An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics 3 (Overview of Presuppositional Apologetics)

An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics, Part 3. Brought to you by roarnomore .com.

All right.

The Limits of Classical and Evidential Apologetics

Well, I wrote a couple things on the board here. You can probably be thinking about this as we go through things. There's definitely a problem with this statement here. Probably most of you have seen this before.

Descartes, I think, therefore I am, where he tries to prove his existence. We're going to be talking about that towards the end. But for now, just sort of let that simmer on your minds and see if you can come up with the reason why that's fallacious.

All right, quick overview. What is apologetics? Defending the faith, right? We talked about 1 Peter 3, 14 through 16, and the prerequisites. You have to be saved, bold, have Christ as Lord in your heart.

You have to be ready, have an attitude of gentleness and reverence to God, and have a good conscience. So we went over those things. Then we started going over systems in apologetics, the different approaches.

So we're not actually really talking about apologetics. We're talking about meta-apologetics, it's called, how to do apologetics. And we talked about, first of all, the classical apologetics and what that entails.

That's reason undergirds faith. We start with reason, and then we can get someone to have faith in God through building upon facts. We first prove that God exists, and then we try to prove that the Christian God is the one that exists.

It assumes, at the outset, that man can be reasonable. When the Bible clearly tells us that man's reason is fallen, he's a fallen nature. He can't reason rationally about things without the help of God.

Evidential apologetics was the next one we started to go over. If you look at your handout, it says, evidence undergirds faith. And I don't see a huge difference between that and classical, but they try to focus more on empirical evidence, the five senses.

We know truth through seeing, touching, tasting, smelling. And that's the only way we can know truth. Some of them go that far. Most of them don't. Most of them will come back to reason at some point, and a lot of apologists use both.

So the basic problem with that one, same thing. It assumes man is able to rationally perceive the world, that his senses are reliable. I heard it said this way once, and I thought this was a good way to explain it.

When arguing with someone who is what we call a naturalist, all they believe is that things in the natural world exist, and maybe they're an empiricist. They believe that only through the five senses can you actually know truth.

A good way to explain to them why that's not possible is the basic way science works. Science assumes that you have to have instruments that actually tell you what's going on. If we take a microscope, we can't perceive small bacteria and little creatures with our naked eye.

We have to use a microscope. And before we do that, we have to make sure that our microscope is fine-tuned. All scientific instruments have to be calibrated before they can be used. And it's the same way with our senses.

How do you know that your senses are calibrated in such a way that they can actually perceive the natural world and be accurate about it? That's the problem evolutionists have, right? Everything's a random process.

Well, how can you trust your brain if it's just a random process? You're kind of cutting off the branch that you're sitting on. And so a good response when someone says the only way to know truth is through the five senses is, well, how do you know that through the five senses, that proposition?

You can't.

It's self-refuting. But anyways, evidential apologetics kind of bases its whole system off of this idea that through the five senses, we're going to know truth. They go to historical arguments. They go to scientific arguments.

Institute for Creation Research, I think, started out kind of that way. I think they're more presuppositional now. But they started out that way, just looking at the natural world and trying to reason back to the God of the Bible.

Presuppositional Apologetics and the Transcendental Argument

So let's go to presuppositional now. That's on page three. We're going to spend the remainder of our time on this. Presuppositional apologetics, I'm going to read the first quote there. It says, due to the noetic effects of sin, presuppositionalists usually hold that there is not enough common ground between believers and unbelievers that would allow followers of the peer three methods to accomplish their goals.

The apologist must simply presuppose the truth of Christianity as the proper starting point in apologetics. Here the Christian revelation in the scriptures is the framework through which all experience is interpreted and all truth is known.

Various evidences and arguments can be advanced for the truth of Christianity. But these are, at least implicitly, presupposed premises that can be true only if Christianity is true. Presuppositionalists attempt, then, to argue transcendentally.

That is, they argue that all meaning and thought, indeed, every fact, logically presupposes the God of the scriptures. So quick example of that, I have an argument here on the board. This is a classical apologetic argument called the teleological argument.

We went over it a little bit last week. We usually use it in very simple forms. We say, there's a design in the world. Look around, there must be a designer. That's the way we usually use it. This is more of a formal way, although not the most formal way, but this is more of a formal way of looking at it.

The universe manifests evidence of design. That's the first proposition it makes. So even Richard Dawkins admits this. Everyone, pretty much, evolutionists admit that, yes, it looks that way, but we're being deceived, is what they'll usually say.

It's not really design. Number two, all design demands a designer. There's nothing that we see in the world that hasn't been designed by someone, anything that's human made. Paley's watch argument. You're on the beach, you see a watch there.

You know that there's a difference between that watch and its complexity and the patterns of the beach around it, natural world. Number three, therefore, the universe must have a designer because it's complex as well.

And four, this is what Christians try to do, that designer is God, and we'll try to prove the God of the Bible from there. Maybe we'll give evidences for why Jesus was historically a real person. We'll put other things in this fourth category.

But these three steps are the major ones. Universe is designed. All design demands a designer. Therefore, the universe must have a designer. And one of the problems, I think, I mentioned last week is that if I said that this church is composed of people, therefore, this church is a person, that's fallacious.

Composition fallacy. To say that the things that exist in the world are designed, therefore, the universe design is the same fallacy you're creating. Other than that, though, can you see any problems with this?

Specifically, this first step. How would we make this argument at least a more valid argument and one we could use? Instead of making our first premise, the universe manifests evidence of design, we would make our first premise the God of the Bible exists.

All these arguments in classical and evidential apologetics, a lot of them can be used. But the way that we use them is not through coming to God as our conclusion. It's starting with God as our first premise.

You can't understand that the universe manifests evidence of design if your senses haven't been calibrated to recognize that fact. How do you know your senses are reliable? Well, you have to have something transcendent over it that is doing the calibrating for you.

So you have to go outside of yourself in order to prove this. So number one, first of all, I'm just going to put God. Number one, God, God of the Bible specifically. Then we can go to number two, the universe manifests evidence of science.

And we can do the whole argument that way. Now, there was an objection that was brought up last week, if you remember. Or not an objection, but a question about that, right? Isn't this circular? Don't you start with God and then you end with God?

Wouldn't that be like saying this rock is millions of years old? Well, how do you know that? Well, because we found it in a layer that's millions of years old. How do you know the layer's millions of years old?

Well, because the rock in it was going in a circle. And we say that's fallacious, right? And it is. But there's a big difference between a viciously circular argument and what I'm calling a wide circular argument.

Every worldview comes down to a circular argument. Now, we're going to talk about this when we get to here at the end. But for now, just realize that this actually is a perfectly valid argument, all right?

And by the end of class, hopefully we'll be able to see why that is. The next quote, John Frame is a modern presuppositional apologist. He says, we should present the biblical God not merely as the conclusion to an argument, but as the one who makes argument possible.

I heard it said this way once. There was a debate between a presuppositionalist and Dan Barker, who some of you might have heard of. He's president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. He was a televangelist at one point, and then he rejected it all and went for atheism.

And he's extremely good at arguing his position, because he has that Christian background. He understands a lot of things Christians believe. Of course, we probably would say, probably not the type of Christianity we subscribe to.

Anyways, though, there was a debate between these two. And the presuppositional Christian apologist took the burden of proof on himself that he had to prove that the God of the Bible exists. Now, you would think in doing that, he's weakening his position, right?

It's up to him to prove. If I was that apologist, I have to prove that God exists, and the atheists can just shoot down all my arguments, and he wins. Well, he did something very brilliant, and presuppositionalists were the only ones really able to do this.

He said, Mr. Barker agreeing to have a debate where the question of whether God exists can be proven or not has conceded the debate. And he said, let's take a step back intellectually here. I want to hear some proofs for proof.

How do you know proof exists? And from that point, he proved that God exists. Because the atheist has no reasonable way to, in his worldview, fit in the idea of proof. How can you prove anything? Who are you going to prove it to?

We're just two chemicals fizzing, basically. And that's not very interesting, right? I'm fizzing Christian theism. The atheist is fizzing atheism. And there's really, they're just chemical interactions.

There's really no rational argument going on there. So in saying that proof exists, that you can prove something, the atheist actually concedes the whole argument that God must exist. And that's what presuppositionalism does.

It starts with God, because without God,.

You can't have proof.

And that's what's called arguing transcendentally, which we're going to get to in just a minute. Here's Proverbs 1 .7. Proverbs 1 .7, I believe, teaches this. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Interesting here, it's the fear of the Lord. I think I mentioned this the first day. It's not necessarily God. It's a certain attribute of God, the fear of him. But there should be a reverence and a respect for the type of God that we're proving, right?

It's not just the blank Christian theistic God. It's the God of the Bible, because he's one that we should fear, because he's what? He's the creator. He's got a law. He's going to judge people by it. And we all know this.

The differences between us and non-Christians is that non-Christians know it, but they suppress the truth. We have the Holy Spirit to convince us to take away that suppression. And so we understand that God exists.

And not only that, we love him for it, and we give him credit for it. The atheist knows that, but he doesn't give God credit for it. He doesn't give him the glory. So fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

And we're going to find that every worldview that denies this ends up in foolishness.

That's why it says,.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction. Colossians 2 says, Christ himself in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge. This is Paul. I say this in order that no one may delude you with persuasive arguments.

So what's Paul saying there? There is a persuasive argument out there that people can give you to disprove the Christian position, right? But what's the starting point? Christ in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

That means all meaning everything, right? You couldn't get out of bed this morning if Christ wasn't Lord. You couldn't do whatever it was. You couldn't watch a Yankees game. You couldn't do astrophysics.

The most complex thing to the most mundane thing of everyday life demands that Christ is Lord. One more quote. This is Augustine. I believe this was in the fifth century, because that's what he wrote.

He says, I believe in order to understand. So belief is what starts the process of understanding, not the other way around. And then I kind of created a little timeline, not timeline, but sort of where we got this apologetic from.

I see it in Psalm and I see it in Proverbs. Then Paul uses it. We're gonna go over Mars Hill, how he used presuppositionalism there. Then Augustine, Calvin, Van Til in this century, and that's basically where we are now.

So it's a long tradition of biblical apologists, of reformed apologists. And a lot of people try to say this is a brand new thing. It's not. This is in the Bible. And that's what we're studying. It's a long tradition.

Reformed Epistemology, Cumulative Case, and Existential Apologetics

Other methods. We went over, so we went over classical, evidential, and presuppositional. Couple other things I wanted to mention, but I didn't think they were all that important. So I just wanted to give them a footnote, basically.

Reformed epistemology. I'm not intimately familiar with this. I know enough to know that I don't really want to get into it. It's basically the idea that Christianity is a fundamentally basic belief. In other words, it's not evidence that causes you necessarily to believe in Christianity.

It's perfectly rational for you to start at the outset of believing in Christianity. Unfortunately, I don't think it goes far enough because reformed epistemology says that if provided evidence, you can switch your belief.

So if we're talking to a Muslim, right, and we start giving him evidence for why Christianity is true, and not Islam, then he is free to change his presupposition. We call it a feeder. It's very, it's much more complex than that.

A lot of people in higher education and stuff are more familiar because this is kind of, in the world of academia, the way Christianity is presented, but I think it's better than some of these other methods, but it just doesn't go far enough.

It still says that basically evidence can undermine a presupposition, and we already know that's not true, right? You give evidence to someone who has a presupposition, they're gonna figure out a way to explain that in their worldview, and I think I gave a couple examples of how an evolutionist can do that.

We do the same thing. I don't think I need to go into detail on that anymore unless someone wants me to. Cumulative case method. Look at the person that you're trying to reach. What is going to reach them?

What do they value?

Very man-centered. Just use whatever works. That's cumulative case. And then existential apologetics. It's the last one. I think I made this up, actually. Trying to think, where did I get this? This would be like Karl Barth, a lot of the, in the modernist controversies of the last century, where evolution and modern science was trying to defeat Christianity in the seminaries, and you had Princeton Theological, and a lot of these big seminaries falling to modernism.

One of the main arguments that was used, and we have this to this day in the Christian church, is that, well, Christianity isn't really a reasonable thing. We never said it was reasonable. It just helps us in our day-to-day life.

It doesn't matter whether the belief is true or not. It just matters whether there's a practical application that we can make of it. Schleiermacher was the first person to use this argument. He found out through what's called the documentary hypothesis that Matthew didn't write Matthew, that Mark didn't write Mark, that the apostles were just, it was a forgery off a forgery, and some of you might have heard of this.

They have the Q document, which the apostles took from, which they've never found, by the way, but the whole thing's absurd, but modern science believed that this existed, modern linguistics, and Schleiermacher, in the 1700s, he heard this argument, and it devastated his faith, and instead of rejecting his faith, he decided that he was gonna hang his faith on a different foundation.

It wasn't gonna be the fact that his faith is true. It was gonna be the fact that there really is no truth, and this helps me get through life. Therefore, it is a legitimate faith, and everything became a metaphor.

Everything in the Bible wasn't a literal truth. We have this method of Bible study to this day. Have you gone into Bible study, and they say, how do you feel about this? How do you feel about this verse?

That's where it comes from. It's not historically what Christians have done, but in the past 300 years, it's sort of come onto the scene, and they treat apologetics the same way. Come to Jesus. It doesn't matter if it's true.

He'll give you joy. He'll give you peace. He'll give you all these things, and unfortunately, I think most Christians are probably using that method to defend their faith. Rob Bell is a perfect modern example of that, because he says in his book, Velvet Elvis, that it doesn't matter whether Jesus was raised from the dead or not, which, of course, directly contradicts what Paul said about that.

He said that if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, wouldn't change his faith a bit, because that's not what his faith is grounded upon, so that's kind of scary. It's kind of a postmodern way. I say existential, because existential is the idea that we can come to the world and make our own truth up, and then everything can fit into the way we make our own truth up, so those are the other three methods.

Worldviews, Ultimate Authority, and the Circularity of Reasoning

I didn't think they were worth going into much detail on, because we're not gonna seriously take them. Summary, let's see here. There's much overlap between the three major systems. Classical apologists regularly utilize evidential arguments and vice versa.

Presuppositionists will even use arguments from the other two traditions, but only if the biblical God is first assumed as the starting point. God is both the premise and conclusion of the presuppositionalist arguments.

There are also classical apologists who will utilize the transcendental argument. However, in order to do so, they must be inconsistent with their belief in man's autonomy. Presuppositionalism is the biblical apologetic used by Paul at Mars Hill.

It is the only way to reason with a nonbeliever in such a way that he is not made autonomous. All evidential and classical arguments must be framed in a presuppositional way in order to answer a fool according to his folly.

And then I have a little chart here that sort of breaks it down, shows the difference between the three major systems. Ultimate authority, I think, is the main thing we need to look at. It's man and both the other ones, and presuppositionalism, it's the word of God, that's the ultimate authority.

Yes, sir?

What are you trying to accomplish with this assumption at the beginning that God exists? What are you trying to accomplish with it? If you assume the result.

Right, we're about to get into that right now in philosophy. The short answer is Romans 1. Romans 1 says that all know God, that they suppress that truth in unrighteousness. We're gonna go over that in detail later on, but that's the long and short of it.

So when I look at a nonbeliever, I don't assume at the outset that he really is having trouble knowing who God is. He may be suppressing that truth, but ultimately he really does know who God is. So that's my first basic assumption off of what Paul says in Romans 1.

So when I first presuppose that God exists, I'm telling him what he already knows. I don't actually have to prove that because he's programmed that way. God gave us the software to understand that he exists from the outset.

And there's no other actually rational way to look at it. If you try to start from any other starting point, it's not going to work. You're gonna run into a contradiction. And we'll see that actually right now.

Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics as a Christian Worldview

Basic philosophy. This is just sort of an introduction to the three components of philosophy. Epistemology. How do we know? That's epistemology. How do we know what's real? Metaphysics is the second branch of philosophy.

What can be known? We know we can know things, but look around you at the material world and the nonmaterial world. What can you know? That's the second question. That's metaphysics. And then ethics or value theory.

What types of things are good or bad? And philosophy can be broken down into these three components. They're big words, but they're really simple concepts when you think about it. They'll throw terms around like, oh, metaphysics and this.

Well, it just means what can be known. How do you know what can be known and what types of things are good or bad? And these three things rely on each other, right? You can't have metaphysics without epistemology, right?

If you don't know that you can know anything, how do you know what things can be known? Sound like a tongue twister, didn't it? Epistemology relies on metaphysics. You have to have a starting point somewhere or else you don't know how do you know anything.

Ethics or value theory. I mean, you have to know what types of things can be known before you know what's good or bad. So these things rely on each other. And when these things are in complete agreement, or at least there's an attempt to make agreement, we call that a worldview.

So these three things are what make up a worldview. In Christianity, how do we know? The word of God. Metaphysics, what can be known? The creation, right? Ethics or value theory, what types of things are good or bad?

Well, everything is consistent with the nature and character of God, his law. So it's a consistent worldview and it relies on itself. The ultimate authority is the word of God. In other worldviews, you run into a contradiction when you get down to it.

And we're gonna see that right now. This is the most basic kind of starting point in most of secular philosophy, I would say,.

If not all.

Descartes, the Cogito, and the Transcendental Argument

How many of you have heard of Descartes, I think, therefore I am? Now, what's the problem with this? Anyone figured it out? This is epistemology, this is how do we know? And he starts with, I exist. Therefore, he tries to prove everything from the fact that he exists.

What's he assuming at number one? I think. How do you know I exist? You're trying to prove that I exist, right? You beg the question. He says, I assume I exist, therefore I exist. That's the argument, ultimately.

And so, it's what we call viciously circular argument because it doesn't actually really prove anything. If you start out with the idea that you exist and then you prove the idea that you exist, that's not a very interesting argument, is it?

Now, I agree with him. Yeah, he does exist. But it's not for the reason that he says he exists. So he tries to build a whole philosophy off of basically a fallacious argument. And this is sort of the starting point in just about all major philosophy today.

Start with the idea that you exist and then reason from yourself to everything around you. Now, I think there's more problems with this. I mean, once you prove that you exist, how do you prove that anything else does and things like that?

But at the basic level, epistemologically, this doesn't really work. Now, we're gonna get to the broad circular argument here, what's called the transcendental argument. Transcendental argument goes like this, basically.

It says that the proof for God's existence is without him, you could not prove anything. The proof that God exists is that without him, you cannot prove anything. It's an argument from the impossibility of the contrary, it's called.

Now, transcendental arguments haven't actually been around for a while. Most of the time, we don't talk about them because it forces us to take a step back intellectually. The proof that God exists is that without him, you cannot prove anything.

And you can make any argument a transcendental argument, like we were looking at this, right? If you start with God as a necessary precondition, this is actually a transcendental argument. All transcendental means is the precondition.

Before you can start doing anything, you have to assume that certain things are true. In this case, God's gotta be true before you assume anything else. I think I mentioned this last week, Van Til used to say you can make an argument from toothpaste, you can make an argument from any fact in the known world to prove that God exists.

And the reason for that is because of what's called, and you don't have to write this down yet, but we're gonna get into this, the preconditions of intelligibility. What do you have to assume before looking at the world?

What are the preconditions for anything to be intelligible, to be rationally able to be understood? You have to assume, what, that your senses are accurate, that they work. You have to assume that nature is uniform.

If nature changed every day, then how would you even do science? How would you do any experimentation? You have to assume, I mean, we could go on forever on this. You have to assume that there's a good and bad way of looking at things, that right and wrong exist.

Science actually rests on morality. If you're dishonest about your scientific method, then science can't be done. You have to be honest about it. And that's actually morality, really, is what even philosophy and logic rests on.

It's because we cannot lie that we can't contradict ourselves. So these things are all interrelated. There's a whole host of things, though, that we have to come with an understanding of before we can even make sense of anything.

Now, in order to assume that these things exist, we can't be arbitrary about it. Arbitrary just means a law unto ourselves. We can't say that because I say something, therefore, that's the way it is. And the reason for this, I'll take a very simple example.

The moral argument's the easiest to understand. Why is, now, forgive me, this might be a little crass, but it's the example I like to use, and that's why I'm gonna use it. I like to use this with people on the street because I've never found anyone who thought this was morally right.

But raping children for fun, why is that wrong, okay? Now, that sounds like an extreme example. I know I'm saying this in church, but on the street, it's a great argument to use. Why is that wrong? I've never found anyone that can answer this.

Well, they'll try to, it doesn't help anyone. Okay, what if it helps me? Well, it just is. That's what we usually go back to.

It just is wrong.

I just know it's wrong. I know you know it's wrong. I'm asking you to tell me why it's wrong, though. I know it's wrong, too, and I can give you a reason for why it's wrong because it's consistent with the nature of God for it to be wrong, and God says it's wrong in his word.

So I can give you a reason for why it's wrong. They can't, all right? I think of all the best arguments you can give, they're either gonna come out two ways. They're either gonna appeal to society, in which case Hitler's right, and every other tyrannical regime, or they're gonna come and say it's wrong because I say so, in which case I can win the argument by shooting them if I want because that's right if I say so, right?

A lot of debates, I've seen this done where the presuppositionalist will say, well, we can win this debate right now. You know, you're fizzing the atoms of atheism. Why don't I just shoot you, you know, and then the debate's over?

Well, they would say, they would object to that. That's wrong, you can't do that, but they have no reason for why it's wrong, right? And what they try to do is they're trying to appeal to a transcendent, invariable law that basically is over everyone, that everyone is bound by, but they can't make any sense of it.

Now, what do we know as Christians? We know that there is a God who has given us these rules and programmed us with a sense of what they are, right? The law of God is written on our hearts,.

That's what Romans says.

So if it's written on our hearts, and that's not just Christians, that's everyone, then we know the reason for why they have a sense that certain things are wrong. Now, other things we would disagree with.

Maybe homosexual marriage would be a good example of that. We believe it's wrong, a lot of people now believe it's not, but why is that? They actually do know it's wrong, and they try to suppress the truth.

That's why they're so hostile about it. That's why they try to say that we're the shameful ones, and they try to project on us and all these things. It's just them constantly, you know, living in guilt, trying to suppress that truth when they know it's wrong.

So that's a good example from morality. Now, let's take an example from logic real quick, and this is gonna get back, I think, hopefully to the circular argument and why we can use this as a circular argument.

Logic, how do you know the laws of logic and mathematics are correct, are accurate, can be known? I heard it said once that the atheist can count, but he can't account for his counting. So he knows that the number one exists, he knows that the number two exists, he knows that the law of non-contradiction, which says that things can't be contradictory, he lives daily by these things.

He looks at his paycheck and he says, that's the right amount of money that I make. He doesn't, and he'll question it if it's not the right amount of money. Lives by this all the time. But can he account for it?

How is it possible in an atheist universe that this would exist, right? Logic. First of all, you have to understand that there are different kinds of logic. There are people, I'll take one example real quick, that believe that there is no such thing as the law of non-contradiction.

Law of non-contradiction, all that is is that things cannot be contradictory. We can't assume things that, like, this is blue and this is red at the same time. Doesn't work. Now, I've run into people that will say that it depends on your perspective, but honestly, we all live by that.

I could say to the atheist who gets his paycheck, well, it depends on your perspective. I think I gave you the right amount of money. You know, they're not gonna accept that. There's a good story of Ravi Zacharias when he was in India and talking at a university, and the Indian said, well, you know, the problem with you people, this is a professor at a university, you Christians, is that you assume everything is, it must be either this way or that way, either or.

You're in this either or distinction. And in the Eastern way of thinking, it's both and. It can be both true and not true, and it can be true and not true. And Ravi says, so what you're saying is either I have to pick the either or or the both and.

And he kind of stuck back and said, it's true, the either or does seem to come out. All right, so even people that try to deny this can't get away from it. That's what a transcendental circular argument is.

If you try to suppress it, you end up assuming it, okay? And we talked about logic last week. Give me a logical reason for why logic exists. Well, you have to start with logic to prove logic. You can't escape it.

That's what the difference is between a viciously circular argument and what I'm calling a wide circular argument is. If you have to assume at the outset that God exists in order to prove that God exists, then what you've done is actually created a very good argument because there's no way you can deny it.

It's impossible to deny it. It is possible to deny this one, this circular argument. I think, therefore, I am. You don't have to first assume this to prove that, all right? That's the difference between a wide and a viciously circular argument, what I'm calling it.

It takes a little bit to think about this. Maybe when you're in bed tonight, just think about circular arguments. And we're gonna go into this in more detail later on, so hopefully we'll review it. And it took a while for it to click in my mind.

But actually, it makes a whole lot of sense because every worldview reduces to this. And this is basically the idea of ultimate authority. We all have an ultimate authority. It's the little kid's question.

He says, why, why, why, why is the sky blue? Well, because, most parents, it just is because I said so. But maybe they'll explain something scientifically. Why is the sky blue? Okay, well, why is that?

Why is that? You're gonna get back eventually to the ultimate authority where you can't ask why anymore. In the Christianity, that's God, the word of God. That's how we know God, right? The word of God says.

In atheism or any other worldview, they're gonna have their own ultimate authority. And for it to be an ultimate authority, it has to assume itself, okay? If they say that God exists because, well, nature demands a designer, then that's not their ultimate authority.

Their nature is the ultimate authority. And actually, their sense is the ultimate authority. And then I would ask, how do you know your senses are reliable? And they can't prove that with their senses.