How to Create an Apologetics Arsenal?

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala and today

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I have a guest with me. I'm really excited to have him on, Doug Powell.

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If that name sounds familiar, I know everyone who has gotten into Apologetics has come across the

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Christian Apologetics. It's kind of a, I think it's from, it's put out by Holman.

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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.

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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

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I will invite him on the screen with me in just a moment. So Doug Powell is a

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Christian Apologist. He's an author, a graphic designer, programmer, and recording artist. He has appeared on Late Night with Conan O 'Brien,

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CNN, NPR, World Cafe, Primetime America, The White Horse Inn, Stand to Reason, and Sound Reason.

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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.

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He's also a contributor to the Apologetic Study Bible and the Apologetic Study Bible for students. In addition,

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Doug is the designer of the Resurrection Eyewitness iPad app. As a recording artist, Powell has released nine albums, including the

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Apprentice's Sorcerer, which gives the transcendental argument for God as told as a magic show and set to music.

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That's awesome. Doug holds a master's in Apologetics from Biola University. So really interesting background.

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Hopefully he can correct anything that might not be accurate. Hopefully that's an accurate summary of Doug there.

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But without further ado, I'd like to invite Doug Powell on the screen with me at this moment.

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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

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I'm looking down, I'm looking directly at you. When I'm looking at you, I can't see you.

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So there's a camera in front of me. So I'm not, you know, when I'm looking down, I'm looking at you. I'm not playing Candy Crush on my phone.

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So I think that's a Mel Brooks skit or something like that. Okay. Well, how accurate was that information?

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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.

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I'm telling you, that was a pretty convoluted record. Okay. So nobody went, wow, this is awesome.

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They went, okay, really weird. Well, I think it's a creative way to try and get the transcendental argument out there.

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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?

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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

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October. And there's a sequel to it that's coming out in about a month. The first one was called

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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.

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But they are a mixture of apologetics in Christian history and biblical archaeology, and about 95 % of it is true.

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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?

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And I really enjoyed reading Dan Brown's books, but I found myself getting a little irked at the misrepresentation.

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So history is interesting enough without having to misportray it, especially biblical history and biblical archaeology.

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And so I just figured out a way to string a bunch of these stories together and archaeological discoveries and come up with the stories like a spoonful of sugar.

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So it makes it way more fun to learn these things than looking them all up individually.

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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?

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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

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Biola professors and love what they do and how they do it.

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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

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William Lane Craig or a Gary Habermas or something like that. I keep thinking of these things to do that they don't do.

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And for a while, I just kind of discounted the idea because that's just not how apologetics was done.

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And then I started realizing that, you know, there are times when where I can step into that role, but I should walk through these other doors that keep opening.

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So as a graphic designer, I found ways of doing a more visual approach to apologetics.

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Like in the first edition of the apologetic study Bible, my contribution to it, to the adult edition, is they didn't want all the color pages to just simply be maps.

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So they asked me to just, they just gave me free reign to come up with different apologetics charts and and things like that.

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So to to be able to visually represent apologetics information statistics, that that was something that I seemed at the time uniquely gifted for, you know.

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So, you know, William Lane Craig wasn't getting into the make a chart business.

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So that one was like wide open for me when it when it came up. And so things like that.

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In the case of the record, I mean,

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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.

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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.

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And so I got very heavily into that. This idea of the pop up books for like the minimal facts argument, stuff like that.

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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.

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But but I designed it. You know, they could you couldn't like propose it as a in a traditional kind of book proposal type of way.

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You had to actually build a prototype and show it. And and only I could have done that.

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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

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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.

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And that's where the innovation was not in the actual content, but in the way it was presented.

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And so the novels are just another iteration of that, really. Yeah, I think that's that's important.

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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

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I mean, think about it. Apologetics is not something that is simply relegated to the ivory tower.

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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.

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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.

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So I think that's I think that's excellent. Well, 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.

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And only some of them will go to the trouble of trying to do the research and chasing down an answer.

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And only some of those will hang with it because once they hit an academic book, sometimes they just start glazing over.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Now, that's interesting. So what do you think are areas that are lacking within Christian apologetics in terms of creative ways to get the content out there?

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So like not every believer is watching, you know, Capturing Christianity or Revealed Apologetics or, you know, whatever

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YouTube channel is out there because it could be too heady for some people. What are some areas that you think the

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Christian content can be creatively put out there, but it's not being done in these areas?

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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.

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

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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 a lot of them shut, but I'm not the one who shuts them.

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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, okay, you know, they need a novel about biblical archaeology and I'll just,

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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.

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And there are times when it's a total misfire like that, the record that you were talking about,

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The Apprentice's Sorcerer, that there was no resonance with that. That didn't resonate with anybody.

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It was just too weird of an idea. So they're not all good ideas, but, you know, the apps really resonated with people.

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I just couldn't keep up with it. I had to teach myself how to program apps and deal with the, you know,

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Apple iOS's and all of that. And they just changed so much that they always need updating.

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And I'm not a good enough programmer to be able to make that a worthwhile thing because it's,

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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.

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So, you know, after you don't update them for two updates, they pull them from the site.

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So that's what happened. But I do have a talk that I give on objective beauty at different apologetics conferences and stuff.

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And when I started doing that 10 to 12 years ago, what made it different than other objective beauty talks that I had heard is that I was a practitioner and not just a theoretician about aesthetics.

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And so that gave me a little bit more street cred. And so I became that guy who gave that talk for a while.

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And that seemed to appeal to a lot of people. Growing up as a creative in church led to, at least at the time, in the 80s, people were suspicious of creatives in the church.

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Because there's just something that sits a little bit different about how they see the world and stuff. And they don't know what to do with that.

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So, you know, when I became a believer and was maturing as a believer, it was at a time when

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Christians and evangelical Christians did not really engage culture for by and large.

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What they did is they created a counterculture or not even a counterculture, because it wasn't parallel, it wasn't swimming against the culture, it was parallel to it.

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So, you know, it would be like, if something was popular in the culture, then evangelical

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Christians would create the inert Christian substitute for it, you know. So it's usually pretty bad.

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Yeah, it was horrible. So, you know, you go to like a Christian bookstore and there'd be, this is going to sound crazy to people who don't remember this, but you go to a

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Christian bookstore and where all the 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, and it was kind of like an early form of the

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Amazon algorithm, right? That said, you know, people who bought this also bought this, except it was printed out for you.

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And so 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

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Jesus mentioned in like seven out of the 10 songs that are on the record. That's exactly what it was.

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And that became the criteria. So people like seem to be more interested in mediocre

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Christian branded stuff than excellence. And Christians historically have been committed to excellence.

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We serve an excellent God. And so we need to serve him with excellence in all that we do.

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And that's why Christians historically have been at the forefront of the arts up until the mid 1800s or so in America.

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And then we somehow turned it into propaganda or ghettoizing ourselves because we were so suspicious of excellence in art made by people who were not believers.

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

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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.

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So I would imagine that appealing to objective beauty is a tool that one can have in their tool belt.

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So I want to kind of return to that in just a moment. But let's talk a little bit about your book,

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The Holman Quick Source Guide to Christian Apologetics. Which is not called that anymore, by the way. They changed the name.

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Is it? Okay. They changed the format. And now it's called, what is it called? The Ultimate Guide to Defending Your Faith.

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Who? Is the cover different? Yeah. They changed the format here. Grab it.

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All right. All right. Here's what it looks like now. Okay.

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All right. That looks cool. So it doesn't look... Here we go. It doesn't look like the tall skinny thing, like a travel guide or a bird watching guide anymore.

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But all they did though was even though it's smaller in dimensions, they shrunk.

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They just took the actual plates for the book, the PDF, and shrunk it down.

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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.

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Okay. Do you like the way they did it? The new way? I think this looks very nice, but I mean, that's small type.

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So if you go to Amazon, you'll see that's where the hits are.

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Is there any new content in there in that edition? Or is it just the same? No. It's just smaller content.

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Okay. So The Ultimate Guide to Defend the Faith. Now, when I first read that book, I was big into classical apologetics.

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I would identify myself as a classical apologist back in the day. And so as I was reading that book,

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I found your summary of the Kalam Cosmological Argument very useful, arguments from design.

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And I had no clue that you were a presuppositionalist as we spoke beforehand, and I learned that you were.

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And so I know presuppositionalists love to use the transcendental argument. And you wrote a piece on the transcendental argument in the apologetic study

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Bible. So what I want to ask you is two questions. Why don't you lay out for us the transcendental argument?

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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.

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How do you bring those together and make them useful? Do you just go out there and use the transcendental argument all the time?

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Or how do you incorporate all of this useful material? 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.

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But in reality, rejecting, for example, the cosmological argument is not an essential feature of presuppositionalism.

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You could be a presuppositionalist, think it's a great argument, and you could be a presuppositionalist and think it's a crummy argument. And of course, you'll have your reason.

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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?

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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.

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Oh, my goodness. I won't keep you that long. I'm going to assume there's pretty...

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people are somewhat watching your show are fairly familiar with the argument in the first place.

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So the way I articulate the transcendental argument is that it's not necessarily an argument itself, but a philosophy of how to argue.

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And it's all based on the understanding that the necessary preconditions for any kind of intelligibility is the existence of the

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God of the that in order to speak using universals to appeal to any sort of objective truth, objective morality requires the existence of an objective lawgiver, of an objective standard of truth.

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And these are all personal concepts. So this objective, the source for these tools that we use has to be a person.

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And this person can't change and the person can't be part of the world. So they're transcended from the world.

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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

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God of the Bible. And so in order to be able to say anything that makes sense requires actually the existence of the

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God of the Bible. To even say the statement that God does not exist requires

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God to exist in order for that statement to even be said, because it's a logical statement.

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But what's the necessary preconditions for logic? Well, there are three laws of logic, and these laws can't be anything than what they are.

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They can't contradict themselves, and they can't ever not have existed. And those things aren't true of the world.

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The world is always changing. There's been a time when the world didn't exist. So these things have to be themselves transcendental.

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They're transcendent from the world, and they also govern how we think. Well, those are properties.

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Those are the attributes of a person. So these laws of logic come from a personal source, and that's

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God. That's what we're defending. So if logic, 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.

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Then anybody who says God does not exist just makes a logical statement that proves

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God exists. By denying God, they prove the very thing that they are denying.

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So the transcendental argument is like this nuclear bomb of apologetics, because it shows how the necessary preconditions for all forms of argumentation, the regularity of the universe, objective truth, objective morality, laws of logic, all of these things require the

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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.

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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.

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What makes that problematic is that one of the things all Christians will agree on, all

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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.

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What you're really doing is saying that God, who's a necessary being, probably exists.

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That doesn't make any sense at all. If he's a necessary being, then he has to exist. He certainly exists.

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He doesn't probably exist. He has to exist. So you're undermining yourself immediately when you argue like that.

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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 asks 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.

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Hold on. Let's define our terms here, 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.

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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.

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They can't say anything without proving ultimately the existence of the God of the Bible.

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But if you go that route as a tactical way, you win the argument. Ultimately, you're right.

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You win the argument, but you lose them at the same time, because they're not persuaded by that.

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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.

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Okay. Well, right there. Let me stop you there, because this is the crux of the issue for a lot of people.

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I've talked to a lot of people, and people have expressed to me this dichotomy that they've created in their mind.

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Like, man, these arguments, like the kalam, the design argument, teleological, moral arguments are so useful, but if I use them, then

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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.

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And so you have this person who's like torn between these two positions here.

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Now, of course, there's an important distinction to be made between the use of evidences and evidentialism as a methodology.

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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.

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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?

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Because you have people who say giving evidence is sinful because it contradicts the idea in scripture that all men know that God exists.

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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.

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How would you speak to a presuppositionalist who's grappling with how to frame all of this? Well, you just cited

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Romans 1, right? All men know the truth and they suppress it in unrighteousness.

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So when ultimately when you're doing apologetics, people are not unbelievers because they lack evidence.

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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.

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Now it will plug holes, absolutely. But that's not why they're not believers.

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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.

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And that can be really painful, and that's why you speak the truth in love. And all of that comes in Paul.

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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.

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I mean, he does state that in Romans, but that's not how he is defending

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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It's that compelling. Then in 1 Corinthians 15, three through seven, he actually lists it, which is a creed that predates his own conversion.

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And he lists witnesses, he lists that he was buried, that the tomb was found empty, so there's like these historical claims that you could go investigate.

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So he actually points to evidence as his defense for the historical bodily resurrection and therefore gets all of Christianity in that.

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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.

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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

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I can articulate it is we're trying to address people.

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We're trying to address a person. So you have to listen to what the person is objecting to.

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In Christianity, you're having a conversation with somebody and you need to address their needs.

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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

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Romans one thing. You know that they suppress the truth and unrighteousness, but they're going to still offer these objections.

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Well, you know, the Bible's been translated a jillion times, we can't know what the original is. A jillion. I haven't heard that number before.

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A jillion. But you can answer that question.

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And this builds this trust and keeps the dialogue going, and you can address other challenges that they might have.

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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.

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So giving them these answers and these evidences, you're not ceasing to be a presuppositionalist while doing that.

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No, because there's a difference between the technical answer and the tactical answer.

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

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It's not that I'm rejecting everything that presuppositional holds to.

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It's that bringing it out right then will win the argument and lose the conversation.

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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.

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Once again, guys, I'm speaking with Doug Powell. He's the author of The Ultimate Guide.

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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.

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If you guys have any questions for Doug, he'd be happy to take some questions towards the back end of this episode.

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So just make sure you preface your question with a question and make sure your question is grammatically correct.

35:32

That makes it very difficult to read sometimes. Oh, by the way, given all of what we just talked about, that explains why my book is in the order that it is in.

35:45

Because the arguments all do fit together. There is a cosmological sequence to them.

35:52

Imagine that book is really a conversation with somebody. The first time we're talking, we were talking all the cosmological stuff.

36:01

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.

36:09

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

36:29

I've told you. Every question, every challenge you've had has been answered.

36:37

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.

36:48

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

36:53

I got you. I agree with that. I don't know who described

36:59

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.

37:07

Someone described C .S. Lewis, I don't remember which guest it was that I had on, but when

37:13

C .S. Lewis was speaking to an atheist who was behaving, he was an evidentialist.

37:20

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 stuck in what he's saying, then he goes that more looking at the foundation.

37:36

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

37:55

But here's my question. So the cosmological argument. We say this often.

38:01

We say that a presuppositionalist can use the cosmological argument as long as he is consistent in doing so within a presuppositional framework.

38:08

What does a cosmological argument, or a teleological argument, or a moral argument look like within a presuppositional framework?

38:17

Is it going to look pretty much the way it's presented by the classicalist? Is it similar but with some presuppositional modifications?

38:24

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?

38:36

What does that look like? Maybe you can give us a brief illustration as to what that might look like in a conversation. Well, the actual arguments themselves,

38:46

I don't think there's really an issue with those.

38:53

I don't have an issue with those as long as it's part of a cumulative case.

39:00

It doesn't stop right there because you don't get all the way to the God of the Bible with any of those arguments, which is what a lot of the criticism is.

39:08

Whoever gives just that one, I don't think that's an appropriate thing.

39:14

That's just like pulling off one piece of a machine and it doesn't have much function apart from the rest.

39:23

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

39:48

God, basically, to determine in and of themselves whether He exists or not, as if there is some kind of neutral ground.

39:58

That's the thing you're trying to avoid. You don't want to say a necessary God probably exists.

40:05

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 because otherwise what you're doing, it's kind of like, okay, remember

40:24

Dumb and Dumber, and Jim Carrey finally catches up with the girl and he says, so,

40:31

I'm not going to do my Jim Carrey impression, but he's like, so what are the odds? What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me getting together?

40:40

She's like, not good. He's like one in a thousand. She's like more like one in a million. He says, so you're telling me

40:46

I got a chance. Anytime you speak in probabilistic language to somebody who according to Paul is suppressing the truth and unrighteousness, then one in a million against means there's a chance, right?

41:01

That's what you don't want to give the impression of. But Doug, I apologize to interrupt.

41:08

So when we use the cosmological argument, for example, isn't the cosmological argument a probabilistic argument?

41:14

If we don't want to argue probabilistically, then how does a presuppositionalist make any use of an argument that is probabilistic in nature?

41:23

This is where you have that tension between the tactical and the technical. So if you want to speak in probabilistic language, there's a yellow flag that goes up as a presupp, because you don't want to push that part of it too hard, but it may be tactical to use that kind of language.

41:46

And then if qualification needs to be made, then you can make it regarding the probability.

41:52

Because any sharp skeptic will point out if that you are arguing probabilistically.

42:02

And either number one, there is a chance, or number two, it's illogical because you're arguing the unnecessary being probably exists.

42:11

And that's a little bit tough. But then that can be an entry itself into the full -blown presuppositional argument, argumentation.

42:23

If they're quick enough for that, then you might be able to go right to the nuclear bomb, which is the presuppositional argument without any of the veiled stuff.

42:36

So forget the framework, we're just like right into it. What's the necessary precondition for the grounds of logic that you're appealing to?

42:45

Because everybody starts with a presupposed source for their things, and logic is personal.

42:53

It's just not like a tool floating around in the universe, you have to be able to account for it. So where does it come from?

43:00

So what do you do when you're talking to someone who's more philosophically astute? And so we're talking about universals and someone, they're just like, well,

43:07

I'm a nominalist. I don't believe in universals. How might you engage with someone who just denies universals?

43:15

I would just act like they agree with me. And then when they get frustrated with that, you just point out, well, if you're saying things, you're using these sounds as tokens that contain these ideas.

43:32

And either these immaterial things are real things that we're both appealing to, and they can't be something other than that.

43:47

If we got rid of all the words, those things would still exist. Those concepts would still exist. You have to be able to explain that.

43:54

Otherwise, they're just these plastic things that we can twist into whatever that we want. So if the universals don't really exist, then anytime you object to what

44:03

I'm saying, I can just take it as you agreeing with me. So no universals, and everything's just particulars, and we just put names on these categories that don't have any universal application, then no appeals to universal conceptual laws of logic as rules to govern the intelligibility of the conversation going on.

44:25

Right. You don't have any kind of thread to string all these beads together.

44:31

Okay. Now, okay, so we talk about building an apologetic arsenal. So we can, within a presuppositional framework, appeal to literally anything, because if everything's evidence for God, then we can talk about anything.

44:43

And Bonson has spoken about in the past appealing to art, appealing to a cup of coffee.

44:51

I remember he mentioned something about just a cup of coffee and the uniformity of nature as to how it relates to causation and all these other sorts of things.

45:01

In terms of building our apologetic arsenal and being creative in ways to bring out the truth of the

45:08

Christian worldview by appealing to this wide variety of data, how might we engage the unbeliever by appealing to objective beauty?

45:16

So say you're walking in the museum with your unbelieving friend, and you begin to have this conversation about the nature of beauty.

45:23

How might that be a platform or a springboard to leap into a

45:28

Christian apologetic? Well, the assumption, of course, is they're going to use beauty in a way where they claim that it is purely subjective, and yet their usage of the term requires some objective standard for it to be properly understood.

45:51

So they're using the term equivocally. And so you can just say, well, what do you mean by that?

45:57

What do you mean by beauty? And they can't mean just that it appeals to me, because there are things that I have are clear case examples of beauty, where if somebody didn't recognize it, you wouldn't go, oh, well,

46:13

I guess beauty's one thing for one person and not for another. It's like in vacation, where they go to the

46:20

Grand Canyon, and Chevy Chase is like, okay, and he completely disses the

46:25

Grand Canyon, and then they're watching it for five seconds, and then they take off. And we laugh. That's the joke.

46:31

The joke is there's this overwhelming clear case example of beauty, and he doesn't appreciate it.

46:37

And that doesn't mean that Grand Canyon isn't beautiful. It means that there's something wrong with Chevy Chase.

46:43

That's what the joke is. That's why we laugh at it, because it's so obvious. So in fact, okay, so let's take the

46:51

Grand Canyon. If you're looking at the Grand Canyon, there is compare it to a water pipe that's running through the desert in northern

47:03

New Mexico. Okay. Why do people travel from all over the world to look at the

47:10

Grand Canyon and not the water pipe? Because they're doing the same thing. They're both functionally good.

47:19

They're both good in the sense that they have a purpose that they serve, which is moving water from one place to another.

47:27

Both the Grand Canyon and the water pipe do that. So there's a functional goodness there, and the world and environment benefits from that.

47:35

So there's a moral good to that. They both really exist, so they're both true. So in these transcendentals of good and truth and beauty, what does the

47:45

Grand Canyon have that the water pipe doesn't? And the answer is there is its beauty, obviously.

47:54

So beauty then is this gratuitous excellence that exists.

48:03

This kind of excellence doesn't make the Grand Canyon any more true or any more good.

48:14

That's one of the best ways of explaining beauty is that it's so closely related to the good and the truth.

48:22

If you've got the good and the truth, then you have beauty. One relates to the other so closely that if you've got two, you've got the other one in any instance.

48:33

In fact, you wouldn't even want to try to imagine a world without beauty. There's another way of doing it. Just do a thought experiment.

48:40

What would a world that was good in the sense that it did its job, it actually functioned and was true, so it really existed, but wasn't beautiful, what would a world like that look like?

48:58

It would be like office cubicles everywhere or something like that.

49:03

It's completely functional and no thought to aesthetics whatsoever. Nobody would want to live in a world like that.

49:11

You need that gratuitous excellence. It's not gratuitous in the sense that it's unnecessary.

49:17

It's gratuitous in the sense that it doesn't make anything more true or more good. People, even artists that I know, creatives that I know, still have a hard time buying into that.

49:32

The best way, the most effective way I've discovered to demonstrate beauty is in the existence of ugliness because there are artists who have tried to make intentionally ugly art.

49:50

Magritte had a period where he made intentionally ugly art. Frank Zappa is a great example because almost everything that he made was intended to be intentionally ugly.

50:02

He said it in interviews multiple times. All of his orchestral pieces, which were the things that were most precious to him, were intended to be intentionally ugly.

50:20

When you hear it, it's hard to listen to. It's fascinating in many ways, but it is hard to listen to.

50:27

It's intentionally ugly. The thing is, you can't make something intentionally ugly unless you have an objective standard of good to rebel against.

50:38

The fascinating thing about Frank Zappa is that, as an atheist, most of his music is meant to express the atheism in one way or another.

50:46

He does it through intentionally ugly art, but he can't make intentionally ugly art unless there's an objective standard of beauty.

50:52

You can't have an objective standard of anything without the personal transcendent God of the

50:58

Bible. For him to be able to express his atheism in ugliness, there has to be objective good, which means that God exists, the very

51:08

God that he's denying in his art. Sure. Excellent. Very good. I just think it's fascinating because beauty is something that is seen to be so subjective to a lot of people.

51:18

I like that example you used, that the failure of someone to recognize beauty doesn't mean that objective beauty does not exist.

51:25

I thought that was super helpful. All right, let's take some questions. We have a couple of questions here from folks listening in.

51:32

Nothing too difficult, I'm sure. We won't throw any curveballs at you, Doug, but we'll start with a nice soft one.

51:40

Here's a softball. I'm going to lob at you, okay? You're already laughing. All right, so Brian Stokes asked you, let me see actually, who is

51:52

Mr. Powell's favorite apologist and why? I have two, actually.

52:01

One is Van Till. He completely reformatted my hard drive.

52:07

I love Van Till. I think he's absolutely, his insights were profound for me and shaped everything for me as an apologist.

52:22

Plugged a lot of holes. Then the other is Francis Schaeffer because I love that he took that and then tried to figure out how to make it work on the ground, really dealing with people.

52:42

His commitment to answering real questions that people had in listening to him and trying to implement what he learned from Van Till, I find it was really helpful to me.

53:01

My favorite book I've ever read is How Shall We Then Live? That book completely changed my life.

53:07

How he approached the arts and applied presuppositionalism and traced philosophy throughout history, it's pretty powerful.

53:15

Excellent. Very good. Big Yehuda, how's it going Big Yehuda? His question is, how do we deal specifically and generally with the problem when the majority of biblical scholars being skeptics overwhelming us by sheer number with dishonest research cited by media?

53:32

I don't know if you understand where the question is coming from. Well, I suppose it would have to depend on the specific claims.

53:42

I don't know how to answer it like super generally. Generally, I would just say the goal in any way you answer or approach someone is to be relentlessly biblical when you speak the truth in love.

54:00

So that was, if you had to sum up Van Till's philosophy towards his apologetics,

54:09

I think he might agree with that, that it is being relentlessly biblical.

54:14

There are all sorts of clever human intellectual philosophical systems, and a lot of them have been very helpful to certain extent, but will fall short of being relentlessly biblical.

54:31

And that is where the money is for Van Till as far as I'm concerned, is that it is really hard to find where he fails on that point.

54:44

So in a general way, I would say that is how you would answer it, because if you're trying to defend the

54:51

Bible, then be faithful to the Bible. Don't accidentally scribble outside the lines if possible.

55:01

Just develop that discipline. The other is to just take it on a case -by -case basis.

55:07

It's hard to know. There's so many different challenges to Christianity and to the

55:12

Bible that you just got to take them as they come.

55:19

Sure. He clarifies, he says, mass media cites dishonest scholarship and becomes the accepted opinions among the public.

55:26

This has become very disheartening. Okay. So that one, the mass media is interested in one thing, and I don't mean to sound cynical about this, but it's about ratings.

55:46

And for somebody to get on television and say, the Bible is true and everything you were ever taught growing up in Sunday school is true and you can trust the

55:56

Bible, that's not going to generate a lot of ratings. If you get on TV and say,

56:03

Jesus was never put in a tomb after his death, but he was left on the cross to be eaten by scavenging birds or thrown in a shallow mass grave and eaten by dogs, that is news, okay?

56:18

Or at least that attracts viewers and that's the goal. So you can't buy into the premise that mass media is interested in truth more than ratings.

56:34

I don't mean to be super cynical like that, but I come out of the music business and know that it really is that cynical.

56:44

I mean, I'm projecting that onto mass media as a whole, so that might be unfair.

56:53

But I do know that when you see people like John Dominic Croson or Marcus Borg or somebody like that talking about those very things every

57:01

Easter, how Jesus was thrown in a shallow grave and eaten by dogs, they get traction because it is controversial.

57:09

It's one of the reasons why Bart Ehrman gets traction is because he says controversial things and that sells.

57:15

It doesn't sell to just say something that you were always told, even if that thing is the truth.

57:24

So the problem with mass media, as far as I'm concerned, is just accepting the premise that they're out there for your good or to inform you.

57:34

In general, it's probably not their guiding principle. I'm not saying you can't trust any of it.

57:42

I'm just saying don't think that that's why they're there. So when the mass media, when the reporter says, thank you for tuning in because you know that we care, you have to be very careful.

57:52

Our antenna goes up. Yeah, right. All right. Well, thank you for that. Test everything.

57:58

Test everything. That's right. That's right. So Jay asks, how do we respond to people who say belief in God can be explained away by neuroscience and how religion is just a psychological fluke that has evolved over time, believed by the weak minded?

58:15

You respond by saying that that is no different than the claim that people who reject

58:22

God can be explained away by neuroscience and how religion is just a psychological fluke or an irreligion or atheism is a psychological fluke that evolved over time, believed by the weak minded.

58:34

You could say the exact same thing. That's right. I think that's a great response when someone says, you know, it's all psychological.

58:43

Hey, if it's all psychological, then their position is psychological as well. Is it meant to suggest that because it's psychological, it's false, right?

58:52

So for example, neuroscience, how does neuroscience explain away religion? People have appealed to this often.

58:58

I've heard people say that they could stimulate a portion of the brain that can give the impression that you're having a religious experience.

59:04

Even if that were true, it doesn't logically follow that because someone can stimulate your brain and make you think you're having a religious experience that a genuine religious experience is impossible and nonexistent.

59:14

There's just no logical connection there. So I don't see how people can appeal to neuroscience at this point here.

59:22

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Good stuff. So I apologize. I gave the example of cheeseburgers and a cup of coffee, but someone's asking question.

59:33

Can you give a couple of silly examples of using coffee or a cheeseburger as a springboard to the existence of God?

59:39

I was joking, but I wasn't. There's actually a way to do that. As you are familiar,

59:44

Doug, that Bonson was famous for using what he called the toothpaste proof for existence. Do you want to take a stab at how one could use a cup of coffee or toothpaste or something to demonstrate

59:56

God's existence in a very thumbnail scale? I actually forget how Bonson went about that, but just the fact that those things exist at all, you have to have some kind of explanation for it.

01:00:11

The coffee comes from somewhere. The cup that holds the coffee comes from somewhere. You can't go into an infinite regress of effects.

01:00:21

The coffee comes from the bean. The bean comes from the plant. The plant comes from the ground. That comes from the seed.

01:00:27

You can't go back forever there. It's got to have a start point. Because it has a start point, there has to be a starter, somebody who is outside of the world and is an agent that can start these things.

01:00:42

So you're saying we can give a coffee cosmological argument? Absolutely. Caffeine.

01:00:47

Caffeinated cosmological argument. So you can use the infinite regress in that way.

01:00:57

But the fact that you can, well, that would be the way

01:01:07

I think would be easiest for most people I've ever talked to to go about that is using that infinite regress approach.

01:01:17

How would you do it? Well, I mean, when Bonson used the toothpaste proof for God's existence, he just appealed to the idea that when we squeeze a tube of toothpaste out of the tube, why do we expect the toothpaste to come out of the tube when we squeeze it?

01:01:32

The expectation that the toothpaste is going to come out is based upon the assumption that nature is uniform.

01:01:39

And so his toothpaste proof for God's existence was just kind of a cutesy way of demonstrating that the uniformity of nature, which we all presuppose necessarily, can only be explained in a world that is created by a

01:01:52

God who gives order to things, such that we can expect the future to be like the past.

01:01:58

And then of course, being a philosopher, Bonson appealed to the points brought up by Bertrand Russell and David Hume that there was a problem of the uniformity of nature.

01:02:08

How do we explain that the future will be like the past without a God, a personal being that you made mention of before at the beginning?

01:02:16

There is no way to contextualize that in such a way that we can expect the future to be like the past.

01:02:22

So you can take something like toothpaste and argue for God's existence because it's connected to the way toothpaste behaves when squeezed out of a tube.

01:02:31

Or coffee poured out of an urn. Or coffee or whatever. Every object that we can use, whether it's coffee, a cheeseburger, or toothpaste, or the planets, as Bonson said, all of them are subject to the presupposition of the uniformity of nature, and we would argue that it is only the

01:02:49

Christian framework that actually makes sense out of that. Now, that said, someone might hear what

01:02:54

I'm saying and say, that's a really cool claim, Eli, but that doesn't prove it just because you say the Christian worldview can demonstrate those things.

01:03:01

Now of course, there's further argument to be had to show how the Christian worldview accounts for that, but we won't go into that because it'll veer off our conversation here.

01:03:10

But that's how I would go about it. And that's part of the format of that book, The Ultimate Guide to Defending Your Faith, is that each one of those chapters, although some people treat those arguments as like a complete case in and of themselves, it's really a cumulative case.

01:03:25

So there are all sorts of different ways to approach it, and the way to know which one to use depends on the person you're talking to.

01:03:33

So one of the things that I had to come to terms with in apologetics is that there are things that I think are fascinating and really wanted answers that people don't really care about.

01:03:48

I can give answers to things that aren't questions for most people, and they don't matter, except to me.

01:03:58

So you got to be able to listen to what people are and not just twist things to what you want to talk about.

01:04:06

So arguing the necessity of logic might be powerful philosophically, but a person might not care about that and be like, they might not be able to make that connection.

01:04:16

So you actually have to reach them where they are. Right. They might glaze over, just treat it as a word game or something like that.

01:04:24

So another way to go about it, the whole coffee cup cheeseburger thing, is that those things, as soon as you say coffee or cheeseburger, you're interpreting these things.

01:04:37

Because what do you mean by coffee? Again, you're appealing to a universal there.

01:04:45

So what's the necessary precondition for universals to exist? These immaterial things that are going to exist, whether you got rid of all the coffee in the world that ever existed or not, the concept of coffee is still going to exist.

01:04:57

The universal is still going to exist. So how do you account for that? And when you say cheeseburger, you're interpreting what you see in front of you using these universals to do it.

01:05:12

So there are a few ways to go about it. All right. Thank you for that. Jay asks another, he says, backing off my last question, how can

01:05:20

I keep the faith while in high school? I've noticed so many youths emotionally charge language, such as Christians being brainwashed, weak -minded, etc.

01:05:32

Well, the way you keep the faith in high school is the way you keep it at any time, which is test all things against Scripture.

01:05:41

Be relentlessly biblical in your thinking. And the best way

01:05:49

I think to expose the bankruptcy of unbiblical thought is not necessarily to directly confront it, but just say, what do you mean by that?

01:06:03

I mean, if you've got a teacher telling you that Christians are being brainwashed, just ask them what they mean by that.

01:06:10

Or the Christians are weak -minded, what do you mean by that? Because when they do that, they're either going to contradict themselves at some point, or they're going to open themselves up to be challenged, where you can press in on them.

01:06:29

Because if they say something like being weak -minded, the implication is that it's wrong or that it's bad, or that Christians are being brainwashed and that's wrong or that's bad.

01:06:41

Well, now they're using moral categories to condemn that sort of thing, that sort of culture or behavior that they can't justify without the

01:06:51

God of the Bible. You can't use moral terms like good, bad, right, wrong, ought, should.

01:06:57

None of those terms make any sense without an objective moral standard, and that cannot be justified in any other way than a personal, transcendent, unchanging, self -existent

01:07:08

God, which is the God of the Bible exclusively. So they're still going to appeal to things that, at some point, that obviously require the existence of the

01:07:22

God of the Bible in order to support, which is the very thing that they are denying. So the best thing to do is just say, what do you mean by that?

01:07:31

Or why would you believe that? Because they're trying to show that their worldview is better, and the way you know that a worldview is true is it can explain your experience.

01:07:49

It can explain the world that you live in, the world that you have a full explanatory power of the world.

01:07:55

You have full explanatory power of your experience, and it justifies its own start point, its presupposition.

01:08:03

And that presupposition is either going to be the God of the Bible exists or the God of the Bible does not exist. And there's only one worldview that does all three of those things, and that is a biblical worldview,

01:08:16

Christianity. There are competing worldviews, atheistic worldviews that have more explanatory power than others or for the world in which we find it or for our experience, but they're never going to fully explain it.

01:08:37

And at some point, their beliefs are going to contradict each other at some point.

01:08:44

So they're going to have full explanatory power. A true worldview is going to have full explanatory power for your experience and the world in which you find it, and it's not going to contradict itself.

01:08:53

So just let somebody who is challenging Christianity talk because they're going to trip over at some point, and then you have a chance to point that out.

01:09:05

Yeah. Jesus does this often when the Pharisees said that when Jesus was casting out demons, they said, we know how you do this.

01:09:11

You do this by the power of the devil, right? And Jesus says, well, if I do it by the power of the devil, by what power do you guys do it when you're doing the same thing, right?

01:09:20

He kind of showed that their position was kind of self -refuting and was kind of silly.

01:09:25

So Doug made a great point where he says we need to be relentlessly biblical. To be relentlessly biblical also requires us to be relentlessly logical because the

01:09:35

Bible is true. The Christian worldview is true. The hallmark of truth is consistency, right?

01:09:40

We are called to be consistent in our thinking and also to show inconsistencies in others.

01:09:46

So I think pointing out some of the illogical nature of some of the points here, for example, the claim that Christians are being brainwashed and Christians are weak -minded is completely irrelevant as to whether Christianity itself is true.

01:10:00

And so I think it's very helpful to just make that logical point that the claim of brainwashed Christians and weak -minded

01:10:06

Christians is completely unrelated to the facts. So let's talk a little bit about the facts, right?

01:10:12

I think that's an important distinction to make because he's right. A lot of people in schools and in other contexts, people bring a lot of these emotional arguments.

01:10:21

I think it's a helpful thing to point out that, hey, that's an emotional argument that has no bearing as to what

01:10:26

I'm saying being true or not. I think that's a very important and helpful thing to point out. So I would say that that's one of the ways you can keep the faith in high school.

01:10:34

Also being rooted in Scripture and Bible doctrine and prayer, having the spiritual disciplines, these sorts of things.

01:10:42

So keeping the faith in high school is not simply an issue of apologetics. It's also an issue of spiritual development and maturation.

01:10:49

We need to be in the Word and we need to be in contact with God in prayer and fellowship with others. So I think that's a very important point to keep in mind.

01:10:56

All right. Thank you for that, Doug. And let's see here. Arthur Bear asked the question, how would you prove the

01:11:03

Bible is true without a subjective proof to prove the Bible is true? Sorry, my dog was trying to answer that question.

01:11:14

That would have been impressive and probably a piece of evidence for the existence of God. Yeah. Well, her name is

01:11:20

Lucy and she's covered in fur, so we call her Lucy Fur. Okay.

01:11:26

How would you prove the Bible is true without a subjective proof to prove the Bible is true?

01:11:32

I'm not 100 % sure I understand that question. Subjective proof. I'm not sure what they mean by that.

01:11:41

But I guess I could point back to Paul, and the point that I made that if anybody ever had a conversion experience that they could point to as evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity, it would be

01:11:54

Paul. And he does not do that because it is so subjective. So when somebody says, why do you believe that?

01:12:04

That's not the question that they're actually asking. They're asking, why should I believe what you believe?

01:12:10

And those are two entirely different answers. Because the reason why Paul believes it is not the reason why

01:12:16

I should believe it or anybody else should believe it. And he understands that. And so he doesn't give the subjective answer of his experience.

01:12:26

What he does is he gives the objective answer of here's the evidence. You could actually go check it out.

01:12:32

This stuff happened in this place at this time. These people saw it. You could do the investigation.

01:12:38

You go check it out. That's how firmly he believed it. And that evidence is still evidence.

01:12:49

You couldn't go talk to those witnesses and you couldn't investigate it in the same way.

01:12:55

But the facticity of those claims is still something that can be tested.

01:13:01

And if we just reduce it to the resurrection real quick, we could talk about how the minimal facts show that the vast majority of New Testament scholars do accept about a dozen claims within the

01:13:18

New Testament surrounding Jesus' death and resurrection as factual, and that using only about six of them, you can show that any of the alternate claims that New Testament scholars have come up with to explain what happened after Jesus' death in a way other than resurrection, like he didn't die on the cross, he just swooned, or the body was stolen, or the sightings were hallucinations, or the story about the resurrection as legend, all of those things, any one of those stories does not explain the facts that the

01:13:57

New Testament scholars who are skeptics say are facts. So they accept only a very small number of the facts, and these facts are facts because they're in more than one source.

01:14:07

They're in the Bible and outside the Bible, and at least one of the sources outside the Bible is from a hostile witness, like a

01:14:15

Jewish tradition or something like that. So that's why these facts are accepted as historical facts.

01:14:23

So now with these historical facts, how are you going to explain them? And what

01:14:29

Gary Habermas has argued pretty persuasively is that no matter what theory you come up with that denies the resurrection, it doesn't explain those facts.

01:14:46

And so you can still appeal to those historical facts that Paul was appealing to to this day, and if you can come up with a story that explains those facts in any other way than resurrection, then you've disproven

01:14:59

Christianity. That's how powerful those facts are. Very good.

01:15:05

I was thinking too, the question here, it says, how would you prove the Bible is true without a subjective proof?

01:15:11

Well, easy. Prove it objectively. Don't use the subjective proof.

01:15:17

Bonson says, with respect to the transcendental argument, he says that I believe that the Christian worldview is objectively provable.

01:15:24

So yeah, we don't need to appeal to subjective forms of argumentation, appeals to experience to prove the

01:15:30

Bible is true. We have arguments that we think objectively demonstrate the truth of the Bible. And so that's one way

01:15:37

I would - And that goes back to that test for a true worldview, okay? The Bible is true.

01:15:44

One of the ways you can demonstrate that is that explains the world that we live in.

01:15:50

It has full explanatory power for where everything came from and why it is what it is.

01:15:58

It describes our experience in the world accurately. It does not contradict itself.

01:16:06

And the presupposition that it's grounded on, which is the belief that the

01:16:12

God of the Bible is true, grounds all of these things. So those three things together make it a unique worldview.

01:16:22

Right. All right. Thank you for that. I'm just going to take a quick stab at this one because I kind of will promote my online class.

01:16:29

Question, in his opinion, and you could share your opinion by the way, what is the best free or cheap online apologetics course?

01:16:36

Well, cheap is going to be relative. Cheap for one man is not the same cheap for another man.

01:16:42

But if you're interested, I actually have, I offer an online course. I teach an online course with recorded lectures, PowerPoints, outline notes that are sent to you once you sign up.

01:16:51

You can sign up for PresuppU on revealedapologetics .com. And that's a five -week course, a lot of content there.

01:16:59

That's one way to do it. In terms of free, maybe Doug can let us know a cheap or free resource that folks might find helpful.

01:17:08

But you probably know better than I, and I'd sign up for your class. But there are lots of good resources out there now.

01:17:16

It's a podcast. Stand to Reason with Greg Kokel, he's like the best short answer apologist around.

01:17:25

I think he's incredibly helpful. The White Horse Inn is a great resource for your theology and the

01:17:34

Core Christianity podcast as well. There's quite a few of them on there.

01:17:40

I haven't looked in a while, but iTunes University, I don't even know if that exists anymore.

01:17:46

They probably ported it over to their podcast or whatever. But there are a lot of theology and apologetics classes that were just free on there for a long time.

01:17:58

You could learn not just apologetics, but you could take systematic theology, you could learn

01:18:04

Hebrew, you could learn Greek. It's a great resource. Sure, absolutely. I used to use iTunesU, but I know there are seminaries that have apps that give almost all their courses.

01:18:16

So RTF, Reformed Theological Seminary, has entire courses on apologetics, Christian philosophy,

01:18:22

New Testament. Covenant Theological Seminary does as well. Covenant Theological Seminary. If you're disciplined and you want to work your way through that informally, yeah, there are a lot of great resources out there.

01:18:32

However, I do encourage a little more structure. It can be a little unstructured and kind of chaotic when you're just kind of diving into it randomly.

01:18:42

So you might want to look into enrolling in a course. I mean, the reality is you get what you pay for. If you're looking for free stuff, there is stuff out there, but you're going to have to navigate the threat of chaos and not really knowing how to kind of systematize it all.

01:18:56

So that's just kind of a word of caution there, but it's not impossible. I graduated from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary and I took one course in apologetics.

01:19:04

Most of my apologetics was learned through online resources and podcasts and things like that.

01:19:10

So it's not impossible, but again, you get what you pay for and there's a lot of free resources out there as well. So, all right, cool.

01:19:18

I think that's the last question here. If anyone is interested in signing up for my online course, I did post a link there in the comments so you can check that out.

01:19:25

And if it's not your cup of tea, that's okay as well. But Doug, I think we're here at one hour and 20 minutes.

01:19:31

So I think we're coming towards the close here of our episode. And I just want to let you know that I've greatly enjoyed this conversation.

01:19:38

I hope it's been wonderful for you as well. I had fun. Thanks for having me. And I think you did an excellent job and you've given folks a lot of food for thought.

01:19:47

And I really like how you, you see when I have some guests who can be very academic and very sophisticated, but for the average person, it's really hard to kind of take that information and make it useful.

01:19:58

So I really love how you are able to simplify the complicated and how you are pragmatic in your approach, but not simply pragmatic.

01:20:07

Obviously, we're not looking simply for pragmatism, but we do want to use what we can given the situation, depending on who we're speaking with.

01:20:15

I think you capture that flexible and pragmatic approach in a simple way of explaining these concepts.

01:20:20

So I appreciate that. Oh, well, thanks. I'm glad that was helpful. Awesome. Well, folks, if you have enjoyed this conversation, please click the like button, share the content.

01:20:31

I mean, this is super important. If you think what we talk about here is useful to people, share the videos, get the content out there, download the podcast.

01:20:41

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01:20:50

If not this channel, go to another apologetics YouTube channel that maybe you're benefiting from and you think is super useful.

01:20:56

I think it's very important that you support ministries like this because there are a wide range of apologetic ministries that are just doing such awesome work.

01:21:05

So it definitely needs to get out there more. Well, that's all for this episode. I just want to thank

01:21:10

Doug one more time. Thank you so much. I think you did an excellent job, and perhaps I could have you on in the future.

01:21:16

We could talk about something else. How does that sound? Okay. I'm not sure what we didn't cover, but that'd be great.

01:21:22

There's always something to talk about. We've talked about apologetics, but perhaps maybe we can cover some topic in theology or something like that.

01:21:29

So that might be fun. You know where to find me. Thank you. No problem. Well, that's it for this episode, guys.

01:21:36

Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you. That's all for tonight. Take care. God bless.