Talking Presup & the Stroudian Objection

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala. I am a Christian apologist. If this is the first time you've ever tuned into, you know, the Revealed Apologetics podcast or YouTube channel, I am a Christian apologist.

I am a school teacher and I am a youth director. So I'm always working with young people and things like that. And apologetics is such an important thing to teach young people. We need to know why we believe what we believe.

And we need to know the scriptures. We need to know how to apply it to all areas of life. And so hopefully, if you've been following this channel, you have found it beneficial. You have found it biblically grounded, philosophically cogent, and just good old educational.

All right? And I've had great pleasure in the many guests that I've interviewed. I always take great pleasure in being able to learn from people who have done all of the studying and the lecturing and the speaking.

Sometimes, well, I would say most of the times, the guests that I have on, I don't have them on because I think people necessarily will find the speaker interesting. That's part of it. But I also like to have people on that I wanna learn from.

So a lot of people get fooled by the books in the background. Yes, these are my books. I have not read all of them. I don't have time to read all of them. And so much of the way that I learn is through conversation.

And so that kind of works out well for me, having a YouTube channel, interviewing folks. I get to have conversations with brothers in Christ to talk about things that are important. And through that, I learn.

And hopefully, every now and then, when I open my mouth, people learn also. So I hope you're finding the show beneficial. Well, today I have a guest. I will do him the honor by calling him a special guest.

I always say I'm super excited to have the person on that I have on. And I am. I have on Joshua Pillows, a very tough name, right? Joshua Pillows. And he is a Christian. He's a musician. Maybe he'll tell us a little bit about that when I invite him on.

And also, he is an apologist. He has contributed some articles on the Apologetic Central website, which I think is run by Arne Verster. You guys should totally check out Apologetic Central. Joshua Pillows' articles are there, along with Arne, I think I'm saying his name correctly, who is a very wonderful brother in Christ who actually helped me set up the Revealed Apologetics website.

So thank you very much for that, Arne. But definitely check out Apologetics Central. And of course, Revealed Apologetics as well. Also, as I've been advertising the past episodes as well, if folks are still interested in signing up for PreSuppU to take the course on presuppositional apologetics that I teach, it's an online course that I offer, you can sign up for that still.

The basic package is available. So we are not doing the live sessions at this moment. We'll start it up again in the future, but you can sign up for the course and work at your own pace. You'll get the PowerPoints, the outlines, and all of the video lectures there as well.

So if you're interested in that, you can check that out at revealedapologetics .com. Look up on the menu, PreSuppU, and you should follow the very, very simple, simple instructions to enroll in that course.

All right, well, without further ado, I would like to invite Joshua Pillows onto the screen with me, and hopefully we will have a wonderful conversation about presuppositional apologetics and a very interesting focused discussion on something that is called the Stroudian objection.

And so we're gonna be talking a little bit about transcendental arguments and some objections against the transcendental argument to which Mr. Pillows is well acquainted with as being a student of Greg Bonson and well-versed in the presuppositional literature.

So super excited to have Joshua Pillows on. Joshua, how are you doing? I'm good, how are you, Eli? I'm doing wonderful. Really excited to have you on. I have been so blessed by reading many of your articles and even just following some of your comments and discussions on Facebook.

They've been very, very, very helpful. So why don't you tell folks a little bit more about yourself? I just told them you had a really tough name and you're a musician and you like Greg Bonson. So why don't you expound?

Who are you?

Tell us who you are. Well, I am a musician, first and foremost. Chronologically speaking, that's what I started out with. My parents got me entrenched in that when I was a kid and so I studied music for, well, really all of my life now that I think about it.

So thank you, mom and dad, if you're watching. In 2016, that's when God saved me. And so studying reformed theology, the inevitable cave stage came up. And so I had to go through the cave stage. And so that happened for a while, but then I was stumbling upon a video on Apology of Studios by Jeff Durbin.

And he mentioned, hey, there's this website that has all of Greg Bonson's lectures on it. And it's pretty cheap at the time you had to pay for them. And I'll never forget where I was and when I heard that.

And so it was from that day onward that I kind of didn't like stop studying theology, but I went to apologetics and I started with Greg Bonson, Dr. Bonson. So since 2017, I would say early 2017 is when I started studying presuppositionalism and I've gone till today.

So it's been about four years now. He's my, I called him my teacher. And some people might not like that because I was only a baby when he passed away, you know? But all I listened to are his lectures and we've talked about this just over and over, repetition.

I've read Jason Lyle. I've watched Psy and Dr. White, Jeff Durbin. I've watched all of them, you know, but they're more supplemental. Now, Dr. Bonson has been my sole teacher throughout these four years.

And so I hope to be an example of that, you know, if he was still alive, what would a student of his look like? Sure. What could come out of that? And I have no formal education. I have no college degrees or anything like that.

I'm either self-taught or taught by a private teacher, which was the case in music or Dr. Bonson as is the case in apologetics. And so that's kind of, that's a short truncated version of my journey into apologetics.

Yeah, I think that's very helpful because a lot of people don't know this, but anyone can do apologetics. I mean, if you've been doing it since, I mean, guys, take a look at some of his articles. He knows his stuff.

2017, that's not a long time that you've been doing apologetics or presuppositional apologetics more specifically. This stuff can be learned with some, you know, just being very intentional about your study and things like that, myself included.

I mean, I went to seminary. I only took one course in apologetics and it wasn't like, it was completely from like an evidential and classical perspective. I enjoyed the class. Actually, I'm trying to get my professor, Dr. Khaldun Swice, I think his name is.

He like edited one of those, you know, those apologetic history books where they go through the history of, of the Christian apologetics throughout church history. So he's a, he's a really sharp guy, but you know, I took one course in apologetics and 99 .9 of what I learned in apologetics was completely and solely independent from my seminary, my seminary work.

So it's something that we all can do. And of course, as we know, first Peter chapter three, verse 15 says that we are all to do it, right? So that's very encouraging based upon what I know about what you know, because I've read your stuff.

I find that very impressive that you've been able to get a firm grasp on it. Of course, we always have room to learn, but you were able to do that in such a short time. So thank you for sharing that. I hope, hope that's encouraging for, for, for folks listening.

All right. So, well, let's start with some basics then. I always ask folks to define their terms for those who are just tuning in and maybe they don't know what presuppositional apologetics is. Why don't you define for us the presuppositional method as you understand it?

Well, as I understand it, I would put it in three different ways. I've explained it in three different ways. The first is that it's a Christ-centered apologetic. Okay. Start on the authority of the scriptures of what Christ says in the word.

We don't pretend neutrality. We don't even attempt neutrality. We believe it's completely impossible. And it's moral, as you're either with Christ or you're against Christ. So first and foremost, presuppositional apologetics is an apologetic method that rests on the scriptures, nothing else but the scriptures.

Secondly, it's a, a covenantal apologetic. We are covenant keepers of the Lord and he has saved us. And so our mission is to defend the faith from the covenant breakers. And so there's this antithesis between us and the covenant breakers.

We always need to keep that in mind. It goes hand in hand with the issue of neutrality. Okay. It rests on the authority of Christ and the scriptures. It's a covenant apologetic. We recognize the covenant.

We don't just shoo it away temporarily. Let's get on some neutral ground here and explain the Christian method. And then we'll, okay. And now we'll come back to Christ. We stick with it firmly covenantally.

And thirdly, it's a worldview apologetic. We don't argue over isolated evidences here or there as a sort of step ladder to get to the whole Christian worldview. We argue as the Christian worldview as a unit, all other units, all other worldview units, atheistic, Hindu, Muslim, whatever.

We take the whole unit as a system and argue that on its own terms, it justifies intelligible experience. And so basically the argument as Vantule always put it was the best, single most best proof for the existence of God is that without God, you couldn't prove anything.

He is the ultimate presupposition, the ultimate precondition necessary for intelligible experience. Whether it be laws of logic, human dignity, moral absolutes, uniformity in nature, you have to accept the Christian worldview.

The Christian worldview must be true in order to explain some of the, all of these things of intelligible experience. And so we take that argument and then go to all of the non-Christian worldviews when they challenge us.

And that's our defense of the faith and say, that not only does your worldview reduce to absurdity and skepticism, but your objection to the Christian worldview already presupposes that the Christian worldview as a whole is true.

So you have to assume the very thing you're arguing against. And that's, to me, that's just the power of the transcendental program is you have to assume it's right in order to argue that it's wrong. Yeah.

That's in short how I would put.

Presuppositional apologetics. Yeah, I think that's a great summary of the method. Let's kind of back up a little bit and define some terms here. And I've defined these terms before in past episodes, but I think it's good to remind folks.

You used the language of neutrality and autonomy. Why don't you define those terms for us and tell us why those are big no-nos when we're doing biblical apologetics.

Neutrality is an attempt, and I emphasize the word attempt because it is impossible, but it is an attempt to rid oneself of most, if not all of your presuppositions, all of your fundamentally held commitments.

Let's get on this neutral ground and let's see where the facts point to us. And then as we interpret the facts one by one, we'll start adding these suppositions in here and there. And then until eventually we get to the end of the race and we've got this whole worldview that makes sense.

Okay. We reject that, not only because it's immoral, because Christ says we're either with Christ or we're against Christ. There's no middle ground there. So we reject it on the grounds of immorality, but it's also impossible.

When it comes to these grandiose issues, such as the existence of God, everyone has an opinion. Everyone starts somewhere. Either you assume God exists or you don't. There's no, well, I don't know God exists.

You know, Romans one, everyone knows he exists. You either start with his existence or you don't. And so that already is enough to just refute the whole notion of neutrality. So neutrality basically says we can all just throw away our beliefs.

You know, a tabula rasa, as John Locke put it, blank slate, and then we'll take everything in passively as needed, and then we'll form a worldview that way. So we reject that. We already go into the argument assuming our Christian commitments from the outset without shame, without wavering whatsoever.

So neutrality is impossible and it's immoral. That's what I mean. You can't just give up your beliefs, you know, on a whim. Autonomy is the attempt, again, I will use attempt, the attempt to reason apart from God and to formulate a cogent worldview that conjures up answers to everything.

You can't do it. And so to argue autonomously is to argue apart from Christ and his word, apart from Christ's authority and on the scriptures.

Okay. All right, so I'm happy you mentioned the word attempting because it's impossible, right? If we live in a God-created world, autonomy is not a thing because by the very fact that we are created beings, we rely upon him by necessity for meaning and cogency and things like that.

Now, I hear a lot of sort of objections against the presuppositional method. And one popular thing that I hear is that it's just a claim. So sometimes I'll read, I mean, unfortunately, I don't have time to engage a lot of the comments.

You know, I wish I did. I mean, some people ask me questions and I'll give a short here and there and I wanna get involved, but I just don't have the time. So I use this platform to talk about and expand on various things.

But when I am reading through Facebook comments and things like that, I'll often hear people say, oh, well, the presuppositionalist likes to make the assertion. Well, yeah, they typically make that claim.

Why isn't the transcendental claim of the presuppositionalist? Why is it not the case that it's simply a claim? Where's the meat to what we're saying? How does one demonstrate transcendentally what the presuppositionalist is saying that without the Christian God, you couldn't make sense out of anything?

Move us beyond just the mere assertion.

Okay, yeah, I've heard that all the time. You're right, this comes up all the time. You know, a Muslim could say the same thing or a Jew or a Hindu or whoever. You're just making a claim that the Christian worldview is the necessary precondition, you know, God exists.

You know, anyone can do that, it's arbitrary. All right, well, how do you prove it? Well, no one's naive enough to just formulate an apologetic without an argument. There's an argument there. And I think the objector doesn't, is not aware of that there's an argument there or he knows there's an argument, but thinks it's, you know, subpar.

He just doesn't understand it at all. The transcendental program, which is what presuppositional apologetics utilizes is an arguing from the impossibility of the contrary. All right, can I stop you right there?

I wanna let people know that is not something that presuppositionalist made up. Okay, transcendental arguments are a thing. Okay, people think, oh, the presuppositionalist made that up. Transcendental arguments are a thing.

You see it in certain, in various forms in Aristotle, you see it throughout the course of, you know, of the history of philosophy, coming more into focus in Immanuel Kant. And Van Til is using a transcendental argument, but he's doing it differently than what has been, how it's been typically used throughout the course of the history of philosophy.

But go ahead, I just wanted to make that point because some people think, you know, we just have our weird, I saw a debate between a presuppositionalist and an atheist, and the presuppositionalist used the term concrete universal.

You're familiar with this language? And the atheist, who should know better, I mean, he knows philosophy. He seems to be very well-read. He says, that's not a thing, presuppositionalist made that up.

And I'm just like, what? That's totally a thing in philosophy. But at any rate, we wanna move beyond that. So why don't you unpack for us? Go ahead.

Yeah, that's a good point. This will get us into the Stroudian objection. You know, anyway, this is a good stepstool to order. Transcendental arguments, which is what the presuppositional method utilizes, is an arguing from the impossibility of the contrary.

And it argues that certain beliefs or certain metaphysical things must be the case in order to make sense of an experience or experience as a whole. And so, as you said, Aristotle used this hundreds of years before Christ for the law of non-contradiction.

You have to assume it in order to deny it. And then there's kind of like this dead period. I mean, I believe, and I haven't studied on this, but I believe the early church used to have this somewhere in the Orthodox, early church used it, but I'm not sure.

But, and then Kant comes along in 1700s, in 18th century, and he utilizes the same thing. And then it comes back again in the 20th century. So for the critic that says, oh, well, you know, anyone can make the claim that God is the necessary precondition for intelligibility or God exists.

They need to prove that, first of all, because we're not giving a claim, we're giving an argument, and that's the conclusion of the argument. We just haven't given the premises of the argument yet. And so the argument is gonna run, is gonna go that the existence of God is a necessary precondition to make sense of logic, to make sense of uniformity and nature of the world around us, to make sense of human dignity, to make sense of mathematical laws, the causal principle, induction, anything.

The existence of God and the truths of the whole Christian worldview are necessary in order to make sense of that. And if you reject that, you're reduced to absurdity, and not only are you reduced to absurdity, you have to assume the Christian worldview in order to argue against it.

And so, no, presuppositional apologetics is not just a claim that God exists and he's transcendental and that's that, we win.

There's an argument toward it. So would you say that part of the demonstration is the inability of the objector to ground the very things that you're saying he can't ground, that's part of it, right? So it's not simply, look, you can't account for intelligible experience, so I win, but saying, look, you can't account for intelligibility, and that's part of the argument.

Okay. If that was it, then you would just have, you couldn't answer the objection of, well, what about hypothetical worldviews? Or have you gotten to every single worldview? Because you've only refuted mine, well, what about my neighbors?

So again, yeah, you're right, that's only part of it, it's not the whole apologetic.

Sure, and so the other part of it would actually be the positive aspect of showing that given the truth of the Christian worldview, we could have those things, and then you lay that out and then answer any objections that comes.

Yeah, there's a negative demonstration, which is what we just went over, critiquing non-Christian worldviews, and then there's a positive, which is expositing from scripture the metaphysical scheme that is the Christian worldview.

And so it's not just a negative aspect to it, because that would be insufficient. It sort of runs into the same problem as Gordon Clark, and he was left to probabilism, and the only way to prove God's existence according to Clark was omniscience, you had to refute every other worldview being able to do that.

And so that runs into the Clarkian problem, but yeah, that's simply for Van Til, that's the negative aspect of the argument, refute the non-Christian and then give your positive.

So what if somebody says, okay, well, Mr. Christian, you're using your transcendental argument. What if a Muslim uses a transcendental argument? Allah and the Quran are the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience.

How would you be, I mean, I would admit that a Muslim can use a transcendental argument, but he can't do it successfully. So if someone brings the objection, well, a Muslim could use that argument. Yes, anyone could use a transcendental argument.

It's whether their worldview actually has the money to pay the bills and actually account for the things that it says only it can account for. Exactly. So how would that look like if a Muslim says, well, the necessary precondition for intelligible experience is Allah and the Quran, and if you do not presuppose Allah and the Quran, you couldn't make sense out of anything.

How would you interact with someone like that? There are a number of ways that people do. You know, you could do it the way where, you know, if the Bible is true, the Quran is false. The Quran says the Bible is true, therefore the Quran is false.

You know, that sort of stuff. It's more theological and scriptural. Okay. I center around the more philosophical issues. Allah is not a trinity. He has one God and one person. And so you need a God, a creator that has made the universe such that we have a one class of things, but a many particulars of things that solves the problem of the one and the many.

So, you know, I see you and I see, okay, you're a human, but what accounts for multiple humans? We have what, nearly 8 billion people now, or a water bottle that I have here, a laptop or whatever. You have a single, you know, universal that you have for each object, but you can't account either for the universal or for all the particulars that correspond with it.

How do you get unity between the one universal and the many particular contingent finite objects? That's where I would go particularly. Admittedly, I haven't read Rushduni as much as I should have with the, what is it? Trinity and Vindication of the Christian, something like that.

I don't know. Bram Bosterman. That's Bosterman, yeah. I haven't read that as well as I should have or as much as I should have, but for me personally, I would go after the Trinitarian nature of God and how it solves the problem.

So I have two questions, if I could remember one of them. Okay, so you would appeal to the Trinity, okay. What if the most, okay, so number one, why is the one and the many an actual problem? I've actually heard people say that's not even a thing.

Like it's not even something spoken about. I've actually had, I won't mention any names because this is a very well-known apologist. He's a good friend of mine, but we used to have a lot of conversations.

And he said, the problem of the one and the many is not even like a thing. Like no one talks about it, you know, in the philosophical literature, which by the way is incorrect. But even if it were true that no one talked about it, it may be the case that no one talks about it because it's a problem they can't answer but they still need to do philosophy.

So they toss it aside, don't talk about it. And they talk about other things. My first question is, why is the one and the many a problem, number one? And number two, why can't the Muslim say that I could account for unity and diversity in that Allah, who is a unity is so powerful that he can create other things that are diverse so that they derive from his ability to create many things.

And so what's the problem?

I would question the objector's knowledge on metaphysics because everyone has a different view of metaphysics. So they say about the problem of the one and the many is gonna be dependent on what they believe metaphysically speaking.

So I would ask them on that. For the second question, I actually have heard someone say that before. I don't remember where, but the problem with that is God in Christianity is absolute. He's absolutely one, he's absolutely three persons.

And so in the nature of the case and reality, we have an absolute universal, but at the same time we have absolute particulars. They exist, they're not illusions, they're not some sort of quasi-physical entities or whatever.

Allah is not many, he's only one, absolutely. But so if he makes a plurality of things, they're not gonna be absolute either. You have the one absolute, but you don't have the many absolute. So now you have to ask them, well, how does that work exactly?

How do I get, how do the particulars relate to the one if the one is absolute, but the many aren't absolute? They're just created after the fact since Allah is all powerful. I haven't had, I haven't seen anyone answer that.

And I frankly wouldn't know how one would go about answering that.

Now, what about the claim that presuppositionalists try to highlight the problems of philosophy? So that like, look, here's a philosophical problem that everyone has struggled with. You can't figure it out, so therefore God.

So it's almost like we're using kind of a God of the gaps, kind of like, well, because there's these unanswered questions, right? You just insert your God, like, look, our God could answer. How would you respond to that?

I mean, these problems in philosophy are problems because the worldviews throughout Western civilization and Eastern philosophy can't answer them. Are presuppositionalists just highlighting on people's ignorance and just trying to supplement God in kind of a God of the gaps sort of thing?

By no means. And I see how that can be construed that way. It is not a God of the gaps where, okay, we're good in some areas autonomously, but in other areas, we don't know. So, okay, we'll fill in God there.

He's the answer, you know. As I alluded to at the beginning, presuppositional apologetics is a worldview apologetic. We don't start autonomously, get as far as we can, and then say, okay, we got, you know, 70 of everything figured out, so we'll fill in God at the 30 mark, you know, 30 of it, and then, okay, now we're great.

We reject that entirely. We would wholeheartedly reject God of the gaps because we start with God at the outset in every facet of experience. There is no point at which we argue autonomously apart from God.

If you did, then yeah, you would have God of the gaps, but God is everything in our reasoning. Faith is the grounding for reasoning, so we don't have any God of the gaps issues there, but again, I could see how that's construed that way, but it's just not the case.

All right, well, now here's the thing that people kind of get, they get us in like a gotcha moment, right? Clearly, presupposition, I mean, if I heard this so many times, like when I hear it, you know, I just want to throw up.

It's one of those things, like, when someone says it, I'm like. Yeah, it gets to that point.

I mean, you gotta do one of the Jim Carrey, like the dry, he's like.

Yeah, yeah. Is when people say, well, the problem with presuppositionalism is that it's circular. Oh no. So there you go. You dummies, Greg Bonson, PhD in philosophy, Van Til, juggernaut reform thinker, whether you agree with him or not, I mean, he was a brilliant guy.

I mean, are these men so dumb to overlook the fact that, oh, I'm begging the question. Why is it not a big deal that presuppositionalists assume what they're trying to prove? And why don't you unpack for us this issue of virtuous circularity versus vicious circularity and why those are not made up categories, but they're actually things that we should consider when we're talking about such foundational issues as one's ultimate presuppositions.

I'm trying to find a way to like put this to bed once and for all, but I don't, I, you know, I'm quickly finding out this will probably never go away. So you just gotta get out of there. You can save a couple of people.

There are people who keep asking it and then there are other people like, oh, okay. I see, I see. And then you can save a couple, right?

You snatch them from the flames. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll lay it out in the way, everything I've learned from Bonson. And so hopefully this will be as straightforward and direct to the layman. For the entire history of philosophy, we've assumed, well, we all start neutrally or at least mostly neutral.

Cause we don't want to beg any questions. We don't want to start at the outset with commitments and then go on to argue for those commitments. Cause that's circular. How do I know the Bible is true? Cause it says it's true.

There you go. Well, no, you can't do that. Cause it's a reason. And so people have assumed for all time that we can just start autonomously and neutrally. And then we'll go again to the facts in a blank slate and then we'll proposition, proposition, proposition.

Okay, now I have a worldview. And that's what's so revolutionary about Van Til is he says, no, that's not the case at all. Everyone has their ultimate commitments. And so to the charge of circularity, I would point to transcendental reasoning and the shame in all of this is that it's not very well known.

We know deductive reasoning and we know inductive reasoning, but we don't really know transcendental reasoning all that well. And so that's what people need to learn. A viciously circular argument. We've talked about vicious and virtuous.

A viciously circular argument is one in which the premises of the argument already assume the conclusion in advance, which is the very thing in question. That's why it's called begging the question. So, you know, my senses are reliable because they give me reliable results.

They give me reliable results cause they're reliable. Therefore my senses are reliable or whatever. The premises already assume the conclusion. You can't do that. A virtuous circle is an argument in which the premises necessarily presuppose the truth of the conclusion and arguing for it.

And that's the key word is it's necessarily presupposed. It's not just arbitrarily presupposed. If someone said, well, how do I know my senses are valid? And I was an atheist. And I said, well, cause you know, they give me reliable results.

Well, that already assumes the conclusion of what I'm trying to prove. And so that doesn't work. It's just an arbitrary justification. But in a transcendental argument, in a virtuous circle, the premises have to presuppose the conclusion in order to make sense of the argument at all.

And so to dumb that down and to, you know, make it more down to earth to people, if we took the laws of logic, which is, you know, commonly known, Dr. Lyle does this a lot. And someone comes up to me, a skeptic and he says, well, how do you know that there are laws of logic?

The law of non-contradiction, identity, excluded middle. How do you know that there are these laws that we have to adhere to in order to argue? All I have to say is, well, you just assume they existed in order to put them into question.

The argument for the laws of logic already has to assume the laws of logic in order to argue for it. And of course people say, well, no, no, no. That's fallacious. You can't assume what, you can't escape it.

That's the problem. There are like, no matter how much the critic wants to put it, there are circles that you cannot escape. I can escape the circle of, you know, justifying my senses in an autonomous fashion.

My senses are reliable because they give me good results, but I can't escape circles such as, how do I know the laws of logic exist? And I'll give you premise by premise to conclusion, but I've already assumed the laws of logic in the premises.

You can't escape it. You have to rely on the truth of the conclusion in order to argue for it. That's what we mean by virtue of circularity and transcendental reasoning. And that's why I think people think, you know, circularity is just lumped into this one bag and it's all fallacious.

And, you know, there's nothing we can do. Presuppositionalism is a joke and la-da-da-da-da. That's just not the case at all. They just, they need to understand.

Transcendental reasoning. Now you could agree, you could disagree with it. You can be like, hey, I think the presuppositionalists are wrong here, but like, you have to understand it. It's not like something you'd, only presuppositionalists just made up so that they could argue in this weird way.

I mean, these are actually genuine philosophical categories that have been discussed, you know. All right. I think you did a very good job in explaining those things. You're doing good. We're up on the half hour.

And so you're still alive. Okay. This is a good thing. Please like, check his pulse. I'm still good. All right. So let's move into, I have one question and perhaps this one question will spill into the main issue that we're going to be discussing, which is the Stroudian objection to the transcendental argument.

So what, in your view, in your reading, in your studies, what has been the most difficult, like genuinely difficult objection that you had to kind of think about against the presuppositional approach?

It would be the Stroudian objection. Last year, when I get, you know, wrote the paper on, you know, we confused ontology and epistemology. Okay. I think Stroud was still in the back of my mind. I have the paper here, but I think he was in the back of my mind.

I didn't really pay much attention to it though. At the time I thought that was it, but I think this is the biggest objection. And I think the last one, honestly, to go against Van Til's apologetic. And that's why I just, I spent about three weeks.

I think this is, it took me five drafts to get everything down the way I wanted to, because I was responding to Bailey, you know, and unfortunately he can't watch right now, but he said he'll watch after.

But yeah, I think this is the single most critical objection to Van Til. And if this could not be answered, then we would definitely have a problem. We'd have to alter the apologetic or just, you know, find another one altogether.

So I think this is the biggest one.

Back to the Kalam. We just go back and the Kalam's just there.

They always come back. There's a generic deity up there somewhere, you know. That's right.

Okay. So, so why don't you tell us, by the way, before, before we do that, let me just let, let folks know if you have any questions, put them into the comments. I know I can't multitask. I'm kind of looking in three little areas.

So if there's some craziness going on in the comments, I'm sorry if I can't regulate that to everyone's liking. But if you have any questions that you'd like us to, to take on towards the end of the, of the podcast episode and the live stream, preface your question with the word question and I'll try my best to get to them.

All right. So if you think if something's being said here, you disagree or you need clarification, now's the time to, to jot down a question. Also real quick, I forgot to make mention. I have, let me get myself in my iPad here.