Apologetics Session 3 - Truth - Part 1

Cornerstone Church

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Apologetics Session 4 - Truth - Part 2

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It's good to see all you guys tonight, and we're looking forward to what the Lord will teach us tonight.

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Let me open us up in prayer and then we'll get started. Father, thank you for this evening, Father. We thank you for,

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Lord, being able to come before you, Lord, and learn about your universe, really,

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Father. What you've done, what you've created, the things that you have made so that we may know them.

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Father, please help us tonight understand this lesson. I feel like it's a foundational lesson we need before some other things.

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And, Father, it's a very relevant lesson to the world and the society we live in right now. Father, please help us tonight.

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And, Father, if there's anybody on their way, please have them be safe coming in. And for those who are not able to make it tonight, for Bob Nichols, for Anthony, a couple of the guys, just be with them,

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Father. Please give them peace tonight, Father, and help them. As Bob doesn't feel well, we ask for this in Jesus' name.

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Amen. So, originally, in this apologetics class, we were going to start with, is the

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Bible true? Seems like a logical place to start. But the problem is, in the society we live in, nobody believes anything is true or absolutely true.

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So this lesson is going to be about determining if there is truth in this world, and can we determine it?

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And how can we determine it? And I had in my mind that I was going to race through this lesson and get through it so Matt could do the

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Bible truth stuff. But I think it's better that I coast a little bit. Probably do it in two weeks.

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So I hope we get off at a good starting, or stopping point today. I know where I want to get to tonight, but we'll see how it goes.

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And then the next time we meet, which will be going over truth again, I'm going to actually get into some arguments with some of you guys.

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You guys are going to have to argue for truth, and I'm going to argue against truth, probably.

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If I don't do the arguments themselves, I'm going to have some videos played. Richard Dawkins would be one of them, but there's some other ones too.

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Don't worry, you can take them down. It's not a problem. But with that in mind, you know, when

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I was in school, no cracks now. How many years ago that was? You were a late man or something?

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Yeah, I was writing on cave walls. I was a calm side guy.

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And I was talking to Nick about this. I hated taking the humanities classes, because it's just like filler. You needed to get rid of it.

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And I took anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. It's like all back to back or something.

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I was like, I fell asleep in every class. I really couldn't stand it. Philosophy, I thought, was the worst.

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That's exactly what we're going to get into tonight. And philosophy, you see, back then,

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I felt like that. But now, and I thought, especially with guys like Rene Descartes, oh,

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I think, therefore I am, right? It's like, wow, that was deep.

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That was really amazing. And then I fell back asleep on my desk again. But now

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I have a better appreciation for the people throughout history who have tried to determine the reality that we live in, the truth that is out there, what the definition of existence is, all the things that man has tried to figure out over the years.

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Now, I'm talking from a philosophical point of view right now. We'll get to the Bible in a little bit. But I do appreciate these guys a lot more.

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And you know one major reason why is because they were willing to use their minds and truly sit down and think.

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We have totally lost that in the culture we live in. We want easy believism.

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We want easy this, easy that. We don't want to sit down and contemplate anything. And because of that, we live in a culture where there's not truth, but there's my truth, and there's your truth, and the whole idea of relativism has taken over our society.

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People do not want to think anymore. People do not want to critically think about things anymore at all.

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That is a tremendous problem. And we just go by what we feel. We're going to get into today, can we determine what truth really is now?

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So, Christian is a mindful religion. And let's turn to a couple verses first. I'm not going to go through a lot of the mind verses, but if someone could read loudly

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Romans 12, verse 2. And you know, to tell you the truth on it, you read 1 and 2.

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12, 1 and 2. Bill Biddle, do you have that? I see you're on your phone. I'm not there yet, but I will get there in a minute.

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Romans 12, 1 and 2. Yeah, Romans 12, 1 and 2. And so, dear brothers and sisters,

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I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you.

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Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind He will find acceptable.

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This is truly the way to worship Him. Don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let

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God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know

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God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. What version is that?

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Ha, ha, ha, it came up in New Living Translation. I will change it to New Living Translation.

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I like New Living Translation. Most of the versions are going to say be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

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Your mind is going to be used by the Lord. Can someone turn to 1

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Corinthians 2, verse 16, and could someone else turn to Colossians 3, verses 1 and 2?

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1 Corinthians 2, verse 16. For who has known the mind of the

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Lord that He may instruct him? We have the mind of Christ. The Lord has given

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His servants, His people, His children, a mind that can understand

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God's revelation, God's design, God's truth. And that mind is to be used.

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Harry, did you have Colossians 3? I wasn't sure who turned to Colossians 3 back there. I've got it.

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Colossians 3, verses 1 and 2? Yep. If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

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Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. Again, the mind.

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Our mind is to be renewed. Our mind is to be used by the Lord. Our mind is to be understanding the things that are around us in relation to what

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God has done in our lives. And there's many, many other verses about using our minds. So let's use them.

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Now, I need a volunteer. I need a hand on this one. Come on, you brave people. Tim, Ron, come on.

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Chad, you want to? Russell? Russell, we got you.

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Russell, I have here before me something, okay? What I want you to do,

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Russell, is to the best of your abilities, tell me what this is. A portable chair for you to sit in.

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Okay. And move where you want it. Okay, you gave us a very extensive definition here.

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I appreciate that. Now, how did

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Russell determine what this object was? Could he smell it?

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No. Not from there. It might smell. Could you taste it,

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Russell? No. Couldn't quite get to it. Now, I felt it, right, because I picked it up.

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But Russell didn't feel it. And you didn't hear it do anything. So what was the method that you used to discern that this object was what you said it was?

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Life. Your eyesight? Life. Well, your life experiences is very important, too.

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Because, you see, you have sensory perception with your eyes. We have sensory perception with those other four things that I just mentioned.

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You have taste, smell, those things. We know about those things. But it's not enough for our eyes to collect an image of that.

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You have to understand some things in your mind to relate that image to what you know as a chair.

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And that comes by experience. You have known over the years that that's what a chair looks like. You also need to understand spatial reality, if there's space between things, that this object isn't connected to the rug, isn't connected to this table, isn't connected to the room as a whole.

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We have an innate understanding that there are spatial differences, spatial realities between objects.

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Those are basically the two major ways that we can collect data in this world, through sensory perception and then through cognitive thinking and reality and deduction.

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Now, there's also innate things within us that we know just because of nature.

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Like when a baby is born, you don't have to teach that baby to suckle its mother. That baby knows to do that.

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You don't have to teach birds to migrate. They know that they need to do that. There's a lot of things that are innate, and that's also part of ways that we know things through innate intuition.

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But now things are going to get interesting. First, I want to go over a few definitions.

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We're going to pop up some words here. I do not want to go over all the definitions.

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You're going to get this. I'm going to e -mail this tonight,

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I believe, even though we won't go through the whole thing tonight. I'll e -mail this out tonight, and we will be able to go through it.

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So I have up here a bunch of definitions, a bunch of big words. And we're not going to use a lot of them in this class, but there's a couple of them that are going to come up.

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Epistemology is one, and this is the study for a theory of nature on the grounds of knowledge, especially with reference to limits and validity, especially with regards to truth, belief, justification.

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It's how we know the truth. How do we determine what truth is? That is what epistemology is.

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Metaphysics is a word we hear all the time, and it just really means, you know, there's a definition there, but it really means that which is outside the physical realm.

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That phone is inside the physical realm. This must be an emergency, so I'm going to pray for it.

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The only other two things on this list that I want to go over are empiricism and rationalism.

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Empiricism is a form of epistemology that says we gain knowledge through sensory perception.

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Oh, he's stealing my object. You can take it, Kevin. Stealing your what? My object. My object might be the camera.

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Huh? Cool. So empiricism is what we just did with the chair pretty much.

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We saw what it was, but then we actually used rationalism a little bit because we deduced in our mind from the information we got, the data we got, we rationalized that that was a chair.

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Now, some people try to separate rationalism and empiricism and say, well, you can't. You know, this is the only way you gain knowledge.

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Empiricism is the only way you gain knowledge. It's not that easy to define that way. It's usually a mix of the two, and I'm not going to go over those right now.

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But let's say we're an empiricist, and we say, I am going to figure things out by my sensory perceptions.

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Now, I want somebody to guess which red line is bigger on that picture.

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Or we could take a vote. Do you think the one in the back is bigger?

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Do you think they're the same? Or do you think the one in the back is smaller? Wait, you guys seen this stuff before?

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The one in the back looks bigger. I'm telling you, I looked at this 50 times, and my wife is like, this is impossible.

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But to prove it to you, I'm going to drag this green line, which I know what size that is.

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Oh, that got bigger. The green line. I cheated. That's just magic.

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And it's like, well, how? It's perspective on where that red line is.

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If you use the tile, there's three tile high, and that red is three tile high.

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But that's because we think that red line in the back is towards that woman, where, in fact, it might just be floating in front of us.

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So it's what we measured against. For me, I'm measuring against those three tiles high versus one tile high.

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Now, is that misunderstanding what the length of the line is, would that be a problem with our sensory perception or with our cognitive abilities, do you think?

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Sensory. Well, your eyes saw the picture. Your eyes saw exactly what the picture was.

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It's actually how your brain forms the interpretation of that picture. And it's like, oh, wow.

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And you've all seen optical illusions. I have some other stuff on here. This is very interesting.

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We know from science class that an object appears red not because it has an inherent quality of redness within it, but that it reflects a certain part of the visual spectrum.

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Right, the frequency. Everything has traveling in waves. Frequency red is a certain frequency of the spectrum.

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And we've certainly all seen a prison. But what that means is you see an apple, and you think it's red.

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Is it really? Does it have any properties of red within itself? Or is it just reflecting an external source?

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It's really reflecting an external source. And this kind of stuff blows people's minds.

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It blows my mind because I had to do this study. And then you think of this. What I have up there, that little graph, the

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ROYGBIV there, the color spectrum, you see that it's only a finite, minute part of the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole.

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Which means every other frequency that's out there, we can't see or know about, except the audio spectrum.

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The audio spectrum is way down here, right, in the kilohertz range. They didn't bring that out.

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But the microwave stuff, the low -level communication stuff, gamma rays, all that, we can't see it or detect any of that stuff with the human body, right, our senses.

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I was thinking about bringing a box in here, a clear box, and saying, what's in this box? And if somebody said nothing,

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I would say, yeah, but if you put a cell phone in that box, how much information can come back and forth through that cell phone?

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The point is, is there is a ton of information out there that's in the natural world that our senses don't pick up.

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There's also a ton of things in the world that our intellect can be fooled about. And when we try to make deductions about things, we can be easily fooled.

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Now, does anybody remember this? Oh, yeah. So, you know what

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I'm getting at with this one? Do you remember the challenge in 2015? Who sees that dress as gold and white?

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Who sees that dress as black and blue? You must be special.

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How many aren't sure? You're not sure? I see gold and blue. Is that an option?

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For you it is. It's always a special one. You're more of a gold and white guy.

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Scientists have not been able to figure out why people distinguish this dress with these colors.

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And I read up a lot about this. And they can't understand why exactly people interpret this dress one way or another.

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By the way, the dress is blue, apparently. Even though I just said things aren't inherently blue or red.

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It is blue. Is there any tan in this dress? Thank you. No, it's blue and black, supposedly.

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Oh, it's blue and black. Believe it or not. But they put a filter on it or something, and then people interpret it one way or another.

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But they can't figure out why people interpret it one way or another. Like, what's the cause that I would look at it one way and somebody would look at it somewhere else?

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Besides either of us being goofy, Brad. Drew, does it have anything to do with colorblindness and the rods in our eyes to pick up the colors?

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Science hasn't revealed that to us yet, my friend. Dumb scientists. Now, this is another question about deduction.

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And in particular, the law of causality. Because I haven't went over the law of causality. This is a law we're going to talk about in a minute.

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Okay, let's say we understand now our senses have limitations. Sometimes our senses make mistakes.

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Sometimes our intellect gets fooled. Well, how about a situation here where we have someone who is trying to examine events and trying to pin those events to a causal relationship.

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Meaning that because this happens, this will follow. Okay, that's what causality is.

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There's a definition of it right there. So someone observes every day a rooster getting up and crowing.

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Every day. Every day after that rooster crows, the sun comes up. That person observes it, logs it, records it, and knows that every day these events happen in the same way, in the same causal sequence, and a conclusion is made.

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The rooster crowing makes the sun come up. That's not unreasonable for someone to come to that conclusion.

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Is that person right, however? We know that person's not right. And roosters crow a lot more than just in the morning sometimes.

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If you have any in your neighborhood, they're out to sound off any time. So that leaves us with some difficult problems, gentlemen.

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There's some more definitions here about rationalism and how rationalism attempts to acquire knowledge.

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I'll let you guys read that when you can. But this last statement here, where does this leave us?

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Can we determine anything in our lives? Do we really know that's a chair there? We think it is.

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Could it be an illusion? Could it be that our senses are fooling us? Could it be that our intellect is fooling us?

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Philosophers have gone over these things for years and years and years to try to come to the knowledge of how do we determine truth.

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Do you want to say something, Rick? Yeah, the chair is a matter of faith. We've seen things work before, and we assume they're going to work again.

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That's very much, to some degree, very right. But I do want to get to the point where we acknowledge that there is truth in the world.

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So on one level, that's very, very correct. We're going to see something from some of the philosophers that is very insightful,

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I'll say, in how they come to the knowledge of whether something is true. So this is the philosopher's dilemma.

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They understand these things. They've gone through it for thousands of years. I want to read to you some of the things that people have said over the years.

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The Sophists were philosophers before the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

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And they were skeptics. They did not believe in anything outside of the empiricism and rationalism.

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So they said, well, this is all hopeless. So one of them, in fact, Gorgias, not gorgeous, but Gorgias, he said, all statements are false.

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He came to the conclusion, you can't know anything. This is a statement, the next one here, from the newscientist .com.

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Check this one out. I really love this one. This is very, very contemporary. This is in our day. And I'll just read it.

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We humans have a bit of a problem with reality. We experience it all the time, but we struggle to define it, let alone understand it.

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It seems so solid, and yet when we examine it closely, it melts away like a mirage. We don't know when it began, how big it is, where it came from, where it is going, and we certainly have no clue why it exists.

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Nonetheless, the desire to understand the reality seems to be a part of our nature, and we have come a long way, he says.

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So despite everything he just said, he says, we've come a long way. What we once explained in terms of divine creation, we've come a long way, and now we look at it in purview of science.

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But now listen to what he says. Over the past 200 years, we have peeled back the layers of reality, even if we are not sure entirely what we have revealed.

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If anything, the mystery has only deepened. We are now at a point where it is equally credible to claim that reality is entirely dependent on subjective experience, or entirely independent of it.

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Reality has never felt so unreal. But yet we've made fantastic progress, folks.

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This man would fall in the line of the skeptics. He would deny that there's truth.

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But this is where our society is, and this is where some of the philosophers have come. They look at this as a futile effort to try to define truth.

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And I have a quote in there from Black Sabbath. We don't need to go through that. Unfortunately, I know that quote very well, because it was ingrained in my head when

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I was younger. But musicians, poets, artists, they all deal with these questions.

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Sometimes we don't deal with these questions, we just live our lives, we go about. But I'm even grateful for those who have questioned truth, to at least try to figure out how things are.

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We can't see that quote. Oh, the Black Sabbath one? It's not probably worth seeing. But the point is next, even though there are many skeptics, and there are those who would say it is impossible to determine what truth is, there are also those who say, you know what?

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I'm examining what's going on in this world, and I can see that there are things we definitely can experience and know.

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But it seems like the greater truth lies outside of us. It lies outside the physical realm that we can see.

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Now, Socrates here stood against the skeptics of his day, which were the sophists.

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And by the way, a couple of the sophists were Heraclitus and Parmenides.

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Those were two of the ones he was arguing. But there was another one called Protagoras. And Protagoras was, some people feel, the father of relativism from way back when.

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Now, when you say Protagoras, you think, oh, is that the guy that did the Pythagorean theorem? No, it's

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Pythagoras. He's more like a protagonist. That's where you get his name from.

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I didn't look at the entomology of protagonist, but that's where that came from. He was one of the sophists, too. Now, Socrates, however, saw that the skeptics of his day were leading to a debauched society.

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And he said, no. He said, knowledge and virtue are inseparable, so much so that virtue could be defined as right knowledge, right thinking, and right doing, can be distinguished from one another, but they can never be separated.

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And there were those who said there is truth there. And we need to understand that following true things is going to lead to right living.

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Now, Plato, his successor, his student, Aristotle, and Aristotle after him, we're going to go through all those guys a little bit.

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But Plato came to the conclusion, and I'm just going to read this. Now, we're going to get back to our chair here in a second.

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Plato conceived of two different worlds. The primary world, or the sphere of reality, where things really are, is the world of ideas in the unseen realm.

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And he came up with the concept of forms. This metaphysical realm lies beyond or behind the realm of material things.

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He had a concept that true reality existed in a realm we cannot see, those forms. And many other philosophers came to the same conclusion.

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They couldn't put the finger on the source or the power of this other realm, but they realized there must be something governing this world.

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There must be something behind everything we see. And what his idea of a form was, is somewhere out there, we see this chair in the physical world right now.

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He would say this is an example, a physical manifestation, of the greater reality of a chair that exists out in the metaphysical world.

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And that sounds kind of weird. I mean, I admit that. When I was in college, I was like, really? You know, come on, there's not chairs flipped around.

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I don't necessarily agree with everything Plato said. But I appreciate the philosophers who understood that there's something greater than this physical world that we see and experience.

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And that was the case. Some of the philosophers went down that road. Some of them did not. One of my questions would be, who determines the right thinking?

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I really think we have to have a standard. Right. And that's what

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Aristotle and Socrates and Plato all pushed for, that there wasn't a relative, like, do whatever you want kind of a thing, but there was an absolute standard.

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Now, we're going to get into natural law probably the next time. If you remember what our

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Declaration of Independence says, it says all men are created equal, and we have inalienable rights given to us by the creator, endowed by the creator, some of which are life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

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That concept of divine law is what, right, and that's what

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Socrates and Aristotle were trying to define, although they weren't necessarily believers in the

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Lord. They understood that there was a standard by which men must live by.

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And even though they didn't necessarily equate that to biblical teaching, they understood virtue and knowledge were coupled together.

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Now, the Christian realizes the unseen realm is actually the more real realm also.

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And I'd like to read a couple of verses about that. We could read a few more, but let's read Hebrews chapter 11, verses 11, verses 3,

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I'm sorry. Hebrews 11, verse 3. It's up on the board, but I'll let somebody read from their version. Jack, how about you give us one back there?

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Hebrews 11, 3. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

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It is by faith, but what is seen was made out of things which are invisible.

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Can anyone turn to 2 Corinthians 4 .18? Do we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen, or the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

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We do know that by faith, but it is very much a reality as well. And we're going to talk about how we know that.

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Now, all this crazy talk I've had so far might have wanted to put you to sleep. I don't really care about this chair over here.

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I'm just going to sit in it. But we really do need to be engaged in our minds these days, because the mind is being attacked.

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They want to feed us whatever they want to feed us via social stuff, via TV, via radio, whatever it is.

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And we need to use our minds. And we need to be thankful for these guys that have gone before thousands of years.

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Now, you're talking, I've brought up Socrates, Plato, Esophagus.

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Those guys were hundreds of years before Jesus even. And then going on further from that, there were many, many other philosophers, and there were different waves of philosophers.

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We are not going to talk about all those guys, because basically they circle back around and they talk about the same kinds of things over and over again.

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We're going to talk about a couple of them, but we're not going to get buried in that, because one is, I'm not a philosophy teacher.

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And two, if you're anything like me, you're probably bored out of your chair already. But there's a couple of axioms they came up with.

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The conglomerate of ideas and propositions that the philosophers made, there's a couple of very key axioms they came up with.

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One is, ex nihilo, nihilo fit. Out of nothing, nothing can come.

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Out of nothing, nothing can come. That's a big statement, folks. That means spontaneous generation?

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No. Even though many, many people through the years have tried to push spontaneous generation, and it's made a big swing back in the last 40, 50 years.

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But that is an axiom. That is a proof. Out of nothing, nothing comes.

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That is not like a question. That is a proof. The next one, the law of non -contradiction.

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That means something cannot be something and something else at the same time, or not something at the same time.

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And that's also an important axiom. The law of causality we already talked about, that if something exists, if we see something, something must have caused that.

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And if that's in regards to religion, something must have made that thing move, if something is changing, or if something is just in the process of being.

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Something must have caused that. And when you come up with all those things, the philosophers put together all these things and said, there must be some sort of external force that was self -existent, because all these three things can't be true unless there is a self -existent creative force in the universe.

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That's a very important statement. Now, I'm not trying to prove the existence of God in this class. We'll get to that later.

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But those three statements eliminate a lot of the philosophical positions that some folks have today.

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Now, I'm not going to go over these other theories of philosophy. You can read those on your leisure.

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We believe, however, in the coherence, or excuse me, corresponds theory, meaning what we believe or say is true corresponds to the way things actually are.

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But the coherence theory is more like relativism, where you can come to this conclusion. They accept that 2 plus 1 can equal 4 because it coheres with his belief set.

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Meaning that if I make a belief system up that says, well, yeah, there's math and all that, but I can come up with a belief system that says 2 plus 1 equals 4 and buck everything that's mathematically and undeniably true through proofs.

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And that's your relativism. So that's the world we're in right now. Some people, or what we've talked about, some people think that because our senses and our intellect are fallible, we can't know anything, and they turn to relativism.

35:07

Some people think that philosophers, because of those axioms that I just showed, and because, yes, we are fallible, that there must be something outside of us.

35:17

And that's where the war is, folks. That's where we need to be battling. We need to be able to make a cogent argument as to why we believe there's a great

35:28

God outside of this physical realm. And I'm going to turn now to relativism and show you how it dies on the vine.

35:38

So, postmodern culture. You've heard about that, right? In the 20th century, to late 20th century, it's become very, very popular.

35:49

And it has made the pursuit of truth come to a grinding halt. Why is that?

35:55

Well, because there is no truth. Why should we even search for it anymore, right? So in parallel with that, the pursuit of critical thinking has also come to a grinding halt.

36:08

Why? Because we no longer examine events, thoughts, actions to determine if they are right or true. We just do whatever we want.

36:16

Pragmatists say they live in a physical world with no concept of absolute truth or morality. We do what we feel is right.

36:25

Now, moving on to a gentleman in the 1600s, a man named John Locke. If you've heard of John Locke, he was an

36:33

English philosopher. He was actually the one that coined the right to liberty. Was it liberty?

36:46

He didn't say pursuit of happiness. Liberty is something in progress. But we stole that from him when we made the

36:53

Declaration of Independence. Now, he was not a believer. And he was a skeptic in his own way to some degree.

37:00

But what he said was this. If you are a relativist, this is what's going to happen.

37:06

You have two ways to make up a society and govern a society. That government is going to exist in civil law.

37:16

Now, if you are a relativist, you base all your civil law on this.

37:24

The law of opinion. What is popular of the day. If, however, you believe that there is something outside of you revealing truth, natural law, and underneath of that, divine law, the laws in the system of government you have will influence your civil laws from this side of the tree as opposed to that side of the tree.

37:49

Now, you can imagine a society that would say, well, there is no truth.

37:57

Everything is relative. So we can base our civil law on the popular opinions of the day.

38:05

How does that work out? Have we seen it work out poorly?

38:13

Go ahead, David. Well, I was just going to say, like, in 2000 and 2020, I mean 2020 and 2021, when police cars were burning and buildings were being destroyed and they were telling us that, you know, there were fires everywhere.

38:30

They were telling us it was just a peaceful protest. But yet when some truckers were just trying to protest a mandate against their bodily freedom to choose what gets injected into their body, they were told that they were terrorists.

38:49

So it's a lot of times the critical thinking is because people are just following, their opinions are shaped by what they're told to think by the news media, not what really is, if they would critically think and be skeptical, that may lead them to the truth.

39:11

But not being skeptical and just listening to what the news media tells you is the truth, and there's so many stupid people that just say, that must be true,

39:23

I'm going to think that way. Let's not use that word skeptical. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We're using that word as a bad word today.

39:29

But you're right, you know, you need to examine everything, and that's really what... Can you bring that down again and see the chart?

39:36

Sure. Okay, so basically what's happened now is that civil law is republic.

39:44

Law of opinion is democracy. People think in terms of public opinion, if they have more people on public opinion on that, and they're calling that what it is.

39:58

But civil law is what our country is or what our belief systems are. You're quoting a paragraph that's just under this.

40:06

Oh, okay. Do you know who John Dewey is? Yeah. You know who John Dewey is?

40:11

He transformed the school system. He certainly did. So if you say that there is no absolute truth, natural law, and that everything should be governed by the law of opinion, the law of public fashion of the day, now we can see the inherent dangers of this.

40:32

The left side of the diagram, the underpinnings of society, would be based upon the whims of the current culture, not upon anything that's absolute, perfect, and true.

40:41

And this is how society develops laws that would discriminate by race, culture, or a culture which would allow the rise of Nazism.

40:51

Absolutely. And here's our friend John Dewey. He had a tremendous influence on the

40:56

American education system. He asserted that complete democracy, which is what Ivan just said, was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights, but also ensuring there exists a fully formed public opinion accomplished by communication among citizens.

41:13

And you can read the rest here. But Dewey basically promoted, we need to get everyone's opinion on this, and when we get everyone's opinion, that is going to be how we run society.

41:25

There are nothing under society that are fixed axioms that say this is right and this is wrong.

41:33

That doesn't exist anymore. It's however we feel today. You mentioned John Dewey and Nazism, right?

41:42

Things got so anarchistic in Germany, as we know, that Joseph Goebbels said, there should exist only one public opinion for all, that the whole

41:53

German nation should think homogeneously. Were we headed toward that? Now, you face people in society today, they are not going to go for this concept.

42:07

What they're going to say is, if you declare there is absolute truth, you are going to oppress others in the society, and you are going to come up with a situation like, and here

42:19

I have it, like the Spanish Inquisition or radical Islam. Liberal pragmatists will always reject the claim that there is absolute truth under any conditions, because they say that leads to oppression.

42:34

Are they right? This question was asked of our friend

42:41

Richard Dawkins, who is a British evolutionary biologist. He is one of the four horsemen of the atheistic clan.

42:50

What I'm going to do, since we're actually way ahead of time, I can't believe we're, I'm just gabbing up here, but we've gotten really far.

42:58

So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to let you see the video from Dawkins, and we'll go over this question in a second, but let's go to the video.

43:08

I believe it's this one. My question is for Professor Dawkins.

43:24

Considering that atheism cannot possibly have any sense of absolute morality, would it not then be an irrational leap of faith, which atheists themselves so harshly condemn, for an atheist to decide between right and wrong?

43:42

Absolute morality. The absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what?

43:51

Stoning people for adultery? Death for apostasy?

43:58

Punishment for breaking the Sabbath? These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities.

44:07

I don't think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed, and based upon,

44:25

I could almost say intelligent design. Can we not design our society which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in?

44:36

If you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don't believe in slavery anymore, we believe in equality of women, we believe in being gentle, we believe in being kind to animals.

44:52

These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture.

45:00

They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy.

45:12

These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick.

45:21

You search your way through the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality.

45:30

You say, look at that, that's religion. And you leave out all the horrible bits. And you say, oh, we don't believe that anymore, we've grown out of it.

45:39

Well, of course we've grown out of it. We've grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion.

45:47

So he gets a big hand. Folks, these are the people you're going to argue with.

45:53

These are the people we need to have answers for. If you were on a debate team, that was not a debate team by the way, that young man asked a very honest question.

46:03

It was a very important question. He did not get a chance to rebut or rebuke what Dawkins said.

46:10

Nor did he get a straight answer. The crowd in the panel was very much in favor of what he said.

46:16

It was a bias. He didn't answer the question. He didn't actually answer the question.

46:22

So besides not answering the question, what would you say would be right or wrong about what

46:30

Dawkins said? He took Old Testament Jewish law that applied to their theocratic society at the time and applied it in modern terms for the

46:42

United States, not ancient Israel. He lifted it totally out of context. Yeah, I would definitely say he doesn't have an understanding of what the

46:50

Bible is all about. Right. Or the time period involved. That's definitely true. He made some very,

46:57

I'll say, harsh assertions. Did you want to say something, Tim? I was going to say even by his...

47:04

What he was saying that he wanted morality to be was he was trying to make it seem very cerebral, to have a discussion and reason through it and agree upon it and stuff like that.

47:15

But if you do that, it means it's going to change all the time because what you reason through,

47:22

I may not. And what I reason through, my kids are not. And so there will not be a continuity.

47:28

There won't be a right or a wrong, that everything is right and everything is wrong. Now, his argument, Daniel, was, we're getting better at this.

47:36

We over the years have made a lot better decisions than our forefathers because we have reasoned it all together, we're hashing it all out, and we're coming to better and better conclusions.

47:46

Is there something okay with that statement? Well, with that theory, then you wouldn't have stealing and robbing and killing anymore because you had thought it all out, right?

47:55

That's a very practical answer. And actually, what you should think about is, is stealing and killing actually wrong?

48:03

Because if there is no objective moral authority dictating what is objectively right and wrong, then it's just your opinion that it's wrong.

48:12

And my opinion may differ from your opinion, and if there is no absolute truth, what gives you the right to...

48:17

What the fuck do I know what's happening to? That's what the young man's question was, right?

48:23

Tim, do you want to say something? I was thinking that I think he's assuming that the people that came before him were not as intelligent as him and not as good as him.

48:33

Sure, there's a pompousness to it. And we don't want to be that way, by the way.

48:38

And we're going to find out there is no reason for us to be pompous about anything, but we're not going to get there today. Well, his biggest argument is not based on God, it's based on construct.

48:49

Human reasoning. Human reasoning. And so you're looking at it, he keeps on going back to religious construct.

48:56

So he's looking at the construct as the faulty, not God. And so the construct's all wrong.

49:03

And so you have to recreate the construct, but that's not believership. That's not what God... It's because he stated there's no intelligent design.

49:09

Right. I thought you couldn't believe he said there's no intelligent design. Listen, I think he set this one up on a tee for us, folks.

49:16

This is like the first tee at Augusta, and man, we need to take a big whack at this one, because I don't think we can miss.

49:23

Because when he says that things are better, he says things have improved.

49:31

He's making an absolute moral judgment about the way things were and the way things are now. What standard is he using?

49:39

He's using his own standard. How he thinks and feels about things. And as Matt said, it's totally arbitrary.

49:46

It's not based upon anything but his opinion. There is no standard. Why is he right and someone else be wrong?

49:53

And that's the world... He's Richard Dawkins. And this is the world we absolutely are stepping into each and every day, whether it be the question of abortion or the question of anything else.

50:04

Why is abortion wrong? Why is homosexuality... Can we just say there is truth, we can know it?

50:12

We haven't gotten there yet, but go ahead. Yeah. C .S. Lewis used a very simple analogy.

50:18

He said you have to have a straight line in order to know that the other line is crooked. You can't know your crooked lines unless you have a straight line.

50:25

And knowing the straight line is the most important thing. You need to know the straight line of the word of God.

50:31

He also said that it was objectively true that there is no objective morality. Classic.

50:37

Classic guy. I think it would help no matter what we do when we're defending the faith that we must do it with an accent.

50:45

You know, because it sounds so much better. You sound much smarter with an

50:50

English accent. We'll tell you that. Like he was saying, that's his opinion and stuff.

50:57

And as David referred to with the truckers going against the ejection and everything, getting all fed that stuff,

51:04

Ted Turner said it a hundred years ago that you control the news, you control the world.

51:10

And that's what's going on. I mean, coming out of CNN and all these news agencies, that's the slang.

51:16

It's like having a vein in your brain and not just trying to feed it through your television or radio. I think

51:21

Marx was the one that said he can control the culture through what? He said he can control the present, he can control the future.

51:30

I think he said through art, through literature, through music. Propaganda. Culture. And also

51:35

FDR had said it before. He said, for heaven's sake, whatever, read.

51:40

But please do not read the news. That might be good advice.

51:48

Listen, we're probably going to have to wrap things up for this particular class. What I'd like to do, we are not going to go over philosophers like Immanuel Kent, David Hume, Jean -Jacques

52:01

Rousseau, Nischke. We're not going to go over those guys because it all revolves back around the same kind of theories and propositions.

52:11

And there's nothing necessarily new. And we're not going to look at Marx or Freud or Darwin or any of that stuff right now.

52:19

From this point on, we're going to look at is there definition of the truth and can we know it?

52:25

And how do we know it? And we're going to look at Thomas Aquinas, we're going to look at Augustine. And then we're going to look at Jesus Christ.

52:34

So I think that's probably where we should stop tonight. Great. But I would love to discuss anything else you guys have on your minds about this.

52:41

Like, has it been confusing so far? Or have we kind of gone in a progression that kind of covers why philosophers have struggled over the years to try to define truth?

52:52

And the whole empiricism versus rationalism, that kind of thing. Is it all making sense?

52:57

You might want to touch on the Enlightenment philosophers to an extent because it's much of their thinking that's caused today's problems.

53:04

Well, I'm just going to say that there was a transition at some point to abandon the pursuit of truth.

53:12

Like, we already kind of have that there is no more pursuit of truth. There are no more philosophers like this.

53:18

There are no more Plato's. There are no more, even David Hume's, like, that are actually trying to discover, or Hegel's, you know, that are trying to actually define and discover the nature of reality.

53:31

Great thinkers. I mean, we certainly don't agree with all the conclusions they had, but they were great thinkers.

53:37

And, look, so if I had a shot to go back to philosophy class, back at Rutgers, Nick, go to Rutgers philosophy?

53:44

No. Yeah? You might have to. And I hated it. I said, I hate it.

53:50

There was these chairs, these idea chairs. Did everyone ever hear of Plato's cave? Yeah.

53:56

That was another big one. Oh, you guys got to go back to school. I think that was yours. I spoke to Republic.

54:03

I'm not sure if it was in Republic or not. We were supposed to read, yeah, a number of Plato's books. But it comes into play.

54:09

It's going to be mentioned later on. I'm just going to mention what Plato's cave is for a second. And it's an imagination that people are locked in a dark cave.

54:17

They're all together. And the only thing that they can see and perceive is these shadows of figures that are projected behind them.

54:25

There's a light behind them, and then there's figures that come, and it's like a shadow of a bush. It just kind of wanders by, a shadow of a man, a shadow of a monkey, a shadow of a giraffe.

54:36

And for their whole lives, that's all they know about. And then one day, somebody escapes and goes out into the light of day.

54:45

And you can imagine what their eyes would be burning, right? But they see a whole reality that they never knew about.

54:54

Plato's cave, now he gave this for a certain reason because it's like sometimes we think we know everything, and then something enlightens us.

55:03

You know, that was his point. And his bigger point was that the people of his time wanted to kill his, not his predecessor, but his master,

55:15

Socrates, because they didn't like how Socrates was approaching things. And eventually, Socrates was killed. Hamlock.

55:20

Yeah, by Hamlock, right? But his point is that once you are enlightened, you see things totally different.

55:29

We are going to talk about enlightenment in the next go -round. He said once you are enlightened, if you went back into that cave and tried to explain to those people what reality was all about, in his story, they mostly mocked him, but some were very violent and wanted to kill him because he had this story about what reality was all about and that they were in the darkness, and they didn't want to hear it.

55:59

Very interesting story, and very apropos to a lot of us, the way we think, the way we act.

56:05

Like what Jesus said, they hate the light because they love their darkness. Yeah. So, philosophy is not that boring.

56:14

It really isn't. There's a lot of ones that you could pull your hair out if you read them.

56:19

It's going to be $50. If you read Nischke, like Nischke was the one that said God is dead, right? Yeah, Nischke.

56:25

Nischke. Nischke. Yeah. You know what it says in the New York City subway?

56:32

Somebody wrote, God is dead, Nischke. Nischke's dead. Yeah, it says Nischke's dead.

56:38

God, right? Who had the last laugh? Well, I'm sure the Lord wasn't laughing at the death of the unbeliever.

56:46

Go ahead, Dave. You know, after World War II, they had the Nuremberg Trials, and they asked

56:53

Herman Goering, How did you get the German people to go along with all this that you did, including the gas chambers and all that?

57:02

And he said, It was easy. We just filled them with fear. And, you know, what we need to do as apologetic people is we need to fill people with the fear of God.

57:13

Amen. And not the fear of some boogeyman or something else.

57:19

Because you can get people to do, I mean, these last two years are a classic example of that.

57:25

You can get people to do whatever you want them to do. They'll give up all their rights if you fill them with fear.

57:33

I mean, you know, it's crazy. Oh, go ahead. I was going to say, you know, in Act 17,

57:41

Marcel and Paul was there, and he was talking to the skeptics and the unknown God, and he was,

57:50

I think, if I remember correctly, some of them wanted to do what exactly happened to Socrates.

57:56

They wanted to kill him because he was enlightening them that from the unknown God that there was a God there, and there was transition of enlightenment that they hadn't known.

58:08

And they were supposed to be the biggest thinkers of the time. So this is something as apologists you're always going to face.

58:16

People, it's never, my experience is, it's never neutral.

58:22

It's always like people really get involved and really want to know more, or they can't stand it.

58:28

It's just, that's what ends up happening. You know, it's darkness. So to prepare for the next time,

58:35

I would say this. Think about these two statements. Jeff's brought this up before.

58:41

Is there general revelation? And is there specific revelation?

58:48

Those are the two things we're going to be talking about a lot next time about how someone comes to the knowledge of the truth.

58:55

But we're also going, I'm going to try to play some of Sean McDowell's videos about how he would argue some of these challenges.

59:05

And if I can find some that are like combative, like one back and forth against another, or if I feel like I can put together an argument that I feel like arguing, me being the atheist.

59:18

Maybe I'll let Matt do that. He said you're good at that. That I may pick on one of you to defend your faith.

59:25

There's some role plays. Yeah. But that's the idea of the class, folks. We're going to try to defend our faith.

59:31

And we're going to rest in His truth. So let's close it up.

59:38

Does anyone want to close us in prayer tonight? Hands? Feet?

59:44

Something? Tim. Oh my God, thank you so much for all the great people that you've given us.

59:53

Thank you for the wisdom that comes from your word. I pray for all of us to increase in wisdom and that you would give us wisdom so that we can better live for you and understand your word.

01:00:06

I also want to pray for people like Richard Dawkins and people who were at the...

01:00:12

listening to him there that they were applauding what he was saying and it seemed like he was really mocking you. So I pray for you to soften people's hearts and that you would use us and train us up further in these studies that we would be able to defend our faith and that we would be able to destroy every argument and win every argument that you would want us to and that we would be sensitive to your leading and not ashamed of your gospel but we would proclaim it and not be afraid to do so.