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

Ultimate Authority and Epistemological Self-Awareness

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

OK, 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. And 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. And I think it's going to be helpful to see what the word of God has to say about this. Colossians 2, 2 through 4, says, 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, right? It's Christ himself. It's not anything else.

And what does Paul go on to say? He's telling us this so that no one will be able to persuade us. So as long as we have Christ as our foundation, no one can persuade us with an argument that is outside of Christ.

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

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

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

So our motivations are all flowing from our motivation to love Christ. And what's the alternative here? There's like sort of a contrast being made, right? We have speculations and every lofty thing and raised up against the knowledge of God, and then we have another category, and that's every thought being captive to Christ.

So there's really only two options out there. And our job as Christians is to make sure that all our thinking is motivated by our love for Christ. And that means that we give him the glory no matter what.

And 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.

And 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. So we start with not only God, but the fear of God. So it's a God with a characteristic. It's the God of the Bible because he is the judge, he's the creator, therefore we ought to fear him.

So it's not a generic God, it's the God of scripture. And then 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.

And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Okay, so 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.

And that is through God's word, right? 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. But of course, when we're reasoning with an unbeliever, we are going to be using the word that has been revealed to all of us.

And Matthew 4 .4 is the verse I wanna 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.

And that's during Christ's temptation, right? In the wilderness. And Satan tempts him to create bread, and Christ responds by quoting, I believe it was Deuteronomy 8 .3. And actually, I think the context there was children of Israel in the desert, and God's giving them manna, right?

And he wants to prove that they must rely on him for their sufficiency for their life. And so, what Jesus is actually quoting has to do with the body, right? 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, right? It consists on many things. We have to know things in order to survive. And 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. And 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 the KJV says, they have no light. They have no revelation. It's interesting that the word of God is someone who rejects that as compared to someone who doesn't have light, right?

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.

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, a 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.

Heaven is the clear, the glory of God. Permanent shows his handiwork. And then it goes to special revelation, really without any introduction. It just goes right from one to another. And 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 PhD 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 gonna 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, 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 a part of creation, right?

And you would 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, but they either have to go to themselves, that it's based in them, or it's based on 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. Well, 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 gonna read these paragraphs here, and then we're probably gonna get into a discussion about this, which is fine.

Feel free to ask any questions you want, because I know we touched on this a couple 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, right?

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. And we hear this all the time from skeptics, scientists, people that are in the rationalist category.

They will constantly talk about religion being outmoded, right? And they'll, usually they'll equate Christianity with some kind of like Thor and Astaroth and all these ancient pagan religions to 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.

And I could, they're opening their Bible and I could say, well, why do you give a reason for reason? That's also big in 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 non-believer that, yes, we believe the Bible because the Bible does say it's truth.

And of course we go the step further by saying without it, we can't understand anything. The non-believer, 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 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. So there's really no foundation. And that's the escape mechanism for the Christian when we're looking at these circular arguments. I'm gonna go over a couple more things.

Hopefully, this will be a little more clear. I made a little chart here. And I actually, I was thinking of putting a bunch of stuff on here, and I realized how involved it was getting, and I only have two there.

So I have one from the more secular, modern example of what you might find in a university. And then I have an example of a religion that is not Christianity. So by examining both of these just really quick, we're gonna go into more detail about Islam and these things hopefully later on.

But by just a peripheral look at these things, we're gonna see the circular argument and hopefully what I'm talking about here. So 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.

And so that would be my first question. Well, you can't just blankly say logic. Describe to me what kind of logic we're talking about here. So that would be, I think, the first question that as a Christian 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.

So what did they say? Our foundation is logic or reason. Well, what's the reality? Their foundation is ultimately in themselves. It's the same thing as the moral argument, right? How do you know morality is overall, is invariable, applies to the rapist, to the murderer, to all these people?

They either have to come back to themselves or society. And 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. So second question, how do we know that life is meant to be rationally understood?

And we talked, we had some syllogisms on the board, right? 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, et cetera.

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 is ultimately, it 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. 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 10, eight or 10 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. 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.

If someone points out a variation in the biblical text or whatever, we mount an explanation for it. We seek to be consistent. Now if Muslims are supposedly consistent with their worldview, 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, 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, ow, 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 backslitting 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.

And so say, if it's New Testament's part of your tradition, let's examine the claims of Christ and see how they stack up to what Muhammad said. And usually, that's, I guess, 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. And it talks about skepticism and why, ultimately, skeptics can't even be skeptical. And 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 just 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.

The Myth of Neutrality in Christian Apologetics

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?

But 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. But 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. And 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? Anyone, 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, where the Christian relies on God's holy spirit.

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 worldview, okay? 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? And 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 worldview.

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, rely on our worldview. They cannot be true apart from the Christian worldview. If you start with any other foundation, they're not true.