An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics 5 (Ultimate Authority and the Myth of Neutrality)

An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics, Part 5, brought to you by RoarNoMore .com.

Okay, review. We talked about this a little bit two weeks ago. We started talking about ultimate authority.

I'm going to read for you the first paragraph. An individual's ultimate or final authority can be defined as his ultimate standard by which all is measured, being last in a series, procession, or progression.

It is an independent standard that relies on no other source for authentication. All worldviews, and thus all people, have a final authority, though most are not conscious of this fact.

Our duty as the apologists is to make people epistemologically self -aware. In other words, we attempt to bring attention to their ultimate faith commitment, which, if humans are to be rational, must be the word of God.

And we went over the unbeliever's ultimate authority, how it's not God's word.

We backed all this up with scripture, as you can see there. It is in opposition to what he knows is the ultimate authority.

So he knows it's God's word, but he's self -deceived, and we talked about that a little bit. It resides in creation itself, not the creator, and it results in foolishness, ultimately.

This morning I want to start with where we left off last time, which is the believer's ultimate authority.

We're going to go through a number of scriptures just to show what that is. I think we already all know it's God, but let's go through the scripture.

I think it's going to be helpful to see what the word of God has to say about this. Colossians 2, 2 -4 says,

It's Christ himself in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument.

That is a really important verse for apologetics because it gives us our foundation. It's Christ himself.

It's not anything else. What does Paul go on to say? He's telling us this so that no one will be able to persuade us.

As long as we have Christ as our foundation, no one can persuade us with an argument that is outside of Christ.

If we don't start with that foundation as Christians, then we're in trouble because what can happen? People can persuade us.

They can give us arguments that will invalidate our Christian faith, that will cause us to be perhaps moved and shaken and be cast to and fro by every wind of doctrine.

Christ himself needs to be the starting point. Matthew 28, 18 says,

And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. You might be wondering, why did

I put this in there? Of course, the sermon two weeks ago. All authority means everything. That would include knowledge, right?

It would include apologetics, philosophy. Christ is the center.

He is the starting point for knowledge based on even this verse because it says everything. 2

Corinthians 10, 5 says, Because we are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

I think Paul here just paints an amazing picture because I envision a kidnapper or someone who's just grabbing something or someone else and dragging them off.

We're taking every thought captive. The thoughts we have about anything could be how to fix a weed whacker, could be how to intimately know the

God of the universe. Anything that it is, we need to be taking those captive to Christ's obedience. Our motivations are all flowing from our motivation to love

Christ. What's the alternative here? There's a contrast being made, right? We have speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and then we have another category, and that's every thought being captive to Christ.

There's really only two options out there. Our job as Christians is to make sure that all our thinking is motivated by our love for Christ.

That means that we give him the glory no matter what, even with our knowledge claims.

When a scientist makes a discovery, when an artist paints a picture, when we do something that we think is amazing or whatever, we have to give the glory to God, and our motivation should be to honor

God. That includes apologetics. Proverbs 1 .7,

we talked about this. We've actually brought this up probably almost every time we meet, but it's a good verse.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. We start with not only

God, but the fear of God. It's a God with a characteristic. It's the God of the Bible because he's the judge, he's the creator, therefore we ought to fear him.

It's not a generic God. It's the God of Scripture. Proverbs 9 .10 says much the same thing, but it also talks about wisdom.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, which is applied knowledge. The knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

Our ultimate authority resides in God himself. Let's talk about how we know, what our reference point is, how we understand that our ultimate authority is

God. That is through God's Word. We wouldn't know God but through the revelation that he's given us, both in his

Word and I would also dare to say his Holy Spirit. Of course, when we're reasoning with an unbeliever, we're going to be using the

Word that has been revealed to all of us. Matthew 4 .4

is the verse I want to start with here. It says, but he answered and said, but it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

That's during Christ's temptation in the wilderness. Satan tempts him to create bread and Christ responds by quoting,

I believe it was Deuteronomy 8 .3. Actually, I think the context there was the children of Israel are in the desert and God's giving them manna.

He wants to prove that they must rely on him for their sufficiency for their life.

What Jesus is actually quoting has to do with the body, survival.

We rely on God for survival, but I think the implications go even farther than that because it says every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Our life doesn't just consist in what we eat and what we drink. It consists on many things.

We have to know things in order to survive. The way we know things is by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Another verse here, John 17 .17. Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth.

Christ is sending the apostles out. He's telling them that the word of God is reliable because it's trustworthy.

Isaiah 8 .20. To the law and to the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn.

Or KJV says they have no light. They have no revelation. It's interesting that the word of God, someone who rejects that is compared to someone who doesn't have light.

Someone who doesn't have the revelation. I think of the beginning of John where the light comes in the world, man loves darkness, right?

And so they did not seek the revelation of God. They didn't want their sins to be exposed, right? That's their ultimate reason for rejection.

So let's go to the next verse. 2 Timothy 3 .16. This is an often quoted verse. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.

It says it all right there, right? When we are in an encounter with an unbeliever, we don't have to walk away from the word because why?

It is profitable for basically all the things that we're doing with the unbeliever. What are we seeking to do? We're seeking to reprove them for not believing, right?

We're seeking to correct their error. And then once they get saved, to train them in righteousness. So we can't leave the foundation of the word when we're doing that.

Psalm 19 .7b. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. Actually, I debated whether we should even look at this whole psalm if you want to in your free time.

It's a great psalm to read because it starts out with natural revelation. Heavens declare the glory of God. Firmament shows his handiwork.

And then it goes to special revelation, really without any introduction. It just goes right from one to another.

And it talks about the law converting the soul and the precepts of the Lord and the testimony of the Lord. And this particular saying, that the testimony of the

Lord is sure, making wise the simple, means that the simple -minded, the person that doesn't actually understand, will understand because of the word of God.

So it makes a conversion. It converts the simple -minded to someone who is wise. That cannot take place without the word of God.

You could be an astrophysicist and have your Ph .D. and be doing all sorts of experimentation on rockets or whatever, something that we would consider very complex and they must have a brilliant mind.

But they are actually simple -minded if what? If they don't have the testimony of the Lord. And so that's an important thing to realize.

We don't have to be intimidated because we are actually, with the word, we are wiser than the unbeliever. And so the third attribute here of the believer's final authority is that it is self -authenticating.

And this is, I hesitate to jump back into the circular thing, but I think

I'm just going to briefly go over it real quick. Exodus 3 .14 says, this is

God talking to Moses. He says, I am who I am. And that statement itself,

I've heard many times that this is a statement of God's self -sufficiency. He doesn't give a reference point to describe who he is.

He just says, I am. And it would be, I'm trying to come up with an, it would be like,

I'm John. Well, who? Who are you? But not telling you who my parents are, who anything,

I'm just John. Of course, I can't do that because I'm part of creation, right? And you wouldn't know who I am.

But God doesn't need a reference point. He doesn't need someone to validate who he is or to compare, to show what his relationship is.

He just exists. And that's an interesting concept that may be a bit on the lofty side.

It may be a bit hard to comprehend. But he is the only being that has this attribute. John 5, 26.

For just as the father has life in himself, even so he gave the son to have life in himself.

So the father is not contingent on anything. He doesn't need food to survive. He doesn't need an environment to exist in.

He has life in himself. El Shaddai is one of the Hebrew names given to God.

And it literally means all sufficient. And then 1 John 4, 8. The one who does not love does not know

God. For God is love. And I put in brackets down there, love requires an object.

Because the world existed, God was still love. Therefore, his attributes find their essence in the

Trinity. He does not need creation to sustain him. So all the attributes of God existed for all time.

And actually this is a very strong argument that we can give, especially to someone who might be a skeptic, an atheist, an agnostic, someone rationalist in that category.

When they try to say that their authority is reason, and then press them, what kind of reason, where is this reason coming from, they either,

I said this a couple weeks ago, they either have to go to themselves, that it's based in them, or it's based in what society has set up.

It's a rule that society has made. So logic is either validated by one of those things.

Now, either one of those has a problem, right? Because what does it require? Humans had to exist in order for it to be set up.

So it may seem ridiculous, but a question to ask someone like that would be, before humans existed, was there reason?

Was the universe following laws? Was the future like the past? All the things that we talked about before, the preconditions of intelligibility, the things that are required for things to function, how did the universe function?

If humans were not here to set up logic and to set up rationality. Now, they may think it's ridiculous off the top, but those things have always existed.

We know those things have always existed, right? But the unbeliever in his worldview cannot account for that, because he's trying to base it in man.

And so, when we look at something like this, 1 John 4, 8, and we see that God is love, we see that there is a reason for having morality in this case, right?

Because love, morality, he has existed for all time, his love is perfected in the Trinity.

He loved the sun before the world was ever created. And we can have a basis for logic, for morality, for all these things, outside of man.

And so, that goes back to the self -sufficiency of God, that he doesn't actually need a creation to exercise his attributes.

He doesn't need a creation to love. He had love before creation existed. He also had logic.

He also had all the other things that we talked about. The necessity of the circular argument.

I'm just going to read these paragraphs here, and then we're probably going to get into a discussion about this, which is fine, feel free to ask any questions you want, because I know we've touched on this a couple of times, but it is an important thing to understand, because we can't really go any further without understanding this.

Every worldview ultimately terminates in a circular argument because of the nature of a final or ultimate authority.

If the question why is constantly asked, we eventually hit bedrock, so to speak. That would be like the child that says, why is the sky blue?

Why do you do what you do? And you say, eventually the parent says, because I'm your parent. But ultimately, the parent keeps having to give reasons, and those have to end somewhere.

So that's what we're talking about there. It has to hit bedrock. The ultimate reason for believing all facts from which all predication is derived.

For the rationalist, reason is the final authority. Therefore, every time reason is given as a reason for reason, say that five times fast, we are listening to a circular argument.

It is just as circular for the rationalist to say that reason is his authority as it is for the

Muslim to say that the Quran is his. We hear this all the time from skeptics, scientists, people that are in the rationalist category.

They will constantly talk about religion being outmoded, and usually they'll equate

Christianity with some kind of Thor and Ashtaroth and all these ancient pagan religions that try to discredit us.

But if they really were examining their own worldview, they see that they're doing the exact same thing. They're accusing different religions of doing.

They'll say that the Muslims, you just believe the Quran because it says in the Quran to believe it.

And they'll say to the Christians, you just believe the Bible because Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.

You don't have any reasons behind these things. You're being stupid. And what they don't realize is they're doing the exact same thing when they give a reason for reason.

They're opening their Bible, and I could say, well, why do you give a reason for reason? That's also begging the question.

Shouldn't you have a foundation outside of reason for authenticating reason? But they don't. And so we're just more obvious about it really is what it is.

We're honest is the word really I'm looking for. We are satisfied to tell the nonbeliever that yes, we believe the

Bible because the Bible does say its truth. And, of course, we go a step further by saying without it we can't understand anything.

The nonbeliever, the person in that skeptical category perhaps, he has the same circular argument going on.

In fact, it's the viciously circular argument that we talked about before. He just doesn't make it obvious.

He tries to hide the fact that he's doing that. And so he's not being honest. So that's really the big difference between religions and the skepticism is that one is honest about their final authority.

The other one tries to conceal it. And so we need to realize that it's not just skepticism.

It's not just the religion that I just talked about. It's every worldview you can possibly think of has this circle going.

They have an ultimate authority that has to authenticate itself. Let's move on to the next paragraph here. The difference between the

Christian worldview and all others is that in the Christian conception of reality there is an escape valve from the vicious circle because the attributes of God make it possible for him to communicate with his creation in such a way that they can understand.

It is the only worldview that makes life intelligible. So what does that mean? Well, we looked at the other circles,

I think, two weeks ago. I showed you a couple of examples. Christianity sets itself apart because we have a

God who is powerful enough to communicate with us so that we can know things for sure. In all the other systems, they don't have that.

They don't have a God with the attributes that are capable of doing that. Or if they don't have a God in their worldview, then they're really out at sea because they have no way of actually knowing anything.

Even the statement that you can't know anything, they have to know. There's really no foundation.

That's the escape mechanism for the Christian when we're looking at these circular arguments. I'm going to go over a couple more things.

Hopefully this will be a little more clear. I made a little chart here. I was thinking of putting a bunch of stuff on here.

I realized how involved it was getting, and I only have two there. I have one from the more secular, modern example of what you might find in a university.

Then I have an example of a religion that is not Christianity. By examining both of these really quick, we're going to go into more detail about Islam and these things, hopefully later on.

But by just a peripheral look at these things, we're going to see the circular argument and hopefully what

I'm talking about here. Let's take the first worldview, rationalism. Their ultimate authority, at least they claim, is logic or reason.

What kind of reason or logic would be my first question? We had mentioned that there were different kinds of reason and logic out there.

There's an Eastern mindset, there's a Western mindset, and even in the Western mindset, there's different starting points that people have come up with to try to explain logic and mathematics and these things.

That would be my first question. You can't just blankly say logic. Describe to me what kind of logic we're talking about here.

That would be, I think, the first question that, as Christians, we should be asking. Get them to define their terms.

Man has derived many kinds of logical systems. What compels the rationalist to say that his is the correct one?

He would have to appeal to himself, in which case, ultimately, he's the final authority, though he doesn't realize it.

What did they say? Are our foundations logic or reason? What's the reality? Their foundation is ultimately in themselves.

It's the same thing as the moral argument. How do you know morality overall is invariable applies to the rapist, to the murderer, to all these people?

They either have to come back to themselves or society. It's the same thing with logic. They either have to come back to themselves or society if they try to exclude

God out of the picture. Second question. How do we know that life is meant to be rationally understood?

We had some syllogisms on the board, and we talked about that, that they have no reason for believing that rationality can account for anything.

In fact, they just blankly assume that life is intelligible, that we can understand things when there's really no way that we can do that.

And then the third critique here is even if a type of logic is proven by assuming that the world is rational and that reason is inescapable, we have no compelling reason to assume that our senses are reliable or that there's uniformity in nature or that the future will be like the past, etc.

So what I'm saying there is that even if you can prove, let's say, that you must have logic, how do you know your senses are reliable?

It doesn't prove all the other things we must have in order to understand reality. So what? You prove one thing.

You prove logic. Now get me from logic to all these other things. You can't do that.

You have to assume the God of the Scripture before you can do those things. So we find that rationalism ultimately refutes itself.

Ultimately, the final authority isn't logic or reason. It's man, which is really what all these come down to if they're outside of Scripture.

And it doesn't account for things other than logic or reason, even if it was true.

So let's take a look at another one. Let's take a look at Islam. Their final authority is the Quran, right?

And they'll say that the Bible is consistent with the

Quran because the Quran says it is. The Quran is a progression. You have the

Old Testament, you have the New Testament, then you have the Quran. And they say, well, we accept the Bible. But what they also say is that it must be distorted.

There must have been editors that came by and put things in there that shouldn't be in there. It's corrupted. The Quran, from what

I know at least, we're going to get into this later, and I need to do a little more study on it, but from what I know, the Quran does not specifically say that the

Bible is corrupt. It says that we're a progression. Jesus was a prophet, Muhammad's a prophet. What the

Muslim apologist, though, tries to do is make sense of all this. He tries to make the Islamic faith consistent by saying, well, yes, the

Bible is part of our tradition, but it's been corrupted. Now, the question that we must ask is what parts of the

Bible are corrupt and how do you know that they're corrupt? Because that's the one thing that they'll never do. They arbitrarily will pick and choose verses from here or there to try to show that the

Bible is consistent with their faith, but they never give you a real reason. And could not the Christian be just as arbitrary?

I would try to reason with them this way and say, couldn't I just arbitrarily say that your text is corrupt?

And in fact, I have a better reason for saying that because I can go back to, like, I think it's Abu Bakr, who there was, like,

I think there was ten, eight or ten texts, separate competing texts of the Quran, and they just arbitrarily chose one.

You find through the prophecies of Muhammad, we can find inconsistencies and so forth. So I can look at the historical realities.

I can challenge them on that. You know, do you believe that your religion must be consistent with history?

And if it's not, then they have even a bigger problem, right? Because now contradictions are allowed, and if contradictions are allowed, then

I can contradict them. And so what we're trying to do is called an internal critique. They say that the

Quran can account for the preconditions of intelligibility. They say it can make sense of reality. What we want to do is put on their glasses.

We enter their worldview in order to point out the contradictions in their worldview to show that they don't even actually believe what they're saying.

And so in the case of the Bible here, when they say that the Quran is consistent with the

Bible, we will challenge them by saying, if it's truly consistent with the Bible, the

Bible contradicts the Quran in many points of doctrine, then your Quran is lying to you, essentially.

And then if they try to say, well, the Bible's been corrupted, then we ask, well, on what basis? Where are you getting this from?

Because I guarantee it's always going to be something arbitrary that they go back to. They just pick and choose. Now, there's a couple other problems here, and I think

I sort of touched on this briefly, but literally scholarship, textual variations, historical realities, these things that as Christians we try to be consistent with.

You know, if someone points out a variation in the biblical text or whatever, we mount an explanation for it, right?

We seek to be consistent. Now, if Muslims are supposedly consistent with their worldview, right, they would have to also provide explanations for these things.

And the fact is, they really can't. And I mentioned the Abu Bakr thing. They arbitrarily pick one text above all the others, you know, press them on that point.

Why this one text? Eventually they're going to keep coming back to, well, Allah says, Allah says.

And that gets us to our third point. The attributes of Allah are not a sufficient base on which to hang the preconditions of intelligibility.

Why? Because he is not triune. We talked about this two weeks ago. You have to have a God who is triune, right?

I mentioned love today. You have to have a God that upholds logic and upholds morality and all these things before man even arrived on the scene, right?

You require a trinity. Without a creation, there has to be something for God to love. This can't take place in the

Islamic conception of reality, right? Because Allah is one, right? There are no three persons.

There is no trinity. Another thing to realize is the distinction between a person and his environment.

When I think of myself, I know I exist, but I look out around the world, and I know there's a distinction between me and the chair, between me and Mr.

Ryan, between me and the church. I know that there's a separateness. When someone pokes my father,

I don't say, because I haven't felt it, because there's a distinction there. But in a monistic view of reality, and even in the

Islamic view, where there's just one thing that starts everything off, then we don't have that.

We don't have a distinction. We don't have any way to account for unity and diversity. And so we have that problem.

We also have the fact that Allah is arbitrary. He can change things. A Muslim can never tell you whether he's going to heaven or not.

He can do everything that the Quran says. He'll never know, never can be sure of it, because Allah is completely arbitrary with his morality.

My question would be, how do we get a moral standard that's right and wrong when the God of that system is arbitrary?

You can't. So the Christian, of course, has answers to all these things. It is in the character and nature of God that we can show how the universe can be intelligibly understood.

But if we start with the God of Islam, that can't be. Are there any questions about that? I know we're getting a bit complex on some things, but hopefully things are starting to clear when it comes to the circular arguments and so forth.

I have limited experience with Muslims, just because there aren't a lot in our area. So whenever we do evangelism,

I'm usually talking to back -slitting Christians or atheists, or something in the

Western sense of the word. I think I've talked to a Muslim once, and he wasn't even really sure of his faith. So I don't have a lot of experience.

But from what I've heard from people that do evangelize Muslims, it's best to stick with the New Testament. Press the point that the

Quran says that the New Testament is part of its tradition. So say if the New Testament is part of your tradition, let's examine the claims of Christ and see how they stack up to what

Muhammad said. Usually that's what the Holy Spirit uses. I'm not an expert on that, so I'm not saying that's necessarily the way you can use any of these approaches.

But that's probably the way I would start out with. One more thing I wanted to mention.

If anyone is still having trouble with this idea of every worldview being a circle and why the

Christian worldview is a valid circle and everything else is a vicious circle, I did write something two years ago that I actually have.

It was on my computer. It talks about skepticism and why ultimately skeptics can't even be skeptical.

It shows the nature of reality that Christ has programmed us, in a sense, to believe in him, as Romans 1 says, and that the nonbeliever is trying to escape this reality.

So if any of you want to delve deeper into that, feel free to email me, or I can make a copy of this for you.

You might want to read it and then get back to me. All right, the myth of neutrality. Unbelievers place pressure upon believers to be neutral in their approach to Christian apologetics.

That's true, right? Whenever we get into a debate with a nonbeliever, what happens? What they attempt to do, usually, is to get you to throw the

Bible. Let's just be reasonable about this, right? Don't judge me based on your

Bible, on your worldview, right? Be neutral with me. And let's start with the elementary principles of the world to try to figure out what the truth is.

Paul said never to start with the elementary principles of the world. Start with Christ. But that's what they'll seek to get us to do.

And so what we need to do is to realize that there is no such thing as neutrality, that there is a wall, so to speak, between the believer and the unbeliever.

Now, there is a common ground, and we're going to talk about that, but starting with his presuppositions, starting with your presuppositions, there's no such thing as a neutral way of looking at something.

Any fact that we look at, like I think I gave the example, if you look at a rock, it doesn't have a little sticker on it that says, from Noah's flood, right?

You look at that with your presuppositions and try to determine what's true. Christian scholarship is frequently pressured to put aside commitments that are distinctly

Christian. That's a huge thing today. The pressure comes in the form of an appeal to be noncommittal to the truth of the

Scripture. Can't buy into that. The nature of reason makes neutrality impossible.

Facts are inseparable from their interpretation. They cannot stand alone. And I just gave the example of the rock.

I'm going to read this to you. When men reason about facts, they always understand them in terms of a broad, unified whole or system.

The question is, which system gives meaning to the facts of the universe? Now, that's a question that's never asked, right, whenever we're talking with someone.

They never ask the question, which worldview, yours or mine, can give meaning to these facts.

They just assume at the outset that we both have a similar or exact way of looking at them.

But the fact is, we don't, right? We have Christ as Lord in our hearts. They do not. So without a unified system or whole, facts are meaningless.

Man cannot reason, live, nor deal with truth apart from presuppositions. Without presuppositions, attempts to reason would take place in a vacuum.

And we know that that's absurd. We can't do that, right? We can't think of nothing. You're thinking of something every time you try to do that.

So most of this stuff, I think, we've kind of touched on so far, so we all understand this.

But I'm just going to briefly go over it so it's sort of embedded in our minds, so we truly understand.

Neutrality is impossible because facts and evidences are interpreted by means of one's worldview. In terms of epistemology, everyone knows what epistemology is, right?

We talked about that. It is the starting point. How do we know anything for certain is true? So in terms of epistemology, the believer has nothing in common with the unbeliever.

The believer and the unbeliever have opposing philosophies of fact and opposing philosophies of law.

Believers and unbelievers are in total disagreement about the structure of reality. When viewing reality, there are only two possible reference points.

Either the sovereign creator is ultimate or chance is ultimate. Reason is not an abstract, neutral faculty.

It is a capacity planted in us by God that enables us to receive divine revelation and, as a result, think truthfully.

What's the ultimate problem with the unbeliever's worldview? We've talked about it so much.

Can anyone tell me in one sentence what they think the problem is with the non -Christian, the way they approach reality?

Think of the astrophysicist. What's the problem with him designing rockets? They're good rockets, right? They can take us to the moon.

They're accurate. How is it that we disagree with them? Can't Christians and non -Christians work at NASA and both achieve a common goal of sending man to the moon or pick any example you want?

The non -Christian comes to his conclusions through his own experiences.

He's the final authority. He decides what's good and bad, what's right and where the

Christian relies. The Holy Spirit, you know, comes through.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So the next question is, why can a non -Christian design a rocket, and why does it work?

If all truth is hidden in Christ, how come he can do that? Because they'll naturally steal from God's design.

Bingo. That's exactly what I was looking for. God made laws, physical laws to be followed.

Right, and they live in that environment. But whenever they do something like design a rocket, they are on borrowed capital.

They're borrowing from our world view. They don't know it though, right?

Because they're self -deceived. We gave the example two weeks ago of the mother and the child. They're good boys, right?

She hides the purse every time they come in because she doesn't want them stealing. Her actions demonstrate one thing. What she says is another.

She's self -deceived. It's the same thing with the unbeliever. They're self -deceived. They are on borrowed capital.

They borrow from our world view. They assume that life is intelligible, the uniformity of nature, that the present and the future are going to be like the past.

They assume laws of morality. The science we talked about has to assume morality.

So all these things that must be assumed to design a rocket, that our senses are reliable, that's another one, they don't rely on our world view.

They cannot be true apart from the Christian world view. If you start with any other foundation, they're not true.

So whenever they do that, they're contradicting themselves. An atheist who designs a rocket, he's doing everything that God has enabled him to do.

The difference is he's not giving glory to God. He's not being honest about it. And so as a Christian, I can work with an atheist on doing...

Well, I can't design a rocket, but I can work with an atheist on something that I can do. I can weed -whack.

And an atheist can weed -whack with me, and I trust that he'll do just as good a job as I can do.

But it's not because of his atheism that he can do that. It's because of Christianity. So that's where the distinction is.

When the atheist tries to get us to throw out our biblical ideas and our conception of God and so forth, to be neutral with him, he's thrown out the only foundation, and not only

I have, but he has. He can't reason about anything anymore either. There was actually a good statement in a debate that I listened to where it was a presuppositional guy debating with an atheist, and he said that the atheist is going to make all my proofs for God's existence today.

He said, you don't even have to listen to me. Listen to everything he says, and it'll prove that God exists. And the reason for that is because, why?

He's assuming the Christian worldview in order to argue against the Christian worldview. The big truth here is that atheism presupposes theism.

Doesn't that sound wild? I had to sort of work up to that, but if we said that to an atheist, they'd be like, no, what are you talking about?

But think about it. Get back to the preconditions of intelligibility. They don't have any way of making sense of things, and so they have to assume theism in order to prove atheism.

The example Ventile always gave was the child on the father's lap, the child slapping the father, and the only reason he can is because he's on the father's lap.

In the same way the atheist is held up by God, and he's slapping God all over the place and trying to gripe about the plight he has, but the only reason he can do it is because he's on the father's lap.

One thing, final thing here, the nature of the sinner makes neutrality impossible. We believe man is darkened in his understanding, right?

He's dead in trespasses of sin. That's the reason he's self -deceived. That's the reason he's relying on God, but he doesn't see it.

He's blind to it. Man loved darkness, so they did not go into the light because their deeds were evil.

There's a couple verses we can look up here. I think we've gone over most of them, though, in weeks prior. We all understand man's sinfulness.

I don't think we need to go into that. This is an interesting quote here. It is all common ground, but none of it is neutral ground.

We have ground in common with the unbeliever in the sense that he's relying on our presuppositions, but it's not neutral ground, right?

We can't leave our faith commitment, and they don't want to leave theirs either. So it's all common ground, but none of it is neutral ground.

It's exciting now because we've actually finished all the meta -apologetics, all the discussion about apologetics, and we can get into actual apologetics now and talk about other worldviews and self -refuting arguments, which

I love, and why Christianity is true, and examining contradictions, and all those kinds of things.

So it's going to be more fun now, hopefully. But in order to get there, we had to go through this first. So that completes our time.

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