Interview with Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason

We want to just encourage you next week, as I'll mention at the end of the show as well, that next week we will be starting class in the School of Systematic Theology, which is the natural progression from what we've just finished up in the School of Biblical Harmoneutics.

Because now we're going to take all of that knowledge of how to interpret each individual text of Scripture, and we're going to now start categorizing all of the Scriptures together, and look at different categories.

And if we're rightly interpreting the Scriptures, we should come to a proper systematic theology. In other words, if your systematic theology is right, you agree with me, right? All right. But that's a joke for any of you new watchers.

Apologetics as a Friendly Defense of the Faith

But what we are going to do today is we're going to have a guest with us, and we're going to be talking specifically about apologetics. And we're going to talk about one part of apologetics that I'm very interested in is the attitude or the character of the apologist.

And that's one of the things we really want to focus on and make sure that we are right to check our attitudes as well when we're out there. I want to make sure we have a lot of time for our interview, so I'm going to bring right in early our speaker, who is Greg Cockel from Stand to Reason.

And you can see the website there on your screen, str .org. So welcome, Greg.

Glad to spend some time with you and your audience today. And by the way, I did get your G. I was chuckling. I don't know if anybody else was, but I was.

Now, Greg and I have known each other. You did a conference. You spoke out of my church that I was pastoring at some years ago. And we've been able to come in the studio and watch you when you've done your program, when I've been out in California, which was a treat.

You've got two of the cutest daughters. They were great. I just wish that I had some of my magic tricks to do with them, because they were having….

People say they're angels, and I said, yeah, they're angels, but remember, they're fallen angels.

Yeah. Well, now, one of the things I wanted to have you come on for is because of the fact that, as I said, one of the things I think I learned most, probably, about you is the attitude we have when we are using the apologetics.

And that's one thing, stand to reason. I want to give you some time. Explain stand to reason, because I know that's a cornerstone of stand to reason.

Some people cringe because, I mean, put simply, but for some people, it's fighting words, you know. It's like putting your dukes up, circle the wagons, pull up the drawbridge. Ready-aimed functions who have engaged in communicating the gospel and trying to make sense of their convictions when talking with people that don't agree with them.

And they've made it into…. There is a conflict of ideas. World views are in play here. We're trying to present our worldview. We're commending our worldview to other people. We want them to consider it.

There's a lot at stake, obviously, in all of this. And it's not unusual. Given all of those details, for things to get a little bit spirited, shall we say. And sometimes it gets spirited. That is, our conversations end up looking more like a detail than like diplomacy.

The reason is represented. These almost 20 years now since we've been working hard at this enterprise is a different approach. We have the same ideas. We have the same substance. We have the same gospel.

All of the content is the same. But what we've tried to do is we've tried to adopt a kind of a posture of a genial diplomat that is a friendly ambassador who is going to provide or present an opposite point of view, a challenge to what other people are thinking.

But we're going to try to do it in a way that gets people to think about what we're talking about instead of getting them defensive. And so our approach then does not entail drawing lines in the sand, not that we don't take our stand, but we're not trying to make it a we-them kind of thing if we can avoid it.

We're not trying to get into fights. My basic rule here, Andrew, is if I add in a conversation with other people, well, I'm going to lose, okay? And if they get mad and I don't, I'm still going to lose.

So my goal is, ideally at least, to engage in such a way that allows me to communicate with clarity, allows me to communicate persuasively, but doesn't get the other person on the defensive if I can avoid it.

I'm going to try to put a stone in their shoe. I'm going to try to get them thinking. I sometimes say to non-Christian audiences when I'm doing public speaking, I'm not here to convert you tonight or today, whenever it is I'm talking to them.

But I just want to annoy them in a good way, say to them. That almost always gets a smile from the audience, because I'm communicating in, even at that moment, a kind of a friendliness that I want them to pick up on.

That is, all right, we may differ. Let's talk about it. As you know from the radio show that I've been doing now, I'm in the 23rd year. The principal goal there is to get a piece of my mind and then to have people give me a piece of theirs.

And hopefully in the process we can have a conversation. We can knock some things back and forth that shows that we are taking the ideas seriously, but we're also treating each other with respect as well.

And that's in a nutshell what we're trying to do, in sharing our convictions and defending them, evangelism and apologetics, but using the stand to reason approach.

So now, I know when we had Jersey Fire, which you spoke at this past summer, which was an evangelism conference, and I know there were a lot of people that when you said put a stone in their shoe, there's a lot of evangelists, they want to close the deals in your words.

And that's not your goal when you go out.

It's not my goal. And I know when you're doing street evangelism, that particular environment is a little bit more aggressive in the way you're approaching that. But most people don't do street evangelism.

They're just looking for a way of getting involved in a conversation that is friendly and easy and doesn't put them in a tough spot. And looks, like I mentioned, more like diplomacy than D-Day. And so this is what we try to provide.

I'm not looking, and I say this to every audience that I speak to, when I'm in a training situation, when I'm trying to speak to followers of Christ and trying to help them be more effective at this whole enterprise, I tell them that my goal in conversations is not to close the deal.

I'm not looking to lead people to Christ. That's my ultimate goal for them, for that person. But it's not my ultimate goal for that particular conversation. Because I realize most people, when confronted with these weighty issues, it takes them time to, one, understand our points.

You know, there's a lot of misunderstanding about Christianity. Some people equate the word Christian with bigot. I mean, that's the way the language has gone nowadays. So there are barriers that are there.

People have lots of questions. They think Christianity is for fools or for dumb people or for people who can't get social acceptance anywhere else. And they don't want any part of that. And I want them to see that Christianity is a picture and understanding of reality that actually fits the way the world really is.

And it's not just a matter of discovering reality. But part of reality is that we have a problem, and we know that, at least in some measure, something's wrong. And in order to find the solution, we have to get the problem correct.

And then we can talk about the right solution. And what the Christian says is, the problem is, is that though God has made us to be in friendship with Him, we have all rebelled against Him. We're in a hostile relationship right now, and that's not a good picture.

Because we're the subjects. He's the sovereign. Yet God has done something. He has taken the initiative to repair that breach. And that's the message we want to bring them. So there's a lot at stake here.

There's no sitting on the fence for people. They're in the game whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not. There's still a lot at stake. And so we want them to see that we're at these concerns.

We want them to consider them. And so when I go in a conversation, I'm just looking to put a stone in their shoe, get them thinking about something. I don't think I'm going to be able to take them the full distance in just my one conversation.

And, in fact, I think, Andrew, and we've talked about this before, most Christians are under the impression that they have to try to close the deal, harvest the fruit and everything, and that encounter, a lot of Christians aren't even going to start.

They won't get going. That scares them. They're not going to do that. And so consequently, they'll nod and smile and say amen when some path doesn't allow them to do that. But in real life, it's just not going to happen.

So what I do is kind of to lower the goal a little bit, lower the threshold, just try to make a difference, try to give people something to think about. And if they can do that small bit, if instead of hitting a homer, to use baseball terminology, instead of swinging it for the fences, they just try to get up to bat.

They don't have to even get on base as far as I'm concerned. That's the Holy Spirit's job. If we just think about ways that we can get into play, then the Holy Spirit can take our motion in the right direction.

That is, we're moving in the right direction. He can do whatever He wants with it. The Spirit can move how He wants once we get moving. So my encouragement is let's take the first step. Do we have any techniques?

And, of course, you know this is something A Stand of Reason really focuses in on. I think we do a good job with giving people tools to just get going. And then we let the Lord take it from there. Look, if the conversation dies a natural death, I don't sweat it.

That's okay if I don't get to the Gospel. It's okay if the person doesn't receive Christ. I'm not going to try to push the river. I'm going to try to be available for Christ to work through me and then just take a couple of steps in the right direction and see what happens.

No pressure in that regard. And that's relying.

I mean, I think a big part of that is you're relying on the Holy Spirit to do the work the Holy Spirit does. Some people sometimes think if they go out and evangelize they have to have just the right words and they've got to say it just the right way.

Or somehow someone's going to be lost and go to hell because they didn't say it right. And yet that's God's job.

Well, I've never heard of just the right words. Just for people to know this, even though I'm out there doing the radio and telling people how to do things or whatever, I get out and employ it in my life, but it doesn't always look tidy.

It doesn't always picture perfect, but that's okay. It doesn't have to look tidy. It doesn't have to be perfect. Sometimes you stumble into circumstances. You do the best you can, but we know we have a God behind us, Andrew, who can take our efforts and really multiply it and magnify it.

That's the key.

God Gives the Growth in Evangelism

Yeah, because Paul said it, right? Some are going to water and some are going to plant, but it's God who's going to do the harvesting. And it's going to increase, right? It's going to increase. And I think that one of the things that when we get out, we can feel like, well, I don't know how to answer someone's questions.

And a lot of times, just as you say, just getting started, people, maybe you've had this because you've been doing radio for a very long time. Just after D .I .R .T. was created, right? Is when you started just after God created D .I .R .T. and then it was Stan Therese and radio, right?

Right, then I was on D .I .R .T., that's right. But I think that people will look at someone like yourself and you seem to have all the answers, but I'm sure that you had the experience that you learned these things one by one slowly over time.

Well, I did learn things one by one slowly over time, and it's a willingness to get engaged and talk things through with people that I think equips us to be more effective next time around. You don't start where I'm at now after I'm almost 40 years a Christian.

But if somebody has that expectation, obviously they'll never get started, and this is why I want to emphasize, even after all these years of doing it, I still kind of muddle through things, and that's okay.

I just want to give people permission to do that. That's the way it works a lot of times, and the more you engage, the more you find out what the questions actually are, the more times you stumble through the process, the more you can reflect back on it afterwards and say, gee, maybe I could have said something differently, maybe I could have taken a different approach, and then you learn from the process.

So it's always a learning process, Andrew. It starts with just simply taking that first step. I'm just thinking the last time that you and I went out on the boardwalk after I took July at Jersey Fire, and then we went on the boardwalk there in Jersey.

I've got to tell you, and you knew this, I felt a little like a fish out of water because I'm not the guy like you are who walks down the boardwalk and engages people in the way that you do, so it was new to me.

And so I had to just stumble into it, as it were. I had to just do something and engage, and as it turned out, as you recall, we had the conversation with those three guys, all young college kids that were smarty pants and wild and crazy and making jokes, but we were able to have some conversation with them, and as it turned out, you met with them the next night, and some of the things that you said and some of the things that I said, even though I was stumbling around at that point, really sunk in, and God used it to set up another encounter that you had the next night.

So you never know. You never know.

Yeah, you don't. But I think that one of the things I'm going to... This is, I think, the key of it. I'm going to put up... This was what happened before you handed out the... Before we went out and started evangelizing, and that's the key.

We don't do this on our own.

Does the picture show the beads of sweat on my forehead?

Well, they don't show the ones on mine because I was behind the camera. So other than the... There are folks who are coveting your library behind you, so this time they're not coveting my library. We did have one question.

Someone wants to know if the wristband on your wrist is a Jersey Fire wristband. Wait, say it again. On your wrist, they want to know if on your wrist there, there's a wristband they're seeing.

Actually not. This is... Let me show. This says WWBD, and it stands for What Would Buddy Do? And a dear friend who has been, for the last almost six weeks, lying semi-conscious in a hospital bed with all kinds of tubes stuck to him, and he's struggling with multiple myeloma, which is a very deadly form of cancer.

And so it's a reminder for me to pray for him on a regular basis, and I pray for him just about every time I see that band. So everybody, the reason is wearing these and praying for Buddy, but it's a good reminder.

That is a good reminder. I like that. Thank you. So let's get into, first off, what is apologetics?

What Apologetics Is and Why It Matters

Well, apologetics is defending the faith. I guess it's the simplest way to defend it. Peter talks in 1 Peter 3, verse, I think, 15. He says that we should always be ready to make a defense for everyone who asks us to give an answer that's within us.

That word defense in English is translated from a Greek word, apologia, which means to make a defense. So we don't use that so much apology in lingo nowadays the way it was used in the past, but to give an apology in the way it used to be used was simply to make an offense.

And so you could be at a certain discipline, and for your discipline or your points of view, some people might say, well, he's an apologist for this or for that or for a particular party or whatever. But we don't use the term very much.

It is usually used mostly for Christians to identify the particular task of responding to challenges. That would be one way an apologist is involved. He's defending his own convictions, the hope that's within him, by fielding challenges to his view.

So there are questions people raise, and they'll say, well, what about the problem of evil, or why is Jesus the only way, or can you trust the Bible or evolution? So there's these standard things people bring up because they're stumbling blocks to them.

And so the job of the Christian when he's doing apologetics is to try to give a response that will be satisfying to the other person and hopefully bring it back to the gospel so he can give consideration to the main claims of Christ on his life.

Sometimes that might be called defensive apologetics. Sometimes you take more the offensive, and that is where you're going out and you're making the case for some detail of your belief. It's hard, for example, for people to take the claims of Jesus as God seriously if they don't believe in God in the first place.

So part of what we might do as apologists is we might make the existence of God given the fact that there are lots of skeptics that are out there in our culture. So sometimes we take the initiative to make a positive case, or possibly we're challenging some other view.

We're saying to the atheists, well, you atheists, you believe in morality, but how can you make sense of morality on your worldview? Because there doesn't seem to be a place for that given a materialistic worldview.

That would be maybe a question that an apologist, a person who is taking on the role of an apologist at that point might ask. Sometimes we're defending against other theologians' views. You have Christian look-alikes like Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons, LDS, or Christian Science, or other groups like that, who to the outside look like they're Christians, but it turns out they deny some central doctrine, or many central doctrines, of classical Christianity.

And so part of our job is to defend the truth against those who would distort it. So apologetics deals with all of those aspects of engaging.

Different Schools of Apologetics

Now let me ask you this, because you said that they ask these questions because it's a stumbling block to them. Do you think more often that they're using these arguments that they're challenging Christians with because it's a stumbling block to them, or because they think it's going to be a stumbling block to the Christian?

Well, I think it depends on the individual. Sometimes when you're dealing with someone who is, you might say, genuinely seeking, they are willing to consider our view, but they just simply can't consider it seriously because of this other objection that's bothering them.

And if we can give a good answer, then that will remove the objection, and they can take the next step forward to taking seriously what we say about Jesus and the Gospel in the wider Christian worldview.

Sometimes, though, the people you talk to, at least initially, aren't being that generous. They have their own view, and they think they're right. And, of course, that's why people hold views that they hold.

They think they're right, but they're not engaging. They're interested in tripping the Christian up. So they might be offering challenges to show that the Christian actually is the one who's wrong in this situation, and the other person is right.

And sometimes those challenges can be very powerful in undermining the confidence that Christians have in their own view. And so part of the role of apologetics, and I would say, Andrew, in my, I guess I'd have to say my professional life, what I do as a, for lack of a better word, professional apologist, is more building up the Christian and giving the follower of Christ confidence in his own convictions for the times he may doubt than it is persuading non-believers.

Both are in play here, but I found out that I think apologetics has a greater impact to encourage and stabilize the Christian in his views than it has in persuading the non-Christian, though it does have a role as well.

Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up, because I'm going to bring that up in a minute on something different, but it's good because this does, there are two types of people that sometimes we get, I mean you have people on the radio who will ask you questions.

I just had, the weekend before last, out on the boardwalk open air preaching and had a guy who was asking me about Q. Now you're familiar with Q, but for those who aren't in the audience, Q is a document that some of the liberal theologians believe is a single source that was first written at all the Gospels, then wrote from that.

Now, I had a gentleman on the boardwalk who was asking me about Q and the single source theory. He has read Bart Ehrman's book, Misquoting Jesus, and so that's where he was getting his information. Now, the difference was in his manner of question.

He was asking it because he's been studying this in his college for two years and this was what his understanding was and he wanted to get my understanding and how what I believed related to that because he realized I had a very differing view because I said that Jesus was God.

That's different than a guy that just shouts it out out of anger and is more looking to see if he can catch the open air preacher. I'm going to answer those differently.

Yeah, right. Q, just for people's information, is a theoretical document. But Mark seems to be the first Gospel and so there are some things that you find in Mark that you also find in Luke and in Matthew.

But then there are also sayings that are common in Luke and Matthew that you don't find in Mark. And there's a sense that since they agree on these particular points that maybe there's another document they were drawing from and this is where you come up with the concept of Q from the German Quell which means source.

And I don't have any difficulty ultimately with Q. Maybe there was a tradition or something written down where the disciples collected this information. Luke says that he researched everything carefully so that's not necessarily a problem for us.

But sometimes Christians might not have heard of this thing and then if there's an aggressive questioner it might trip them up.

Yeah, and that's what we had. We had a lady who had never heard of it and I had to then explain what it is. Now his argument from what he thought was that this discredits that the Bible was written by God which we ended up discussing.

But the thing that was funny about it, because this was the day after President Obama had spoken at the Democrat National Committee. So what I asked him was, I said, because part of his argument was there had to be a single source because of the similarity.

So I asked him if the President spoke last night and he said yes. And I said, well, did the Washington Times report what happened and what he said? And the gentleman said yes. And I said, what about the USA Today and the New York Times and the Boston Globe?

They all reported similarities and yet they didn't get it from a single source. They were all eyewitnesses to the same event. And so it's possible that if that happens today, there's no reason that that can't happen with the Gospel writers.

That's right. There is nothing about the Q hypothesis that in itself undermines anything about the credibility or authenticity or the truthfulness of the Gospels. This is somewhat of a tempest in the teapot.

It's an interesting issue to academics, but some who want to make it out as some kind of charge against the reliability of the New Testament, they're just barking up the wrong tree on this one. And I mean, I think one...

Say that again, Greg. I didn't hear that.

Your illustration with the President's speech at the DNC is a very good illustration to demonstrate that.

Thank you. Yeah, it was funny because one of the things, he was trying to argue that he believes things on scientific grounds. And I said, but wait a minute, you know, Q has never been found. So it's not even a historical ground that you're on.

To quote a subtitle of a book that I heard, you have feet firmly planted in midair, which is the subtitle to your book on relativism. But that's really what he did. He's basing his whole argument on that the Bible, we can't know the Bible based on something we don't have.

That's it. It's really silly. And you're right to point out for these people that claim they want to get all their information from science, none of this has anything to do with science. That's a different discipline meant to measure a different kind of thing.

Science is not used to measure history, period. You don't even know what you had for dinner yesterday based on science. You find that out in different ways, but not in anything scientific.

Not science. Yeah, I ask people when they say that they believe only in science, I ask them if they can prove scientifically that George Washington lived and was our first president because we get that historically, not scientifically.

Presuppositionalism, Evidentialism, and the Apostolic Model

So, but let me get to, we're talking about the apologetics. Now, when you said that when you are sharing on the radio, mostly what you're doing is sharing and encouraging the faith of believers, which is often what I find with that.

Now, there's some different views of apologetics. And I know that, so what are the different schools? I know that there's presuppositionalism, there's evidentialism. I believe there may be some others, but those are two main ones I know of.

Can you define them and explain the differences?

This is going to be a little harder. Sometimes you hear about classical apologetics, you hear historical apologetics, you hear, you know, the one-step approach, the two-step approach, and there's lots of ways that you can slice and dice it.

But when people ask me the question that you just asked me, Andrew, I basically tell them there are only two main schools of apologetics. There is what's known as presuppositional apologetics and then everything else.

And because all the other categories, evidential apologetics or historical apologetics or classic, all are very similar to each other in their basic approach, whereas presuppositional apologetics is very different.

Now, it isn't necessarily different if you were a presuppositionalist. You wouldn't, if you didn't know what to look for, you wouldn't necessarily know what was going on. I think of this as a tempest in a teapot because I'm not a presuppositionalist in my approach.

A presuppositionalist holds that ultimately, let me back up for a second and say that only Calvinists or those who believe in Reformed theology are presuppositionalists. And so in their basic theology, they start with God because God is the supreme being.

He's the one who secures our salvation. He's the main mover. He's the one who rescues us. So he's the center of our theology. You always start with God. And so what they are trying to do is then be consistent in their apologetic approach.

And that is they want to start with God in their apologetics. If they don't start with God, if they start with just basic evidences, if they start with reason, say, and they go to a person and say, let me give you reasons why you should believe in God on their view.

Now, I'm just reflecting their view. I'm not agreeing necessarily on their view. Is you are putting the nonbeliever who is the rebel against God, you're putting him in the seat of the judge, and you're putting God in the dock as if he's the person being judged by using the evidence and the reason of the nonbeliever.

And they think that's topsy-turvy. No, the believers, the one who's in the docket, God is God. God is the judge. And the right approach to apologetics is to show the non-Christian that his problem is that he's in rebellion against God.

And even when he uses reason and logic to try to rebel against God, he's got the kinds of tools that wouldn't even be useful any way if God didn't exist in the first place. And now this is called the transcendental approach.

That is, in order for there to be reason or logic, in order for anybody to trust their five senses, to give them information about science, in order for there to be a world at all, there has to be a God to make it work.

Another way of putting it is you have to presuppose God's existence for anything else in the universe to make sense. Now, by the way, I think that's a good argument, and I use it a lot. But notice on that approach, if you don't start with God, if you start with the non-Christian and where he's at and with his rebellion, then you're somehow dishonoring God because, in their view, you're using reason to judge God instead of God as the main judge.

To me, that's like saying you're putting grammar above the Word of God if you have to understand grammar in order to read the Word of God. No, the Word of God is still the ultimate authority, but God has given us some tools that we need to understand properly before we can even figure out what the Word of God says.

This is one reason that I'm not a presuppositionalist. I'm an evidentialist. I try to start where people are at with their views and their understanding and then work from there. And I have a whole host of resources that I can use in order to do that.

But I put it this way. If people don't know the refined differences between presuppositionalism and everything else, some evidential approach, I say, well, look it. Just look at the way the apostles and Jesus indicated their convictions.

Now, it turns out that the apostles and Jesus didn't argue for the existence of God, but that's because that wasn't a question that was being asked. They did use evidences quite aggressively. Jesus said, look it, believe me because of the words I speak.

There's a self-evident quality to the power of Jesus' words. Or believe me because of what Moses said. They're prophetic words that were uttered that supported Jesus. Or Jesus said, believe me because of what John the Baptist said.

Or believe me because of the miracles that I work. So there are lots of different appeals that Jesus made to people. Indeed, when you look at the Gospel of John, you'll see at the end of the Gospel, chapter 20, John says many other signs and wonders Jesus performed that I didn't include in this book.

But these I included in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and in believing you'll have life. So it's almost as if John is saying, I have laid out all of these compelling evidences.

Luke calls it many proofs in the book of Acts in the first chapter. They laid out all of these evidences to give credibility to the message. Now if Jesus did that and the apostles did that, I don't know why I can't do that in the very same fashion.

And that's what I tried to do.

Well, now, one thing I know that I could disagree with on that is the fact that since I went to a seminary that would definitely say they're not Calvinistic, yet they taught presuppositional apologetics.

So not all Calvinists are those that would claim to be Calvinists.

Some still hold to it. It was not reformed, but they not only taught by way of giving the information about presuppositionalism, but they actually promoted it.

Yeah, they taught presuppositional apologetics, but they definitely would not say that they're Calvinistic. They're definitely not reformed.

Presuppositionalism is the right, appropriate, God-honoring way to do it, and the other evidentialism is not correct.

They wouldn't say that evidential is not correct. I never heard that. But the form of apologetics they would teach was presuppositional.

Okay, well, I think presuppositionalism, too, in a lot of the techniques, the transcendental argument, the preconditions of intelligibility, I mean, these are different phrases that are used to describe it.

I think that they're really good and useful. Real presuppositionalists are committed to presuppositionalism in principle as opposed to an evidential approach. But anyway, that's interesting to hear.

Objective Morality and the Problem of Evil

Well, yeah. I mean, there are times where I do like to be able to just go to Romans 1 and explain to people. You know, you get some lost person. They know God exists. And so a question that came into the chat room is, have you encountered atheists that believe that morality has evolved like anything else?

And how do you deal with that perspective?

Yeah, but this is where a very important clarification needs to be made. What do you mean by morality? Do you mean, this one I'm going to say may sound a little bit complex, but I'll try to explain it for everybody.

Do you mean that right and wrong are actually qualities of an self? Or are you saying right and wrong are merely the judgments that we make as subjects make about an action? Now, here's why distinction is important, because the difference between objective morality and relativistic morality is the distinction I just made.

If we say grass is green, do we mean that the grass actually is green? Whether I got my, if I got my, maybe I believe it's orange, it's still green, because that's the nature of the color of grass. Or when I say grass is green, am I just saying what my impressions are, and everybody's answer to this is just as good as anybody else's?

If grass, if the greenness of grass is in your mind, then people could have different ideas about the color, and they're just as right as anybody else. If the green is in the grass, well, then that's an objective quality of the grass, and people who disagree are wrong.

That is, they're mistaken about that. Now, we're going to transfer that notion to morality. When I say rape is wrong, is rape actually wrong? Is rape itself wrong? So wherever the rape goes, whenever it happens, whatever time of history, it's always wrong, regardless of what any particular person thinks about it.

Or is, when I say rape is wrong, I'm just describing something about my own belief system, and that's as far as it goes. You might believe rape's not so bad, and I can't say you're wrong, because neither of us are talking about rape, we're talking about ourselves.