Covenantal Apologetics Stated and Defended: Eli Ayala & Scott Oliphint

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All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala. And today

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I am super excited to have a guest with us, Dr. Scott Oliphin of Westminster Theological Seminary to discuss what is popularly known as presuppositional apologetics.

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But of course, anyone familiar with Dr. Oliphin's work, they will understand that he's not a big fan of the terminology and I agree with him.

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The term does have some ambiguity in it. And so he has kind of worked towards changing kind of the nomenclature there into a covenantal apologetics, which

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I think grounds the methodology in scripture. And so I very much resonate with that.

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And so we're going to just welcome Dr. Scott Oliphin in just a few moments. If you're wondering, you're seeing my face on the camera there and Dr.

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Oliphin has had a makeover. He, now he just looks like a gray circle there. He will not be appearing via video, but his audio will be there.

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And so I'm sure this video will still prove useful as well. Those of you who are also following the

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Revealed Apologetics podcast, I will be taking this audio and putting it up on the podcast as well so that anyone who is interested can avail themselves of this material.

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Also, just before we formally introduce Dr. Oliphin, he will be taking live questions.

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So if you have any questions, you can put them on the comments and then we'll put them up on the screen. Just as a heads up, we are taking questions that are pertaining to apologetic methodology, not some idiosyncratic view that, you know,

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Dr. Oliphin may or may not hold and get into some of these other side issues. So I want to try and keep the questions specifically to our topic at hand.

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I greatly appreciate that. And of course, keep your questions succinct and short and to the point.

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Without further ado then, I'd like to welcome Dr. Scott Oliphin. Why don't you say hi to the audience there and tell folks a little bit about yourself if maybe they don't know who you are.

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Right, thank you. Yeah, I'm currently at Westminster Theological Seminary, professor of apologetics and systematic theology.

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I've been here since 1991, originally born and raised in Texas.

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And we moved here in 91, have three children and 11 grandchildren.

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So that's the story. Okay, living the life, man. Yeah. All right.

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And you are a proponent of what some people would call

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Vantillian apologetics. Why don't you define for us your specific flavor of presuppositionalism and then we'll take it from there.

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Okay. Yeah, well, I hope it's not my flavor.

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What I hope to do is take Vantill's approach and make it more accessible, more explicitly theological, more understandable.

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And so one of the things that I recognized early on when

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I was thinking about apologetics, this was before I even came to Westminster. So it was over 30 years ago that I was speaking to a well -known apologist, name's not important, but he was not happy with Vantill's approach.

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And so we were speaking together and he said, so are you a presuppositionalist? And I said, yes.

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And he said, so are you Schaefferian or Carnelian or Clarkian or Vantillian?

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So off he went and listing these things. And that's the first time I'd heard that. I'd read Schaeffer, but I just hadn't organized things in that particular way.

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And it bothered me a little bit because I knew enough about Clark and Carnel.

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And as I said, I read Schaeffer to know that there were significant differences, whatever the overlap between those men, there were significant differences.

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So I think what the word presuppositionalism does is it provides a kind of overarching category for just about anybody who thinks presuppositions are important.

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And that's not really what Vantill was after. So the term itself was one that was actually given to him in the late forties, you may know, in an article that was printed.

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It was said orally before that, but it was printed first in the late forties. He was called a presuppositionalist and it stuck and Vantill didn't mind.

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So he just let it stick, but it wasn't a term that he himself gave to his approach. And I think one of the problems with it, let me just say, first of all, of course the label is gonna stay.

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It's been there, it's sort of written in our history and history of apologetics. So it's going to stick around.

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I think that's an unfortunate fact. It's going to stay, but it's so ambiguous, number one.

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It includes, I think, a kind of breadth that doesn't help in specifying what it is.

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I'm not against breadth. I'm just saying the label itself is too broad to really specify what

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Vantill was up to. And I think the third thing, almost as important, is that it gives the impression that apologetics is primarily, if not exclusively, philosophical.

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And it's just not. I mean, apologetics has had to deal with philosophy through the years and centuries because philosophy has been known to attack

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Christian belief. And if you're gonna attack Christian belief philosophically, it's a good idea to answer it philosophically if you're able to do that.

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But apologetics isn't fundamentally philosophical. It's fundamentally

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Christian and biblical. And I think the word presuppositionalism is just a long, philosophical, abstract, ambiguous term that is of virtually no help in our day and time.

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I mean, I hear people say this still. They say, you know, I have presupposition, so I'm a presuppositionalist.

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That's not what it means. Or back in the heyday of postmodernism, people would say, well,

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Vantill was the first postmodern because he recognized that everybody has their own interpretation of the world.

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That's not what he's saying. That's not it either. So Vantill's gotten a lot of bad press, a lot of misunderstandings out there that remain.

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There's a cultural narrative that's taken hold that just perpetuates itself about all the problems with Vantill's view.

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And I think most of those, I'm not trying to be naive here because I know there'll always be detractors, but I think most of those could be cleared up if the discussion revolved around theological and biblical concerns in the first place.

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And then if we want to move to philosophical things, we can do that or others can do that if they want to. But the primary impetus behind everything

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Vantill did was who God is and the authority of his word.

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And those are the two foundational presuppositions of everything that happens and everything that is in the world.

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And without those, there is nothing. So all he was trying to say to us is those have to be our presuppositions, our foundations, not only when we're living in this world that God has made under God's authority, but also when we're speaking to others who don't want to abide by that authority or who don't believe in God or who aren't sure whether there's a

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God. In any case, the fact of the matter is still that God made the world, he is who he is, and he has said what he says, and what he says is the truth from Genesis to Revelation and what he says in creation is the truth.

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So those are all theological points, biblical points that need to be stressed. Right, and I think the biblical aspect's very important.

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This is one of the reasons I have to be careful not to say presuppositionalism. I do agree with your way of phrasing it.

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So what drew me closer to covenantal apologetics is it's very biblical nature, but I think a lot of people's access point to presuppositionalism is often through that philosophical route.

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And of course, Van Til's language is just covered with idealistic philosophical vocabulary of which he didn't hold to those idealistic philosophical systems and points, but he filled it with Christian meaning because as you know, he was very much bathed in scripture from his youth, and these were the categories that he thought.

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But I think it's very important that we get back to those scriptural issues. And just another point too,

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I think, and I agree with you here, that the term presuppositionalism is very ambiguous. I've heard people equate presuppositional methodology as fideism because they define presupposition as an assumption that is taken on its own authority and you cannot validate it externally.

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And so they'll say you just, it's kind of like an, they'll equate it with like an axiom, which is by definition, unprovable. And so is that something you see people make mistakes at the scholarly level as they critique it, or is this just more at the popular range?

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Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's at all kinds of levels. Once you tell somebody that my responsibility is to presuppose the truth, and in speaking to people who don't believe in God or who don't believe his word, that we're presupposing those things, their automatic reaction is, well, then you've got nothing to say to somebody who doesn't believe it.

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Well, you've got a world of things to say to somebody, literally a world of things to say to somebody who doesn't believe it, because even in their unbelief, they are still having to presuppose the existence of God and what he has said.

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Now they don't believe that, but the presupposition at that point is more dealing with the state of affairs than it is their own belief system.

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And I think that's a legitimate way to talk about presuppositions until it does it that way. So there's no leaning toward fideism here.

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It's just, to me, it's another one of those narratives that's out there that people wanna use just to try to sort of throw an ad hominem out and dismiss it because who would believe in fideism?

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It's that sort of boogeyman that they put out there. Faith is important. Christian faith is necessary to us.

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But to say that presupposition is fideistic is really to take it out of the Christian context altogether.

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That's right. Okay, just a real quick shout out. They're just gonna give two books here for people who are interested.

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This comes highly recommended by Dr. Olyphant. It might be his favorite apologetics book, Christian Apologetics by Norman Geisen.

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I'm just kidding. If you guys are interested in Dr. Olyphant's work, you can definitely check out his book,

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Covenantal Apologetics, Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith. One of my favorite definitions of apologetics is

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I heard it from you first, Dr. Olyphant. And again, it just gets back to this issue of the biblical nature of the presuppositional method is that in one context, and you can maybe expand on this, you defined apologetics as the application of biblical theology to unbelief.

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And I really liked that. Why don't you expand on why you phrased it that way, or maybe I'm misquoting you and you wanna clarify. No, thank you.

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Yeah, and again, what I'm trying to do is, I think Van Til would say amen and amen to that.

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What I'm trying to do is try to help people understand that if all of us as Christians are required by scripture to do apologetics, 1

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Peter 3 15, then God has given us what we need to do it. And what we need is the truth of his word.

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Of course, we need the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. And when you have those things, then you're capable.

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And then what do you do? You bring in the other things that you know, maybe you're an expert in computer science.

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So you're able to talk to somebody in that field. Maybe you are an expert in philosophy, so you can deal with these things philosophically.

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But whatever else you bring in, those are sort of addenda to the foundation, which is biblical truth.

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So what we're doing in apologetics, because it's Christian apologetics, is we're trying to help people understand why we believe what we do.

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And if we don't believe what we do, we really have nothing rational or cogent that we can believe.

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That's a kind of impossibility of the contrary. That's what Van Til liked to call it, sort of transcendental. And that's a nice way to think about it.

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If we really believe that Christianity is true, and we do, we don't believe Christianity is true because we believe it.

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It was true whether we believe it or not, but we believe it's true because it's the only position that's cogent and rational according to what

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God himself has said. So we can't just measure rationality as some sort of neutral thing, because we've seen in the history of thought where that's gone, that always devolves into an utter subjectivism, and nobody can live with an utter subjectivism.

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So we understand that what is rational is what God has said. And if we don't understand God in that particular way, then we really have nothing but our own subjective belief.

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And people recognize intuitively because they're made in the image of God and know God, they recognize they can't live with an utter subjectivity.

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No one operates that way in the world, no matter what they wanna argue. Now, when people come into contact with presuppositional methodology, there is often a blurring of the lines between presuppositionalism as a methodology and the transcendental argument as a specific argument.

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Why don't you explain for us, is the transcendental argument equivalent to presuppositionalism, or is it an application of presuppositionalism in a particular instance?

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So are you familiar with the conflation of those two concepts? Why don't you kind of iron that out for us? Yeah, I am.

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And I'm, I guess, true confessions here, I'm not terribly interested in the transcendental argument side of folks.

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Nothing against those. I mean, people can make those applications and that could be -

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Come on, I love the president's life. Come on, man. Yeah, no, but okay. So having spoken of it in that way, let me tell you what

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I think Van Til was trying to do was something different than what these folks are trying to do. And again,

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I wanna say, if you can do it, do it and more power to you, it's just not my particular interest. But what

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Van Til was up to, and again, this is because you alluded to this earlier, this is because of his training.

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His training, you know, he moved from Calvin College reading

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Bob Ink and Kuiper to Princeton Seminary. And at Princeton Seminary, he became a little uneasy because especially in his apologetics course with William Brenton Greene Jr.,

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he was getting common sense realism. And that can be proven. That's not debatable because at least in our library here at Westminster, we have the syllabus from William Brenton Greene's apologetics course.

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He's getting common sense realism and that disturbs him because he says, wait a minute, the reform stuff

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I was reading at Calvin doesn't comport with this apologetic methodology. Now, if you read

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Van Til's works, he praises his apologetics professor. So there's nothing personal here, but he recognized some inconsistency.

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So he leaves Princeton Seminary and goes to Princeton University and writes his dissertation on idealism,

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God, the absolute. So it's Christianity and idealism. In other words, idealism is not

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Christian. And there were some during Van Til's time who were saying because idealism touts an absolute, it really is

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Christian because we believe God is an absolute. Van Til was saying, no, no, no, that's an absolute that requires a relative. God doesn't require a relative.

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God is absolutely absolute requiring nothing else. He's in need of nothing at all. He is,

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I say, is, and always has been. So when Van Til's reading all of these authors of idealism, one of the things that he becomes very astute in is

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Kantian idealism. Now, Kant's philosophy is very technical and difficult for anybody to understand.

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But one of the things that Kant was trying to do in the wake of David Hume's empiricism, which had led people, even during Hume's time, led people into utter skepticism.

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So just for your listeners, in Western history, and again, this is a gross generalization, but I think it has some truth to it.

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The rationalists tried to show that everything could be understood strictly by way of the rational axioms or by way of the intellect.

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Begins with Descartes, I think, therefore I am. That proved to be a failure.

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So along come the empiricists, and it was sort of gradual from Locke to Berkeley to Hume.

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And by the time Hume comes along to try to be a consistent empiricist, what he finds out,

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Hume himself recognized this. He says, I go out of my study and play backgammon, and then I come back in my study, and none of my philosophy makes any sense because he was arguing for the non -reality of cause and effect and things like that because they can't be proven empirically.

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Well, that leads you to skepticism. So Immanuel Kant is studying away, interestingly, he's studying metaphysics, nature of ultimate reality, and he comes across Hume's writings.

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And what does he say? He says, Hume woke me up from my dogmatic slumber. So what did Hume do?

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He woke Kant up to the reality of the problems of metaphysics.

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And so Kant begins to develop, in his critique of pure reason, what he calls a transcendental approach.

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And the reason I use the word approach is because it wasn't in Kant's day meant to be a strict, formal, logical method in the way that there were other formal, logical methods available to people at that point in time.

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But it was actually meant to be, transcendental approach was meant to be an argument that showed how, unless you presuppose whatever

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Kant thought you presupposed, unless you presuppose something, let's keep it general, then you can't prove anything else.

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So that any proof has itself a foundation and a presupposition on which it rests.

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Now for Kant, that was a convoluted series of qualities and conceptual ideas.

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So Van Til takes that, it's a long answer to your question, but Van Til takes that idea of transcendental and he says, wait a minute, that's really what we're saying in Christianity, that unless you presuppose the reality of who

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God is on the basis of what God says in his inerrant word, unless you presuppose those things, then things like logic and the empirical, the rational, these things sort of float in the air and have no real foundation.

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So again, I wanna say, people that are wanting to try to formalize transcendental argumentation, that's great.

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I'm just saying, that's not my interest. What Van Til was up to was, you have to have those, this is a necessity of the created order.

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You have to have those things, who God is and what he has said, and those things have to be laid out side by side because you can't have one without the other.

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Who God is and what he said, given that then we can properly understand logic and the empirical, the rational, without those things, it's impossible for those things properly to be understood.

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So the transcendental argument can be formulated as a specific argument, but you would say that what

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Van Til was thinking was, he was trying to present to us a biblical way, the way we must think, that we find ourselves in this context in which these things must be true in order for anything else to be true.

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So in one sense, generally speaking in conversation, we present the Christian way of thinking and outlook and why it's a necessary foundation.

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But perhaps some people have tried to formalize that within a different context, maybe in a debate or trying to make a point to an unbeliever.

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Yeah, good way to put it. Exactly right. So again, the latter, the one you mentioned that nothing wrong with that, but what

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I'm saying is, Van Til didn't have interest in that. I don't have particular interest in that. What Van Til was trying to say is, you could put it this way, this gives some objectivity to it.

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Van Til would say, look at the history of philosophy, all right? They've had 4 ,000 years at least in the

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West to work on three basic questions, the nature of ultimate reality, the nature of knowledge and the nature of ethics, right and wrong.

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They've got those three categories. Where are they 4 ,000 years later? They're still wondering about the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge and the nature of right and wrong.

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Now, what's the problem? The problem is that philosophy itself has failed to give an account of those things.

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And the reason for that, and I'm speaking generally here, of course, you've got all these sorts of specifics underneath that that you can argue about, but the reason that there has been that failure, the reason that Descartes couldn't prove what he wanted to prove, the reason that Hume couldn't get to where he wanted to get to, is because they were all trying to do this without recognizing that this is

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God's world, God has spoken, there's a connection between a human being and the world because God has created that connection covenantally at the beginning and maintains and sustains it all along.

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Unless you have those things that sort of transcend the subject and the object, there's no way to bring the subject and the object together.

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So that's why Van Til called it the impossibility of the contrary. Any position contrary to the

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Christian position is impossible consistently to believe and to live.

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That was the point he was trying to make. So that's the impossibility of the contrary. All right, so let's jump into this now.

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So, because primarily this show is apologetic in nature. So if someone asks you, from a presuppositional perspective, how do you know

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Christianity is true? I'm an atheist, I don't believe all this. You guys give cosmological arguments, this, that, the other thing.

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I don't see how you Christians can demonstrate that your perspective is true. I know you guys believe it.

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I know you guys are very passionate about it, but I have yet to see an argument that can demonstrate conclusively that Christianity is true.

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What say you, Dr. Oliphant? Yeah, well, as you know, there are about 100 to 200 ways to begin to address that.

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One of the things I try to impress on people, I'm not an expert in this by any stretch of the imagination, but one of the things

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I try to impress on people is one of the first things you ought to do is ask questions to the questioner.

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So I would say something like this. Could it be possible that the reason you don't see it lies in yourself and not in the arguments themselves?

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Is it possible that there's something wrong with you and that's why you don't see it? Or is it just strictly that there's so much wrong with everything objective you've looked at that there's no possibility for you to see it?

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And he would say, probably it's all the objective. And then the next question would be, so what will it take, in your mind, for you to believe this to be true?

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What exactly do you need in order for you to believe this to be true? So let me respond with a popular answer that people who do apologetics on the internet would be very familiar with, okay?

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I don't know what it would take to convince me of your God, but if your God exists, he should know.

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That's a popular one. People will say so. So how would you respond to that? I would respond by saying, well, again,

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I could ask some questions, but I don't wanna be too obnoxious here. But instead, when I got to the indicatives, one of the things

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I would say is, guess what? God does know, he knows exactly, and he's already told me.

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And by the way, I can tell you what he said about that. So this is not, God is not the problem here.

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It's not that God hasn't made himself known. It's not that you don't know who God is and yourself to be a creature of God.

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It's that you have an innate capacity and desire to subdue and rebel against what

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God himself has done. There's a way out of that. But if you really wanna be out of that, you've got to listen to what

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God has said about it, not reject it. Now, if someone says, okay, I guess I kind of see where you're trying to get with that, but what's your argument, man?

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Give me premises, I wanna follow your logic because we can have this conversation back and forth. You could ask me questions that maybe

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I can't answer, fine. But give me an argument that God exists. How would you do that from a presuppositional perspective?

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Yeah, well, I mean, you could do it a number of ways. So I'm talking to you, a hypothetical person here.

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I don't know much about you. So maybe I could talk to you a little bit about my own testimony, all right?

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So that's not illegitimate, that's an argument. Okay. But if I didn't wanna do the experiential,

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I could do the more objective and say something like I said to you earlier, I would say something like, tell me what's happened in the history of philosophy while philosophers have been trying to wrestle with the nature of ultimate reality.

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What is their conclusion? And I would ask this person, what is their conclusion and what conclusion do you find tenable?

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And why would you find it tenable? So I would wanna put the burden back on them. Then they would say, no, no,

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I'm talking about you. What's your argument? And I would say, here's my argument. My argument is this, the reason I'm asking you those questions is because it is not rational for me or anyone else to, in and of ourselves, by ourselves, rationally produce the conclusions necessary that would compel us to believe in God.

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That's not possible. Can you repeat that again? I'm sorry, I think that was important. Maybe. It's not possible for you or for me to assume that we can rationally produce in and of ourselves the conclusions necessary to produce rational belief in us.

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That's not possible. So basically you're saying, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it's impossible to produce an argument to get to that conclusion autonomously, in and of ourselves.

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So you're pushing the point that if we wanna go that route, we need to already rely on the context of the reality of Christianity.

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Yeah, that's exactly right. And I may say something like, the reason you're having such a problem here is because in your attempt, whether it's sincere or not, in your attempt to say,

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I want a rational argument, underneath that attempt, what you're saying is, and don't you dare tell me who

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God is and what he has said. And I'm saying to you, if you won't let me say that, then you have disallowed the possibility of belief in the first place.

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Okay, in other words, give me an argument, but don't bring in this revelation stuff. And you're saying that unless you start with that revelation, you can't even reach any, not just the argument to conclude that the

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Christian God exists, without the Christian context, you couldn't rationally conclude anything because you lack that worldview context to ground the very things we're engaging in.

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That's right. And I would say, you don't have the right in our discussion to tell me to disallow what I'm saying to you is the only possibility of rational belief.

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You don't have the right to do that. So if you don't wanna talk to me, except in your terms, then let's go have a cup of coffee and we'll have another discussion later when we can have a meeting of the minds.

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Okay, so that's good for an everyday sort of conversation. Like, hey, listen, we have that foundation, we ask these questions.

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What about within the context of an actual debate? How would we structure more formally what you've just said?

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Is there a way you can lay out? Because basically what you're giving is a kind of transcendental argument and couched in conversational language.

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But if we were gonna engage in a debate, maybe let's throw a bone to some of our internet apologists who engage in these things in this context.

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How might they construct a logically structured argument transcendentally? Is it possible to formulate a transcendental argument deductively in which you lay out a deductive argument and defend one of the premises transcendentally?

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What are different ways and different routes that some apologists can use in that regard? Yeah, I think your latter question, yeah, it's possible.

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Again, I'm not as interested in that. It's possible to lay some of those out. I think the quintessential example that probably most of your listeners know about is

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Greg Bonson's debate with Gordon Stein. I think one of the reasons that that turned out so well is not only that Greg was such a good debater and a capable apologist, but it was also that Stein had no idea what was coming at him.

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So he sort of assumed he had a standard tomist on stage with him and it just so happened,

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Bonson agreed with him that those proofs are useful and off he goes. But when you listen to Greg in that debate,

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I mean, he's got it exactly right. At one point, maybe it's not in that debate, but at one point when he's debating, he says,

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I wanna thank so -and -so for being here. You've just proven the existence of God. What's he doing there?

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What he's doing is trying to help people recognize that if you're an atheist and you come to a debate, you're already presupposing that there's meaning in what you and I are saying, that when the words leave my mouth and reach your ears, that they're the same word and that you can understand that and communicate back.

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None of that makes sense on an atheist worldview. So I think part of what you would wanna do that Greg was so good at was try to show people how their worldview is in reality, number one, meaningless and number two, meaningless because it's based on their own presuppositions, which are nothing more than subjective decisions and biases that they've chosen.

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So, you know, Ventile would say, you know, I've got, I have presuppositions that are necessary in order for me to speak, in order for me to know, in order for me to live, in order for me to recognize anything.

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Tell me about your presuppositions. What are those? And Ventile would say, let me get on your ground. Let me get on the unbeliever's ground and let's work with this a little bit and see how this goes.

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And, you know, you really don't have to get that complicated when you get to the end of it because as Schaefer liked to say over and over again, your basic option is time plus chance plus matter.

30:58

And there's not much else available to you at that point. And if that's all you've got, you know, you've got a lot of chemicals sort of mixed up in a bottle and that's who we are.

31:08

Now, of course, agnostics and atheists are gonna reject that, but you wanna try to find out why and how they reject that.

31:17

And that's where the asking questions comes in. And this is an important point too. And I just wanna speak a little bit to people listening is that you don't successfully demonstrate the truth of your position merely by asking questions.

31:30

This is one of the things that accusations that are made towards many presuppositionalists online that we just are following this script to trip up the unbeliever.

31:38

Questions are asked for a purpose. They're not just for setting up a trapper or avoiding having to kind of put forth your own positive case.

31:47

I think asking questions is vitally important in clarifying and even using that kind of Socratic method of asking questions so as to allow the person who you're engaging with to understand, oh, wow, that is problematic within my view, you know?

32:01

Ask them the question and the manner in which they answer it actually is its own refutation. I think that's very, very important.

32:08

Okay, I'm just gonna stop. Yeah, go ahead. Did you wanna follow up on that? Yeah, I just wanna say one thing. You're exactly right. So one thing you might wanna do is say, let's say to the person you're talking to, let's do it this way.

32:20

I'm gonna ask you a series of questions and I'd be very interested to answer. Then when I'm through, please either use those same questions or ask me your questions and then we'll have some substance of debate in order to go back and forth.

32:32

So the questions I'm asking you, please feel free to ask me because I'd like to give you answers to those as well.

32:37

That's another way to think about that. And then you're into a real debate and a real argument about assumptions and ideas and presuppositions, all sorts of things.

32:44

And that's not because you want to avoid giving an argument. I think you're trying to get to the foundation that why go through an argument that will not address the issues because you have not first addressed the foundations that affect how we're going to even interpret those arguments and engage in the premises.

32:59

Right, and as I was saying to you earlier, unless you lay the ground rules for that, you're not gonna be able to get into discussion in the first place because typically what the other person is doing is gonna disallow you to presuppose what you know you have to presuppose in order to have discussion at first.

33:14

All right, excellent. Let's take a few moments to take some questions if that's okay. We're gonna put it up on the screen there. And I would imagine you're not gonna say pass, but if there's a question, you'd be like,

33:23

I don't know, we don't know everything, but you're a pretty sharp guy. So I hear. You don't know everything, that's for sure.

33:31

That's right, that's right. Okay, so here's a question. Daniel asks, what is the role of arguments outside of the transcendental for believers and atheists?

33:40

So basically, as presuppositionalists, are we only relegated to using different forms of transcendental arguments or is there a place for other sorts of arguments outside of that?

33:52

Yeah, again, I think it's a really good question because I wanna say this in the proper way.

33:59

I don't wanna sound negative here, but we don't need to make too much of the transcendental. The transcendental is very important,

34:06

I think, for those who understand it properly, as the impossibility of the contrary because it recognizes

34:11

Christianity is true and nothing else is. That's an important point to make and that's an objective point.

34:16

That's true whether we believe it or not. But I would say, again, I'm trying to make things here as accessible as possible.

34:25

Look at the way Jesus argues. And he has different ways of arguing with different people, but when he's arguing with the

34:36

Sadducees about who's this woman gonna be married to, what does he do?

34:42

He goes right to the Pentateuch, which is what the Sadducees believed in. They didn't believe in the rest. And he talks about why their belief in no resurrection, and he basically concludes how their belief in the resurrection, in no resurrection is absurd based on their own

34:57

Pentateuch. That is based on what they claim to believe. So what's he doing there? He's persuasively turning their own views against them in order to apply pressure to not believe those views anymore.

35:11

And he's doing it with what they themselves claim. So I would say one of the best arguments that we see in scripture over and over again is those who use what the others believe in order to show the reality and truth of what we believe.

35:30

That's a kind of persuasive subversion that I think can be used very well in apologetic discussion.

35:37

And you don't even have to talk about transcendentalism if you don't want to. I think that's a nice way to begin to think about argumentation.

35:45

I'm working right now on a little book on apologetics and persuasion. I hope it'll be a little clearer to me and everyone else by the time

35:53

I'm finished with that. But I think it's sometimes a missing link in our apologetic discussions.

35:59

Mm, very good. Again, there's another question by Daniel. He's a nice guy.

36:05

He has really good questions. And I like to promote his questions because he's asking basically what a lot of people ask.

36:11

So I hope you don't mind seeing the same guy pop up multiple times. But okay. Well, if he doesn't mind seeing me at all.

36:18

That's right, that's right. Real quick, I just want to give a shout out to another book that you contributed to.

36:24

And I just finished reading your section, which I thought was superb. Again, I don't want to make your head too big, but greatly appreciated.

36:32

In the book, Debating Christian Religious Epistemology. Debating Christian Religious Epistemology.

36:38

Dr. Olyphant has a chapter there where he defends, let me find the name of the chapter here, a covenantal epistemology.

36:48

That's right. And I just got finished reading it and it is a superb article or section in the book.

36:54

And definitely will answer a lot of these other questions that we might not have addressed yet, but are definitely prevalent in these discussions.

37:00

So definitely check that out. Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to say it might be of interest that that was the title given to me by the editors when they asked me to do it.

37:11

They said, would you write a chapter and defend a covenantal epistemology? So I was happy they did that because that's what

37:18

I would have wanted to call it. And so it was really fun to interact with those guys, differing views on Christian religious epistemology.

37:24

Now, I haven't read your interactions yet. So I'm gonna make sure I avail myself of that because I thought your chapter was excellent here.

37:31

Now, here's a doozy. Again, I don't know how familiar you are with popular discussions on presuppositionalism, but these are the sorts of questions that a lot of people are asking, believe it or not, this issue of the one and the many.

37:43

So here's the question. Should Christians present things such as the one and the many problem in Islamic debate or not?

37:50

To what extent should these philosophical things be brought up? Now, before you answer the question, I do understand that there are different routes you can take.

37:56

You can say, well, we shouldn't bring those issues up because it kind of sidetracks from some other issues.

38:02

But why don't you address the usefulness of the issue of how the Christian worldview can ground this one and the many issue, whereas this might be problematic and perhaps useful to bring up in certain contexts.

38:12

Why don't you address that issue? Yeah, thank you. I think

38:17

Ben Till actually struck on some genius here when he began to think about these things because again, he's a fully reformed

38:27

Christian man. He understands that the doctrine of God is not an abstraction.

38:33

He doesn't, he's not interested in dealing with a kind of natural theology proper that has just philosophical moorings and really can't get to the

38:40

Trinity. And that's the way, that's the methodology that was used in some of the medievals.

38:47

And even if they didn't mean to do it, what they, what began to happen is that there was too much of a distinction, sometimes even a methodological separation between God as one and God as three persons.

39:01

So what Ben Till does is he starts then, he says over and over again, that we are meant to presuppose the triune

39:08

God of scripture and that his starting point is not with one, but his starting point is with one in three.

39:16

And as he begins to think about that, that God is one in essence, three in persons, it also strikes him that reality has the same kind of structure to it.

39:28

It's analogous, it's analogous, it's not in any way identical. But if we reckon and understand that the

39:35

Trinity is like God incomprehensible to us, we don't know how it can be that the father can be fully

39:42

God, the son fully God, the Holy Spirit fully God, and not three gods. We articulate that by way of essence and persons or usia and subsistence.

39:52

We have all kinds of ways, hypostases, all kinds of ways of articulating that as we need to do.

39:59

But even when we say that, we still don't know at bottom what we're talking about.

40:05

We know who we're talking about, but we can't get to the bottom of that. So it's mysterious. So Ben Till looks at the way philosophy has worked historically in trying to deal with this problem.

40:16

And his famous foils are Parmenides and Heraclitus. Parmenides was the person who wanted to emphasize one and only one and being is, and anything that is not being by definition is not and therefore is nothing.

40:32

So there is that which is and then nothing else. And that just summarizes everything into one abstract blob of oneness.

40:41

And Parmenides recognized that the empirical would show you something different. And he says, well, that's

40:47

Parmenides, that's the common way. In other words, yeah, for idiots like you and me, we have to go with the way the world is.

40:53

We just have to navigate it that way. But for the philosopher kings, the way we understand these things is by our intellect.

40:59

And we know that being is and nothing else could be that one of those kinds of. So Heraclitus, the opposite direction,

41:07

Panta Re, everything flows, everything is in flux. So it's not that there is one, but there's many.

41:14

You can't, the illustration, you can't step into the same river twice. You put your foot in, you pull it out, you put in a nanosecond later, it's a different river.

41:22

How do you bring these two together? That's what philosophy has been attempting to do with mainly with prejudice to the one, but in our contemporary era, a lot of prejudice to the many.

41:34

How do you bring these two things together? The universal and the particular. You have a tree outside your window and you say, there's that tree, but in order to identify that tree, you have to know something about tree nests and you have to know something specific about that particular tree.

41:51

So not only does it participate in tree nests, but it participates in L nests or something like that.

41:58

How do you bring these two together? Van Til's point was you like analogous to, okay, just analogous to God as one in three.

42:08

It's not humanly possible to reduce one to the other, nor does God want us to do that, to reduce the tree just to itself without any tree nests or to think of tree nests as the real tree like Plato would do without reference to the specific thing.

42:26

So that's kind of the one of the many, in sort of a general overview. How important is it in Islam?

42:37

I think it just depends. I think I have a chapter in Covenantal Apologetics, seventh chapter, where I do a hypothetical dialogue with the

42:46

Muslim and that issue doesn't really come up in that dialogue. It could have, it's hypothetical.

42:52

So a hundred other things could have happened, but what I try to do in that dialogue is show from, quotations from an actual

43:01

Muslim scholar show that the problem with Islam is it's inconsistent and I would say it's irrational rationality.

43:13

That is, it tries to be overly rational, which is why it's going to reject the Trinity and in trying to be overly rational, it really can't even make sense of the

43:23

Quran. I mean, it's not even able to help us recognize what the

43:29

Quran is, much less what it says. So I think the one of the many, again, is a sort of a genius of Bantil.

43:36

I think it can be used in apologetic discussions, but I think one of the things we don't want to do in our apologetic discussions is force the issue when it's not really what people are dealing with personally.

43:51

How stressing is it? How much sleep do I lose over the one and many problem? Not very much, really.

43:57

Okay, I'm gonna take two more questions for now. There's a lot of questions coming in. These two questions are taken from Pine Creek.

44:04

He is a skeptic. I believe he's an atheist agnostic and he's got somewhat of a YouTube presence and he's asking a question.

44:10

I think it's a good question and would be a good opportunity for you to clarify. And so he asked the question regarding circularity.

44:17

If you need God, let me put this up here. If you need God to justify logic, then you can't use logic to justify

44:24

God without being circular. Does Scott agree? Perhaps you can say if you agree or not and then kind of qualify that if you understand what he's asking.

44:32

Yeah, I mean, part of the, a good question. I think part of the issue here has to do with our terms.

44:39

So let's not talk so much about need, but let's say, as I believe, that God is the one who creates everything that is and including our way of thinking.

44:48

And one of the ways that he has embedded our thinking is logically, that is we are made to make distinctions.

44:57

And when God made Adam and Eve, he made a distinction between Adam and Eve and he made a distinction between Adam and Eve and creation and the different species that he created.

45:07

All of that is God helping us understand that our thinking is analogous to his own thinking.

45:16

So I think without that, again, as Bonson, I think helpfully showed in his debate with Gordon Stein, that without a foundation like that, then it's difficult for someone to show how the abstractions of logic actually fit in the created world.

45:37

Van Til's famous phrase was, he called logic a turnpike in the sky. And somebody asked him, why do you use that illustration?

45:45

Why is it a turnpike? Why is it in the sky? And he says, because you can't get on it. And what he meant by that is in his study of logic, and I think it's still true, we're talking very generally here, but I think it's still true that logicians have a difficult time moving from the symbols to reality.

46:02

So what is taking place actually in the world when things are changing?

46:08

I mean, Heraclitus was right on one level, everything that we see around us is changing to some extent.

46:15

And so how do we think about those things? My eldest son is a philosophy student, getting a

46:23

PhD in philosophy. And one of the courses that he took a couple of years ago was a course called Vagueness. And I said, what in the world?

46:29

It's an entire course. It's a whole course. And I said, what in the world is going on in Vagueness? And he said, well, it's the reality that we really aren't able all the time to think in a binary way,

46:41

A and not A. So at what point, this desk in front of me, let's say I cut it in half, and now there's half a desk, but there's still a desk there that I can put things on it.

46:51

And I just start slicing, slicing pieces of it, moving toward the edge.

46:57

At what point does it cease to be a desk? Well, it's kind of vague. And there are a lot of answers to that.

47:04

Maybe it's not a desk after you cut it in half. Maybe now you've got a half a desk. So you've got this kind of vagueness in reality that's not quite as conducive to A is not non -A as some people want to think.

47:16

Now, having said that, we're made to make distinctions like A is not non -A.

47:21

So I'm not saying at all there's anything wrong with those. I'm saying those things have to be grounded. And if they're grounded in the character of God, then we recognize, again, there's something transcendental that supersedes the subject and the object and helps us to recognize how properly to use logic.

47:40

So real quick, Dr. Oliven, why don't we simplify that then? So if someone says, if you need God to justify logic, then you can't use logic to justify

47:48

God without being circular. Is that true or false? If it's true, is that an issue?

47:53

Is it an issue of being circular when it comes to our ultimate foundations? Is it fallaciously circular to be circular with regards to our ultimate foundations?

48:02

Well, it's sort of like saying if your questioner used air to breathe in order to write his questions, that he's being circular in justifying the reality of air for life.

48:22

There are certain things, as many philosophers have pointed out, whether you buy their arguments or not, there are certain things that are by nature circular because of the way

48:33

God has created the world. And yes, there's a fallacy of reasoning in a circle when the circle is vicious, but circularity in and of itself is not logically fallacious.

48:47

Why don't you explain that for people? What's the difference between what people say, virtuous circularity and vicious circularity?

48:54

What's the difference there? And why is one fallacious and why is the other one not? Yeah, well, I think the main reason is because in vicious circularity, you stop at a place where you've started and in each of those, the stopping place and the starting place, there's no foundation or ground available to you.

49:17

So again, the illustration of the dog chasing its tail, you know, why would you do that?

49:23

That's kind of a viciously circular enterprise with no meaning because why? You've got no context in which to make that meaningful.

49:31

There's no foundation there in order to understand that properly. A virtuous circle means that when you presuppose, as we do, that God exists and that he has spoken in his word, and then you don't even have to say that when you're in the midst of an argument, but then you start to discuss things with people about maybe who

49:59

God is or what logic is with your questioner there and how to think about logic. And that person says to me, well, so you're presupposing

50:09

God in talking about logic. And so you're using logic in order to talk about God.

50:15

And I would say, yeah, because there's no other position available to us in the world that God has made and you and I as God's creatures.

50:24

So in that sense, we're not in the midst of a vicious circle, but we're presupposing something. And then given that presupposition, we can talk about anything in the world, but just because we're talking about those things or using those things doesn't mean that the circularity nullifies the argument in any way, shape or form.

50:42

Again, it's like, you know, prove to me the verifiability or the trustworthiness of the empirical, prove that to me without using the empirical.

50:52

You just can't do it. It's because we're made in a particular way. God's put us here in a particular way.

50:59

And so there's nothing wrong with that. That's the way God has made man and woman. All right, great stuff.

51:05

And I hope that's answering many of your questions. Again, we're not gonna be able to get to everyone's questions, but I will every now and then scroll up and down to find something that I think would be useful for people.

51:16

Let's get back into our main discussion. I wanna talk a little bit about not so much presuppositionalism and kind of like explaining the ins and out of it.

51:24

Since you kind of did that, there's obviously more that can be said with regards to that if people can avail themselves of the books that are out there and articles.

51:31

Let's talk a little bit about the comparison between the presuppositional method and the classical method which is usually the other side of the coin for a lot of people.

51:40

And I want you to be able to define as briefly as you can, presuppositionalism, and it's okay if you rehash a little bit about what you've already mentioned, but very distinctly, and then classical apologetics.

51:51

What are the key differences? And as a presuppositionalist, what concerns you about a classical approach?

51:57

And when I say concern, I don't mean we're painting our side versus their side.

52:02

From our perspective, what are some of the concerns from an apologetics and biblical context of using that methodology?

52:09

And then we can kind of dig into those in a little more detail. Yeah, okay. So when

52:15

I talk about Van Til's approach, again, I say that there are two primary things that we recognize.

52:23

Foundation that we stand on is who God is and what he has said. Without those two, we've got nothing to say.

52:31

Without those two, we don't even exist. So that has to be basic. Now, when we say that, when

52:37

I say that, that doesn't mean that's the first thing we say in a conversation. It just means when we're in our conversation, we can never leave that foundation really and truly.

52:48

We can leave it, Van Til says, for argument's sake alone, get onto the foundation of somebody to whom we speak and begin to talk about their assumptions and their ideas and their views.

52:59

But in doing that, we're always standing where we have to stand, which is God is who he said he is and God has spoken.

53:06

So that's my view of a kind of covenantal approach. Those things are necessary, important, without which we cannot be,

53:15

I think, covenantal apologists. The classical approach, again,

53:21

I hate the word because it just depends on who you're referring. It tends to refer to a certain view of Thomas Aquinas.

53:33

Now, it's a view of Thomas that's out there among Thomas. There are other views of Thomas that wouldn't be as enamored with some of Thomas's five ways or would want to see them differently.

53:47

But the way that I learned Thomas when I took a course on Aquinas at Villanova from Thomas, a very respected one and a fascinating teacher, the way

53:58

I learned Thomas is that he taught me that Thomas's five ways were meant to move you to the existence of a

54:08

God. And the five ways would be first mover, that one's pretty much out because it's sort of antiquated, but you've got causality, contingency, the nature of being or the gradation of being and teleology design, those four.

54:29

I think one of the problems with the classical approach, the way

54:35

I try to put it in my classroom is if you're, we have students from all kinds of theological backgrounds and many, many countries at Westminster.

54:47

So there's a variety in the classroom. And so I tell students, if your basic approach to theology is more

54:56

Arminian, then you should not be a covenantal apologist.

55:03

And then I say, but I'm gonna try to make you one by the time we're finished with class. But if your theological leaning is

55:12

Arminian, then you probably ought to be classical. So that kind of gets to what

55:18

I see as at least two of the main problems in a more classical approach, if we think of it as generally

55:25

Thomistic. The first one is I don't see anybody in the classical side of things taking

55:34

Romans one seriously. The fact that Paul is clear that all people know

55:42

God and it's not that all people have the potential of knowing God. This is not a capacity that might possibly be filled if we have the proper experience.

55:52

That's some people's way of understanding what Paul's up to there. That's not what he says. As a matter of fact, he says, we know

55:59

God and it's that knowledge of God for which we will be held accountable on the day of judgment.

56:06

So we remain inexcusable. We're inexcusable because God's revelation in and through creation gets through to us, whether we like it or not, because it's

56:15

God doing it, it gets through to us and therefore we know him. Now, the question would be, and Calvin was brilliant on this, what would that do to our apologetic and our discussion with people if we knew that the ones to whom we speak actually know

56:33

God, but suppress that knowledge in unrighteousness? It doesn't mean that we come right up to them and say, hey, you know

56:39

God, but you're suppressing it. That's not the point. But the point is we know the ones to whom we speak know

56:44

God and that what they're giving us in their own philosophy, their own understanding of the world, their own unbelief, what they're giving us is actually a suppression of the truth and unrighteousness rather than the truth.

56:56

So you don't see that in classical apologetics. The second thing you don't see, that I think is just as important, is you don't see a robust understanding of depravity in the classical apologetics.

57:08

So what you tend to see in a classical approach is the view that our reasoning capacity is basically intact and able in and of itself to understand the world properly and to understand any arguments properly so that we really don't have to include

57:27

God and who he is and what he said and what he's done in our argumentation because our mind is perfectly capable in and of itself of coming to the proper conclusions.

57:38

So I think in the classical approach, those two things are sort of problematic.

57:44

With regards to that last thing you said, I do hear often the accusation of presuppositionalists conflating ontology and epistemology.

57:53

And there are those who make the distinction between the necessity of God as the precondition for intelligibility versus the necessity of presupposing

58:02

God in order to have intelligibility and things like that. Well, what is the accusation really?

58:09

I mean, as you understand it, what are people saying with regards to what they think we are doing by conflating ontology and epistemology and what's up with this issue of the existence of God being the necessary precondition versus the assumption of God, the presupposition of God being the necessary precondition?

58:29

People tend to make a kind of a conflation there. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.

58:34

And again, we have to be clear when we can about what we mean by presuppose. Van Til uses it in two or three different ways.

58:43

One of the ways he uses it is a presupposition is what I actually believe foundationally and that informs everything else that I believe.

58:53

So that's a kind of subjective aspect and that's exactly right. That's the typical way it's used.

58:59

But Van Til also says that unbelievers presuppose

59:04

God even in their rejection of God. Now, what could he mean by that? He's not saying there that the presupposition in that sense is subjective.

59:15

What he's saying is, again, what Bonson was saying, thank you for coming to this debate. You've just proven the existence of God.

59:22

In other words, in order for us to have any meaning whatsoever in what we say as human beings, what we do as human beings, the

59:31

Christian story has to be true and God has to be who he says he is. So that's kind of more of an objective scenario.

59:39

And I think what people have said to me is, you confuse the ontology with epistemology because I knew a lot of things before I became a

59:47

Christian. So, and I didn't presuppose God in all of those things that I knew. And my point is, you knew all of those things if you did and when you did, only because Christianity is true and God is who he says he is.

01:00:01

And you came to recognize that when you were converted to Christ. So those things were already in play.

01:00:08

That's what I mean by presupposition. The reality of that state of affairs was already in play as you were living and moving and having your being.

01:00:17

That's Paul's point in Acts, isn't it? So the reality of the existence of the triune God, now

01:00:23

I'm speaking to people who ask these questions in different contexts. And so you might be wondering why I'm bringing this in, but the triune

01:00:29

God creates that ontological context where oneness and manyness is equally ultimate, correct?

01:00:35

So that's true regardless if you're living, for example, in the Old Testament time, right?

01:00:41

If the triune God is a necessary precondition for knowledge now, then it must be the case that the existence of the triune

01:00:48

God of scripture is a necessary precondition back in the Old Testament times. So with regards to knowledge, having knowledge in the

01:00:57

Old Testament, what do we do with Old Testament prophets, for example, that didn't really understand God as triune?

01:01:03

In what sense do they have knowledge if they're not consciously acknowledging God's triunity, which is connected with the one and the many issue, which in turn is related directly or indirectly to the epistemological issue?

01:01:16

Yeah, well, as I think you know, revelation is progressive in history.

01:01:23

God didn't say everything at once. He could have. I mean, he could have just easily in the garden after Adam and Eve sinned, he could have just said, here's the

01:01:31

Bible, go read it and do what it says. He could have had it all there. He chose not to do it that way.

01:01:36

He chose to reveal to the fathers through the prophets. And in that revelation,

01:01:42

God's people are always and only responsible for what God has said at that point in history.

01:01:49

So everything that they were meant to know, they had available to them by God's revelation.

01:01:56

Now included in what God says to his people from Genesis forward, included in that, as Paul makes clear in Romans one, has always been the revelation of God that comes through creation.

01:02:08

Paul says, since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, eternal power, divine nature, have been clearly seen.

01:02:16

So there's never been a time, again, Paul in Acts 14, there's never been a time when God has been without witness.

01:02:22

So knowledge of God has been intrinsic to the human condition, since God blew the breath of life into Adam and then from Adam, Eve, and each of them became a living soul made in the image of God.

01:02:39

So in that sense, we've been people who know God at the point of self -consciousness.

01:02:44

If we know ourselves, we know God. And then on top of that, included in that has been

01:02:50

God's active speaking to his people from Genesis one, all the way through and then post -fall,

01:03:00

God speaking to his people in redemptive history. So maybe Isaiah didn't have the availability of a one and many argument, but he certainly had the recognition that reality is what it is because of who

01:03:15

God is and what he has said. And that's the fundamental presupposition for all of us throughout history.

01:03:21

Now, let's dive into a little bit. This is something that comes up often, and it's an issue, two things that I wanna ask.

01:03:28

And I think this is a great opportunity to clarify is we say, for example, in accordance with Romans chapter one, that all men know that God exists and they suppress that knowledge in their unrighteousness.

01:03:38

But in what sense does the unbeliever know that God exists and doesn't know

01:03:44

God, right? When we talk about these things, there's a way in which he knows and a way in which he doesn't. And what is the content of that knowledge?

01:03:51

Is the knowledge of God that the natural man is suppressing? Does that involve God's triunity? What is the boundary line with regards to what can be known about God that is known to the unbeliever such that he's without excuse?

01:04:06

Right, yeah, and it's a good question. And my standard answer to that question is this.

01:04:12

We don't have the option to begin to create categories and lists that scripture doesn't clearly give to us.

01:04:23

So I wish I knew the answer to all those questions. Van Til says that one of the most difficult questions that we face as Christians, and especially in apologetics is the question of human knowledge.

01:04:34

God hasn't given us a whole lot of detail on what people are always thinking or on what an individual thinks at a particular point.

01:04:43

But the list that he does give us in terms of the suppression of the truth is that what people know, and I think we have to say this would likely vary in people's lives according to what

01:04:56

God is doing in the world and then in their lives individually if they're not trusting in him. But they know his invisible attributes, his eternal power, his divine nature.

01:05:05

So there's never a point when we're speaking to somebody at which they don't know those things about God.

01:05:11

And in knowing those things about God, it includes the fact that they know that they're creatures of his.

01:05:18

And therefore they owe him, they're obligated to be obedient. That's Romans 1 .32.

01:05:25

So not only do they know him, but they know his righteous requirements.

01:05:31

Paul says Romans 1 .32, the dikaioma as he says it there, the Greek word is the righteous requirements of God.

01:05:38

That's given in natural revelation. So everybody that we go to and speak to, everybody that listens to us should recognize that God has said that they know him and they know what he requires.

01:05:53

Certainly not in every detail, but enough to know that when they see him on judgment day, they will not be able to say,

01:06:02

I can be excused because you didn't tell me enough. I can be excused because I didn't know what to do. Nobody's going to be excused because God has made himself known.

01:06:11

And the dynamic there that Paul gives us Romans 1 .18, the wrath of God is being revealed as sort of a dynamic thing that God is doing in and through the world.

01:06:22

It's a process taking place that all of us are confronted with. So just a nice relevant example.

01:06:29

What in the world, literally, what in the world is going on with this virus? Well, we know this is going on.

01:06:35

God is in the business of getting people's attention in various ways.

01:06:41

And when he gets people's attention across the world in this kind of way, where we recognize our helplessness in the midst of something like this that we can't see, our first reaction ought to be to hit our knees and repent and understand, yes, not only am

01:06:56

I not in control of this virus, I'm not in control of anything in the world, but God is, and it ought to press us to know him.

01:07:06

So, you know, what is that? So the virus is a revelation of the wrath of God in history because it's a product of sinfulness, wouldn't be doing what it's doing if we hadn't ruined what

01:07:17

God had made. So it's a revelation of the wrath of God. And what that ought to do is not make us suppress who

01:07:24

God is, but make us turn to God and repent and believe. All right, now let's shift a little bit to I think what is an underdeveloped area within the presuppositional methodology, at least,

01:07:36

I mean, again, I'm speaking in terms of just the popular accessibility of it all. I mean, with regards to some of the scholarly work,

01:07:43

I'm not sure how much work is done in this area, but there seems to be a common misconception that presuppositional apologetics, various forms of the transcendental argument in particular works well with the atheist, but what do you do when you have other religious perspectives that vie for plausibility with regards to its ability to ground things like logic, like, you know, rationality and things like that?

01:08:10

How might we apply a presuppositional approach? And even if we were so inclined to use a transcendental argument, how would we apply that to different religious perspectives?

01:08:22

Yeah. Great. Boy, I wish I could have the knowledge to go through every one of those and let you know, because there are so many religious perspectives, aren't there?

01:08:33

Just grab a couple. You can grab a couple of example, you don't need to be exhaustive, it's okay. Yeah, right.

01:08:38

Well, I think what Jeff Durbin has done with respect to Mormonism, he's applied this in significant ways and has a real ministry in that context.

01:08:48

And what I tried to do in my book with the fellow that I invented that I speak to about Islam, what we need to recognize in every one of these religious contexts is that Christ is not savior.

01:09:05

And see, I think when sometimes we can get so mixed up with the intellectual side of this, that we miss the actual point of what the problem is.

01:09:15

The problem in every other religion is that Christ is not savior, really and truly.

01:09:20

And so one of the things we wanna try to do is we presuppose who God is and what he's done, is help people recognize that with that presupposition comes the reality that the only way our sin can be taken care of is if Christ is who he said he is.

01:09:37

And if he's done what he said he's done. And so if we wanna talk to some Muslim about the

01:09:45

Quran, they think they're exalting Christ by calling him a good prophet.

01:09:52

And I think we need to help people like that understand that's not an option biblically.

01:09:59

And I remember hearing a converted Muslim say, he said, Muslims have no problem at all with the

01:10:05

Old Testament. And my reaction was, well, that's perfect because guess what, Christ is in the

01:10:11

Old Testament and the reality of our need for salvation is in the Old Testament. So let's talk to a

01:10:18

Muslim about the Old Testament since they don't have a problem with it and show them who Christ is and show them what he is going to do in light of what the

01:10:26

Old Testament is telling us. That's the way I think we need to try to approach religion. The advantage we have with religions is that they have their books and sometimes it includes the

01:10:37

Bible, but if it includes the Bible, the Bible is never central. They have their books and we have our book.

01:10:43

So what we need to recognize theologically is that at any time when we communicate the truth of God's word to people who are outside of Christ, that truth makes its way and always accomplishes what

01:11:00

God sends it for. That's Isaiah 53. So there's no point at which the truth of God is going to fail.

01:11:05

So the more we expose them to the truth of God, the more we are quote unquote successful in that the

01:11:14

Holy Spirit will use that for his own sovereign purposes. So it's just a continual, I think a continual discussion about what

01:11:22

God himself has said in his word. And then, you know, if we want to get on their turf and say, so why do you believe you don't need a savior?

01:11:31

Or why do you believe sin is not as a dire as what our Bible says it is?

01:11:36

Why do you think sin's just sort of not a big deal? You know, you can begin to talk about those kinds of things and help people understand as much as we're able humanly that without Christ, we're blind and we're deaf.

01:11:48

Hmm. Those of you who heard Dr. Oliphant mention Jeff Durbin, we're gonna be having

01:11:53

Jeff Durbin on the 29th to discuss specifically a presuppositional application to different areas of unbelief.

01:12:01

And so - Tell him more for me. I most definitely will. And so we'll be addressing those issues, which

01:12:06

I think is worth an expanded discussion, guys. What I'm trying to do is get people more aware of a more intellectual presentation of the presuppositional method.

01:12:18

I know there are a lot of different attempts in employing it in different contexts. And of course, those attempts should be lauded.

01:12:26

Obviously, we should all be engaging in apologetics, but I do think that there are useful ways that we can do it in terms of clarification and application in areas that are not normally seen, you know, used in that way.

01:12:38

We also have Dr. Michael Kruger as well, who will be talking about presuppositional application to the issue of biblical canon.

01:12:46

So I think the awesome thing about presuppositional methodology is its great breadth of application, which is just waiting to be tapped into with regards to at least the popular level apologetics, which we very much appreciate the work that many scholars are doing in their specific areas.

01:13:01

So hopefully this material will get out there and people will be able to benefit from it and use it in a way that is consistent with 1

01:13:08

Peter 3, verse 15, it's injunction to do apologetics with gentleness and respect.

01:13:16

And that goes for the people in the comments as well. I would imagine that Dr. Oliphant would agree with me that it is very possible to engage in apologetics unbiblically.

01:13:27

And that includes the manner with which we engage, not just the content of our argument.

01:13:35

All right, well, let's take a couple more questions and then we'll wrap things up because I do want to respect your time, Dr. Oliphant.

01:13:41

And before we do end and take some questions, I do want to thank you for just sacrificing your time.

01:13:47

I know that you're really busy. One would think you're just probably home playing video games because you're quarantined. What else do you have to do, right?

01:13:54

You know, not that, not that. Are you a movie guy? Do you watch movies on your spare time? What do you, let me ask a quick side personal question.

01:14:01

What do you do for fun, Dr. Oliphant? Well, you know, because I'm a theologian, we define our terms, don't we?

01:14:09

So what do you mean by fun? I'm actually having a great time writing on my current book that's already late and meant to be submitted.

01:14:21

So that's great fun. But sure, my wife and I, we relax. We take walks.

01:14:27

When I'm not confined by a virus, I play handball with a group of guys nearby.

01:14:33

Yeah, I've been playing that for a while. That kind of keeps things going. And you know, if I'm stressed or something,

01:14:38

I can attach a certain name to the ball and hit it against the wall. And that's a good therapy for me.

01:14:45

I'm teasing about that. But you know, those kinds of things. Yeah, certainly, you know, I'm not immune to watching movies by any stretch.

01:14:53

Okay, I would never have taken you for a handball guy. That's kind of like, you know, you're in like Manhattan somewhere with, you know, in the park somewhere.

01:15:01

That was definitely out of left field. Well, I'm sorry people don't play it more. You know, it's become, racquetball's become the big thing now because it's easier and, you know, you don't have to do much to play it.

01:15:13

But handball was the original game. And unfortunately, it's not as popular because it's, you know, it's not easy to learn and it's kind of hard on your body.

01:15:21

But it's a great game. It's fun to play. Well, I think you'll appreciate this here after you just expressed what you do for fun.

01:15:28

Someone here put there, Matt Yester says, Dr. Scott, I'll have fun. That's a really good one.

01:15:36

All right, so let's take some questions and comments here. Let's see here. Daniel is asking a question here.

01:15:44

It may be a big one, but if you can just be as distinct as possible, could you explain Van Til's rejection of Aquinas' first way?

01:15:52

Maybe this person's writing a paper and wants a quick answer. Maybe you can briefly summarize that.

01:15:57

I mean, feel free. I mean, I'm saying briefly because I'm assuming you probably have to get to other things, but I can technically be on here with you for quite a long time.

01:16:06

So go for it. Yeah, okay. The first way, so, you know, this is the world

01:16:14

I live in. The first way was actually arguing for motion. That one's kind of gone by the boards. People don't talk about it much anymore because it had a sort of antiquated view of motion.

01:16:22

The second way is from causality. The fourth way has more to do with the gradation of being.

01:16:28

So I'm not exactly sure exactly what he's asking, but let me just say one thing because I won't be able to say everything here.

01:16:38

In covenantal apologetics, one of the things I do is I show the classical approach.

01:16:43

I actually use a real live example of a classical approach on causality. And I go through that.

01:16:50

It's a transcript of an actual event that happened. And then what I do is say, now, if you're going to be covenantal about this approach, here's one possible way to apply it.

01:17:01

So I do try to show that the theistic proofs, Van Til would say this over and over again, the theistic proofs are objectively valid.

01:17:09

The problem with the proofs, one of the problems with the proofs is they can't do what they're supposed to do if you begin with a kind of neutral notion of rationality.

01:17:20

And I think that's what's been shown in the classical approach. And that would be Van Til's primary objection.

01:17:27

All the proofs, all of the five ways and other apologetic approaches, more evidential approaches, is that if you start with a kind of presupposition of autonomy, that you can figure this out yourself or that you have the rational ability to start from premise one and to conclude for the existence of an infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient

01:17:48

God. You just don't have the tools in and of yourself to do that. We just don't have a way theoretically, methodologically to jump from the finite to the infinite, from the temporal to the eternal, from the changeable to the immutable.

01:18:04

We just don't have a way to do that. So that was his problem. But if you presuppose the existence of God and then talk to someone about causality or contingency and necessity, then you can move a ways with that and begin to discuss that.

01:18:19

I tried to work that through a little bit in a Four Views book that I was involved in a couple of years ago on Christianity and philosophy.

01:18:28

And I interacted with Graham Oppie some on that. And his view is basically all that is is matter and there's nothing but matter.

01:18:36

And I was trying to show him that there really was a need for something necessary if what we have in the world is nothing but contingency.

01:18:48

And I use that, I think, in a presuppositional way and just trying to show that he really, his way is no explanation.

01:18:55

It's just kind of stating the facts of the matter, but it really doesn't help us with explaining what's going on.

01:19:02

And he said at one point, I think he said, if I were really pushed, I might go for some sort of beginning point for contingency, but that's as far as I could go with it.

01:19:12

Well, that's okay. But the point is if you presuppose who God is and what he said, then things like causality, necessity, contingency, teleology, those things take their proper context and you can discuss them.

01:19:23

Right, by his light, we see light, right? He provides that context. Here's a, not a question, but a really, this is why

01:19:29

I like to do this, these kinds of things. Spartan Theology says, great interview. I'm really trying to understand the methodology better.

01:19:34

And this channel has been very helpful. Well, mission accomplished. That's the goal. That if people are understanding the methodology, even if you don't agree with it,

01:19:43

I hope you agree with it. I think it's a biblical method, but if you don't agree with it, mission's still accomplished if you accurately understand the perspective.

01:19:53

So thank you, Grant. Can I give you one suggestion? Sure. This is a book that a former student of mine just published.

01:20:02

It's called Every Believer Confident. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the author is

01:20:07

Mark Farnham, F -A -R -N -H -A -M. He's really trying to do what you're doing, make this accessible for the church and his book,

01:20:17

Every Believer Confident, is a really nice, easy intro into a lot of these ideas.

01:20:23

So I would highly recommend it for people who are interested. Can you say the name again there? Yeah, Mark Farnham, F -A -R -N -H -A -M.

01:20:32

He teaches at Lancaster Bible College and does a lot of work in apologetics over there.

01:20:37

He's just a fabulous guy and really a good thinker on these things. Okay. All right, thank you for that.

01:20:42

And here we have another comment from Pine Creek. Maybe you could address it. It's a comment, not so much of a question, but I think someone could form it in a question here.

01:20:50

Pine Creek says, "'Presuppositional apologetics is ineffective "'for all worldviews in terms of changing minds.

01:20:56

"'Dr. Scott Olyphant became a Christian years "'before he learned about this apologetic.'"

01:21:01

If we could restructure that into a question, what do you think this person is getting at? Yeah, I understand what he's saying because before I was a

01:21:10

Christian, I didn't care about apologetics and I didn't think I had a worldview. And then the

01:21:16

Lord changed me and reached in and grabbed me. And then I began thinking about other people who also need

01:21:24

Christ like I did and wanted to talk to them about their need for Christ. And in the process of those discussions, by definition,

01:21:34

I would get into debates about things, you know, not because I wanted to, but because we're talking about, you know, two vastly different worldviews.

01:21:43

And in getting into those debates, I became more and more interested in apologetics. I wanted to know more and more how best to articulate what

01:21:51

I believed and what I was saying and how to help people understand that better. Also how to understand people better when

01:21:58

I'm articulating these things. So I think apologetics like evangelism is a tool that we use as Christians, that we're supposed to use as Christians.

01:22:08

And then I think I have to say, given all of that, even when we use those tools, the one who changes minds is

01:22:17

God himself through the Holy Spirit. He uses his truth to do that, but apologetics in and of itself won't change minds, but apologetics that is rooted in scripture can be used by God to change minds and to change hearts and to bring people to himself.

01:22:32

Right, and here's another question that Pine Creek asked. Could a diune or a tetraune

01:22:38

God be sufficient precondition for intelligibility? I guess it's kind of a variation on the, well, suppose you have a

01:22:45

God who has some sort of grounding for oneness and manyness. Why couldn't these options possibly fit the bill?

01:22:54

Why does Christianity with their triune God necessarily have to be the case? Yeah, and the short answer to that is because a diune or tetraune

01:23:05

God would be an idol. That's not who God is. God has told us who he is.

01:23:11

We don't have the option of redefining him so that our methodology conforms to our redefinition, but God is who he is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one

01:23:21

God. So anything else would not be the God of scripture and would not be the

01:23:28

God who's revealed himself in the world and through his word. So by definition, it would be utterly idolatrous and ineffectual.

01:23:36

I think also another issue with this, when someone tries to posit another option for the necessary preconditions of intelligibility,

01:23:42

I wonder if the person suggesting this hypothetical option himself holds to that option. Because if he's granting, perhaps this other thing can ground intelligibility.

01:23:50

Are they also implicitly admitting that their current position does not ground the very intelligibility of their questions since their question is formed from a worldview perspective?

01:23:59

Good question to ask. You can't float in between worldviews and ask these questions from a neutral perspective, which

01:24:06

I think is very important to keep in mind as well. All right, there are a couple of questions about regards to your views on simplicity, but I don't wanna touch on those because they are outside the bounds of what we really tried to do here.

01:24:19

But - I affirm it, by the way. I'm sorry? I affirm it, by the way. Divine simplicity.

01:24:25

Okay, I'm sure someone will say, well, what kind of divine simplicity? Yeah. Let me tell you something.

01:24:31

Every person that I've had on this show, someone has messaged me and said, be careful with that person. This person holds to, and then they'll go off to some other.

01:24:39

So I guess we could never have anybody on the show because someone is a heretic in someone else's eyes. So -

01:24:44

Yeah, it's a rough world out there. It is a rough world there. Okay, so let me wrap things up here.

01:24:50

Dr. Oliphant, thank you so much for coming on and giving of your time. I know that you're a busy man and I'm sure that people will find this one hour and 25 minute or so interview very, very helpful as we've covered a wide range of topics.

01:25:06

Just real quick, in terms of encouragement for people who want to continue to study apologetics and the presuppositional method in particular, do not merely be a podcast and YouTube channel apologist.

01:25:18

You do want to first acknowledge the usefulness of things like this, but you definitely want to engage in some of the reading and more in -depth study if you're able to do that because there's much more to flesh out.

01:25:30

It does not do justice to the topic to just merely do an interview here for, even if we did it for three hours, we couldn't exhaust all of the possible issues that are related to this.

01:25:39

So with that said, is there anything you'd like to say in closing, Dr. Oliphant? No, just thank you for your work and what you're doing.

01:25:46

And I'm sorry to say I wasn't familiar with it, but I'm happy to see this kind of thing being done. So thanks very much.

01:25:52

Well, thank you so much. If you could just stay on just for a few moments as I end the broadcast, we'll still be in kind of that unlive studio where it'll just be you and I, and then we will part ways from there.

01:26:01

Thank you so much, guys. If you have any questions for me with regards to possible guests or apologetics questions or things like that, you could email me at revealedapologeticsatgmail .com

01:26:11

and stay tuned for upcoming interviews. We have Dr. James Anderson from Reform Theological Seminary coming on,

01:26:19

Jeff Durbin, Doug Wilson, and I'm trying to get Jason Lyle. If anyone knows how to connect me with Jason Lyle, that'd be greatly appreciated.

01:26:26

We want to provide a great resource for people to promote this apologetic methodology. And so I would greatly appreciate that.