How to Create an Apologetics Arsenal?

Apologetics as a Creative Calling

Welcome to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala and today I have a guest with me. I'm really excited to have him on, Doug Powell. If that name sounds familiar, I know everyone who has gotten into Apologetics has come across the Christian Apologetics.

It's kind of a, I think it's from, it's put out by Holman. It's called the Quick Source Guide to Christian Apologetics. I know that when I first got into Apologetics, I had this book and it was really helpful in summarizing the apologetic arguments and things like that.

And so he is the author of that book and many more. I just want to take a few moments to share a little bit about Doug's background and then I will invite him on the screen with me in just a moment. So Doug Powell is a Christian Apologist.

He's an author, a graphic designer, programmer, and recording artist. He has appeared on Late Night with Conan O 'Brien, CNN, NPR, World Cafe, Primetime America, The White Horse Inn, Stand to Reason, and Sound Reason.

His books include the best-selling Holman Quick Source Guide to Christian Apologetics, Resurrection Eyewitness, an interactive book on the minimal facts argument for the historical evidence for the resurrection, and Jesus Eyewitness, an interactive book on the life of Christ.

He's also a contributor to the Apologetic Study Bible and the Apologetic Study Bible for students. In addition, Doug is the designer of the Resurrection Eyewitness iPad app. As a recording artist, Powell has released nine albums, including The Apprentice's Sorcerer, which gives the transcendental argument for God as told as a magic show and set to music.

That's awesome. Doug holds a master's in Apologetics from Biola University. So really interesting background. Hopefully he can correct anything that might not be accurate. Hopefully that's an accurate summary of Doug there.

But without further ado, I'd like to invite Doug Powell on the screen with me at this moment. How are you doing, Doug? I'm good. Thanks for having me. Well, it is an honor to have you. Just as a quick note, when I'm looking down, I'm looking directly at you.

When I'm looking at you, I can't see you. So there's a camera in front of me. So when I'm looking down, I'm looking at you. I'm not playing Candy Crush on my phone. So I think that's a.

Mel Brooks skit or something like that. Okay. Well, how accurate was that.

Information? Was that a good summary of your background there? That was pretty.

Good, except for the that's awesome part on the transcendental argument record because that review was never given for that record. I'm telling you, that was a pretty convoluted record. Okay. So nobody went, wow, this is awesome.

They went,.

This is really weird. Well, I think it's a creative way to try and get the transcendental argument out there. That's fine. That's all good. Well, okay. So is there anything else that you'd like to share with folks before we kind of get into the content of our discussion with respect to background?

Anything interesting or important people should know about you before we jump into the.

Conversation? I guess the only thing that wasn't included in that is that I have started a series of novels and the first one came out last October and there's a sequel to it that's coming out in about a month.

The first one was called The Well of the Soul and the second one's called Among the Ashes. There'll be a third one later this year and there'll be at least five in this series. But they are a mixture of apologetics in Christian history and biblical archaeology and about 95 of it is true.

It's kind of like a Da Vinci code treasure hunt type of thing, except it's all true. It's good history instead of like, oh my gosh, where did he get this kind of stuff, history? And I really enjoyed reading Dan Brown's books, but I found myself getting a little irked at the misrepresentation.

So history is interesting enough without having to misportray it, especially biblical history and biblical archaeology. So I just figured out a way to string a bunch of these stories together and archaeological discoveries and come up with, you know, the stories like a spoonful of sugar.

So it makes it way more fun to learn these things and look at them all up individually and this way you can kind of also see how they relate to each other. So when you write things like.

This, is this kind of an attempt to do kind of like apologetics in a kind of different way as opposed to just writing a book that's just factual, you know, kind.

Of just information? Is this kind of just a different way? Absolutely, you bet. You know, one of the things that I struggled with for a while going through Biola was figuring out how to use the training that I got because I love my Biola professors and and love what they do and how they do it.

And so that's just kind of how I thought of it at first. And then after a while, I just kind of, it took me a while to understand that I am not a William Lane Craig or a Gary Habermas or something like that.

I keep thinking of these things to do that they don't do. And for a while I just kind of discounted the idea because that's just not how apologetics was done. And then I started realizing that, you know, there are times where I can step into that role but I should walk through these other doors that keep opening.

So as a graphic designer, I found ways of doing a more visual approach to apologetics. Like in the first edition of the the Apologetics Study Bible, my contribution to it, to the adult edition, is they didn't want all the color pages to just simply be maps.

So they asked me to just, they just gave me free reign to come up with different apologetics charts and things like that. So to be able to visually represent apologetics information statistics, that was something that I seemed at the time uniquely gifted for, you know.

So, you know, William Lane Craig wasn't getting into the make a chart business. So that one was like wide open for me when it when it came up. And so things like that. In the case of the record, I mean, I have a background as a recording artist.

I'm an amateur magician with far more interest and passion in it than talent for it. But I realized that a lot of the tricks were metaphors for spiritual truths and ended up being able to illustrate the transcendental argument using a lot of that terminology.

And so I got very heavily into that, this idea of the pop up books for like the minimal facts argument, stuff like that. That's, I mean, I just had this crazy idea and told my editor at Lifeway when we were at lunch one day about it, and he immediately fell in love with it and went for it.

But I designed it, you know, you couldn't like propose it as a in a traditional kind of book proposal type of way. You had to actually build a prototype and show it. And and only I could have done that.

I mean, not only me, but that's that's one of those things that among the apologists that I'm aware of, that was one of the things I would be more uniquely gifted for. And so, you know, it's so it's not doing high end apologetics that expands the field that I ended up having opportunities to do is more like I was a popularizer, but I was discovering these opportunities to do that work in ways that hadn't been done before.

And that's where the innovation was not in the actual content, but in the way it was presented. And so the novels are just another iteration of that, really.

Yeah, I think that's that's important. It's not always expanding in the field intellectually. I think being able to convey the content that's kind of in the ivory tower to the average person is I mean, think about it.

Apologetics is not something that is simply relegated to the ivory tower. This is something that we need to be getting to people in the church. And the average person in the church isn't going to be walking around talking about infinite regresses and, you know, quantum mechanics and transcendental reasoning.

It's very important to be able to do what you do and simplify it and visual, you know, allow people to visualize it in the creative ways that you do so that they can use it in their everyday life. So I think that's I think that's excellent.

Well, the other the other thing that it took me a while to realize is that with I know tons of Christians who have apologetics questions, whether or not they are aware of what apologetics is or not, they have them.

And only some of them will go to the trouble of trying to do the research and chasing down an answer. And only some of those will hang with it because once they hit an academic book, sometimes they just start glazing over.

And so there is there there's there's a subset of Christians who have a need for answers, but they don't like reading academic books or they don't like reading these apologetics books, but they still want good answers.

So how are they going to get them? And so that's one of the reasons for the novels. It's not just a vanity project or although it is a large part of that because I just have too much fun doing it. But but it does it does serve a demographic of people who want answers and are not going to look for them in the traditional places where I found them.

And I just happen to have an opportunity that matched an idea I had that allows them to have access to it in a different way.

Apologetics, Beauty, and the Christian Imagination

Now, that's interesting. So what do you think are areas that are lacking within a Christian within Christian apologetics in terms of creative ways to get the content out there? So like, not every believer is watching, you know, capturing Christianity or revealed apologetics or, you know, whatever YouTube channel is out there because it could be too heady for some people.

What are some areas that you think the Christian content can be creatively put out there, but it's not being done in these areas? So, for example, you have someone like C .S. Lewis who was able to take, you know, very complicated theological truths and convey them through very creative writing style.

What areas do you think Christians can do better in in terms of the creativity with which they put the content out there?

I, you know what, I don't have a specific answer for that because I just I have my set of gifts and interests and I walk through any door that opens up and and a lot of them shut, but I'm not the one who shuts them.

So, you know, I have a lot of different creative ways of expressing myself and I keep finding ways of expressing apologetics, being able to articulate apologetics through them. But it's not like I sat down and did like some kind of analysis of the market and went, OK, you know, they need a novel about biblical archaeology and and I'll just I'll be that guy.

You know, it wasn't like that. It wasn't targeted at all. It was something that simply appealed to me and that appeal seemed to resonate with other people. And there are times when it's a total misfire like that, the record that you were talking about, The Apprentice's Sorcerer, that there was no resonance with that.

That didn't resonate with anybody. It was just too weird of an idea. So they're not all good ideas, but, you know, the apps really resonated with people. I just couldn't keep up with it. I had to teach myself how to program apps and deal with the, you know, Apple iOS and all of that.

And they just changed so much that they always need updating. Right. And and I'm not a good enough programmer to be able to make that a worthwhile thing, because it's it's I mean, the system updates happen so fast.

It's like trying to climb an avalanche. And that's just not where my interest or gifts are. So, you know, after you don't update them for two updates, they pull them from the site. So that's what happened.

So, okay. But the I do have a talk that I give on objective beauty at different apologetics conferences and stuff. And when I started doing that 10 to 12 years ago, I was it what made it different than other objective beauty talks that I had heard is that I was a practitioner.

Okay. And not just a theoretician about aesthetics. And so that that gave me a little bit more street cred. And so I became that guy who gave that talk for a while. Okay. And, and I and that seemed to appeal to a lot of people.

There's a, you know, when I growing up as a creative, in in, in church led to, at least at the time in the 80s, people were suspicious of creatives in the church. Because there's just something that sits a little bit different about how they see the world and stuff.

And, and they don't know what to do with that. So I, you know, when when I became a believer and was maturing as a believer, it was at a time when Christians and evangelical Christians did not really engage culture for by and large, what they did is they created a counterculture, or not even a counterculture, because it wasn't, it wasn't parallel, it wasn't swimming against the culture, it was parallel to it.

So you know, it would be like, if something was popular in the culture, then evangelical Christians would create the inert Christian substitute for it, you know, so it's usually pretty bad. Yeah, it was horrible.

So, you know, you go to like a Christian bookstore, and there'd be is gonna sound crazy to people don't remember this, but you go to a Christian bookstore, and where all the like CDs and cassettes and records are and stuff, they had a list that said, if you like Bruce Springsteen, you'll like this, you know, it was kind of like an early form of the Amazon algorithm, right?

That said, you know, people who bought this also bought this, except there's printed out for you. And so the the idea was, Bruce Springsteen, secular, bad. So you need to listen to this guy who tries to sound like Bruce Springsteen, except he sings he has Jesus mentioned in like seven out of the 10 songs that are on the record.

That's exactly what it was. And that became the criteria. So people like seem to be more interested in mediocre, Christian branded stuff, then, then excellence. And Christians historically have been committed to excellence, we serve an excellent God.

And so we need to serve him with excellence in all that we do. And that's why Christians historically have been at the forefront of the arts, up until, you know, the mid 1800s, or so in America, and then we we somehow turned it into propaganda or ghetto izing ourselves, because we were so suspicious of excellence that in art made by people who were not believers.

And so that the priorities changed. And so I never really bought into that. But it made growing up in that environment a little bit, a little bit difficult.

Sure, sure. Well, I want to get a little bit on the topic of aesthetic objective beauty, because the title on the thumbnail is creating an apologetic arsenal. So I want I would imagine that appealing to objective beauty is a tool that one can have in their tool belt.

So I want to kind of return to that in just a moment. But let's talk a little bit about your, your book, the Holman quick source guide to Christian apologetics,.

Which is not called that anymore, by the way, they changed the name, is it? Okay, they changed the format. And now it's called, what is it called? The ultimate guide to defending your faith? Who is the cover different?

Yeah, they changed the format here. All right. All right. Here's what it looks like now. Okay. All right. That looks cool. So it's no, it doesn't look, here we go. It doesn't look like, you know, the tall, skinny thing, like travel guide, or, you know, birdwatching guide anymore.

But all they did, though, was even though it's, it's smaller in dimensions, okay. They shrunk, they just took the, the, the, the actual plates for the book, the PDF, and shrunk it down. So they didn't reset the text or anything.

It's the exact same layout with this exact same text flow, which means this text is really, really small.

Oh, okay. So do you like the way they did it the new way? Or are you like,.

I think this looks very nice. But I mean, I do. That's small type. So if you if you go to Amazon, you'll see there are that's where the the hits are.

Are there any? Is there any new content in there in that edition? Or is it just the same?

No, no, it's the same. Okay, it's just smaller content.

Okay, so the ultimate guide to defend the faith. Now, when I first read that book, I was big into classical apologetics, I would identify myself as a classical apologist back in the day. And so as I was reading that book, I found your summary of the Kalam cosmological argument, very useful arguments from design.

And I had no clue that you were a presuppositionalist. And as we spoke beforehand, and I learned that you were and so I know presuppositionalists love to use the transcendental argument. And you wrote a piece on the transcendental argument in the apologetic study Bible.

So what I want to ask you is two questions. Why don't you lay out for us the transcendental argument? And then I want to ask you how you fit all of those other arguments that are typically understood as arguments that are understood within the realm of the classical approach?

How do you bring those together and make them useful? Do you just go out there and just use the transcendental argument all the time? Or how do you incorporate all of this useful material? Because because just as a point of clarification, for some people who don't know, presuppositionalists often are known for rejecting a lot of the traditional arguments.

But in reality, rejecting, for example, the cosmological argument is not an essential feature of presuppositionalism. You could be a presuppositionalist think it's a great argument, and you can be a presuppositionalist and think it's a crummy argument.

And of course, you'll have your reason. So where do you stand on that spectrum? I mean, you wrote a book that surveys all these arguments. Why don't you lay out the transcendental argument and why you think it's such a good and powerful argument, and then how you kind of fit in all of those other arguments that are typically associated with the classical approach?

Does that question make sense?

It does. That's a big one. How long does this show last?

Well, we have had both on for two hours. Oh, my goodness. Well, I won't keep you that long.

But a lot of I'm going to assume there's a pretty people are somewhat watching your show are fairly familiar with the argument in the first place. So the way that the way I articulate the transcendental argument is that it's not necessarily an argument itself, but a philosophy of how to argue.

And it's all based on the understanding that the necessary preconditions for any kind of intelligibility is the existence of the God of the Bible, that that in order to speak, you need using universals to appeal to any sort of objective truth, objective morality requires the existence of of an objective lawgiver, of an objective standard of truth.

And these are all personal concepts. So this objective, the source for these, these tools that we use has to be a person. And this person can't change and the person can't be part of the world. So they're transcended from the world.

And this person must be eternal, not relying on anything else. And once you lay out all the things that are required for the necessary preconditions for things like objective truth, objective beauty, the existence of universals, then you've actually listed the attributes of the God of the Bible.

And so in order to be able to say anything that makes sense, requires actually the existence of the God of the Bible. To even say the statement that God does not exist, requires God to exist in order for that statement to even be said, because it's a logical statement.

But what's the necessary preconditions for logic? Well, there are three laws of logic, and these laws can't be anything other than what they are. They can't contradict themselves, and they can't ever not have existed.

And those things aren't true of the world. The world is always changing. There's been a time when the world didn't exist. So these things have to be themselves transcendental. They're transcended from the world, and they also govern how we think.

Well, those are properties. Those are the attributes of a person. So these laws of logic come from a personal source, and that's God. That's what we're defending. So the necessary precondition for the laws of logic, which we all use intuitively in order to make any sort of coherent statement, the necessary preconditions for logic is the existence of God.

Then anybody who says God does not exist just makes a logical statement that proves God exists. By denying God, they prove the very thing that they are denying. So the transcendental argument is like this nuclear bomb of apologetics, because it shows how the necessary preconditions for all forms of our argumentation, the regularity of the universe, objective truth, objective morality, laws of logic, all of these things require the God of the Bible's existence as the necessary precondition.

So given that, there is a course room for all of the classical arguments and the evidential arguments, because the evidence is still evidence, and the classical arguments are still valid arguments. If you argue, the problem is, as a presuppositionalist, my view of evidentialism and the classical apologetics is that without this understanding of the necessary precondition of God being the grounds of all forms of intelligibility and the ability to argue for anything, then what you really have is you're creating this tacit acceptance of neutral ground, that we have the ability to ration and reason apart from the existence of God.

And therefore, we can hear the evidence for and the evidence against, and we're in this neutral place where we can weigh it and then determine whether there's more evidence for God or against God. And what makes that problematic is that one of the things all Christians will agree on, all Christian apologists, is that the God of the Bible is a necessary being.

But if you argue as an evidentialist or as somebody who's focused only on the classical arguments, those are probability arguments. So what you're really doing is saying that God, who's a necessary being, probably exists.

That doesn't make any sense at all. If he's a necessary being, then he has to exist. He certainly exists. He doesn't probably exist. He has to exist. So you're undermining yourself immediately when you argue like that.

But if the problem with the transcendental argument is how to actually use it in a practical way, because if you're having a real apologetics conversation where somebody has questions that you're trying to give real answers to, and they're making challenges that are more in the evidential range or in the classical area, and you say, well, wait a second.

Hold on. Let's define our terms here, right? Because before you can make an argument against God, I want you to ground logic, and I want you to explain universals, and I want you to explain morality, and I want you to explain laws of logic and all that.

If you do that, they're going to think you're playing a word game because now you're not answering their objection. You're setting all these ground rules, and they're going to take it as, okay, well, all you're doing is stacking the deck against me so that I can't say anything, which in one sense, it's true.

They can't say anything without proving, ultimately, the existence of the God of the Bible. But if you go that route as a tactical way, you win the argument. Ultimately, you're right. You win the argument, but you lose them at the same time because they're not persuaded by that.

And so the way that I believe all these things are valuable, all of the forms of argumentation are valuable and can be used within a presuppositional framework.

Okay, well, right there. Let me stop you there because this is kind of the crux of the issue for a lot of people. I've talked to a lot of people, and people have expressed to me kind of this dichotomy that they've created in their mind.

Like, man, these arguments like the design argument, teleological, moral arguments are so useful. But if I use them, then I'm not being presuppositional. But then I want to be presuppositional because I want to be faithful to God's Word.

I think it's a biblical approach. And so you have this person who's like torn between these two positions here. Now, of course, there's an important distinction to be made between the use of evidences and evidentialism as a methodology.

So what we're not saying is that appealing to evidence is the same as using evidentialism as a methodology. So I would not agree with people who say presuppositionalism is one of the tools in your tool belt, as though you can use that methodology and then discard the methodology when you're talking about evidence.

I don't agree with that. But what do you do? How can you speak to the person who sees this dichotomy between presuppositionalism and the use of evidence? Because you have people who say giving evidence is sinful because it contradicts the idea in Scripture that all men know that God exists.

So to give evidence is to almost pretend that this person is ignorant. And so we're giving them evidence. And so they're standing as judge over God. How would you speak to a presuppositionalist who's grappling with how to frame all of this?

Well, you just cited Romans 1, right? All men know the truth and they suppress it in unrighteousness. So when ultimately when you're doing apologetics, you're not necessarily... People are not unbelievers because they lack evidence.

So when you're giving answers, it's not like they've been waiting for that answer and all of a sudden that plugs some hole. Now, it will plug holes. Absolutely. But that's not why they're not believers.

They're suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. But what you're doing when you give an answer is, because they're suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, is you're revealing that self-deceit. And that can be really painful.

And that's why you speak the truth in love. And all of that comes in Paul. He writes about all of those things. And you know what else he writes is when he defends the truthfulness of Christianity, the way that he does it is not going, well, you already know and you're just suppressing it in unrighteousness.

I mean, he does state that in Romans, but that's not how he is defending Christianity. That's not how he does apologetics. That's how he explains the state of the people you're talking to, he's talking to.

So when he does apologetics, you'd think if anybody ever had a good conversion experience that he could use it as evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity, it would be Paul. But he doesn't do that.

Anytime he's talking about his conversion experience, it's in the context of his authority as an apostle, not as evidence. What he does in 1 Corinthians 15 is he says that if the resurrection, the historical bodily resurrection didn't happen, then we're completely wasting our time.

So he's pointing out the actual weak spot in Christianity and says, if you want to knock it down as a system, all of it, you just got to do this one thing. And that's unique in the literature of world religions.

No other scripture points out its weak spot to go after. But he does it because he's so secure about the persuasiveness of the historical evidence for the resurrection. It's that compelling. And then in 1 Corinthians 15, 3 through 7, he actually lists it, which is a creed that predates his own conversion.

And he lists witnesses. He lists that he was buried, that the tomb was found empty. So there's these historical claims that you could go investigate. So he actually points to evidence as his defense for the historical bodily resurrection, and therefore gets all of Christianity in that.

So in a certain sense, Paul is an all-of-the-above kind of guy. But it's not that presuppositionalism is a tool in his tool belt that he pulls out every once in a while. It's a framework that he has for understanding all of it.

And so I would say to people who are trying to figure out how these two things work together, the best way I can articulate it is we're trying to address people. We're trying to address a person. So you have to listen to what the person is objecting to.

In Christianity, you're having a conversation with somebody, and you need to address their needs. And in order to do that, you have to listen to them. And no matter what they say, as far as why they don't believe, you already have the Romans one thing.

You know that they suppress the truth and unrighteousness, but they're going to still offer these objections. Well, you know, the Bible's been translated a jillion times. We can't know what the Romans are.

But you can answer that question. And this builds this trust and keeps the dialogue going, and you can address other challenges that they might have. But as I'm giving them answers, I know this isn't the reason why they don't believe, but it's getting me closer.

To it. So giving them these answers and these evidences, you're not ceasing to be a presuppositionalist while doing that. No, because there's a.

Difference between the technical answer and the tactical answer. And if I give a tactical answer that doesn't like honor everything that presuppositional purists want in it, it's only because it's a tactical thing.

It's not that I'm rejecting everything that presuppositional holds to. It's that bringing it out right then will win the argument and lose the conversation. I'm trying to be persuasive here. And so the best way to be persuasive is to answer these objections and keep this dialogue going, build that trust, be winsome and attractive, and not just try to win the argument, but try to persuade them.

Once again, guys, I'm speaking with Doug Powell. He's the author of The Ultimate Guide. What is the new version of it called?

The Ultimate Guide to Defend Your Faith.

There we go. The Ultimate Guide to Defend Your Faith, which was previously known as The Quick Source Guide to Christian Apologetics. If you guys have any questions for Doug, he'd be happy to take some questions towards the back end of this episode.

So just make sure you preface your question with a question and make sure your question is grammatically correct. That makes it very difficult to read sometimes.

By the way, given all of what we just talked about, that explains why my book is in the order that it is in. Because the arguments all do fit together. There is a logical sequence to them. Imagine that book is really a conversation with somebody.

The first time we were talking, we were talking all the cosmological stuff. And the second time we're talking, we're talking about all the design stuff. If you have this conversation, each chapter is just another episode in the conversation.

And you get all the way to the end. You go through all these 13 chapters of argument, and somebody is still not buying into it. Then you can pull out the technical part of the transcendental argument and go, listen, you're just suppressing this stuff I've told you.

Every question, every challenge you've had has been answered. So now it's just illogical not to believe. At a certain point, they're confronted with that. And that's where the presuppositionalism all of a sudden gets revealed.

And it has more power that way than bringing it out on the front end.

I got you. And I agree with that. I don't know who described C .S. Lewis in this way. Because C .S. Lewis did have some presuppositional tendencies in the way that he presented some of the arguments. And someone described C .S. Lewis, I don't remember which guest it was that I had on.

But when C .S. Lewis was speaking to an atheist who was behaving, he was an evidentialist. So like, if he's behaving, he's just asking these questions like, yeah, let's meet him where he is. But when he's speaking with an atheist who's misbehaving, who's not giving an inch and looks like he's just, you know, kind of stuck in what he's saying, then he goes that more, you know, looking at the foundation.

So, again, C .S. Lewis wasn't a presuppositionalist in that proper sense. But I think there's some usefulness, like, as you said, tactfully speaking, tactically speaking, to talk about evidences here and there with the background music, so to speak, of our presuppositions, and then bringing that kind of mega argument when it's appropriate.

So, but here's my question. So the cosmological argument. We say this often, we say that a presuppositionalist can use the cosmological argument as long as he is consistent in doing so within a presuppositional framework.

What does a cosmological argument or a teleological argument or a moral argument look like within a presuppositional framework? Is it going to look pretty much the way it's presented by the classicalist?

Is it similar but with some presuppositional modifications? I mean, what does that look like so that people who might be struggling with consistency, they're presuppositionalists, but they find value in talking about these other arguments.

How might one bring those together? What does that look like? Maybe you can kind of give us a brief illustration as to what that might look like in a conversation.

Well, the actual arguments themselves, I don't think there's really an issue with those. I don't have an issue with those as long as it's part of a cumulative case. It doesn't stop right there because you don't get all the way to the God of Bible with any of those arguments, which is what a lot of the criticism is.

But I mean, whoever gives just that one. I don't think that's an appropriate thing. That's just like pulling off one piece of a machine and it doesn't have much function apart from the rest. But as you articulate these, I think the thing to avoid is any kind of language that leaves the person you're talking with, that gives them the impression that they are on some kind of neutral ground and have the ability to judge God, basically, to determine in and of themselves whether he exists or not, as if there is some kind of neutral ground.

That's the thing you're trying to avoid. You don't want to say a necessary God probably exists. So you kind of step around that kind of language that's really easy to say in conversation, but just being aware of it, just so you don't end up with giving somebody a misunderstanding.