all the time.
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The difference between the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore is obvious.
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Right.
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You can imagine the Grand Canyon coming about by the process of erosion because it's just a bunch of rocks carved out by water.
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But if you looked at Mount Rushmore and said, yeah, that happened by erosion, you'd have to be nuts.
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Right.
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I mean, the two are diametrically opposed to one another as to the purpose and picture of design.
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Now, when Charles Darwin put forth his theory of biological evolution, you know what we would call particle to people evolution going from single cell organism all the way up to the multi cell intelligent creature that most people are.
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He did not have the capability to see inside the cell that he was espousing simply became what we are.
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The cell itself bears the marks of irreducible complexity.
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You ever heard that term irreducible complexity? Irreducible complexity was actually a theory put out by Michael Behe, who himself is a scientist.
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Michael Behe said this.
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He said that there are there are certain contraptions that we use that are irreducibly complex, even though they're simple.
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Think of a mousetrap.
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A mousetrap is only made of four parts.
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It has a base, a spring, a latch and a hammer or whatever's going to whatever's falling.
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It's basically four parts.
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But if you take away any one of those four parts, even though a simple machine like a mousetrap would no longer function and it would not have purpose.
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Right.
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It has to have all four parts.
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All four parts have to work together for it to have function and purpose.
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So Michael Behe said, think about the human, the cell and the human body, which is far more complex than a mousetrap and requires all of that complexity for its ability to survive.
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And yet we say that happened by chance.
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It's irreducibly complex.
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And that's that's one of the arguments of Telos for teleological design.
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Now, there have been I'm not going to lie.
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There have been attempts to argue against this.
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Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Blind Watchmaker.
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That was his answer to the teleological argument.
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I'm telling you, the Christian science community, not the Christian science.
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That's a religion.
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The scientific Christians went after him about it because his book was ridiculous.
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The teleological argument is a strong argument because it says when we see design, we see the footprint or the fingerprint of the designer.
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Not only do we see creation and we say creation testifies to a creator, but we see creation that has purpose.
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Thus, we see the mind of the creator.
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That's the teleological argument.
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They go together.
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Cosmological argument, teleological argument fit together.
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All right.
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Moving on.
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I'll see how I run out of time.
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I'm pretty much out of time.
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What time is it? Yeah.
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We'll keep going for a few minutes anyway.
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Let me at least get through these.
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Anthropological argument.
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The anthropological argument is based on the Greek word Anthropos.
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What does that word mean? Man.
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Think about anthropology, the study of man.
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And basically, this is the argument that man is not simply a physical being, but he is a moral being.
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He has a conscience, an intellect, emotion, and will.
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Francis Schaeffer said this.
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He said, there are physiological and moral features in man's constitution which may be traced back to find their origin in God.
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A blind force could never produce a man with intellect, sensibility, will, conscience, and an inherent belief in a creator.
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I ask unbelievers all the time.
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This is actually one of the questions I ask somebody who says, I don't believe in God.
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I say, do you believe that you are merely a biological machine? That that's all you are is a biological machine.
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Most of them will say no.
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They'll say, I'm more than just chemicals and energy.
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Some, though, some, though, will say, yes, that's all we are is chemicals and energy.
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And if someone believes themselves to be just chemicals and energy, then things like love and emotion and dignity and justice take on a whole new meaning.
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Because, yes? Are those the ones that would be? Yeah, you're just out.
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When you die, the synapse is shut down and everything closes off and it's not even darkness.
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It's nothing.
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It's nothing.
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That's right.
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And I have that.
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I asked that.
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I said, do you love your family? What is love? If you are nothing but a biological machine, is that not just the firing of synapses in the brain? Is it like if I took a Dr.
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Pepper and a Mr.
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Pibb and I shook them up and I set them beside each other and opened them and all those chemicals started to flow out? We would think nothing of that because those chemical reactions mean nothing.
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Why do the chemical reactions in your brain have value? Why are you more valuable than a Dr.
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Pepper or Mr.
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Pibb? The anthropological argument says there's more to man than just chemicals and energy.
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And we know this inherently because we treat man with respect and dignity.
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And we get angry when he is treated unjustly because we understand the inherent value of the human person as being made in the image of God.
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This argument is a little more philosophical than the teleological argument or even the cosmological argument.
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But I think it's still valuable because here's a good question.
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If you have somebody who really believes this, all I believe, I'm just chemicals.
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I say, then do you have a free will? Now, I'm not talking Calvinism, free will, all that stuff.
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Leave that at the table for now.
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Just ask this question.
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Do you have free will? Because if you believe that you are simply a being of energy and chemicals, then you are the product of that energy and chemicals.
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I say, why are you upset for me for believing? I'm predestined to this because this is the way my body was made.
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The chemicals and energy in my body are making these decisions for me, not me.
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And your willingness to not believe is how those chemicals and energy are working in you.
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Why do you even care what I think? You see, the atheist cries out, I'm a free thinker, all the while being absolutely predestined by the chemicals and energy within him if his worldview is correct.
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He's not a free thinker.
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He's bound to his nature.
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The moral argument is similar to that.
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We'll go through these quickly.
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The moral argument can be combined.
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I almost combined them for you, but I wanted to keep them a little bit separate because the moral argument says this.
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If man is only a biological creature, why does he have a sense of obligation? Recognition of moral standards and concepts cannot be attributed to the evolutionary process.
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The Biblicist recognizes that God has placed a sense of moral justice within the human race in contradistinction to all other creation.
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You realize that dogs don't worship, right? You don't see cows out in the middle of the field going, oh, you know, they just don't do that.
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We're the only ones who have a moral obligation to things like that.
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We're the only ones that have moral obligation to justice.
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You realize in the animal kingdom, there's no justice, right? There's a circle of life, according to the Lion King.
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But as far as justice, there is rape all the time in the animal kingdom.
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Nobody cares.
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There's stealing and theft in the animal kingdom all the time.
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Nobody cares.
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There's murder in the animal kingdom.
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Nobody cares because animals don't have an inherent sense of justice and duty and ought.
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Ask the unbeliever, where comes your sense, where from comes your sense of ought and duty? Altruism, altruism is what causes a soldier to jump on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers.
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Altruism is what causes a man to run up the twin towers rather than running down.
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That's not an evolutionary byproduct.
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That's a product of the image of God.
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That's the moral argument.
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Last one is the ontological argument.
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I'm going to tell you, the ontological argument, as far as I'm concerned, is the most difficult to make, and I don't use it.
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But the ontological argument, basically, it's gone through many, many iterations over the centuries.
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It was first introduced by Enselm, and basically it says that because man, I'll read it to you.
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It's a little difficult.
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Our idea of God is of a perfect being.
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It is more perfect to exist than not to exist.
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Therefore, God must exist.
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It's a deductive argument.
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All the rest of the arguments we've looked at are inductive.
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This is a deductive argument.
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It's a little odd.
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I encourage you, if you're interested, look it up.
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It is a little difficult to understand.
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I would honestly say I don't quite understand fully the argument.
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It is in our book.
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It's in our textbook.
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I wanted to put it in here, but I will say this.
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I don't use it.
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Ultimately, though, it deals specifically with the fact that God is perfect, and being is better than non-being, and so because God is perfect, he must be rather than not be.
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It's somewhat of a deep philosophical argument, one that I'm not quite ready to stand my ground on, as it were.
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I'm going to stop here.
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Well, is anybody in a hurry? You've got five minutes? I can finish this.
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Really? Yeah.
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Basically, you know what, though? I don't want to do that.
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I don't want to rush these.
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Huh? You can't write that fast.
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I tell you what.
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Let's do this.
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Let's hold the antitheistic theories to next week, and then look at the revelation of God next week, and we'll make part one a two-parter.
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Does that sound good? In that way, I don't have to rush? Because I've got a lot to say, and I hate to feel like we're rushing it.
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All right, let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for the truth of the word.
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Thank you for those who are willing to come tonight and study together, and I pray this has been fruitful for them.
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And, Lord, to encourage us to believe is the goal of this study.
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To encourage us to know what we believe in, why we believe it, and be able to stand for our faith in light of a world which is constantly coming against it.
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Lord, may we continue to study and trust in you.
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In Christ's name, amen.