The Problem of the One and the Many w/Anthony Rogers

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala and today we are going to be talking about a really really abstract philosophical concept.

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So this topic is not for the faint of heart. I'm just kidding. It's actually very interesting and while it sounds unimportant it's actually a very important topic and so we're going to be talking about what is known as the philosophical problem of the one and the many and I have a friend of mine on today that is literally a black belt in the doctrine of the

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Trinity. So I mean you know literally that's a thing. He actually went to Trinity School and earned a black belt so now he will defeat

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Unitarians and you know Muslims and all these people who challenged the doctrine of the

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Trinity. My special guest he's able to dispatch those objections quite thoroughly.

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So I am super super excited to have my friend Anthony Rogers and you guys if you don't know who

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Anthony Rogers is you definitely need to go over to his YouTube channel. I think it's literally just called Anthony Rogers.

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He'll correct me if I'm wrong on that point and he has live streams. He takes questions and he unpacks biblically biblical defense of the

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Trinity, the deity of Christ. He's got some great content over on his YouTube channel so stop exemplifying the doctrine of total depravity.

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Go over there now and subscribe. Alright so with that out of the way before I actually introduce him on the screen with me

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I just want to make just a quick couple of announcements. On November 3rd at 8 p .m.

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Eastern I will be having Toby Sumter on with me to talk about everything presuppositional.

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So we're gonna talk about a wide range of issues regarding presuppositional methodology. Also on November 18th

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I will be having Dr. Jason Lyle on to talk about the historical Adam and so folks you definitely want to check out that discussion especially in light of the recently published book by Dr.

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William Lane Craig, The Quest for the Historical Adam, that's really made some waves and people have been talking about it and so hopefully we can provide a solid biblical view of the historical

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Adam while respectfully interacting with some of the argumentation that Dr. Craig has made on that topic.

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So hopefully folks will find those discussions interesting and I've just been notified that a friend of mine,

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Chris Bult, if you guys are familiar with the website Choosing Hats, he used to contribute on that website

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Choosing Hats, which was an excellent presuppositional apologetics website. My friend Chris Bult has just agreed to do a formal debate with an atheist on my channel and that's gonna be an excellent opportunity for folks to see a very knowledgeable presuppositionalist engage with an unbeliever so you can kind of see, you know, perhaps in a more intellectually astute way how the presuppositional methodology plays itself out in the context of a formal debate.

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So I'll keep the folks updated on that when it is scheduled. All right, well that is it by way of announcements and without further ado, the black belt himself in the doctrine of the

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Trinity, Anthony Rogers, how are you doing, sir? I'm doing great. I've never been described that way, but thank you for the colorful introduction.

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No worries. Well, I was thinking of the background, so you have kind of that Asian, you know, that Asian flavor in the background and I figured you really do know the doctrine of the

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Trinity really well, so I figured black belt in the Trinity. So it makes you look, makes you look cool.

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So why don't you take a few moments to introduce yourself and point people in the direction of your stuff, where they can get their hands on maybe videos, articles that you've written.

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Why don't you just tell folks a little bit about yourself before we get started? Okay, so vocationally

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I am a pastor in the Presbyterian Church of America. In that capacity,

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I serve as the regional director in South Carolina for Metanoia Prison Ministries, so it's a branch of Mission to North America, which is the

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PCA's missions agency. So that's what I do vocationally. Primarily, I also have some other side jobs that I do for different places.

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I also preach regularly, pretty regularly, at churches in place of pastors that have to be away, and then

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I do a bunch of stuff on YouTube and other online forums. As far as where people can find some of my material,

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I've written various things in various Christian magazines, theological journals, and books.

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I contributed to a book called Our God is Triune, since you mentioned the Trinity. It was edited by my friend

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Michael Burgos, and it was co -authored by a number of people, Michael, as well as Dr.

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Edward Dalkor, and other people. Among the journals that I've contributed to, one is the

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Puritan Reformed Theological Journal, which is, you've probably heard of Beakey's work.

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He is up there at Puritan Reformed Seminary, and he is the main guy behind Reformation Heritage Books, so they have a journal.

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I've contributed to that and other magazines over the years. Anyways, online, I've contributed, or at least in the past did for quite a while, contributed to the

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Answering Islam website. Not everything on there is, for me, is specifically about Islam.

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There are things just setting forth or defending particular Christian doctrines, so there's all sorts of stuff there that people can look at, even if they're not interested in Islam.

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I've done a lot of YouTube stuff in the past. I mostly did stuff on the

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Act 17 apologetics page with David Wood, and since December, I've been doing stuff on my own channel, so I've been building that up.

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So yeah, that's basically me. That's what I do. That's hopefully useful to some people.

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Yeah, well, I encourage people, before I invited John, to check out your YouTube channel.

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If you guys don't know, Anthony came on my show earlier to talk about, a few episodes back, to talk about presuppositional apologetics applied specifically to Islam, and for good measure, you also applied presuppositionalism to Judaism.

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I don't know if you remember that. I mean, you do a bunch of stuff, but I remember specifically in that discussion, you were able to weave in a presuppositional application both to Islam and Judaism, which

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I thought was very helpful for folks. So let's dive right into our topic, and before we do that, just want to let folks who are listening, if you have questions,

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Anthony Rogers is also a black belt in answering questions. So if you have any questions about our specific topic, just kidding around, if you have any questions about our specific topic, just make sure that you preface your question with questions, so we can differentiate between the comments.

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All right, well, let's open up with kind of some context, Anthony, right? So you and I, we would identify ourselves as presuppositionalists in our apologetic methodology, and we are typically known to use something along the lines of what we call a transcendental argument for the truth of the

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Christian worldview, okay? And one of the centerpieces of the Christian worldview is the Trinity.

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So can you lay out for us, okay, the transcendental argument for the

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Christian worldview, and why the Trinity is the centerpiece of the

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Christian worldview? And then maybe we can kind of move from there to this issue of the one and the many, so we can make connections for people as to why the

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Trinity actually provides what we often say provides the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience.

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I hope my question was well -formed. Yeah, okay, sorry, I was just actually looking at some of the comments, but so first I'll start with the doctrine of the

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Trinity and its centrality, its importance with respect to the Christian worldview. The doctrine of God, it should be, you know, incontestable to people, is foundational to Christianity.

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There is no Christianity apart from God, and foundational to our doctrine of God is understanding that God is triune, and that in turn is foundational to every other

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Christian doctrine. One thing I often say is every Christian doctrine either presupposes the

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Trinity, or logically follows from the Trinity, or at the very least coheres with the

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Trinity. So anything that doesn't presuppose it, follow from it, or cohere with it, just simply isn't

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Christian. And so just to take out one thing that everybody would recognize is fundamental to Christianity, say the doctrine of salvation.

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Salvation, to be properly understood, is something that we understand as a work of the triune

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God. We are chosen by the Father, purchased by the Son, sealed by the Spirit, blessed God, three in one, as the old saying goes.

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That's basically Paul's point in Ephesians 1, right? And of course there are other details we can fill in there.

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Sure. And then just to take a practical thing, something as central to Christian piety is prayer.

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You know, prayer is to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. Of course we could pray to each person of the

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Trinity, but just talking about the ordinary mode of prayer, we pray to the Father through the

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Son by the Spirit, and so this gives you an idea of the centrality of the

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Trinity, the importance of the Trinity, its foundational nature. But also if we're talking about creation, which becomes particularly relevant in a discussion like this about the one in the many, a

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Christian doctrine of creation is Trinitarian. You know, we don't just teach a generic

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God, neither do we teach a generic doctrine of creation. A full -blown Christian doctrine of creation recognizes that all things are of the

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Father through the Son in the Spirit, right? So for example, Paul in 1

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Corinthians 8, 6 says, for us there's but one God from whom are all things, right?

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And then he goes on to say, and one Lord Jesus Christ through whom are all things, and elsewhere you have mention of the

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Spirit. The authors of Scripture don't always say everything in one place, but in Psalm 104, just to give an example, it says, you send forth your

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Spirit and they are created, and you renew the face of the ground. So there you see the Spirit's involvement.

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So this is central to Christianity. It's the chief distinguishing article of Christianity.

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If you look at Turretin's Institutes of Elanctic Theology, and this is just, I'm picking out somebody at random, you know, he's not a one -off, he's not out on a limb here.

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He's stating what every good dogmatician of the Christian faith has said or would agree to.

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He says that it's Christianity's chief distinguishing article, it's the mainstay of the Christian religion, by it

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Christianity is distinguished from Judaism and Islam, and so forth. So that gives you something of an idea of why the

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Trinity is central and important and all the rest. One quick additional note is this was the primary issue that was being hammered out in the early centuries of the church.

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If you look at the history of the church, you'll see that the church will hammer out various doctrines over time, usually in the crucible of controversy, and the doctrine of the

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Trinity was first up, right? It was the first thing. When you look at the points of attack when it comes to non -Christian groups, this is the one thing that they go to before anything else, though they go after, right?

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If you go, if you talk to a Muslim, they're gonna quickly bring up the Trinity. You talk to a Jewish person, they're quickly gonna bring up the Trinity. So again, you see the importance of it, but creedally, if you look at something like the

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Athanasian Creed, it says that confession of the Trinity is requisite to salvation.

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Now that's not the same as saying that a person has to have a robust, you know, theology and be able to articulate it at the level that, you know, a highbrow

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Christian theologian might, but on a rudimentary level, every Christian knows God as his Father through Christ the

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Son, who is his Lord, and by the Spirit who is in him and enabling him to cry out,

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Abba, Father. So Trinitarianism is, according to the classical creeds, an essential of the

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Christian faith. So the other part of your question was, I forgot.

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The transcendental argument. So where does the Trinity fit in a transcendental argument? So for those who are seasoned in this discussion, they'll know what a transcendental argument is.

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If we can just kind of define what a transcendental argument is very briefly, and then just assume folks are kind of up on the topic, and just kind of explain, how does the

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Trinity play into a presuppositional transcendental argument for the truth of the

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Christian worldview? Yeah, so briefly, since your audience, most of them will likely know this as you said, but briefly, when we talk about arguing transcendentally, what we're saying is everybody has a worldview, everybody thinks in reasons in terms of a worldview, everybody processes arguments, evaluates facts in terms of a broader framework, and what we're arguing is that when you lay the

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Christian worldview side by side with the non -Christian worldview, whatever form it takes, you know, whether atheism or Islam, it's only in terms of Christian theism that you can account for those things that are necessary for making anything intelligible, and that includes even what atheists are doing.

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So ironically, when atheists argue against God, they're necessarily presupposing the

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Christian worldview in order to do so, they're not really working in terms of their worldview to the extent that they're doing anything legitimate.

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Now, what happens though is when we argue with atheists, the points of application end up being of a certain sort, right?

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The atheist, for example, classically in a Western context, atheists are materialists, naturalists, and so, or also empiricists,

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I'm not saying all atheists are those things, I'm just saying that's very commonly the case when it comes to atheism in the

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West, and so when we apply this kind of reasoning to it, we're usually focused on the inability, for example, of the atheist to account for immaterial realities, right?

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So if an atheist says that only concrete particulars exist, we say, well, in order to argue that, you're relying upon things that aren't concrete particulars.

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It'd be like somebody saying, only marbles exist, and here's my proof that there are only marbles exist, it's this pen right here, right?

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That wouldn't make any sense, I'd be using something other than a marble to prove that only marbles exist, right?

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Now, it's an absurd example, but I also think that the whole line of reasoning is absurd, that immaterial things don't exist, and the proof of that is this propositional statement combined with this other propositional statement, right?

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Recognizing that propositions are not material in nature, right? This proposition and this proposition lead to this immaterial conclusion, right?

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None of that makes any sense. Now, what happens is people then respond, including some

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Christians, and they say, well, that just, you know, at best, you've proven some kind of a need for some kind of a platonic worldview or maybe theism, and I haven't even given the full argument that we would make against atheism, you know, just giving something for people to, you know, have a reference point here, but the argument usually is that that only requires then a general theism.

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Why couldn't a Muslim come along and a Jewish person come along and say, hey, look, we believe in a personal God, and by virtue of that, we don't have that problem.

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But see, what this misses is, when we're talking about laying the Christian worldview alongside of the non -Christian worldview, that version of it called atheism will give rise to particular points of application, but as soon as other things enter into the picture, like belief in some kind of a

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God, we still need to be talking about what is this world you look like, what is this world you look like, and now ask, does this other factor that you've introduced here get you as far as you need to go in order to be able to account for how things are intelligible?

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And our contention is, no, it's not a generic God that's going to do the trick, it's only the triune God of biblical revelation, and that's what brings us to the problem of the one in the many, because really, without getting into that just yet,

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I know you want to sort of get there, but when you talk about, say, a atheist's inability to account for immaterial realities, or universals, or concepts, or laws, or categories, or even beyond that, things like human dignity, which all atheists take for granted, you know, why'd you cut in front of me, why'd you cut me off on the road, you know, why did you insult my wife, you know, any number of things they might say that presuppose human dignity, something other than the fact that they're just, you know, biological chemicals, you know, anything that is necessary to make things intelligible.

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I mean, when you look at these sorts of things, even though you can talk about the problem at one level, it doesn't mean that there aren't additional layers of problems, you know, the problem of universals and particulars, if you now admit that there are universals, and no longer have to, let's say, give an account of the existence of universals, there's still an issue that remains, namely, how do you relate these two things, right?

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And so that's what I'm getting at, is that the problem the atheist has in accounting for universals goes even deeper, but we often don't go there, because why go deeper when we can't, when you guys, you know, why say to the atheist, let's see if you can swim out in a pool that's 50 feet deep, when they can't even get out of the, you know, kiddie pool, right?

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I mean, you know. All right, so okay, so you did touch on a couple of things there that I think will be a good platform to kind of get into the issue of the one in the many, we could kind of explain what that is for folks who still might not have a clue, and by the way,

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I do see the super chats, Israel, thank you so much, we'll get to those towards the back end of the episode, so thank you so much,

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I do appreciate that, but okay, so you mentioned something that is actually a common objection against presuppositionalists who use the transcendental argument, so when we say that the

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Christian God, the triune God of Scripture, provides the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience, okay, folks will often say something to the effect of, well, what prevents the

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Muslim for saying the same thing, I mean, couldn't a Muslim be a presuppositionalist, couldn't a

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Jew be a presuppositionalist, or whatever, which by the way, we invite them to, the whole point of presuppositionalism is to get the other side to recognize that they are presuppositionalists, so let's get to the foundation and do that worldview comparison, but what is it about asserting a non -triune

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God as the necessary precondition of intelligibility that doesn't work, why doesn't that objection fly when the

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Christian is putting forth the triune God, in other words, can you unpack what makes the

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God of Christianity unique and relate that to this issue, which I, throughout the process of answering my question, you can define this issue of the one and the many.

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Hopefully my question is not all over the place and it makes a little sense, but go for it the best you can.

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Yeah, well one thing I would say is even before we get to the doctrine of the Trinity, just a consideration of God's nature and attributes already presents a problem for post -Christian apostate

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Jews or advocates of the newfangled religion of Islam. You know,

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Judaism, let me just say this real quickly, Judaism is not to be confused with Old Covenant religion. Judaism is a post -Christian concoction, right, it's not the religion even of the

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Jews at the time of Jesus, the Second Temple period more broadly, or prior to that. It's a later post -Christian reactionary type of thing, and in many ways over the centuries it's been influenced by Islam.

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You know, if you read Machmanides' Guide for the Perplexed, and Machmanides is a giant in terms of determining or defining what is contemporary

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Judaism, it looks a little different than Islam. And Islam itself has experienced all sorts of differentiation within its ranks, there are different permutations of Islam.

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The philosophical types over time have been very much influenced by certain

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Greek lines of thought, and because somebody like Machmanides was under the rule of Muslims in medieval

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Spain, he was influenced by this. So there's a lot of similarities there, but one thing

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I would bring out, just taking Islam as an example, the Islamic conception of God's nature and attributes and character aren't the same as those of the biblical

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God. A lot of people, they get sort of distracted by terms like God, and just think, okay, we're just, you know, you put the word

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God in there, so it's the word God that does the trick, right? We're saying there's a problem, we say

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God solves it, and now they talk about God, so that must mean they've got the same solution. But no, that word means something.

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It means something to Christians, it means something else to Muslims. And when Christians think of God, one of the things that we say is that God has a definite nature, and he always acts in accordance with that nature.

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So, for example, because God has a definite nature, he is holy, he is righteous, he is just, he's good, there are things that God cannot do, right?

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Not because he's limited in terms of his power or something like that, but because his nature is of such a sort that he acts in a certain way, and one of the things

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God says in the Bible that he cannot do is he cannot lie, right? And more broadly, it says he cannot deny himself, and that really covers everything.

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It means that he can't act in any manner that's inconsistent with his nature. His holiness, his justice, his goodness, his righteousness, all of these things are going to be manifested in God's actions, and God's actions are all going to be consistent with those qualities.

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Islam, on the other hand, has a very different notion, and again, I'm being somewhat simplistic here because you can't say everything, but there are different versions of the

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Islamic doctrine of God. They like to pretend like they're monolithic, but they aren't. But one strong vein of Islamic thinking says that Allah has no definite nature, he is pure will, and he just does whatever he does, so that morality, for example, is just whatever he wills at any given moment.

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He might will that it's okay to drink alcohol at one time, and he might will that it's not okay to drink alcohol at another time.

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Now this shouldn't be confused with, because sometimes you get people that don't understand basic distinctions, they'll say something like, well, doesn't

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God in the Bible forbid certain things and then later allow them? There's a distinction that we would draw in the

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Bible and in our own context between something like a ceremonial prescription that's intended to serve a certain end, that is, it's pointing to something, it serves a pedagogical purpose.

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In Scripture, those ceremonial laws are teaching the way of redemption, they're pointing to Christ, they're not moral norms in themselves.

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What makes them morally obligatory is the fact that God commanded them, but not because there's something in the nature of those actions that's necessarily to be done as moral duties, but actual moral laws, absolutes, are those sorts of things you find in the

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Ten Commandments. Have no other God besides me, don't worship me in an idolatrous fashion, don't take my name in vain, that sort of thing, and those things are absolute, they can't be different, they can't change, because they reflect

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God's unchanging character. You can't have another God besides him because there is no other God, right?

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You're not to worship him in an idolatrous fashion because this is to falsify who he is.

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If you're worshiping him in a way that misrepresents him, then you're denying him in effect, and it's fundamental to his character not to deny himself, so he requires the same of us, and on and on you could go.

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That's why Scripture repeatedly makes God the standard of morality, be perfect as your father in heaven is righteous, where his image -bearers were to reflect him.

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Well, in Islam then, if you have this concept of Allah's will not being tied to some definite nature, then

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Allah can change his mind from one day to the next, and has, even in the Quran and in the

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Hadith, you have changing morality. Allah in the Quran shows himself to be fickle, he boasts about being the greatest of all deceivers, in Surah 354,

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Surah 830, Allah says he's the greatest of all deceivers. Satan, in the Quran, ends up looking like a good guy.

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He says that I'm going to, because you've beguiled me, I'm going to lead people astray.

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So the reason Satan's doing what he does is because Allah first did it to him, right?

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And the Quran, you know, it's not as if Satan is making a false charge, that's the whole point. When you look at what the statement is based on,

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Satan has been done wrong, and so now he's going to return the favor. So Allah is even greater than, or trumps

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Satan in his duplicity. So, if I can interject there, so, okay, so in Islam, there are a whole host of problems.

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So you have, of course, besides the fact that Allah is not a trinity, and that's going to be, he's not triune, that's a problem in and of itself, but you have all these other deficiencies.

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I mean, someone even has made a comment here, I'll put up on the screen, a Muslim told me today, Allah doesn't even need to be just.

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So that goes along with him being able to kind of be fickle in the way that you've described. But let's kind of zero in on the issue of the one and the many.

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What is the one and the many problem, and why does a worldview, be it

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Muslim, be it Unitarian of any kind, why does a worldview need a justification for the one and the many, unity and plurality, for intelligibility at all?

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So why, you know, someone might be listening to this and be like, what's the big deal? I don't see how this is a problem. Why don't you lay out what is the problem itself, and why does a worldview need to solve that problem to have intelligibility?

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And then we can kind of talk about how the Trinity really solves that issue. Yeah, so my own, the beginnings of my own thinking on this go back to when

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I started reading philosophical works. I was already a Christian at the time, but I was engaging non -Christians, and so I wanted to read philosophical stuff.

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And I started where, you know, a lot of people will pick up contemporary works talking about this or that, but I kind of started at the beginning of Western philosophy, started reading the ancient

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Greek philosophers, and if just taking the Milesians, those are the philosophers that preceded

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Socrates, they looked around them at themselves at the world, and they realized that there's a remarkable diversity about us, right?

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And I mean, it's incredibly diverse, right?

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And I couldn't even really get past the basic beginnings of spelling out some of the differences that we could talk about, but some are just really painfully obvious, right?

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There are different colors, there are different objects, there are, some things are animate, some things are inanimate, some things are rational, some things are not rational, up -down, left -right, you know, right -wrong.

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I mean, there are all these distinctions, and they're not just concrete things, but abstract things.

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And so in this buzzing, blooming confusion, I think it was William James who used that phrase, the question that arises is, is there any unity in all of this?

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And if there isn't, then it's not possible to make sense out of anything. How do you, see, when we start trying to make sense out of things, we're usually doing so in terms of some principle, of some unifying factor, right?

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So if you see an animal with four legs and a tail, and it meows, and it has fur, you know, and so forth, you don't, you don't just look at that and, and think something about that particular thing.

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You're, you're eventually, knowledge is when you're able to then look at another thing like that and say, you know, oh, these two things are cats, right?

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So here, here's this notion of cat -ness that you're applying to both of them. So you unify particular instances of cat by this abstract category that unifies them.

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So you have the many, particularity, individual cats, and the one, the thing that unifies them.

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Yeah. Okay. And, and so what the Milesians were doing is they, so they said, okay, what is the principle of unity?

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What is it that relates things, so that we can do this sort of thing? And, and one way to illustrate this that might be helpful to people, and I got this example from Ralph Smith, he's written some good stuff on the

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Trinity, the Christian worldview, Christian apologetics. If anybody's interested, they could go to his website called

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Berith .org. Berith is the word for covenant, B -E -R -I -T -H .org. And, but anyways, the, he uses the example of a dictionary.

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If you imagine a dictionary, and there was no such thing as unity, right, then all you would have in the dictionary is a list of words and no definitions, right?

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Because a definition, what is, what is going on when you define a word? Well, you're using other words to define it.

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And so you're assuming that there's some unity, that these, these things can be used to interpret each other, to explain or make these things intelligible.

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On the other hand, if everything is just one, then you just have a dictionary with the single word in it, right?

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And, and there'll only be, you know, one word in the dictionary, or that same word over and over again.

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And, and what does that word mean? Well, you'd have to use the same word to define it. So you either, you either have these words that somehow relate to each other, and therefore can define each other, or you've just got unintelligibility.

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So if you have only unity, it's, there's nothing to be rendered intelligible. If you have only diversity, there's nothing to be, there's nothing to unify and make them intelligible.

32:07

And so this is what the Milesians were grappling with. And this is where you get what a lot of people have heard, but maybe don't really have a context for.

32:15

This is where you get this whole concept of earth, you know, the elements, earth, air, wind, fire.

32:23

Thales initially said, well, the thing that unifies everything is water, all is water.

32:30

And then another philosopher came along after him and refuted him and said,

32:36

No, everything couldn't be water, it's got to be something else, everything is air. And then another philosopher comes along after him and says,

32:43

No, that doesn't work, it's got to be fire. And then another philosopher comes along, and he says,

32:49

Well, none of these things work. So maybe we just need to say whatever this thing is, it's, it's undefinable, right?

32:55

And so here, I basically described Thales and Axamander and Xenon and so forth.

33:03

These are these are pre Socratic philosophers, for those who want to look it up, there's a whole literature that summarizes their thought, if you have

33:13

John frames history of philosophy and theology, there's a whole category where he goes through the pre

33:18

Socratics, and the work of Gordon Clark, if you pick up his old philosophy texts,

33:24

Thales to Dewey, there's an entire section, I think Dr. Clark was an expert in pre Socratic philosophy, where he talks a little bit about this.

33:30

So folks are interested, they can definitely check that out in those resources. But go ahead. Yeah, so one problem was that none of the things that each philosopher was picking out could do the trick.

33:46

And that didn't mean that they thought the project couldn't be done. However, now this is what gives rise to Plato and Aristotle.

33:53

What then happens is you get a bunch of philosophers known as the sophists who come along, and they say, this is an insoluble problem.

34:02

And so really, what we should be trying to do philosophically is just persuade people, right?

34:08

In other words, get them to believe whatever is advantageous to us in every any given moment. And the sophists are usually likened to contemporary lawyers, right?

34:19

What is a lawyer doing in many cases? Well, he's just arguing whatever case is put before him, whether it is a legitimate,

34:27

I don't know. Is that my music or yours? Oh, man. It's downstairs.

34:34

I share a space. Is it really loud? I mean, I'm fine with it. Okay, it's nice and smooth.

34:42

That's the kind of sound I can't control. I do apologize. No, that's fine. I just always worry that it's on my end.

34:50

And it's like a nice, like, you know, it's like some dramatic song while you're explaining. It has some dramatic punch.

34:56

So we'll make lemonade out of lemons there. So I do apologize for that.

35:01

Yeah. So the sophists came along and they thought, well, what's this is insoluble.

35:08

So we're just going to make arguments that persuade people to to our advantage.

35:18

And Plato had a problem with that. So Plato was trying to refute the sophists or Socrates as his foil.

35:26

You know, there's some debate whether Socrates was actually responsible for the things attributed to him by Plato.

35:32

But in any case, that's the project. Right. So Plato's trying to find some thing that could account for the unity that we need.

35:42

Now, OK, so here I've sort of explained the problem. Now, all worldviews are on kind of a trajectory with respect to how they approach this issue.

35:52

You have religions that are more or less monistic and will say, you know, they incline in the direction of of something.

36:03

There's some unifying factor. The problem is every single worldview like this ends up having a principle of unity that destroys diversity.

36:12

So there's there's no particulars left to really explain in light of the universal that they've tried to bring into account for things.

36:20

And in the other direction, you have worldviews that are more or less inclined towards diversity, which renders unity impossible.

36:30

So I'm just talking here about trajectories. You either have this principle of unity that has that allows for no differentiation, so an undifferentiated unity or worldviews that incline towards plurality, but it's a disunited diversity.

36:46

Right. So there's no no principle that can be introduced here.

36:54

Either way you go, you end up with problems. And you see this. I just want to be, you know, keep keep this in touch with some of these religious alternatives.

37:03

It's interesting when you look at the world's religions, you find the same sort of dynamic. You either have impersonalistic, what

37:10

I'll call impersonalistic worldviews. I think they're all outside of Christianity, not truly personalistic, but for different reasons.

37:17

But there are worldviews that tend to be monistic, like Eastern religions tend to be monistic religions that say all is one.

37:25

Right. So I remember talking to a advocate of a particular version of Buddhism who was saying all is one.

37:35

And in the course of our conversation, I did what we were talking about earlier, I said, Okay, let's let's do this. I said, You give me some idea of what your worldview is.

37:43

And then I'll tell you what my worldview is. And then we can go from there. And he explained his worldview to me. He told me everything is one.

37:50

There are no distinctions. Our problems in life arise from making distinctions when there aren't any really.

38:00

Distinctions are illusory. And he went on with that, you know, and he said, you know, the goal of salvation in that system is to recognize that we're all ultimately part of the one and not really discrete things.

38:14

And then I said, Okay, here's the Christian worldview. And I explained it. We posit a fundamental dualism, not in the sense, not in an ultimate sense, like there's always been two things, but dualism in the sense that there's the

38:26

Creator and there's the creature, right? There are only these two categories, but there are these categories.

38:32

There's a difference between God, the Creator and his creation. And as the creation of God, man in particular is his image bearer.

38:41

We are responsible to him. We sinned against him. He's going to judge us. We need a savior.

38:47

And as I'm talking about this, he began to get really uncomfortable. And he started hurling, you know, certain epithets at me.

38:54

And I'm skipping over some things. And I said, Wait a minute, I said, Let you know, stop there for a moment,

39:00

I said, Remember your worldview, according to you, everything is one.

39:05

And our problem comes when we make distinctions. I said, When you call me these choice terms that you're using for me, on your worldview, all you're doing is making statements about yourself, right?

39:17

Because there are no distinctions. And so it gives, it gives, you know, justification to the old children's statement, right?

39:25

I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me sticks on you. If all is one, and you know, you've called me a jerk and all these other things, that all you've really done is you're just looking in the mirror, right?

39:36

Sure. And I mean, you can't be saying that I'm a jerk in contrast to you, or as opposed to you, or, you know, other than you, because there is no other than you, right?

39:47

It's all one. And, you know, the guy got upset, you know, he says, You Christians are intolerant.

39:52

And I said, You mean Christians as opposed to Buddhists? You know, and then he realized what I was doing at this point, right?

39:57

I'm saying you're assuming distinction. And then he kind of got up in a huff, and he went out of the house and because he was a neighbor of a friend of mine, and he was going to go across the street to where he lived.

40:09

And I said, you know, make sure you look both ways before crossing. You don't become one with the pavement, right?

40:16

And so, but then you get other worldviews that tend towards pluralism, you know, the ancient

40:27

Greek religions, the Roman religion, the Norse gods, right? You've got this diversity.

40:34

Now here, really, even in these systems, you don't really have an ultimate diversity.

40:44

There's an illusion here. And this is what I meant by saying you have these religions that kind of look personalistic, but end up not really being so.

40:51

In paganism, you have finite deities. They're not really absolute. And so they are as much a part of reality, what we would call creation as...

41:01

They're particulars that exist within a broader context of impersonality. Right.

41:07

And so even if you look at like the Greeks back of the gods, there were things like the fates, right?

41:13

These impersonal things that were somehow responsible for things at a higher level.

41:19

So there's not an absolute personalism in those ancient polytheistic systems.

41:25

And that's true of polytheistic systems today. If you look at Mormonism, which is a perversion of Christianity, Mormonism has all sorts of finite gods.

41:34

So there are beings that are higher than man or greater than man. Or if you look at open theism, right? Its deity is no different than, you know, maybe a bit of an upsized

41:43

Zeus, but it's still a being who himself is conditioned by a larger reality, whether categories of time and space and all of that.

41:56

And so it can't be the ultimate explanation of things. Islam, I think, ends up being a version of impersonalism to the extent that Muslims are consistent with their denial of the trinity, they render their deity impersonal.

42:12

And we can get more into that. Okay, but but so here's the point. So I looked at philosophy, and I saw that there's this issue, this mother of all issues, this was the beginning of philosophical reflection in the

42:24

West. And just just as a side, Anthony, because I know a lot of people think because because Christians tend to bring this up when we use presuppositional argument, a lot of people who had never really heard of this, or they have kind of a passing acquaintance, they think it's something like presuppositionalist, like made up, like, oh, the problem of the one in the many, you guys talk about that.

42:43

But that's not actually a thing. And I'm just kind of like, like, this is not made up by the presupper. This has been an issue before presuppositionalism even came to full expression.

42:54

So this is not something we made up. It's a persisting problem. I've even had educated

43:00

Christians who know philosophy, who would say, oh, that's just a made up problem. That's not that's not a thing.

43:05

You know, no one talks about that in the literature. Again, you're not you're not going to talk about something if you feel it's hopeless to solve it, you can't solve it.

43:13

Unless you're ground your worldview in that which is ultimately unity and plurality, which we'll get into in a few moments,

43:21

I'm sure. So it's not a made up thing. It totally is a thing in philosophy. And you can't just hand wave it away.

43:27

It's something that your world needs to deal with. Yeah, and that's actually so there's a number of things here.

43:35

One is what's happening in contemporary philosophy is exactly what happened in the time of the sophists that gave rise to Plato and Aristotle.

43:44

Remember, they said, look, none of these guys could solve it, it's insoluble. So let's just try and, you know, hoodwink people, you know, use our argumentation to get our will accepted.

43:57

And but Plato and Aristotle are actually trying to do the hard work they were trying to come up with a workable worldview.

44:06

Even if they were unsuccessful, they should be lauded for their effort to do that. Subsequent philosophy largely abandoned the real quest of philosophy, which was the solution to this problem.

44:17

And virtually all of the other particular problems that you see people trying to deal with now, are actually just themselves the the children of this problem, right?

44:27

They're birthed out of this problem. And really, when you hear

44:32

Christians or others that are philosophically inclined, scoffing at this as an issue, number one, it shows how provincial their reading is, they haven't read as widely as they think.

44:44

Number two, it shows how affected they are by contemporary philosophy, and, and its own shortcomings, because it's really an abandonment of a problem that it was not thought possible to deal with.

44:59

And, and so people think they're really doing bang up philosophical work, when they're just being, they're just doing, they're more part of a project of suppressing the big issue than anything else.

45:12

Well, Anthony, do you think that's an issue connected to the analytic philosophical tradition that that is really doing something different than say, the continental tradition?

45:21

So when we take a look at like, Bonson and Van Till, for example, Van Till was more of a continental sort of philosopher, which they took philosophy from a more broader, all encompassing analysis, whereas the analytic philosophers today tend to focus on specifics, language analysis, and they don't really have that big picture.

45:41

And so I know, you know, analytic philosophy today is kind of the sexy thing, like, you know, everyone's focusing on these detailed problems, that do you think that's connected to the fact that many people don't have the ability to step back and kind of look at the broader worldview issue in which the one in the many problem becomes really an issue that appears every time you get to those foundational issues?

46:00

Yeah, that's certainly part of it, too. And that's why I think a lot of people in this context sort of, you know, just want to think they can dismiss somebody like Van Till.

46:11

Right. And man, I mean, it's humorous to me. I know one guy recently, and I don't pay as much attention these days to people that are critiquing presuppositionalism, because as I've said to you in the past,

46:25

I spend more time personally using the gifts that I've been given to engage in apologetics.

46:32

I don't have a problem with people who talk about these things, who are teaching these things or anything like that.

46:38

It's just I realize my own equipping is such that I want to use these things in a particular way.

46:46

And so I started ignoring some of this stuff. Besides that, it got kind of nauseating hearing the same stuff that I just knew wasn't true.

46:54

But one person that I've seen talking about this, and it's not because I've been looking for it.

47:00

It's like, you know, this person's just always commenting at every turn. Like, you know, they get out of bed and they're thinking, how can

47:06

I attack Van Till today? And I saw this person, you know, make this comment, like they were going to do this, this big response to to Bonson.

47:15

And then at the very beginning of this response, basically admit, I only read like a chapter of Bonson or whatever

47:20

I'm thinking. You know, that's, I'm sorry, that's just lazy, number one.

47:26

But the same thing is true when it comes to Van Till, the vast majority of people really just don't read Van Till. And so they don't see what he's dealing with.

47:34

And they're also and this is the point that you're getting at, they're not as well familiar with the broader philosophical scene.

47:42

And I'm not pretending to be a philosophical expert. I'm just saying that, I mean, this is a fact that other people haven't ignored these things.

47:52

And those that are coming from a context where it is largely ignored, are going to look at somebody who's not ignorant of these things and think this guy is just talking nonsense.

48:01

Right? What does he know? Right? That's not what philosophers deal with. You know. But, you know,

48:08

Van Till, for example, he studied under idealist philosophers who were grappling with this issue.

48:14

He wrote his and what's one of the ironies, and I'm sure you know, this is people sometimes accuse Van Till of being an idealist.

48:21

But Van Till's first philosophical major philosophical work was written against the absolute of idealism under idealist philosophers, right?

48:29

So he was even writing this in opposition to the view of a professor that was going to be, you know, grading his paper, basically.

48:40

So Van Till did what any good philosopher would do or any good evangelist or apologist would do.

48:46

He often used the language of the people that he was talking to. Like, if I go to Germany, and I want to be an evangelist there,

48:53

I'm going to have to try and learn some German, right? Unless they know English. And even apart from language, you know, meaning particular languages, we have vocabulary in Christianity that other people don't understand.

49:09

So we have to learn how to explain things to people in words that they're used to using. We do this sort of thing all the time, but people turn to Van Till, ignorant of some of these things.

49:20

And they think, you know, this guy, you know, it reminds me of C .S. Lewis, where he talks about a three dimensional being visiting a flatlander, right?

49:30

Flatlander, like, you know, saying this guy's just talking nonsense. That's how people look at Van Till.

49:37

They're all a bunch of flatlanders, not all of them, but you know, a lot of flatlanders, and they're looking at Van Till and, and thinking, you know, this, this guy is, is out to lunch.

49:49

Right. I just, I was reading Bonson's Van Till's Apologetic, and he actually has a specific quote right from Van Till himself.

49:59

I can't find it with all these, with all these flaps. I didn't flap that specific section. But it is, he mentions this himself, you brought up the example that the only reason why

50:10

Van Till sounds like an idealist is because he's adopting the language of the philosophers he's critiquing. But he explicitly denies idealism.

50:17

And it's probably one of the worst, probably second worst objection against Van Till.

50:23

I think the first worst objection is the claim to fallacious circularity. Oh, yeah, yeah.

50:29

Every time I hear that, I'm just kind of like, well, that's just begging the question. It's like, all right, let me get my glasses.

50:35

I want to go get a cup of coffee and just relax. I get nauseated every time I hear that it is the worst, as though presuppositionalist never, ever heard this before.

50:44

And you know, it's the silver bullet objection. So, right. I just heard it the other day from someone

50:49

I won't mention the name because it's off track. But so, so, so let me so let me summarize for folks, maybe kind of low lower shelf.

50:59

Okay, so the problem of that, and you can let me know if I've got this Anthony. So the problem of the one in the many, which, which was dealt with in terms of trying to answer this question of unity and plurality during the pre

51:11

Socratic philosophers, right? The problem of the one in the many is asking what is the fundamental nature of reality?

51:17

So we observe both unity and plurality, how do these fit together, right?

51:23

And the fact that they must fit together is a requirement for the preconditions of intelligible experience.

51:30

So if I posit an ultimate many, in which the grounding of reality are loose, disjointed, unrelated particulars, there is nothing that unifies them.

51:41

And so you cannot make knowledge claims about individual, unrelated particulars, because they're not unified, you can't categorize them.

51:50

So there's really no relation to one object to another object. So if you posit an ultimate many, intelligibility goes out the window.

51:58

And I got that so far. Yep. And so if one posits an ultimate unity, what happens?

52:04

Why? Why is an ultimate unity unintelligible? Oh, well, an ultimate unity is unintelligible, because the illustration

52:13

I gave with like the Buddhist, okay, down all distinctions, there are there are no particulars to render intelligible, there's nothing to be explained, right?

52:22

It all becomes this unintelligible, undifferentiated, amorphous thing.

52:30

Right. And so the problem is, it's like when you look at the ancient philosophers, it's not like they didn't believe that there were real particulars or a real unifying thing.

52:40

The problem was for somebody like Plato was how do we account for these things?

52:45

What is that principle of unity? And we, you know, that principle of unity has to be something that doesn't destroy particularity.

52:54

It can't do away with diversity. And that's what was happening with the pre Socratics, right? As soon as Thales said all is water, well, then really, there aren't different things you've, you've introduced a principle of unity that destroys particularity, right?

53:08

So you've got to have not only unity and diversity, but a unity that preserves the particularity and a particularity.

53:16

So the problem with non Trinitarian worldviews, whether it's pre

53:22

Socratic philosophy or anything else, is that the answer to the question, what is metaphysically ultimate unity or plurality, any non

53:31

Trinitarian perspective will either move to the one extreme, it's all unity, or the other extreme, there's an ultimate plurality, right?

53:42

Would you say that that's the deficiency in all non Christian non Trinitarian worldviews that they either move to one or the other, making knowledge and unintelligible and not possible?

53:51

Is that what you would say? Yeah, yeah. And here, let me say this, there's always a distinction that has to be made, or usually, between what the person is claiming and what's ultimately true when we analyze it.

54:05

Okay, right. So in other words, you know, you might meet a Buddhist who would say,

54:10

No, I don't deny particularity or something like that.

54:16

Right. But if we look at your worldview, and you say all is ultimately one, I'm going to say yes, you do, right?

54:22

If I'm talking to a atomist, like democratist, or epicurist, or something like that.

54:29

And they say, No, we don't, we don't deny that things can be made unintelligible, or can be made intelligible through some unifying principle,

54:38

I'm going to say, Well, yeah, if you say everything is ultimately reducible to these, you know, discrete monads that have no tie between them, you know, so you always have to distinguish between what a person says, they think that what they think about their philosophy, and what it actually does, and what they're actually doing, it's, you know, it's just like the, the, the person who, you know, he works at a job, and the boss comes along and says,

55:05

You're doing a terrible job. And the person says, No, I'm not, I'm doing a great job. I'm the judge here, right?

55:11

Well, yeah, it's not just a matter of what is this group claiming?

55:17

It's what is actually the case? Sure. I don't mean that we're arbitrarily imposing on them. Oh, yes, you do really believe this, if they don't really,

55:25

I'm just I'm saying that we have to take into account that sometimes people don't see the implications of what they're saying.

55:32

And that's, that's just a basic fact of reality, right? All right,

55:40

I was just laughing at where Israel, we're gonna get to your super chats. Thank you so much. He said he'll mortgage his house if he has to.

55:48

Well, I greatly appreciate the super chats. We're definitely gonna get to those first. And then we'll take some other questions.

55:54

We'll, we'll try to kind of land the plane at this point. So, so either a non trinitarian worldview will either move to an ultimate unity, with respect to answering the question of what's metaphysically ultimate, or an ultimate plurality, with respect to what is metaphysically ultimate, both destroy intelligible experience.

56:13

And so the reason why it destroys it is because really, they have no way to bring these two necessities together.

56:19

So how does the how does the Trinity solve that problem and save intelligible experience, knowledge, and so forth?

56:27

Yeah, well, one of the things I like to just point out at the outset, especially for the benefit of people for whom this may be is just not a way they're used to thinking.

56:35

Sure. And maybe with some difficulty, they're sort of plodding through this. Well, one, I mean, the more you devote to something, the, you know, some things are difficult at the beginning, and they become easier, the more you think about it.

56:46

So don't don't give up if that's where you're at. But given where some people might be at, one thing

56:52

I would say is this, it struck me early on, even before I made much progress in philosophy or studying these world religions, it struck me when

57:01

I saw that all these philosophies either held to an ultimate unity that destroyed diversity or an ultimate diversity that destroyed unity.

57:10

And then when I looked at, you know, world religions, where you either had this, you know, plurality of gods, or a

57:16

God who is one, but not also many, right versions of Unitarianism, Judaism, Islam, I thought how striking this original problem of knowledge and accounting for reality and so forth, is a problem known as the one in the many.

57:32

And it's only in Christianity that you have a God who is both one in many the foundation of reality, according to Christianity, is a being who is himself both one and many, right, not one to the exclusion of the other, not one in any way that destroys the other, right, that the unity of God doesn't destroy or preclude or swallow up the diversity and vice versa.

57:59

And let me read a couple of quotes here from Muslims, I thought this is a good example, one of the things that struck me.

58:07

These are just footnotes found in, sorry, Yusuf Ali's popular commentary on the

58:16

Quran. He's commenting on verses where it's talking about, Anthony, would you like to just get a quick drink of water?

58:21

It's fine. Yeah, sometimes when people are on the camera, they feel obligated to like, let me just get my thought out, and we don't want you to, you know, we don't want you to joke.

58:35

Yeah, so I'm ready, I think. Okay, all right. So there are certain statements in the

58:40

Quran where it talks about the heavens or the stars and how things operate in an orderly fashion and stuff like that.

58:50

And Yusuf Ali has all these footnotes, and I look at them and I'm thinking, he just can't see what he's saying, right here.

58:56

So this is a footnote 166, he says, Allah is one, and among his wondrous signs is the unity of design in the widest diversity of nature.

59:06

So he's commenting on a statement of the Quran which talks about the unity of things, the unity of things, right, a diverse number of things.

59:18

And he says this is a sign pointing to Allah as the one who's back of them.

59:24

And so one thing you should be thinking to yourself when you hear that sort of thing is, well now, wait a minute, why does unity in diversity point to a

59:33

Unitarian God? Okay, here's another quote, everything, this is footnote 1392, everything in Allah's creation has use and purpose and fits into a design.

59:44

Though so varied, it all proclaims his unity. A couple of other quotations, actually

59:50

I'll just read one more. This is not from Yusuf Ali, it's from another Muslim called Dawood Khalilullah.

59:58

He says, in the creation of Allah, we see this wonderful manifestation of unity and diversity from the atom to the solar system to the galaxies and beyond.

01:00:05

There is this great fabric of diversity through which runs the common thread of unity. Okay, so now think about it.

01:00:13

Now again, I'm just giving people a very simple thing to kind of think about.

01:00:21

It's striking that this earliest problem that gives rise to philosophy and out of which are birthed all these other problems is a problem of the one in the many.

01:00:31

You have various religions that attempt to solve it and ultimately fail because they either introduce a principle of unity that destroys diversity or they posit an ultimate diversity and no unity.

01:00:45

And then you also have these religions that go in one direction or another, that God is either an ultimate diversity in terms of many gods or there's just a

01:00:55

God who's one but not also many. Here's the Quran or people commenting on the

01:01:01

Quran saying that the unity that we see in nature points to the unity or oneness of Allah.

01:01:08

And the initial question that people ought to ask is, well, if the unity of things points to the unity of the

01:01:15

Creator, why is the diversity just discarded? Why isn't that also a relevant factor?

01:01:21

Why doesn't that point to something? I have a suggestion here. The diversity that we see points to diversity in the

01:01:31

Creator. And so I'm just throwing this out there for people to think, hey, there is at least something here to be thought through.

01:01:41

It is striking that Christianity has a God who is both one and many. And the original problem that the philosophers were trying to deal with was how do we account for unity and diversity?

01:01:53

Well, now let's go further. I mentioned at the beginning of the show that you have this problem within creation of diversity and accounting for unifying principles.

01:02:10

One question that people can ask is, what is the relationship between the diverse things of the world and these things that we're using to unify and make them intelligible?

01:02:24

So for example, you know, when some people say things like platonic forms might do the trick, right?

01:02:32

We say that there are concrete particular things and the way that we unite them is by means of these platonic forms.

01:02:38

The problem is, how do you relate these two things? In Plato's system, these things were related by means of a demi -urge, right?

01:02:46

Are contemporary philosophers willing to embrace the notion of a demi -urge, right? The demi -urge is combining the forms and the material particulars or really fashioning things according to the forms.

01:02:59

That's not the sort of thing that a contemporary philosopher is going to do. But you still have that issue, right? How do you bring these two things together?

01:03:05

How do you bring unity and diversity together? Christians give numerous answers to this.

01:03:12

Number one is, we don't think of impersonal principles ultimately as the unifying factor, but the triune

01:03:21

God, right? So the relationship between something like, let's say, you know, one of the things philosophers marvel at is the relationship between mathematics and reality.

01:03:34

What do numbers have to do with the world, right? Numbers are not material, concrete particular things, and yet we are able to describe the physical world using numbers in a remarkable way, and this is mystifying to non -Christian philosophers.

01:03:54

Well, from a Christian perspective, all these things reflect God's own thinking, and God is the one who created and governs the world in accordance with his own rational character.

01:04:04

And so these things are already united by virtue of the fact that they're the creation of, and they're providentially sustained by,

01:04:13

God, right? In whom, you know, in whom all of these things are intelligible.

01:04:22

I see you looking at something. I'm thinking you want to interrupt, but... No, no, no. I was just looking at something on the screen, one of the comments.

01:04:30

I'm trying to listen to you and then follow the comments at the same time. So let me just throw out this little thing here, and then we can go from there, but in the

01:04:40

Christian doctrine, so one of the things you'd have to ask is, if God were a

01:04:46

Unitarian being, why would the world be this way, right?

01:04:52

Why would the world be characterized by both unity and diversity? In fact, if God was a solitary being from all eternity, why would he make a world in which, you know, fundamental to personhood is existing in relationship, right?

01:05:13

The highest reality would be some solitary individual, right, like himself. You know, when

01:05:19

God created Adam, he says it's not good for the man to be alone, right? There's something not good about that, and that's the world we find ourselves in, a world which is good precisely because it's not a world in which we exist as solitary beings, but beings in relationship, and so if you have a

01:05:38

Unitarian conception of God, you might be able to account for... I mean, you might be able to account for oneness, but explaining diversity becomes a problem.

01:05:52

If you have an ultimate plurality, explaining unity is a problem, right? If you have a plurality...

01:05:57

And you need both of them for intelligibility. That's the key. Right, right. So if you don't have...

01:06:03

if you can't account for both of them, you don't have the preconditions for intelligible experience, and that's why those particular worldviews cannot simply be inserted in a transcendental argument and think it does the same thing as what the

01:06:14

Christians do. Yeah, yeah. I see somebody saying that distractions in chat are a favorite pastime.

01:06:22

Hey, it's Chris Bolt! He should be on here with us.

01:06:28

Yeah, well, I want to get him on soon. He's great. He's got some really good stuff to say. Yeah, so basically, in God, we have a

01:06:38

God who is both one and many. The unity of God does not destroy the diversity.

01:06:43

The diversity does not destroy the unity. Unity and diversity are equally ultimate in God, as Van Til would say, as Orthodox Christianity would say.

01:06:53

And so it's this God who is the origin and source of the world. He made the world, he upholds the world, he governs the world in accordance with his own triune character.

01:07:03

And so that's what accounts for why the world is both one and many, why there are principles of intelligibility, why there are things to be made intelligible, right?

01:07:12

And on and on we could go. And there's no disjunct then between principles of unity and diversity.

01:07:18

It's the triune God who is himself the source of both, right? He is the source of both unity and diversity in creation.

01:07:27

And this is something that can be explored at great length. And again,

01:07:32

I would recommend to people some, and I don't agree with everything that you find in the stuff that I recommend, so I'm always a little bit reticent about it, but I do like some of the stuff that Ralph Smith, that I mentioned before,

01:07:45

Ralph Alan Smith, has done, some of the stuff that he's done. There's another resource, and I think the guy's name is

01:07:55

Michael Warren. He has a website called christiansiv .org

01:08:01

or .com, christiansiv, so it's C -I -V, short for civilization. And he has a two -part paper on there called

01:08:08

Christian Civilization is the Only Civilization, I think it's called. And he's arguing for how...

01:08:13

I think I read that a long time ago. Yeah, it's been out for a while, right? It's an old article. Oh yeah, yeah. So he has something really good.

01:08:19

Obviously the stuff on the website you mentioned before, Choosing Hats, that has all kinds of great stuff.

01:08:26

But just yeah, in terms of the one and the many stuff, some of these are the stuff that comes to mind for people that want to explore it further.

01:08:33

There's also, you know, some books help not so much because they look at this problem directly, but because they look at some of the results of this problem.

01:08:46

A book that I like is one by John Bile. I think it's called The Divine Challenge. John Bile, B -Y -L.

01:08:55

I hope I'm saying it right because Bile's not otherwise a nice sounding name. You're gonna look it up and weird images of bile liquids will pop up.

01:09:06

Anthony said something about bile. I don't know what's going on here. Yeah. Oh, and then obviously, of course, read Van Till, though obviously, you know,

01:09:12

I mean for a lot of people Van Till's gonna be heavy sledding initially. Bonson won't be the best source on this, even though I love

01:09:20

Bonson to pieces, both as a example of Christian piety and Christian scholarship and apologetically, but it just wasn't something he spent a lot of time...

01:09:30

Well, Anthony, I think, and here's the thing, Bonson tended to focus more on epistemological issues and really didn't touch on these sorts of questions, but if folks are looking for an easy explanation of all this, you're not gonna find it.

01:09:47

You're asking about the foundations of reality itself and what grounds it. There's gonna have to be a little bit of legwork.

01:09:54

There are some books that do cover the topic, but there's not many, but if I could suggest it's hard, it's not easy reading, but you definitely want to check out

01:10:05

Brant Bosterman's book on,

01:10:11

I think it's called The Vindication of the Trinity in Christian Paradox, where he deals specifically with the problem of the one in the many and actually goes into detail as to why he thinks not only must

01:10:23

God be both equally ultimate with respect to his unity and plurality, but he also argues in that book why

01:10:30

God must be triune and not, say, bi -une or quadriune, okay?

01:10:38

So you want to check out Brant Bosterman's book. It's a difficult read, but it's definitely worth picking up because he unpacks that.

01:10:44

I actually had Bosterman on my show to talk about this specific topic, so you might want to check out that episode a little bit earlier on if you kind of scroll through.

01:10:53

Anthony, I do want to take the now to kind of get to some of the super chats and the questions. Typically, I saw them, some of them look hard.

01:11:02

Yeah, some of them are very philosophical. It's okay, we'll try our best. So in essence, if your world is going to provide the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience, it has to ground both unity and plurality, and if it's not a triune worldview, it's not going to be able to ground unity and plurality because it either sways to the left, unity is ultimate, and there's problems, or it sways to the right, particularity, plurality is ultimate, and there are problems.

01:11:32

You need something that is equally one and many, and the Trinity is the only worldview that provides that.

01:11:39

So just by way of quick, simple summary. So let me get through some of these super chats, and Anthony, I'll ask you the questions, and you can give your best shot, and I'll maybe share some of my thoughts, and then we'll move on from there.

01:11:52

All right, let's see here. Okay, so Israel Wisdoom Media gives a $5 super chat.

01:11:58

Thank you so much, Israel. I think he spent a lot of money on this episode. He just threw a bunch of super chats.

01:12:04

I do appreciate it. Thank you so much. But he asks, what kind of mereology do you guys hold to?

01:12:09

Nihilist, universalist, or the middle one? How do you apply it to the Trinity? Are you familiar with mereology,

01:12:16

Anthony? So that's why I said it was hard. I've heard the term before, and I suspect if he defined it,

01:12:22

I might have a better answer to give, but I'm not as familiar with that term.

01:12:30

Like I've heard it, but you know, it's not a clear concept to me. I mean, when he uses words like nihilist, universalist, or the middle one,

01:12:39

I kind of have a bit of a suspicion, but let me just throw this out there, and if, pardon me if it doesn't really address what you're trying to ask.

01:12:54

There are some people who would say with respect to something like universals, some will advocate a nominalist view.

01:13:08

Others would advocate a realist view, and then in between that you have other views like conceptualism or what have you.

01:13:16

And by the way, I mean a lot of people confuse nominalism and conceptualism, but nominalism reduces what we've called abstract principles, laws, all that.

01:13:25

It reduces them to linguistics, and it makes them just conventions of our language.

01:13:32

Conceptualists would say, no, these are mental categories that we're applying to the world, and I agree we have mental categories, but is that all they are?

01:13:40

And part of the problem with that would be, you know, what basis do you have for believing that your mental concepts correspond to somebody else's?

01:13:47

You still have this problem of, you know, knowledge now, unless you have some way of uniting these things.

01:13:55

Ultimately, the Christian answer is that the principles we're applying to interpret the world and make it intelligible apply or obtain precisely because they reflect

01:14:08

God's own thinking, and it's God's thinking that makes things what they are, right?

01:14:13

Everything is created, governed, and upheld by God. In fact, it's significant, I think, that Scripture ultimately attributes this to God's Word, right?

01:14:23

It's God's Word that causes all things to exist. It's God's Word that upholds all things.

01:14:29

It's God's Word that governs all things and makes things happen, and so when we interpret the world to the extent that we're being consistent and Christian and so forth, we're not merely using words, you know, linguistic conventions that have no real application to the world.

01:14:56

We're not just imposing our subjective concepts on the world, but we're actually thinking

01:15:04

God's thoughts after Him. We're thinking of the world in light of what God Himself says about the world.

01:15:10

Now, again, that may or may not get at his exact question, but that's just my best guess at what he's asking.

01:15:17

Sure. I don't know what he is referring to with respect to relating mereology with nihilism, universalism, or the middle one, but when we speak of mereology, we're speaking of a particular view of identity that deals with the relationship between the parts and the whole.

01:15:36

Should something, is the identity of a thing dependent upon its component parts, its related parts?

01:15:44

And so he's actually, he might be asking a more metaphysical question with respect to what we believe about the unity and plurality of God and how we identify the nature of His being.

01:15:55

Now that's going to get us into deep water, which might take us into particular views with respect to the simplicity of God, whether God's attributes or His identity, the attributes are equal to His identity, if that makes sense.

01:16:09

And so that specific issue, the issue of simplicity, is a deeper issue that I still am working through stuff myself.

01:16:16

So if you're trying to connect mereology with kind of the ontological nature of God and how we relate the whole,

01:16:24

His essence, and the parts, the triunity of God, I'm not really firm on my particular view of simplicity, and I'd be very careful of dividing the persons with respect to like this idea of being parts of God, because then that would commit a heresy of known as,

01:16:41

I think it's called partialism. So that question would have to be teased out a little bit more, and I'd have to reflect a little bit more on my particular view of divine simplicity.

01:16:51

All right, let's see here, let's get to, I think he got a couple of super chats, so we'll get to his first. All right, so how do you counter the

01:16:59

Orthodox essence -energy trinity? So the the Orthodox view of the

01:17:04

Trinity, I don't know if you're familiar with the idea of the essence and energy distinction within Eastern Orthodox theology.

01:17:11

Are you familiar with that? So I'm not an expert in Eastern Orthodox distinctives.

01:17:20

It is something I've had an increasing interest in learning more about.

01:17:27

You know, Eastern Orthodoxy is becoming a bit more visible because of things like the

01:17:34

Internet, and my Eastern Orthodox friends may not like me saying this, but apart from something like this,

01:17:41

Eastern Orthodoxy is largely invisible in the

01:17:48

West, right, because the Western Church has always been a great deal more mission -minded, evangelistic, and the

01:17:56

Protestant Reformation especially, right, a lot of Rome's advances were through conquests and other things, but I'm not saying all of it,

01:18:07

I'm not trying to broad brush it like that, but Protestantism when it came along, you know, just took off with with the idea of spreading the gospel all over the world.

01:18:18

Eastern Orthodoxy has largely remained holed up in the East. Now, I mean, I'm not saying it's not in other places, but it's largely been confined to a particular part of the world, and so a lot of us haven't come in contact with it as much apart from the

01:18:33

Internet, you know, so I confess that in a lot of ways some of the things that Eastern Orthodox people are saying today

01:18:42

I'm not overly familiar with, and what's interesting to me, though, is

01:18:47

I'm not unfamiliar with the writings of the Eastern Fathers of the Church.

01:18:53

The reason I bring that up is because it's interesting to me because I have been familiar with the

01:18:58

Fathers for decades, and so when I hear contemporary Eastern Orthodox people speaking, I sometimes think, well, that's interesting because I'm familiar with the

01:19:06

Fathers, but now you're talking about something that to me isn't something

01:19:12

I really encountered which suggests to me that this is a development in Eastern Orthodoxy, and so I'll give you an example.

01:19:20

I mean, one thing that people will say a lot, and this is something I know a little bit more about but wouldn't claim to be an expert in,

01:19:26

I hear a lot of Eastern Orthodox people today saying that they believe in the monarchy of the Father, and what that means in Eastern Orthodoxy is the

01:19:34

Father is the one God, not the Son or the Spirit, it's the Father who's the one God, and then the

01:19:41

Son and the Spirit also partake of the essence, but properly speaking, it's the

01:19:46

Father who's the one God. He's the monarchy. He's the sole ruler, you know, and the Son and the

01:19:51

Spirit are sort of like adjuncts. I mean, I don't mean to put it so crudely, but when

01:19:57

I look at the Fathers, that's not what I see. They don't speak of, you know, for example,

01:20:05

Gregory of Nazianzus. When he spoke of the monarchy, he said, he spoke of the, he says explicitly, we don't believe in a monarchy of one, but a monarchy of three.

01:20:16

Monarchy means sole rule. He was saying it's all three persons who are the monarchy, and so I'm suspicious to some degree about, with some of the stuff that I hear are

01:20:29

Eastern Orthodox views, that they're not so much historically the view, maybe they're found in some earlier figures, but they weren't the view across the board, but have risen to prominence among at least a contingent of those who have made their presence felt on the internet.

01:20:48

But, yeah, I mean, I'm not. The question is a little strange, it says, how would you counter the

01:20:55

Orthodox essence -energy Trinity? So now I'm familiar with the essence -energy distinction that God in his essence cannot be known, that God is known through his energies, and I, perhaps that's related to a specific view of the

01:21:08

Trinity. I did hear Jay Dyer, who's Eastern Orthodox, speak about the Eastern Orthodox position of the

01:21:14

Trinity being slightly different than the Western understanding, so I would want to see that teased out a little bit, that's actually really interesting,

01:21:21

I'm not really sure about that, but if I were to counter the essence -energy distinction in the

01:21:28

Trinity, I'd have to understand the concept first. I think if I were to counter Eastern Orthodoxy, I would do it on different grounds, and it would be very similar as to how you would engage a

01:21:37

Roman Catholic, since like the Roman Catholic, you do have, well, Eastern Orthodox kind of see it as one stream, one tradition stream, both

01:21:46

Scripture and their tradition is kind of part of one unified tradition, but you do have this idea of tradition and Scripture, so you'd probably want to engage them in a similar fashion with some adjustments as you would a

01:22:02

Roman Catholic, but it would be very difficult because you have different, you're working with different sources of authority, and how they understand how those things work out, so there are a number of ways you can go about doing that,

01:22:12

I'd have to understand how you're connecting essence -energy Trinity, that phrase there is kind of ambiguous to me, so maybe if someone knows what that is referring to,

01:22:21

I'm unfamiliar with the specific distinctions of Eastern Orthodox Trinitarian perspective, since I heard

01:22:27

Jay say that there was a difference there, and I'm not in a position to know what that difference is and speak to that, unfortunately.

01:22:35

Now as an aside, I see somebody saying, we debate Jay Dyer, this is obviously a question related to Eastern Orthodoxy that we're talking about.

01:22:44

I did a show on Sunday on justification by faith alone, since it was Reformation Day, and of course that stirred up the hornet's nest, and I knew it would.

01:22:53

One particular person who's actually a longtime friend decided that he would farm out the job of refuting me, right, because he's now abandoned his confidence in Christ alone to save, and you know, still love him as a person, but you know, he has forsaken his confidence in Christ alone for his acceptance before God, and I take that seriously, but he enlisted, you know, it reminded me of Acts 7, in Acts 7, you know,

01:23:25

Stephen says he was full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, and the the Jews couldn't refute him, so they induced certain men to respond to him, and so anyways, so this person has enlisted a couple of Roman Catholics to respond to my case for justification by faith alone from the fathers, and this also led to somebody contacting me and saying, hey, an

01:23:53

Eastern Orthodox guy named Cobain wants to debate you, and I've actually seen

01:23:58

Cobain before. I think he debated Matt Slick on justification by faith alone, so I contacted

01:24:06

Marlon Wilson of The Gospel Truth, and I told him, hey, contact Cobain for me and organize a debate, so I will be debating

01:24:15

Cobain, and I think Cobain was on a show with Jay Dyer not too long ago talking about justification.

01:24:22

Cobain is a really nice guy. I actually liked his interaction with Matt Slick. I thought it was good. Yeah, and honestly,

01:24:29

I mean, all the people involved in this, I don't really have any, I mean, I'm a hard guy to offend, you know what

01:24:37

I mean? So even if they were curmudgeons, I mean, I'm not the guy that's gonna be like, you know, they could be, they could have the worst

01:24:46

Christian character. I mean, that's not good for them. I mean, well, they could have the worst character by Christian standards, right, because I do think that justification by faith alone is a deciding, defining

01:24:57

Christian or not issue, but, you know, it does, I mean, if they have a bad character,

01:25:03

I think it's a problem if you're holding a view of salvation on the basis of your own inherent righteousness.

01:25:10

The last thing you want is to have bad character, you'd think. But anyways. Did you see, did you see, just a side question, did you see the debate between Jay Dyer and Trent Horn?

01:25:19

I did. Yeah, what'd you think of that? So I thought in the debate, it looked to me quite obvious that Trent Horn was struggling at the bit and Jay Dyer had the upper end of the discussion.

01:25:32

I do think they both had some things to say that were difficult for the other. You know, one is that Trent was able to quote things from earlier fathers that were not the same as what

01:25:47

Jay was arguing for, even though, ironically, I find myself more in agreement with Jay on the issue of, you know, he was talking about natural, he's opposing natural theology, and a lot of the reasons why he opposes natural theology is because of the influence of the

01:26:02

Reformed tradition, you know, Jay at one point, as I understand it, studied under Bonson, or Bonson's material, not

01:26:10

Bonson. And so that's where that comes from, and he thinks it's consistent with the best of Eastern Orthodox thought, and that may not be the case, but Trent was able to quote certain fathers who did advocate a kind of natural theology.

01:26:26

So I think he has good points there, but I think that overall I thought that Jay was getting the better end of that discussion.

01:26:31

Yeah, I agree. I mean, with the disagreements, obviously, I mean, I'm not Eastern Orthodox, but when there isn't kind of the,

01:26:42

I mean, I guess, I mean, if he heard me say this, he'd probably roll his eyes, but when he's not rough around the edges, really kind of getting to the point where it's not allowing the sides to communicate, when he's kind of misbehaving, if I were to say, when he's not misbehaving,

01:26:59

I think that Jay is an excellent debater, just in terms of debate style.

01:27:05

He knows his material really well, even if, like, people ask me, would I debate Jay? I wouldn't, not because I think he's right.

01:27:12

I think he's an excellent debater, and I think he has a wider knowledge in some areas that I don't think

01:27:17

I would be a good opponent for him, but I do appreciate a lot of his debates, even if I disagree, obviously, at the end of the day in our theology.

01:27:27

So if Jay ever listens to this, I thought you did an excellent job against Trent, even though I disagree with you on other issues.

01:27:34

So, but yeah, folks should check that out. Just to reiterate something I said, see that for me,

01:27:40

I'm willing to defend any important matter. You know, I don't have all the time in the world, so it's going to have to be an important issue like justification by faith alone, and I'm willing to defend that, you know, the whole world can come and challenge me to debate on that issue, but like I was saying, like,

01:28:02

I grew up in a context where we were all rough around the edges, and it was a pastime to make fun of each other.

01:28:10

Well, I think Jay, I think Jay uses it as a debate tactic. So I think he, he would justify some of the tactics he uses as well.

01:28:17

This is within the purview of classic debate. And I think to a certain extent, he's right. Although I do think some elements, he does step out of line, but that's just an issue of my, of my opinion, you know, he would disagree at that point.

01:28:27

For me, it's sort of like, I want the person to be a bit more uppity. That, that only gets me more excited.

01:28:33

And the more good debate between yourself and him, that'd be fun to watch. The more excited I get, the more the neurons are firing in the head.

01:28:40

And so, you know, yeah. All right. Hey, I'd love to moderate a debate, but I would love to moderate a debate between you and him.

01:28:47

I did reach out to him. I did try to get him to debate Dr. Costa, but there was some misunderstanding.

01:28:53

And I think we got off on the wrong foot. So I think my opportunity to connect with him is, is probably shot.

01:28:59

But I would like to see that interaction. That would be, that'd be good. Well, like I said, I am going to be debating

01:29:04

Cobain. This is a topic that Cobain, I think has taken a good bit of interest in.

01:29:10

So I think he should be a good representative of the Eastern Orthodox view. And like you,

01:29:16

I think he's a nice guy. And like I said, even if you weren't a nice guy, I probably wouldn't notice because it doesn't bother me, you know, be as mean to me as you want.

01:29:28

I'm going to sleep good at night. I belong to a perfect savior and you know, that's awesome.

01:29:34

All right. Well, let's move quickly through these super chats here. We'll see as quickly as we can go. So any thoughts on James White versus the Muslim metaphysician

01:29:40

Trinity debate, by the way, love you, Eli, big fan. Thank you so much, Israel. I really appreciate your super chat and your kind words.

01:29:47

Anthony, were you able to see that debate a while back with, with James White? So I didn't see the whole thing.

01:29:53

And I'll tell you part of the reason why. I mean, I, I get, even though people, they know me as a debater, right?

01:30:01

I debate people. I like to debate, but I have to be the guy in there debating. Otherwise, what happens is, even if there's somebody competent on the

01:30:11

Christian side, who's defending it, when I'm hearing this other person, I have this overwhelming need to respond.

01:30:17

So I ended up stopping the, the, you know, what's playing and I'm sort of like,

01:30:23

I'm carrying on the debate. Like, like this person has just made an opening statement against me. Right. So I feel like I have to stop it and respond to it on the spot.

01:30:31

And I ended up never finishing. Besides that, I get, I do get nauseated when I hear non -Christians say dumb things.

01:30:40

Okay. And I know it's par for the course. You'd think I, I would know that's what I'm in for.

01:30:45

But even in my debates, I mean, half the times in my debates, I'm in there and I'm thinking, this person's killing me.

01:30:53

I'm, he's boring me to tears, or he's saying, you know, stuff that is so loopy that I almost don't want to listen to him anymore.

01:31:01

I have that, you know, I have to force myself to stay in some of these things. And that's kind of why I like some of them to be uppity because that keeps me interested.

01:31:08

But, you know, like I, I hear, you know, if I listened to Dale Tuggy, Unitarian extraordinaire, he's as boring as all get out.

01:31:18

And he says dumb things. And so I'm listening to this and I'm like, am I really going to sit here for another hour and a half listening to this dribble?

01:31:27

And I mean, you could take this out, by the way, and send it to, send it to Dale.

01:31:33

We've debated before. Okay. All right. So, okay. I know this, it's not the question here.

01:31:39

So I listened to this and I, I'm listening to the Muslim metaphysician and I'm thinking, this guy thinks he's more sophisticated than he really is.

01:31:48

Right. Okay. Uh, and I do think with all due respect to James White, I think

01:31:53

James White gave him far more credit than he deserves. I heard James White talking about him on his broadcast at certain points saying, you know,

01:32:01

Jake is up on these issues and I'm thinking, no, he isn't. Um, I'm not saying he hasn't read anything and I'm not trying to take any, everything away from him.

01:32:11

I'm just saying he, he knows less than he thinks he does. And so that kind of graded on me.

01:32:16

But then the, uh, other thing is I don't, in the first place when it comes to Dr.

01:32:21

White, think of him as a philosopher and that's not a criticism. Sure.

01:32:27

Uh, I don't think he would see himself as a philosopher. Yeah. And I think this was a philosophical discussion and Jake makes that clear.

01:32:35

That's the kind of discussion he wants to have. And so in a sense, it takes Dr. White outside of his range of special competence, which is the biblical text, uh, you know, the biblical languages, the history of Christian theology, that sort of thing.

01:32:49

And so I didn't like it for that reason, just because I thought, you know, uh, you know, and I don't in the first place think myself a philosopher, but I'm not ignorant of a number of these issues.

01:32:59

So, uh, I was trying to get a debate with Jake and actually what's interesting is one of my

01:33:06

Eastern Orthodox friends was actually trying to arrange a debate between me and Jake, the

01:33:13

Muslim metaphysician. And that whole thing fell apart and Jake stopped talking to him and hadn't contacted me at all or anything.

01:33:23

So, uh, I, I don't think Jake's as sophisticated as he thinks. I'd love to debate

01:33:28

Jake, uh, and we'll see, it may still happen. Okay. Yeah.

01:33:34

That'd be, that'd be interesting to, uh, to watch there. Israel's got another super chat. He says, does personhood require three minds in one being or a mind that acts as multiple ones?

01:33:43

What is personhood? So I don't think there are three minds or three wills or what have you.

01:33:51

Uh, each person is a particular, uh, subsistence of the one divine being.

01:34:00

Uh, so they, you know, one mind, one will and so forth. Um, and, uh, what he says, uh, what is personhood?

01:34:13

Well, here we have to remember we're speaking analogically when we talk about God. The term person, just like any term that we use for God derived from human experience, isn't going to be univocal with respect to God, right?

01:34:27

There's always going to be points of difference. And so, so for example, if we say

01:34:33

God is a shepherd, what does that mean? Right. It doesn't mean that God, and I use this example all the time.

01:34:40

Anybody who's heard me has heard me use this example. I should probably come up with some others, but it doesn't mean God is walking around heaven with a, uh, a long flowing robe and sandals on his feet and a shepherd's crook in his hand and a rod in the other, uh, you know, other concepts that we apply to God.

01:34:56

God is King. God is father, right? God is a rock, right?

01:35:02

I mean, none of these things, some of them are just metaphors, but I mean, none of these things are being used univocally.

01:35:07

Even when we talk about God having life, right? What is life? Life in the case of human beings refers to, uh, you know, that it refers to, well, it's,

01:35:25

I don't want to give too technical a definition, but, um, in our case, life is something we have, right?

01:35:36

In God's case, it's something he is, um, in our case, our life is derived in God's case.

01:35:45

It's not something derived, right? Ours is dependent. It, it, it began and it could cease to exist where God to no longer will it to exist.

01:35:54

I mean, none of that applies to God when we say life. So life is being used in an analogical way, a way that goes beyond what's true of us.

01:36:03

And so as the early father said, like Augustine, he says, we use the term terms like person, not because we have perfect idea of what that means, uh, but because we have to say something right.

01:36:17

And this is the best term that we, we have at our disposal right now. And so it, it, all these terms, even though they're not, there's not an exact correspondence between what we mean by them in application to created things.

01:36:31

And God, they still communicate something to us, even though God is not literally a shepherd. Everybody gets a notion of, of something about God from that metaphor, right?

01:36:43

Sure. We think of God as caring for us as providing for us as watching over us as, as protecting us.

01:36:48

Right. Uh, even though it's not univocal, uh, and I'd say the same thing goes with respect to the word person.

01:36:55

Um, there's, there's an analogy there between what we mean when we talk about ourselves as persons and God as a person or three persons.

01:37:07

Uh, certainly it involves, uh, the ability of the persons to relate to one another, right?

01:37:15

Persons are essentially relational beings. Well, the person, the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Spirit relate to one another.

01:37:21

Um, so that's, that's just one, one example of, of something involved in that.

01:37:29

Um, and then obviously these are all entire topics, right?

01:37:35

Sure. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's move on here. Uh, there's a comment here by Mick Gustav.

01:37:43

I don't, I'm not going to try to pronounce that. Uh, he says, I don't understand why Anthony accuses the materialist atheists for being unable to account for immaterial existence, universals, if they are materialist, then for them, universals are not immaterial.

01:37:57

Um, well, is the claim here that universals are material? What's wrong with, uh, with saying universals are material.

01:38:06

And if he says, um, that's not what I'm saying. I just reject universals. And what's wrong with that? Why don't you speak to that,

01:38:12

Anthony? Yeah. So when he says, if, if, for them, if they're materialist, then for them, universals are not immaterial.

01:38:20

Well, the problem is if they're material, then they're not universals, right? Uh, material things are concrete, particular things.

01:38:28

Uh, but things like the laws of logic are not concrete, particular things.

01:38:35

Uh, you know, you, you can't observe a law of logic like you could the sun.

01:38:42

You couldn't subject it to testing in a test tube or, you know, putting it under a microscope.

01:38:48

You can't go to the store and buy a pound of logic. You know, you didn't wake up in the morning and stub your big toe on the law of non -contradiction, right?

01:38:57

You didn't bump your head on the law of identity. Uh, that's, you know, that's just not what logic is.

01:39:04

And so if somebody says it is that, then they've, they've got the problem that I was talking about, right? If you say there aren't those sorts of things, everything is just concrete, particular things.

01:39:13

Uh, then there is, there are no universals that unite or make the particulars intelligible.

01:39:18

And that just is the problem that we're talking about. Um, so I mean, think about, uh, well,

01:39:28

I, here's an example of how early on, I mean, long before I had read very much in philosophy,

01:39:37

I was in a philosophy class, a university class in Las Vegas, uh, and I had a philosophy professor and I said, he was describing the theory of the early atomists, you know, democratists, epicurists.

01:39:53

And he said, according to them, everything is just, uh, atoms, right.

01:39:58

And their definition of atoms isn't precisely our scientific definition today, but they did mean something that was irreducible, right?

01:40:05

You, you, you, you know, you go down further and further and you get to this irreducible thing and these things are all discreet from each other separate.

01:40:14

And I said, well, if that's the case, then how do we account for logic? And he said to me, and I don't think he got my question at first, but he said, well, he goes, he goes, we may not like it.

01:40:27

He said, but if it's true, we're obligated to believe it. And I said, well, that's kind of my problem.

01:40:35

How can I evaluate this as true given what it's saying?

01:40:40

If, uh, I said, how do I evaluate, you know, my thinking tells me that God exists and that there are other things besides atoms.

01:40:52

And he says, well, he said no on, on democratists view there, there is no

01:41:00

God, at least not in that sense. Right. If there is a God, then he's an Adam, he's made up of atoms.

01:41:07

Right. Um, and then, uh, I said, yeah, I said, but my problem is that what he said is that all of my thinking is just atoms.

01:41:18

Right. Uh, and I remember hearing Doug Wilson at this, he had debated a person and I remember hearing him saying something like, you know, all our thoughts are just Adams banging around.

01:41:27

Right. Right. And, uh, so I said, well, that, you know, you've reduced all thinking to Adams banging around.

01:41:32

And then, uh, the teacher replied, well, uh,

01:41:38

I, oh, I said, so I said, how, how do I know that my thinking about God is wrong?

01:41:45

And his thinking about everything being Adams is right. And he says, well, you have to ask which one's more logical. And I said, yeah, but you've reduced logic to Adams banging around in my head.

01:41:58

The Adams banging around in my head lead me to conclude that God exists. The Adams banging around his, in his head, lead him to conclude that God doesn't exist.

01:42:09

And I, uh, I said, so how do we adjudicate between them? And then he says, well, we have to decide which one's more logical.

01:42:14

So now notice what he's done there. Initially, according to Democritus's theory of, of reality, he reduced logic to Adams banging around in our heads.

01:42:25

Now, when I pick the conclusions of the Adams banging around in my head over against what

01:42:30

Democritus concluded, he says, we have to evaluate who's right by virtue of logic.

01:42:36

He's now made logic, something that transcends both of us and can be used as a criteria to evaluate the way these

01:42:43

Adams are banging around in our two separate heads. So he's in effect, uh, gone outside of the, the, the philosophy of Adam ism and appeal to a view of logic that isn't possible in his system.

01:42:58

Right. So that, you know, that hopefully gives you some idea of the problem with that sort of thing.

01:43:05

All right. Thank you for that. Israel has another super chat. Thank you so much for the $5 super chat. He says, if I make a case about God with the one in the many law,

01:43:13

I'm not sure what he means by law, but, um, does it have to be an inductive argument? And yes,

01:43:18

I'll mortgage my house for super chats. Thank, thank you. Um, well, no, it doesn't have to be an inductive argument.

01:43:27

That's part of the trend. We're using a transcendental argument. So a transcendental argument is not necessarily inductive or deductive.

01:43:34

I suppose you can, you can put a transcendental argument in a, in a deductive form. So for example, um, if knowledge is possible,

01:43:42

Christianity is true. Knowledge is possible. Therefore, Christianity is true. That's, that's a valid deductive argument in which the first premise is defended transcendentally.

01:43:51

So you can lay out a transcendental argument. Uh, I'm sorry, it's a deductive argument with a transcendental premise, but you don't have to, you don't have to, since the transcendental argument is more all encompassing, it's really arguing at the paradigmatic level, uh, which doesn't necessitate that you argue in kind of that, um, direct formulation where you have, you know, step one, step two conclusion, we're asking what are the preconditions for steps in general?

01:44:13

Uh, and logical categories themselves. So I don't think that you have to use inductive or deductive or anything like that.

01:44:20

Sorry, Anthony, I kind of hopped on that one. That was an interesting one. I liked that one. Yeah. One thing I'd throw in is just that even though a transcendental argument is not an inductive argument, which is what he mentioned, um, we do make a transcendental argument that induction itself is necessarily right.

01:44:42

Uh, something that has to be part and parcel of the Christian worldview.

01:44:47

And that really goes back to, so like I, you know, I just got through talking about the problem that materialism has, you don't have universals if you're saying everything is just concrete particulars, but then the next question is what is the relationship between the universals and the particulars?

01:45:04

Unless you can bring these two things into context, uh, contact, they're irrelevant to each other. And so if you're talking about say logic, what, what justification do you have for applying a principle like the law of non -contradiction to reality, especially, especially since the law of non -contradiction is, uh, universal, invariant and abstract, but the world is not right.

01:45:29

The world, there are two different kinds of things. So what justification do you have for applying one to the other, right?

01:45:35

They're like oil and water. What does logic have to do with reality and why, you know, why apply these things across reality, right?

01:45:44

Uh, inductively, I mean, why, why engage in, in something like that? Uh, only in Christianity can you account for that?

01:45:50

Because again, all the particulars of experience, all of history is the creation of, and is subject to the control of the all knowing personal

01:45:59

God who governed everything in accordance with his purpose, right?

01:46:05

His counsel and so forth. Right. All right. I'm just going to do a couple more here.

01:46:10

We're going to go really quick. Uh, there was someone who made a comment. Only super chats are getting answered. Typically that's not the case, but if someone does do a super chat,

01:46:18

I try to get to those. Um, and, uh, but you guys know, I do try to answer as, uh, or have my guests answer as many questions as we possibly can.

01:46:26

Uh, but we are running up on, uh, an hour and 46 minutes right now. So, um, how about we, uh, do two more and then we'll wrap things up.

01:46:34

How does that sound, Anthony? Sure. And thank you so much. You're doing a great job. I really appreciate it. And I'm sure folks are, uh, are enjoying this.

01:46:41

We have, uh, quite a few people looking in and if you guys like, uh, the conversation, um, you know, give the video a like share the video.

01:46:48

I'd really appreciate that. And don't worry if, um, clear liquid is leaking out of your ears because your brain is melting because of the nature of the conversation.

01:46:56

Um, it's just because of the nature of the specific topic. Obviously you guys know our conversations are typically, um, understandable, uh, you know, under normal circumstances, but this is an important topic and it is deep.

01:47:08

Uh, and so I appreciate that we're able to do it. And I think Anthony's doing a great job. Um, so here we have a $10 super chat by Lewis.

01:47:15

I appreciate that. Thank you so much, Lewis. He says, don't worry if you don't get to this. Uh, but could you address why making a truth claim is a big deal?

01:47:23

I tried to explain it to a friend and failed. Can't a computer, can't a computer assess its state truthfully.

01:47:30

Now I don't know that second part, but why is it important to recognize that an unbeliever is making a truth claim and why that's important when we're arguing presuppositionally?

01:47:39

Yeah. So I, I mean, I really think that what he's looking for probably hinges on that last part.

01:47:45

Um, but I, I don't, I'm not necessarily clear. Maybe, maybe it'll come to me what he means by that as I'm talking about this.

01:47:52

But, uh, you know, truth claims are unavoidable number one.

01:48:01

Uh, so, I mean, it's just a matter of intellectual integrity, right? I mean, we, we have to, we have to recognize that we make truth claims.

01:48:12

Uh, we do it all the time and we couldn't even function or get along in the world unless we were making truth claims, uh, even the statement, right.

01:48:21

I'm not making a truth claim or I don't make truth claims or truth claims aren't possible, or you shouldn't make truth claims.

01:48:27

All those are, are claims, right? Truth claims. They're either, they're claims that are either true or false. And so, so the first thing to observe is just that it's inescapable.

01:48:36

Uh, the only person who's not making any truth claims is a person who doesn't exist and you're even making truth claims, even with your mouth shut.

01:48:45

Right. I mean, uh, one of the things I think about sometimes is, um, just the something as simple as lying.

01:48:53

Right. I mean, how often does somebody lie in a day? And I was thinking about this the other day because I was watching somebody, you know, evangelize and saying, you know, have you ever lied?

01:49:03

You know how all that goes. Right. And I was listening to people and I was thinking it's, you know, it's interesting, it's more interesting to me about that question is, is listening to people think about it for a second as if they should have to think about it.

01:49:15

But the other thing is when they sometimes give a number like, oh yeah, I lie, you know, at least once a day or something like that,

01:49:20

I'm thinking, man, I think they're way off because we communicate even without words, right?

01:49:27

We, we make facial gestures, we smile, we frown, we grimace, uh, we, we move our eyes, we, we do all sorts of things that are communicating and I'm not saying that these are propositional per se, but I do think there is something behind them that, you know, at least mentally you're thinking something, right.

01:49:47

Uh, you know, uh, somebody says something and you want to give out the impression that you, you like it even though you don't and you smile or, uh, you know what

01:49:57

I mean? That we're communicating all the time. And back of that, even if we're not speaking is, is some, some thought about it, right?

01:50:06

So I, I don't, you know, think anybody's being honest with themselves or others. If they pretend that we're, they're not making truth claims, but, um,

01:50:16

I mean, I don't know where else you go with that. I mean, there's a lot to say with respect to all of these questions.

01:50:25

There's just so many different things you can kind of touch on. So it's definitely, uh, definitely a lot. Yeah. I mean,

01:50:31

I, yeah, the other thing is if, um,

01:50:38

Even saying that, you know, it's possible not to make or to not make truth claims or, or we shouldn't make truth claims or, or something like that assumes a particular view of the world, right?

01:50:52

It's obviously not the Christian worldview, right? Um, and so a person who says that should have to give some account for why he rejects the

01:51:03

Christian worldview. Right. You know, and if he says, I'm not making any claim with respect to the Christian worldview, well, yes, you are.

01:51:09

If you're saying that there are no truth claims or something like that, then you're, you're definitely saying something that is contrary to the

01:51:17

Christian worldview. Hmm. Uh, yeah. So I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?

01:51:23

Nope. I think that that's good. I mean, there's just so much to say about it. I don't want to, because I think we'll, I, I, I'd kind of go and into depth and I'll never, we'll, we'll never end.

01:51:32

So I just, I want to end in this, this, with this one question that is completely unrelated to our topic, but I think is so important.

01:51:40

Okay. Um, someone asked the question, um, how do you share the gospel?

01:51:46

And he says, I actually liked the way Ray Comfort, Ray Comfort does it now, regardless of how Ray Comfort does it.

01:51:51

I know Ray Comfort gets a lot of pushback from people. Um, but how do you share the gospel in the midst of having these really deep intellectual discussions?

01:52:02

How do you pivot from these deep discussions to a presentation of the gospel, because that's really where we want to go and just as a tipping my hat off to Ray Comfort, he might not be philosophically astute and, you know, respected for his, you know, his logical precision or whatever.

01:52:22

Um, but this man has a love for people and a desire to share the gospel. And I'm sure he's probably reached more people than the average apologist.

01:52:31

So, um, if that's the ultimate goal of reaching people for Christ, uh, then God is using them in that area and like all the power to him, you know, us apologists, we focus on these kind of, um, these isolated areas and there's a context for this, but there are other people who are just sharing the gospel and God's using that.

01:52:47

And so I think we should, um, we should be very careful about how we speak negatively against other, um, brothers in Christ who are doing their part, uh, as they seek to, um, to spread the gospel.

01:52:59

But how do you share the gospel with someone, um, Anthony? Yeah. I mean, a lot depends on, uh, the context, you know, if I'm, uh, just bumping into a person only going to be with them for a few minutes, uh, it might take one, uh, you know, uh, direction if it's somebody like a neighbor that I'm going to see several times there, you know,

01:53:21

I might do things differently, uh, if I'm in a context where people are hostile, that might have something to do with what

01:53:28

I, you know, but if I were just to describe like a normal conversation, first of all, I'm not going to bring up a lot of the stuff that we're talking about,

01:53:35

I'm going to let the, the discussion go there if it, if it goes there and just be ready to deal with that, but, you know,

01:53:42

I'm not going to go up to a person, how do you solve the problem of the one in the many? Right. Uh, but I, you know,

01:53:49

I, I might, I might just be looking for an opportunity to say, uh, you know, something about, uh, actually here's my sort of default approach.

01:53:59

I go into the conversation, acting like the person agrees with me on everything I'm about to say, you know, and just state it as matter of fact, and I wait for them to tell me where they disagree.

01:54:08

Right. So, uh, you know, I might just go into the conversation and say, um, you know,

01:54:13

God created the world. Yeah. You put man in the garden, entered into a covenant with him upon condition of perfect personal obedience, uh, threatening him with death upon the breach of that covenant,

01:54:25

Adam disobeyed all mankind sinned in him and fell with him or under the sentence of death, uh, by virtue of that, all men need a savior,

01:54:32

God promised a savior. And he did so hundreds of times throughout the old Testament. And that was fulfilled in the new

01:54:37

Testament. And here we are today, uh, benefiting from it. Even those of us who aren't, uh, you know, looking to Christ and giving him the glory that he deserves, you know, and then a person will say, oh, you know, they might say,

01:54:50

I disagree with all that. They might say, I disagree with part of that. Uh, and then I take it from there and then whatever the point of disagreement is, that's where I, I will on the spot kind of try and figure out what is the best thing that occurs to me at the time to, to press them on with respect to that, you know?

01:55:07

So if a person, you know, what's going to happen in that, right. Is, is a person's going to say, you know, resurrections aren't possible, right.

01:55:15

Let's say, and then I'm going to say, well, why not, you know, and then they're going to give me their philosophical account and that might get into one of these philosophical issues, you know, they might say because, you know, it's a violation of natural law and I'm going to say, what is natural law?

01:55:30

Right. As a Christian, I think that what people refer to as natural law is just God's ordinary way of governing things.

01:55:37

And God is a person and he's free to do things differently than he normally does them. He's an orderly

01:55:42

God. Ordinarily people don't get up after they die. Uh, in this case, someone did, and that draws particular attention to it.

01:55:49

And, uh, in the, uh, you know, from the perspective of the Bible, it, it. Seals that, you know, his claims, he claimed to be the son of God.

01:55:57

He was put to death for it. God reversed what they did and thereby vindicated him and said, yes, he was telling the truth.

01:56:04

You know, there's obviously more to it. Uh, he, he, he paid the penalty for sin. So it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

01:56:10

But so on a Christian view of, of natural law, the resurrection is not impossible.

01:56:15

I mean, the, the universe was created by God. The resurrection was hardly, you know, uh, anything more than, uh, a snap of the fingers, uh, figuratively speaking.

01:56:28

And so then the person, you know, might want to say, you know, no, you know, that's not what natural law is.

01:56:35

And then I'm going to say, well, you know, what justification do you have for believing in any notion of law?

01:56:42

That, that there's, uh, you know, why, why do things behave in a law like way? If you don't accept my account of things that God is the one governing things and you put something else in its place, uh, what is that right.

01:56:56

And if you just tell me the universe is ultimately the product of chance, I'm going to say, isn't that inimical to the whole notion of law?

01:57:05

Uh, what looks like law to you is, you know, obviously just an illusion.

01:57:11

There's not really any law there. Uh, anyways, I didn't mean to go off. Law presupposes regularity, but regularity makes no sense in a context in which everything's random.

01:57:22

Right. So, um, basically what I do is I just, I tell people what I can about Christianity, look for them to raise an objection, and then

01:57:31

I go from there. Uh, I don't try and, you know, argue for anything that I don't have to, right.

01:57:36

What, however much they're going to give me is however much I'm going to take. And, uh, you know, and I don't try to be philosophical.

01:57:44

I never have, I mean, I'm not trying to dazzle anyone at the end of the day. You know, um, it means nothing if they leave the conversation thinking

01:57:53

I'm a smart guy, you know, I'm sure, you know, so well, the real, the real question that we need to answer before we finish up is, uh, is your favorite scholar,

01:58:04

Steven Anderson or Kent Hovind? Be honest. So I know who

01:58:09

Kent Hovind is obviously, but I've, I'm, I know very little. Um, I mean,

01:58:15

I've seen clips basically. Sure. I'm more familiar with the stuff by Steve Anderson.

01:58:23

Um, and the late great Steve Hayes, by the way, miss that guy.

01:58:29

You know, he was the guy who did stuff on trial blog. He did a lot of great stuff over the years.

01:58:35

Uh, but yeah. Um, but neither one, my answer has to be neither one, either

01:58:42

Steve Anderson or Kent Hovind, because I've just, you know, there've been other people I've, I've read more than either of them.

01:58:50

All right. That's my diplomatic answer. There we go. And that's a good place to end Anthony. I thought,

01:58:55

I thought you did an excellent job. Uh, one hour and 58 minutes. No one can complain that no one addresses this issue.

01:59:01

They have almost two hours of content, uh, to explore this issue and hopefully it'll inspire them to kind of look a little deeper into the issue and do some.

01:59:08

So I hope this is helpful for folks who are listening in. Thank you so much for the super chats. I'm so sorry.

01:59:14

I couldn't get to all the other questions. Um, there's, I'm going to have a live stream tomorrow. So if you have a question that didn't get answered tonight, um, if you hop onto the live stream tomorrow, we're going to be talking specifically about.

01:59:26

Presuppositional apologetics just in general. And a lot of these questions kind of relate to it. So, um, you could ask your question there and we'll make sure we try to get to as many as possible.

01:59:34

Anthony, are there any last things you'd like to say before we close this live stream? Uh, no.

01:59:41

All right. Well, thank you so much. Run out. So it's a perfect time.

01:59:47

That's right. That's right. Well, that's it for this episode, guys. Thank you so much for listening in. Take care.

01:59:53

Maybe I could ask real quickly since Mr. Bolt is in the chat. Mr. Bolt, are you going to be at ETS this year?

02:00:01

Okay. We'll see if he answers the car. I actually have a, I actually have his cell. I can, I could actually text him right now.

02:00:08

Uh, let's see. Maybe he'll answer quickly through the text. I'm not sure if he's on still. Oh, well, okay. I see his comment here.

02:00:15

Well, maybe he will. I want to get Chris bolt back on, um, in the future.

02:00:21

So hopefully, um, we could set that up. So, all right. Well, guys, this, that's it for this episode, guys.

02:00:26

Thank you so much. I appreciate the support and until next time, take care and God bless.