Crash Course in Presuppositional Apologetics: Self Refuting Worldviews

Ultimate Authority and the Preconditions of Intelligibility

Hey everyone, welcome back to a Crash Course in Presuppositional Apologetics. In the last video, we were talking about ultimate authority and how in order for an ultimate authority to actually be valid, it must first meet the preconditions of intelligibility or account for them.

Now, I believe there's only one worldview that can do this, and that is the Christian worldview. All other worldviews have a problem. They don't have the character of God by which to root the preconditions of intelligibility in.

And so, they run into logical contradictions and fallacies. And there's an extensive list at the link below, but I just want to share a couple of those with you today. Empiricism, the idea that science can find out any kind of truth, empiricism basically says the five senses are our ultimate authority, they say science is the best way to determine truth.

Now my question would be, if that's the case, what scientific experiment proved that statement to be true? Think about it for a moment. They say science is the only way to know truth, but yet they didn't use science to actually prove that statement.

Therefore, what? It's a logical contradiction, it's a self-refuting statement, it can't be the right ultimate authority. How about postmodernism, relativism, deconstructionism, the belief that there are no absolutes, there really is no ultimate authority, we all have our own ultimate authorities.

Well, that belief also runs into a problem because someone who says that is absolutely sure. You see, there is one absolute, if you say there are no absolutes, and that's the absolute that there are no absolutes.

Or if you say I'm not sure if there's an absolute, what you're saying is I'm sure, I know that I'm not sure, in which case you've also contradicted yourself. Let's look at a couple other worldviews that are out there.

Eastern Religions, Pantheism, and Self-Contradictory Claims

We could go into detail on a lot of these, but something like pantheism or eastern religions. How about the statement that everything is an illusion? Now here's a question, is that statement an illusion?

If everything is an illusion, then even that statement would have to be an illusion, in which case it's not really true, I have no reason to believe it. How about the Buddhist idea that we must lose our desires?

Now here's a question, do you have a desire to lose your desires? How about the statement that all is one? Now here's a question for somebody who makes that statement. Who's making the claim? Me? Or the chair?

Or the sun? Or the cloud? Or the mockingbird? To make the claim that all is one means that there are no distinctions, and that's one of the reasons Christianity is true is because we have a trinity in God in which there are distinctions, because it's a trinity, and the starting point was a unity in diversity, and that's why I can distinguish myself between the world around me.

In pantheistic eastern religions, we can't do that. How about the skeptic who comes and says, I doubt everything? Well here's a question, do you doubt that you doubt everything? You see, every worldview, other than Christianity, essentially comes back to some kind of a contradiction.

Islam, Mormonism, and the Bible as a Source of Revelation

Even the worldviews that we think of as being more complex and close to the Christian worldview, like Islam, or Mormonism, these also have contradictions, now it's a little harder to bring them out, it takes a little more study, but you'll find that as you study Islam, that they believe that the Bible is a valid source of revelation.

But if that's the case, then why don't they believe the Bible? They'll say it's corrupted. How do they know that it's corrupted? Keep pressing them on this point, and soon you will find that what they have is a God whose character cannot account for the preconditions of intelligibility, a God who cannot preserve the religious text, a God who essentially can change his mind at any moment of any day.

That's a scary thing, but that's a God who can't account for the uniformity of nature. How can nature be uniform if God just changes his will all the time? That's just one example from Islam, but we can do the same thing with Mormonism.

They claim to have the Bible as a standard too, they steal from Christianity essentially, but yet they believe in the Book of Mormon, which contradicts the Bible. That's a contradiction. They have a contradiction in their worldview.

They say one thing, they believe, they practice another. And so, all that to say, all worldviews essentially must account for the preconditions of intelligibility, and that requires them to be internally consistent.

Only the Christian worldview has that claim and can validly make it.