Apologetics Session 3 - Truth - Part 1

It's good to see all you guys tonight, and I'm looking forward to what the Lord will teach us tonight. Can you open us up in prayer, and then we'll get started. Father, thank you for this evening, Father.

We thank you for, Lord, being able to come before you, Lord, and learn about your universe, really, Father. What you've done, what you've created, the things that you have made, so that we may.

Know them.

Father, please help us tonight understand this lesson. I feel like it's a foundational lesson we need before some other things. And, Father, it's a very relevant lesson to the world and the society we live in right.

Now.

Father, please help us tonight. 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, Father.

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

Amen.

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

True?

It seems like a logical place to start. But the problem is, in the society we live in, nobody believes anything is truly true or absolutely true. So this lesson is going to be about determining if there is truth in this world.

And can we determine it? 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 Bible-true stuff. But I think it's better that I coast a little bit.

I'll probably do it in two weeks. So I hope we get off on a good stopping point today. I know where I want to get to tonight, but we'll see how it goes. 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.

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

Don't worry, you can take them down. It's not a problem. But with that in mind, when I was in school, no cracks now. How many years ago that was?

You were a caveman?

Yeah, I was writing on cave walls. I was a comp sci guy. And I was talking to Nick about this, and I hated taking the humanities classes because it's just like filler. You needed to get rid of it. And I took anthropology, philosophy, and psychology.

It's like all back to back or something. I fell asleep in every class. I really couldn't stand it. Philosophy, I thought, was the worst. That's exactly what we're going to get into tonight. And philosophy, you see, but back then, I felt like that.

But now, and I thought, especially with guys like Rene Descartes, oh, I think, therefore I am, right? It's like, wow, that was deep. That was really amazing. And then I fell back asleep on my desk again.

But now 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.

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

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

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

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 Romans 12 verse 2. And you know to tell you the truth, why don't you read 1 and 2.

12, 1 and 2. Bill Biddle, do you have that? I see you're on your phone.

I'm not there yet, but Romans 12, 1 and 2.

Yeah, Romans 12, 1 and 2.

And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship Him.

Don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

What version is that?

Ha, ha, ha. It came up in New Living Translation.

I will change it to English for you next time. I like New Living Translation.

Most of the versions are going to say, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

King James.

Your mind is going to be used by the Lord. Can someone turn to 1 Corinthians 2, verse 16? And could someone else turn to Colossians 3, verses 1 and 2?

1 Corinthians 2, verse 16. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.

The Lord has given His servants, His people, His children, a mind that can understand God's revelation, God's design, God's truth. And that mind is to be used. Harry, did you have Colossians 3? I wasn't sure who turned to Colossians 3 back there.

I've got it.

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

Again, the mind. 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 God has done in our lives. And there's many, many other verses about using our minds.

So let's use them. Now, I need a volunteer. I need a hand on this one. Come on, you brave people.

Tim?

Ron? Chad? Russell?

Russell, we got you. Russell, I have here before me something. What I want you to do, Russell, is to the best of your abilities, tell me what this is.

A portable chair for you to sit in. And move where you want it.

You gave us a very extensive definition there.

I appreciate that.

Now,.

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

No.

Nothing there. He might smell it. Could you taste it, Russell?

No. Couldn't quite get to it.

Now, I felt it, right? Because I picked it up. 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?

Your eyesight? Life. Well, your life experiences is very important, too. Because, you see, you have sensory perception with your eyes. We have sensory perception with those other four things that I just mentioned.

Taste, smell, those things. We know about those things. But it's not enough for our eyes to collect an image of that. You have to understand some things in your mind to relate that image to what you know as.

A chair.

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, this table isn't connected to the room as a whole.

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

Now, there's also innate things within us that we know just because of nature. Like when a baby is born, you don't have to teach that baby to suckle its mother. That baby knows to do that. 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. But, now things are going to get interesting. First, I want to go over a few definitions.

We're going to pop up some words here. I do not want to go over all the definitions. You're going to get this I'm going to email this tonight, I believe. Even though we won't go through the whole thing tonight.

I'll email this out tonight.

And.

Go through it. I have up here a bunch of definitions. A bunch of big words. 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. Epistemology. Epistemology is one.

This is the study or theory of nature on the grounds of knowledge especially with reference to limits and validity, especially with regards to truth, belief, justification. It's how we know the truth.

How do we determine what truth is? That is what epistemology is. Metaphysics is a word we hear all the time and it just really means that which is outside the physical realm. That phone is inside the physical realm.

This must be an emergency. The only other two things on this list that I want to go over are empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism is a form of epistemology that says we gain knowledge through sensory perception.

Oh, he's stealing my object. So empiricism is what we just did with the chair pretty much. 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.

Now, some people try to separate rationalism and empiricism and say this is the only way you gain knowledge and 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.

But let's say we're an empiricist and we say I am going to figure things out by my sensory perceptions. Now, I want somebody to guess which red line is bigger on that picture. Or we could take a vote.

Do you think the one in the back is bigger? 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? 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.

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

Oh, that got bigger. The green line.

I cheated.

That's just magic.

And it's like well how.

It's perspective on where that red line is. If you use the tile there's three tile high and that red is three tile high 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.

So it's what we.

Measured against.

For me, I'm measuring against those three tiles high versus one tile high.

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?

Sensory.

Well, your eyes saw the picture. Your eyes saw exactly what the picture was. It's actually how your brain forms the interpretation of that picture.

And.

It's like, oh.

Wow.

You've all seen optical illusions. I have some other stuff on here. This is very interesting. We know from science class, right 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.

Right, the frequency. Everything has traveling in waves frequency red is a certain frequency of the spectrum and we've certainly all seen a prison. What that means is you see an apple and you think it's red is it really?

Does it have any properties of red within itself? Or is it just reflecting an external source? It's really reflecting an external source. And this kind of stuff blows people's minds. 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 ROYGBIV there the color spectrum you see that it's only a finite minute part of the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole which means every other frequency that's out there we can't see or know about except the audio spectrum.

The audio spectrum is way down here in the kilohertz range they didn't bring that out but the microwave stuff the low level communication stuff gamma rays we can't see it or detect any of that stuff with the human body or our senses I was thinking about bringing a box in here a clear box and saying what's in this box?

And if somebody said nothing 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? The point is there is a ton of information out there that's in the natural world that our senses don't pick up.

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.

Now.

Does anybody remember this? Oh yeah. So, do you know what I'm getting at with this one? Do you remember the challenge in 2015? Who sees that dress as gold and white? Who sees that dress as black? You must be special.

How many aren't sure? You're not sure?

I see gold and blue. Is that an option?

For you it is. For you it is.

It's always a special one.

You're more of a gold and white guy.

Scientists.

Have not been able to figure out.

Why.

People distinguish this dress with these colors. And I read up a lot about this. And they can't understand why exactly people interpret this dress one way or another. By the way, the dress is blue.

Apparently.

Even though I just said things aren't inherently blue or red. It is blue.

Is there any tan in this dress?

No, it's blue and black. Oh, it's blue and black. Believe it or not. But they put like a filter on it or something and then people interpret it one way or another. 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? 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?

Science hasn't revealed that to us yet, my friend.

Dumb scientists.

Now, this is another question about this is another question about deduction. 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.

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

Meaning that because this happens, this will follow. Okay? That's what causality is. There's a definition of it right there. So someone observes every day a rooster getting up and crowing.

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.

The rooster crowing makes the sun come up. That's not unreasonable for someone to come to that conclusion. Is that person right, however? No, that person's not right. Roosters crow a lot more than just in the morning sometimes.

If you have any in your neighborhood, they're apt to sound off any time.

So that.

Leaves us with some difficult problems gentlemen. There's some more definitions here about rationalism and how rationalism attempts to acquire knowledge. I'll let you guys read that when you can. But this last statement here, where does this leave us?

Can we determine anything in our lives? Do we really know that's a chair over there? We think what we think it is. Could it be an illusion? Could it be that our senses are fooling us? Could it be that our intellect is fooling us?

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. 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.

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.

So,.

On one level, that's very correct. We're going to see something from some of the philosophers that is very insightful, I'll say. And how they come to the knowledge of whether something is true. So this is the philosopher's dilemma.

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

And they were skeptics. They did not believe in anything outside of the empiricism and rationalism. So they said, well, this is all hopeless. So one of them, in fact, Gorgias, not gorgeous,.

But Gorgias,.

He said all statements, he came to the conclusion you can't know anything. This is a statement, the next one here, from thenewscientist .com. 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. 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. 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. Nonetheless, the desire to understand the reality seems to be a part of our nature, and we have come a long way, he says.

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. 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. 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.

We're entirely independent of it. Reality has never felt so unreal, but yet we've made fantastic progress, folks. This man would fall in the line of the skeptics. He would deny that there's truth. 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. And I have a quote in there from Black Sabbath. We don't need to go through that.

I'll see how it works.

Unfortunately, I know that quote very well, because it was ingrained in my head when I was younger. But musicians, poets, artists, they all deal with these questions. 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. We can't see that quote. Oh, the Black Sabbath one? It's not probably worth seeing.

Oh, yeah.

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? I'm examining what's going on in this world, and I can see that there are things we definitely can experience and know. But it seems like the greater truth lies outside of us. It lies outside the physical realm that we can see.

Now, Socrates here stood against the skeptics of his day which were the Sophists. And by the way, a couple of the Sophists were Heraclitus and Parmenides. 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. Now, when you say Protagoras, you think oh, is that the guy that did the Pythagorean theorem?

No. No.

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

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

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

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

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. 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.

He would say this is an example, a physical manifestation of the greater reality of a chair that exists out in the metaphysical world. And that sounds kind of weird. I mean, I admit that. When I was in college, I was like, really?

Come on, there's not chairs floating around. 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.

And that was the case. Some of the philosophers went down that road. Some of them did not. My question would be who determines the right thinking and right thinking? You have to have a standard. Right, and that's what 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. Now, we're going to get into natural law probably the next time. If you remember what our 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, that concept of divine law is what, right, and that's what Socrates and Aristotle were trying to define, although they weren't necessarily believers in the Lord.

They understood that there was a standard by which men must live by. And, you know, even though they didn't necessarily equate that to biblical teaching, they understood virtue and knowledge were coupled together.

Now, the Christian realizes the unseen realm is actually the more real realm also. And I'd like to read a couple verses about that. We could read a few more, but let's read Hebrews chapter 11 verses 11, verses 3, excuse me.

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? 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.

It is by faith, but what is seen was made out of things which are invisible. 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, for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal?

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.

Now,.

All of 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. 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.

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

And.

We need to use our minds. And we need to be thankful for these guys that have gone thousands of years. I've brought up Socrates, Plato, Thesophis. 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.

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. 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.

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.

The.

Conglomerate of ideas and propositions that the philosophers made, there's a couple very key axioms they came up with. One is Ex nihilo, nihilo.

Fit.

Out of nothing, nothing can come.

Out of nothing, nothing can come. That's a big statement, folks. That means spontaneous generation? 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 but that is an axiom, that is a proof.

Out of nothing, nothing comes. That is not like a question. That is a proof. The next one, the law of non-contradiction. That means something cannot be something and something else at the same time or not something at the same time.

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

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

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

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. 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 truth.

For proofs.

And that's irrelativism. 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.

Some people think the philosophers, because of those axioms that I just showed and because, yes, we are fallible that there must be something outside of us 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 god outside of this physical realm. And I'm going to turn now to relativism and show you how it dies on the vine. So, postmodern culture we've heard about that, right?

In the.

20th century to late 20th century it's become very, very popular and it has made the pursuit of truth come to a grinding halt. Why is that? 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. Because we no longer examine events, thoughts, actions to determine if they are right or true. We just do whatever we want.

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

Now.

Moving on to a gentleman in the 1600s, a man named John Locke. If you've heard of John Locke, he was an English philosopher. He was actually the one that coined the right to liberty. Is it liberty? He didn't say pursuit of happiness, he said liberty is something in progress or poverty, yeah.

But we stole that from him when we made the Declaration of Independence. Now, he was not a believer. And he was a skeptic in his own way to some degree. But what he said was this if you are a relativist this is what's going to happen.

You have two ways to make up a society and govern a society. That government is going to exist in civil law. Now if you are a relativist you base all your civil law on this 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.

Now.

You can imagine a society that would say well there is no truth everything is relative so we can base our civil law on the popular opinions of the day. How does that work out? Have we seen it work out?

I was going to say in 2000 in 2020 in 2021 when police cars were burning and buildings were being destroyed and they were telling us there were fires everywhere 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. So it's a lot of times the critical thinking is because people are just following.