Talking Presup & the Stroudian Objection

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala. I am a

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Christian apologist. If this is the first time you've ever tuned in to the Revealed Apologetics podcast or YouTube channel,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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I don't have time to read all of them, and so much of the way that I learn is through conversation.

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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,

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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.

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Well, today, I have a guest, I will do him the honor by calling him a special guest,

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I always say I'm super excited to have the person that I have on, and I am. I have on Joshua Pillows, a very tough name, right?

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Joshua Pillows, and he is a Christian, he's a musician, maybe he'll tell us a little bit about that when

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I invite him on. And also, he is an apologist, he has contributed some articles on the

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Apologetic Central website, which I think is run by Arne Verster, you guys should totally check out

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Apologetic Central, Joshua Pillows' articles are there, along with Arne, I think

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I'm saying his name correctly, who is a very wonderful brother in Christ who actually helped me set up the

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Revealed Apologetics website, so thank you very much for that, Arne. But definitely check out Apologetics Central, and of course,

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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.

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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

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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,

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look up on the menu, PreSuppU, and you should follow the very, very simple, simple instructions to enroll in that course.

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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

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Stroudian objection. And so we're gonna be talking a little bit about transcendental arguments and some objections against the transcendental argument, to which

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Mr. Pillows is well acquainted with as being a student of Greg Bonson and well -versed in the presuppositional literature.

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So super excited to have Joshua Pillows on. Joshua, how are you doing? I'm good, how are you,

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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.

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They've been very, very, very helpful. So why don't you tell folks a little bit more about yourself?

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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?

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Who are you? Tell us who you are. Well, I am a musician, first and foremost.

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Chronologically speaking, that's what I started out with. My parents got me entrenched in that when

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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.

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In 2016, that's when God saved me. And so studying reformed theology, the inevitable cave stage came up.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And I started with Greg Bonson, Dr. Bonson. So since 2017,

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I would say early 2017 is when I started studying presuppositionalism and gone till today.

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So it's been about four years now. He's my, I called him my teacher. Some people might not like that because I was only a baby when he passed away, you know.

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But all I listened to are his lectures. And we've talked about this just over and over, repetition.

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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.

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Now, Dr. Bonson has been my sole teacher throughout these four years. And so I hope to be an example of that.

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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.

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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.

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Bonson, as is the case in apologetics. And so that's kind of, that's a short truncated version of my journey into apologetics.

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Yeah, I think that's very helpful because a lot of people don't know this, but anyone can do apologetics.

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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.

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This stuff can be learned with some, you know, just being very intentional about your study and things like that, myself included.

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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.

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I enjoyed the class. Actually, I'm trying to get my professor, Dr. Khaldun Swice, I think his name is.

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He like edited one of those, you know, those apologetic history books where they go through the history of, the

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Christian apologetics throughout church history. So he's a really sharp guy, but you know,

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I took one course in apologetics and 99 .9 % of what I learned in apologetics was completely and solely independent from my seminary work.

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So it's something that we all can do. And of course, as we know, 1 Peter 3, verse 15 says that we are all to do it, right?

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So that's very encouraging based upon what I know about what you know, because I've read your stuff.

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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.

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So thank you for sharing that. I hope that's encouraging for folks listening. All right, so, well, let's start with some basics then.

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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.

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Why don't you define for us the presuppositional method as you understand it? Well, as I understand it,

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I would put it in three different ways. I'd explain it in three different ways. The first is that it's a Christ -centered apologetic.

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Okay. Start on the authority of the scriptures of what Christ says in the word. We don't pretend neutrality.

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We don't even attempt neutrality. We believe it's completely impossible. And it's moral. You're either with Christ or you're against Christ.

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So first and foremost, presuppositional apologetics is an apologetic method that rests on the scriptures, nothing else but the scriptures.

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Secondly, it's a covenantal apologetic. We are covenant keepers of the

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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We don't argue over isolated evidences here or there as a sort of step ladder to get to the whole

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Christian worldview. We argue as the Christian worldview as a unit, all other units, all other worldview units, atheistic,

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Hindu, Muslim, whatever. We take the whole unit as a system and argue that on its own terms, it justifies intelligible experience.

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And so basically the argument as Bantul always put it was the single most best proof for the existence of God is that without God, you couldn't prove anything.

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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

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Christian worldview. The Christian worldview must be true in order to explain some of the, all of these things of intelligible experience.

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And so we take that argument and then go to all of the non -Christian worldviews when they challenge us.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Yeah. That's in short how I would put presuppositional apologetics. Yeah, I think that's a great summary of the method.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Everyone starts somewhere. Either you assume God exists or you don't. There's no, well,

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I don't know God exists. You know, Romans one, everyone knows he exists. You either start with his existence or you don't.

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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.

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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.

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So we reject that. We already go into the argument assuming our Christian commitments from the outset without shame, without wavering whatsoever.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Okay. All right. So I'm happy you mentioned the word attempting because it's impossible, right?

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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.

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Now, I hear a lot of sort of objections against the presuppositional method.

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And one popular thing that I hear is that it's just a claim. So sometimes

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I'll read, I mean, unfortunately I don't have time to engage a lot of the comments. You know,

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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.

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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,

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I'll often hear people say, oh, well, the presuppositionalist likes to make the assertion.

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Well, yeah, they typically make that claim. Why isn't the transcendental claim of the presuppositionalist?

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Why is it not the case that it's simply a claim? Where's the meat to what we're saying?

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How does one demonstrate transcendentally what the presuppositionalist is saying that without the

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Christian God you couldn't make sense out of anything. Move us beyond just the mere assertion.

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Okay, yeah, I've heard that all the time. You're right, this comes up all the time. You know, and a

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Muslim could say the same thing or a Jew or a Hindu or whoever. You're just making a claim that the

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Christian worldview is a necessary precondition. You know, God exists. You know, anyone can do that, it's arbitrary.

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All right, well, how do you prove it? Well, no one's naive enough to just formulate an apologetic without an argument.

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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.

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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.

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All right, can I stop you right there? I wanna let people know, that is not something that presuppositionalist made up.

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Okay, transcendental arguments are a thing. Okay, people think, oh, the presuppositionalist made that up.

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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.

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And Bantill 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.

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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.

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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.

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He says, that's not a thing, presuppositionalist made that up. And I'm just like, what? That's totally a thing in philosophy.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And so, as you said, Aristotle used this hundreds of years before Christ for the law of non -contradiction.

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You have to assume it in order to deny it. And then there's kind of like this dead period.

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I mean, I believe, and I haven't studied on this, but I believe the early church used, had this somewhere in the

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 the necessary precondition to make sense of logic, to make sense of uniformity in nature of the world around us, to make sense of human dignity, to make sense of mathematical laws, the causal principle, induction, anything.

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The existence of God and the truths of the whole Christian worldview are necessary in order to make sense of that.

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And if you reject that, you're reduced to absurdity. And not only are you reduced to absurdity, you have to assume the

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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.

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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?

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That's part of it, right? So it's not simply, look, you can't account for intelligible experience, so I win, but it is, but saying, look, you can't account for intelligibility, and that's part of the argument.

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Yeah. Okay. If that was it, then you would just have, you couldn't answer the objection of, well, what about hypothetical worldviews?

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Or have you gotten to every single worldview? Because you've only refuted mine. Well, what about my neighbors? Or, you know, so again, yeah, you're right.

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That's only part of it. It's not the whole apologetic. Sure, and so the other part of it would actually, would be the positive aspect of showing that given the truth of the

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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

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Christian worldview. And so it's not just a negative worldview, or a negative aspect to it, because that would be insufficient.

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You know, it sort of runs into the same problem as Gordon Clark, you know, and he was left to probabilism, and the only way to prove

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God's existence, according to Clark, was omniscience. You had to refute every other worldview in order to do that. And so that runs into the

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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.

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So what if somebody says, okay, well, Mr. Christian, you're using your transcendental argument. What if a

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Muslim uses a transcendental argument? Allah and the Quran are the necessary preconditions for intelligible experience.

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How would you be... I mean, I would admit that a Muslim can use a transcendental argument, but he can't do it successfully.

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So if someone brings the objection, well, a Muslim could use that argument. Yes, anyone could use a transcendental argument.

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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.

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So how would that look like if a Muslim says, well, the necessary precondition for intelligible experience is

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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?

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There are a number of ways that people do. You know, you could do it the way where, you know, if the

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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.

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Okay. I center around the more philosophical issues. Allah is not a

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Trinity. He is one God and one person. And so you need a

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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.

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So, you know, I see you and I see, okay, you're a human, but what accounts for multiple humans?

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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.

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How do you get unity between the one universal and the many particular contingent finite objects?

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That's where I would go particularly. Admittedly, I haven't read Rush Duney as much as I should have with the, what is it,

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Trinity and Vindication of the Christian? Something like that. I don't know. For example, Bram Bosterman. That's Bosterman, yeah.

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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

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Trinitarian nature of God and how it solves the problem. So I have two questions, if I could remember one of them.

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Okay, so you would appeal to the Trinity. Okay, what if the most, okay.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Like no one talks about it, you know, in the philosophical literature, which by the way is incorrect.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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And so what's the problem? Well, I would question the objector's knowledge on metaphysics because everyone has a different view of metaphysics.

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So they say about the problem of the one and the many is gonna be dependent on what they believe metaphysically speaking.

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So I would ask them on that. For the second question, I actually have heard someone say that before.

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I don't remember where, but the problem with that is God in Christianity is absolute.

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He's absolutely one. He's absolutely three persons. And so in the nature of the case in reality, we have an absolute universal, but at the same time we have absolute particulars.

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They exist. They're not illusions. They're not some sort of quasi -physical entities or whatever.

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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.

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You have the one absolute, but you don't have the many absolutes. So now you have to ask them, well, how does that work exactly?

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You know, 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.

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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?

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So that like, look, here's a philosophical problem that everyone has struggled with. You can't figure it out, so therefore

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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?

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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

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Western civilization and Eastern philosophy can't answer them. Are presuppositionalists just highlighting on people's ignorance and just trying to supplement

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We don't start autonomously, get as far as we can, and then say, okay, we got 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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All right, well, now here's the thing that people kind of get. They get us in like a gotcha moment, right? Clearly, presupposition,

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I mean, if I heard this so many times, like when I hear it, you know, I just want to throw up.

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

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

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Is when people say, well, the problem with presuppositionalism is that it's circular.

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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.

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I mean, he was a brilliant guy. I mean, are these men so dumb to overlook the fact that, oh,

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I'm begging the question. Why is it not a big deal that presuppositionalists assume what they're trying to prove?

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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.

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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.

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So you just gotta get out of the way. You can save a couple of people. There are people who keep asking it and then there are other people like, oh, okay.

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I see, I see. And then you can save a couple, right? You snatch them from the flames. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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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.

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For the entire history of philosophy, we've assumed, well, we all start neutrally or at least mostly neutral.

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Cause we don't wanna beg any questions. We don't wanna start at the outset with commitments and then go on to argue for those commitments.

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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.

28:02

And then we'll go again to the facts in a blank slate and then we'll proposition, proposition, proposition.

28:07

Okay, now I have a worldview. And that's what's so revolutionary about Van Till is he says, no, that's not the case at all.

28:13

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.

28:25

We know deductive reasoning and we know inductive reasoning, but we don't really know transcendental reasoning all that well.

28:32

And so that's what people need to learn. A viciously circular argument, we've talked about vicious and virtuous.

28:40

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.

28:49

That's why it's called begging the question. So, you know, my senses are reliable because they give me reliable results.

28:54

They give me reliable results cause they're reliable. Therefore my senses are reliable or whatever. The premises already assume the conclusion.

29:00

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.

29:12

And that's the key word is it's necessarily presupposed. It's not just arbitrarily presupposed. If someone said, well, how do

29:18

I know my senses are valid? And I was an atheist. And I said, well, cause you know, they give me reliable results.

29:23

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.

29:37

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

29:45

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?

29:51

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?

29:58

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.

30:09

And of course people say, well, no, no, no. That's, that's fallacious. You can't assume what you can't escape it. That's the problem.

30:14

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.

30:25

My senses are reliable because they give me good results, but I can't escape circles such as how do you, 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.

30:36

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 virtuous circularity and transcendental reasoning.

30:44

And that's why I think people think, you know, circularity is just lumped into this, you know, one bag and it's all fallacious.

30:52

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.

31:00

Now you could agree, you could disagree with it. You can be like, hey, I think the presuppositions are wrong here, but like, you have to understand it.

31:06

It's not like something you'd, only presuppositions 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.

31:16

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.

31:22

And so you're still alive. Okay, this is a good thing. You're still alive. Please check his pulse.

31:29

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

31:39

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?

31:56

It would be the Stroudian objection. Last year, when I wrote the paper on, you know, we confused ontology and epistemology.

32:05

Okay. I think Stroud was still in the back of my mind. I have the paper here, but I think it was in the back of my mind.

32:10

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.

32:16

And I think the last one, honestly, to go against Van Til's apologetic.

32:21

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

32:30

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,

32:36

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.

32:43

We'd have to alter the apologetic or just, you know, find another one altogether. So I think this is the biggest one.

32:49

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

32:55

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.

33:08

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,

33:14

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.

33:29

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.

33:36

Also real quick, I forgot to make mention. I have, let me get myself in my iPad here.

33:42

I wanted to let people know that next Tuesday, I will be having

33:47

Ricky Roldan on for, from Urban Reform Podcast. And that episode is, is called

33:54

Taking Presup to the Street. So if you guys know who Ricky is, he's got a really great podcast called the

33:59

Urban Reform Podcast. So if you like Presup, but from, from a guy, you know, who, who sounds tougher than I do, you know,

34:08

I don't sound very tough, but if you want to, if you want to see what Presup looks like, like how it would look like in the streets, you know,

34:16

I could just picture Ricky, you know, wearing his duet, you know, waiting in the corner, waiting in a dark alley, waiting to leap on some atheist somewhere.

34:27

So, so definitely you guys want to, you guys want to listen in on that, on that episode. That'll be next Tuesday at 9 p .m.

34:32

Eastern. Okay. Also, I'm going to be having Seth Bloomberg on. I don't know if he has any website or anything like that, but he's been on the

34:40

Gospel Truth and did some debates. I thought he did a really good job and thought it would be good to have him on. And I'll also be having

34:45

Brian Knapp from Choosing Hats on in the future. I haven't set a date yet.

34:51

And for those who like the Calvinism stuff that we have, I'll be having Michael Preciado is, he is the author of A Reformed View of Freedom.

35:00

So he's, he's basically a Guillaume Bignon without a French accent.

35:05

So, you know, they cover kind of the same topic. So if you like those topics, definitely you'd want to check those out when

35:13

I, when I keep folks updated with regards to the dates. All right. But if you have any questions, please take, take a moment to write a question out and we'll get to it later.

35:22

All right. Okay. So Joshua Pillows, what is the Stroudian, who is Stroud and what is he objecting to?

35:31

So in the 20th century, there was a resurgence of transcendental arguments following after Kant, you know, about 100, 150 years earlier, 200 years earlier.

35:42

And so the arguments would argue again from the impossibility of the contrary, but also, you know, you have to assume what's in question in order to argue against it.

35:52

So in the 20th century, you have, you know, not a lot, but you know, you had a group of philosophers that would utilize transcendental arguments to counter the skeptic in one area.

36:02

And that's the crucial point. It was only in one area. It wasn't a whole worldview sort of argument.

36:08

And so everything was going well and dandy until this guy named

36:13

Stroud comes along and he critiques another philosopher by the name of P .F.

36:20

Strawson. And Strawson is an atheistic philosopher, was, who used transcendental arguments as well to combat the skeptic in two or three different areas.

36:30

And so Stroud comes along and criticizes Strawson. And he says, you can't make a transcendental argument where the premises are in the vicinity of your experience.

36:42

And then the conclusion goes to something beyond your experience, where, you know, because Strawson would say something like the existence of objects must go on, must, they must continue to exist while we don't perceive them.

36:54

And so Stroud comes along and says, we can't just conclude that that's what's the case in reality.

36:59

That's all, we only have to assume that conceptually speaking. Well, you know, Strawson, when he made that argument, wasn't arguing ontologically.

37:07

He wasn't arguing about reality. He was just arguing conceptually. So Stroud completely misconstrued

37:12

Strawson, but in the process, he came up with a pretty heavy criticism against transcendental arguments, saying ultimately that any transcendental argument you give can only ever prove at best a conceptual necessity.

37:25

You have to assume the conclusion conceptually speaking, but that doesn't mean it's the case external to us.

37:31

And - Is that the conceptual, like, for example, in the Michael Butler article in Greg Bonson's Feshriff, I think

37:39

I have the book somewhere. Let me see. Do I have it somewhere? Because I have it too, it's just not in the

37:44

Feshriff. I don't think I have, it's in the Feshriff. There is an article, a very lengthy article that is written by Michael Butler.

37:54

And it's an excellent article, by the way, great summary of the transcendental argument. But one thing that he leaves hanging at the end is this issue of the difference between conceptual necessity versus ontological reality.

38:06

So what does that mean for folks who have no idea what we're talking about? If we demonstrated successfully that the transcendental argument is solid, right?

38:15

You need to presuppose the Christian worldview in order to make sense out of anything. All that would prove is that you need to presuppose the

38:23

Christian worldview to make sense out of anything. So you've proven conceptual necessity.

38:29

I need the Christian worldview conceptually speaking to make sense out of anything. Now that's pretty good as far as it goes.

38:36

If it didn't go anywhere further than that, that's still pretty powerful thing, but that's not what Van Til was trying to do.

38:42

Van Til was not trying to demonstrate the conceptual necessity only, but the ontological reality.

38:48

Christianity actually had to be the case in order for anything to make sense.

38:54

And so what you're pointing out here is this distinction that if this objection is valid, then all we've proven, although a good start, all we've proven is conceptual necessity, not that it's actually the case.

39:07

Is that the nature of the objection? Yeah, basically. And yeah, in layman's terms, that's how you would put it.

39:15

I go to an atheist and let's say he's philosophically well -read and I give him the transcendental argument.

39:21

And he says, well, all you've proven is that I have to, in my head, assume God exists and Christ rose from the dead and all that sort of stuff.

39:27

But that doesn't mean it's actually the case in the external world outside of me. For I know it's something totally different.

39:33

So all you've proven as an apologist is that I have to conceptualize it in my head. So what do

39:38

I have to do with that? And so that's the objection, basically. And to me, that's quite brutal because that's not what

39:48

Van Til wanted to do. And it makes it even look worse because Van Til construed or formed his apologetic probably 20 to 30 years before Stroud even comes into the picture.

40:00

And so now you're thinking, okay, well, did Van Til construe his apologetic, his argument already immune to Stroud or did it succumb to Stroud?

40:09

And now here comes Bonson, his protege. And now we've got to ad hoc, after the fact, modify it to circumvent

40:16

Stroud. So that's like the penultimate question there. So yeah, it is a devastating criticism.

40:22

So here we are, we have a comment. Someone says, currently I'm on Stroud's team.

40:28

It seems to me like transcendental arguments tell us how things must appear to us. Now, how things actually are, not how things actually are.

40:35

We don't know our lenses prescription is accurate. How would we respond then?

40:41

How would we respond to the, how have you responded in your paper? What was your solution to this objection?

40:49

Well, firstly, it wasn't my solution. This was from my teacher, Dr. Bonson, which again, he didn't,

40:55

I don't see anywhere in his written writings, which is a shame. It was only on the tapes I've listened to in his courses. But the

41:01

Stroudian challenge fails against Van Til because the Stroudian challenge is only predicated on atheistic autonomous worldviews that start with man as the center of the universe.

41:13

And then for man to work out and get all the facts and whatnot. The Christian worldview rejects that entirely.

41:18

We don't start with man, we start with God. So on the one hand you have, and the atheist who, we'll just take atheists for now, who starts with an egocentric predicament.

41:27

And he's got to conjure up all the facts, but on the Christian worldview, you don't start with an egocentric predicament. You start with God and you're in connection with God and you're in connection with the external world.

41:35

That's our worldview. And that's - Now real quick, Justin, cause

41:41

I could anticipate people saying this. Well, you don't start with God, Joshua, okay? You might start with God from like a metaphysical perspective, right?

41:51

But epistemologically, we have to start with ourselves. I mean, don't you know you need your senses, bro, to read the

41:57

Bible? You know, like, so why don't you quickly address that and then you can continue to your line of reasoning there.

42:02

I know there's gonna be people who are listening like - Yeah, I mean, I'm glad you did cause that goes to the previous paper as well.

42:11

It irks me when people, when classical apologists say this, you have, you can either start with yourself or God, you know, you have to start with yourself.

42:19

You can't start with God. To which I just sit there and I'm like, says who? Like, that's a false dichotomy.

42:26

Who says we have to either start with man or we have to start with God? Cause Sproul has repeatedly said, we can't start with man.

42:32

We have to start with, or we can't start with God. We have to start with self -consciousness with man. And then we go to God. Where's the argument to say, well, it's an either or situation.

42:41

You know, we reject that entirely. Everyone has a priori inescapable, innate knowledge of God at the outset.

42:47

It's impossible not to have it. In the same way that we would argue, it's impossible not to have knowledge of laws of logic.

42:54

You have to have not laws of logic, knowledge of laws of logic in order to question it or to predicate at all, anything, you know?

43:01

And so I, again, I irk at that criticism, but on the Christian worldview anyway, we start with both.

43:08

We're made in the image of God. And so anything we do consciously, morally speaking, quite literally images our creator, we can't escape it.

43:16

There's no chronology there in terms of knowing, okay, we know ourselves. Okay, now let's look and see if there's a

43:22

God, you know? We know innately. And so that's my answer to that is there's no -

43:27

So would babies know God? Yeah, that's another issue. I knew you were gonna go, I knew you were gonna go there.

43:33

To be honest, let's throw to our interlocutors. That's a difficult question.

43:39

I believe all men know God and I believe babies know God. The difficulty is in what sense?

43:45

I don't know how to unpack that. And that's something, you know, I'm sure there are people out there who might have better responses than what

43:52

I just gave, but I'm not sure as to the - I'm confident that all have knowledge of God in light of the fact that we're image bearers of God, but it's difficult to explain and work that out.

44:03

I think that would be something worthy of looking into in more detail. Yeah, and it goes over to an issue of internalism and externalism in the debate of justification.

44:14

Do babies know things or how do they know things? For me personally,

44:20

I don't have a solid answer for that. I'm not sure anyone has a solid answer for that. I don't think that's a criticism towards the argument.

44:28

Even if assuming babies don't have knowledge of God and maybe there's a certain age when their brain develops that they do or whatever, that doesn't negate the argument automatically.

44:38

So yeah, that's how I would respond anyway. Real quick, someone's saying, I guess they're coming late to the show.

44:44

Bonson was a teacher. Joshua would have been one years old. Yeah, we mentioned that. He's his teacher in the sense that he listened to lectures, took his courses, and he considers him his teacher.

44:54

Basically, you are basically someone who took Bonson courses without the ability to raise your hand.

45:01

Yeah, and I couldn't ask a question. I was kind of stuck until it finally clicked one day, but yeah, no, if he came late, then everything

45:10

I've learned about presuppositional apologetics, the transcendental method, comes from Bonson.

45:16

Supplementary, Lyle and Sait and Brunke and whatever, but Bonson's been my only teacher. All my notes, handwritten, typed, are from him, so.

45:24

That's right. All right, so again, so the Stroudian objection. How do you respond to the Stroudian objection?

45:32

Well, in short, in one sentence, it's a non -issue. On my worldview, it's not an issue. On the atheistic worldview, it is an issue because on the atheistic worldview, you start with man, and you already start with an egocentric picture because man is divorced from the external world, and so that's the pervasive problem in philosophy is, and even

45:52

Kant himself, what you call the father of transcendental argumentation, couldn't get beyond it.

45:58

How do you get from the phenomenological to the noumenal, and you just can't bridge the gap on an atheistic worldview? On a

46:03

Christian worldview, we start with God. He's created us in his image. He's created the world that we're in contact with, and so ultimately, the

46:09

Stroudian criticism is a non -issue. So basically what Stroud is really critiquing are transcendental arguments that assume autonomy.

46:20

Yeah, every time. So it's not, once you critique a transcendental argument, that's not sufficient to say, look,

46:26

I've tackled Van Til's argument because Van Til's, the unique aspect of Van Til's transcendental argument is that he doesn't start with the assumption of autonomy.

46:34

He is starting with God, so he doesn't start with the egocentric predicament, starting from himself and then moving outward.

46:42

Yeah, exactly, and after studying everything, I'm surprised at how little

46:47

I've seen this answer, and I've seen other presuppositionalists answer it, but not in this way, and it just kind of takes me aback because the whole point of presuppositional apologetics is the circularity involved, the inevitable.

47:03

We start with the Christian worldview, and so Stroud unwittingly started with his atheistic worldview and making the objection.

47:11

Well, I have a worldview here and a worldview here, and yeah, the objection's great over here, but hey, we're over here, so how about you come over to this circle and -

47:18

He didn't do the internal critique. No, and it was never leveled against Van Til.

47:24

It was always leveled against, it was leveled against Stroustan and then secular transcendental arguments, so -

47:29

But he didn't, he lacked an internal critique because if he would have internally critiqued the Christian worldview, the

47:34

Christian form of presuppositionalism, he would have had to have hypothetically granted the truth of Christianity, which we assert teaches that we must start with God.

47:45

So on the assumption of Christianity, you're already removing yourself from the egocentric predicament because given

47:51

Christian thought categories, we start with God, not with man. Yeah, and even Mike Butler, who was

47:56

Bonson's protege in his paper, he didn't concede Stroud, obviously, but he didn't answer in this way, and Bonson did, that's how

48:04

I got my answer, and Butler was sitting in on the lecture five years earlier before he published the work, and I'm just reading it and I'm blown aback, like, why didn't you answer that way?

48:14

Everyone has circles. It's not like we're all neutral here, and that's one of the criticisms that Beilink, in his paper, who he argued in favor for Stroud said was, well,

48:24

Butler's begging the question, the presuppositionalist is begging the question because he's just pausing at God at the outside. He says, okay,

48:29

Stroud, you're not a problem. I'll wash my hands and be done with it. We can't do that because it's circularity. Of course, Stroud was being just as equally circular in his criticism.

48:38

He was assuming the non -existence of God and the autonomy of man, while we were assuming at the outset the existence of God and the lack of self -sufficiency of man's reasoning and that sort of stuff, so you have two circles.

48:49

Stroud's definitely affects once. His criticism's valid. It's definitely valid. Kant couldn't escape egocentrism, and his conclusion is valid against all secular transcendental arguments, but on Van Til's approach, starting with the

49:02

Christian worldview, it makes no sense. It's not even an issue. He'd have to walk over and get in the

49:07

Christian worldview and say, well, how do you start with God and man, that sort of critique, but as he put it, it's not an issue.

49:15

And so that's why these, I mean, presuppositionalists, we're always repeating the terms, no neutrality, no autonomy.

49:22

Those are central. It's not even, they're not even like the cliche by what standard, we get made fun of for that.

49:29

By the way, asking what standard is, by what standard, is it perfectly valid question? I don't know.

49:35

People have made fun of it so much that now people are afraid to use it. It's like, that's a perfectly valid question to ask.

49:40

So I keep asking it, you know, let them make fun of the fact that we say it, but this issue of autonomy and neutrality is central.

49:51

The fact that, well, it's impossible, but the fact that we don't assume those things actually saves our philosophy instead of damages it, right?

50:01

Yeah, we don't start with autonomy whatsoever. We know we start with the Christian worldview. If you are a presuppositionalist, see, here's the thing, even with other presuppositionalists who wanna concede

50:11

Strauss's point, like Balint, for instance. Hello, Balint, when you watch this after. You, there's a tenet, you know, you want to say, yeah, we're, you know, we have to embrace a worldview.

50:22

We're all circular and you know, but then when Strauss comes along, you kind of want to abandon that three hands up and say, well, this is, you know, this is a valid objection.

50:30

So let's get outside of the worldview and let's look down on it, you know, and see if Strauss's objection is an issue.

50:35

And if it's not, then we'll go back into the worldview. You can't do it. And I think that's what the people who can concede to Strauss's argument are in error with.

50:43

You can't escape circularity. They're trying to have a neutral standpoint by which they can answer the objection, answer the objection, okay, now we're not neutral anymore.

50:51

You just can't do it. Like you have to go on this Christian worldview where there is no autonomous reasoning. You don't start with man.

50:56

You start with God and circumvent the issue in that manner. Now in Bonson's lectures on transcendental arguments,

51:04

I was listening to the last lecture and Bonson was answering the objection that the transcendental argument does not prove that Christianity must be the only necessary precondition for intelligible experience.

51:17

And as he was answering it, and I thought Bonson gave a brilliant answer and I was in full agreement with Dr. Bonson. And he says,

51:24

Michael, the mic talking to Michael Butler, which was his, he goes, Michael, now, why are you laughing?

51:31

Why are you laughing, yeah. Are you laughing because it's too good to be true?

51:37

Or are you laughing for some other reason? And Michael Butler says, I'm laughing because it seems too good to be true.

51:43

Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. You know, yeah, again, which boggles my mind.

51:50

Why didn't Butler answer in his paper in the same way? He was sitting in on the lecture, you know, and then

51:56

Bonson dies in December of 95. And then he, I don't think he published his paper in 02, you know, so seven years later, but then, you know, but I like that point.

52:06

I'm glad you brought that up because more philosophically astute atheists will say, okay, well, you know, you've proven that Christianity is a sufficient condition.

52:15

It can satisfy the preconditions for intelligibility, but that doesn't mean, well, it's the only true worldview. That, you know, that doesn't follow at all.

52:22

You have to go and refute this worldview, this worldview, and all the hypothetical ones before you're allowed to say Christianity is exclusive.

52:28

Of course, when they say that, I have them right where I want them because in the nature of the case, there can only be one true worldview.

52:35

There can only be one transcendental. That's like saying Christianity is true. God exists.

52:41

And Hinduism is true. God doesn't exist. And all these millions of other gods exist. And then they're both true at the same time.

52:47

Well, that doesn't make sense at all. You've lost unity. You lost coherence. You've lost any sort of truth whatsoever if both of these systems are true.

52:55

There has to be, and there can only be one transcendental. If the Christian worldview satisfies the preconditions for intelligible experience, then by default, it's true.

53:04

And so I can sort of coerce or trick the atheist into saying, oh yeah, it's just a sufficient condition, but now

53:10

I have them right where I want them because now all I have to do is say, well, there can only be one. So you've just admitted that the Christian worldview -

53:15

If it's sufficient, that's necessary, bro. Yeah, that's exactly right. So I'm gonna cut a little sleight of hand there, if you will.

53:22

But yeah, there can only be one. The Christian worldview justifies intelligibility.

53:27

So you're wrong. And you don't wanna put it that way, of course. The only way they could come back from that is to go on the

53:33

Christian worldviews on terms and critique it and find an internal consistency or whatever in that way. But if they can't, and they really can't,

53:40

Christianity is true, both conceptually and metaphysically external to us. Now, I have heard many people,

53:49

I've laid out the argument. I've convinced many, a classicalist, by the way, which

53:54

I'm very happy because once you explain a lot of these things, you get past a lot of the common misconceptions and caricatures.

54:00

A lot of people kind of just like, huh, okay, you've given me something to think about. I remember speaking with, again, very well -known apologist, sharp guy.

54:08

He was helping me prepare for a debate, okay? And so he was playing the atheist and I was giving my transcendental argument and you could hear the shift in his voice from when he was the atheist.

54:22

And then you began to hear him ask his own questions because I began to answer the questions in a way,

54:27

I was like, huh, okay, but what about this? And he began to ask his own questions. And at the end of that little interaction where he was almost, his interest was peaked.

54:34

And this guy's a classicalist. His interest was peaked. He's just like, it just sounds too easy. It sounds too good to be true.

54:42

And many things that sound too good to be true usually are, except the transcendental arguments. That's right.

54:49

But what if someone posits a deist God? Or someone kept on giving, and there are answers for that.

54:55

I mean, not every presuppositionalist answers it the best way that they can, but there are these kind of gotcha moments.

55:01

Like, well, what about this? There are answers to that. And usually some of these objections come from a complete misunderstanding of what we're actually arguing.

55:09

Yeah, well, so here's a question that I hear a lot of people ask. Where's the argument itself?

55:16

Let's see its premises. Let's follow the line of thinking.

55:22

Can the transcendental argument, or is the transcendental argument, at least as Bonson presented it, is it ever laid out in some kind of logical form that one could follow?

55:34

Like the P's imply Q's, and the if then's, and those sorts of things that some of the more rigorous guys are looking for so that they can examine each point and critique it in a way that they feel is satisfying.

55:50

Yeah. This was an issue brought up by Gordon Clark, again, with Van Til back probably in the 50s.

55:58

And he says, well, Van Til nowhere lays out his argument. Where are the premises of the argument? There are two responses to that.

56:05

The first is that presuppositionalism is a comparison of world views. It does not argue inductively.

56:12

It does not argue deductively. It argues by a comparison of world views. Which one can make sense of intelligibility?

56:17

Which one can't? And so that's a good reason why you never see it laid out formally speaking.

56:25

But second, there is a formal form to it. It's a syllogism.

56:31

So the first premise would be that in order for P to be the case, Q would be the case. Q has to be the case since Q is a necessary precondition for P.

56:41

And then premise two is P is the case. And then the conclusion is therefore Q is the case. And so that would be the syllogism.

56:47

And even in Bonson's writings, I haven't seen it laid out that way. And he never gave it in that transcendental argument seminar, actually.

56:54

It was Butler who gave that syllogism. But that's how the transcendental method would go.

57:00

Not only for Van Til, but for any transcendental argument in general. Any secular, you know,

57:05

Wittgenstein or Strawson or Stroud or whoever gives the transcendental argument, that's the generic form, if you will.

57:13

There's one form to the argument, but as you know, there are many arguments in terms of content.

57:19

Argument from uniformity in nature, validity of sense perception, the possibility of knowledge, all that sort of stuff.

57:24

But the syllogism I gave you would be the form of the argument. Okay. All right. Very good.

57:30

All right. Well, I think we covered a lot of ground, man. I think it'd be a good time to go to some of the questions. There are some questions, some nice comments, as well.

57:39

Real quick. If you have a question, it's not too late. I mean, I'm feeling good right now.

57:44

I don't know about you. I have time. So I love the Q &A aspect.

57:50

Also, if I hear a lot of people, and it's in the comments too, people say this is such an underrated channel.

57:58

Then share it. I have to,

58:04

I admit, I agree. If I wasn't doing this channel and I was watching this channel, I'd be like, hey, this is some pretty good content here.

58:11

So if you find the content super helpful, do me a solid and share it. Subscribe, tell others to subscribe.

58:18

It gets the conversation going. And hopefully these kinds of discussions will help clear some of the differences between the different methodologies.

58:25

And even if people disagree at the end of the day, we could have more fruitful conversations because a lot of these things are being laid out.

58:31

So subscribe, check out the website, Revealed Apologetics. I'm in the process of moving.

58:36

And so when I move, I'm in New York, I'm gonna be moving to North Carolina. When I move, I'm gonna have a lot more time to write.

58:43

So if folks check out my website and there's only like two blog articles there, more is coming, we're just in a period of transition.

58:50

But definitely share the content and send in questions, topics you'd want me to cover.

58:56

I'm gonna try to do a little bit more of some spiritual formation sort of stuff too. I don't just do the

59:02

YouTube channel. There are some podcast episodes that are not done on YouTube. So I'm gonna be doing how to study the

59:08

Bible and maybe a little bit more on transcendental arguments, kind of do some practical stuff as well.

59:13

Because I think this is very important is that when we're doing apologetics, we can't be imbalanced, all right?

59:20

When we're talking about philosophy and theology, we always have to remember the importance that all of this has to be rooted in scripture, okay?

59:28

We use philosophical terminology, but I would guarantee that Joshua and myself, we can take these issues of transcendentals and show you in scripture where that is a principle that is derived from the text of scripture itself.

59:41

So being biblically based, I think is so vitally important and biblically balanced. Sometimes we need to put away the apologetics books, we need to put away whatever we're reading and dive in the scriptures.

59:53

I don't remember who said it. It was a really cool quote. They said, visit many books, but live in the scriptures.

01:00:01

I'm sorry? Spurgeon. Spurgeon, yes. And that quote really struck me because as I've said in the past, we can be so consumed because we love apologetics, we love theology, and they're important.

01:00:13

We can be so much into those books that we don't actually stay in the scriptures and soak ourselves in the word of God and allow it to transform our lives because our lives are not just apologetics.

01:00:25

We are fully orbed people and we're to apply these truths to all areas of life, not just when we're debating and arguing with the atheist or the

01:00:33

Jehovah's witness or whoever. So very, very important. All right, well, let me go all the way to the top here.

01:00:40

And this is the awkward moment where I scroll down. Slam RN asked, did

01:00:47

Joshua talk about his organ playing? Did you mention you play the organ? I saw that.

01:00:53

We thought like, oh, Josh, we probably like in some band somewhere. I don't think he mentioned like, well, I actually play the organ.

01:00:59

He didn't. Okay, well, I should clarify. So I'm a classical musician. I don't even listen to contemporary music.

01:01:06

Wait, you're not a presuppositional musician? You're a classical musician? Come on, man.

01:01:11

I thought you were - Sorry. Okay, that was good. That was good. I'll guarantee that. Listen, man. Classically trained.

01:01:19

Okay. I can't get around the joke, but whatever. Yeah, so I'm a classical musician. My parents raised me in music, even from when

01:01:26

I was in the womb of my mother. I was just listening to classical music on the way to church every Sunday or Wednesday or whatever.

01:01:32

And then I took piano when I was five and then trombone in school. And then

01:01:38

I started composing after that. Now I do organ. So I'm currently, I go to a

01:01:44

Lutheran church, Missouri Synod, and I play the organ there, but I compose as well on the side for organ or piano or choir or whatever.

01:01:51

So yeah, I played piano. I played organ for about six years now. Very cool.

01:01:57

Very cool. Maximilian Albrecht. That's a really cool name.

01:02:02

Says, this is what I need. I'm just learning about this and I really don't like the evidential. Even watching those guys brothers bothers bothers me because sometimes they make it seem like possibly we could be wrong as Christians.

01:02:19

Thanks for the video. Well, thank you so much Maximilian. Yeah, that bothers me too.

01:02:26

But what are you gonna do? The best you can do is keep speaking the truth, be as biblical as possible. And hopefully people come around.

01:02:33

That said, God still uses those who use the evidential approach. As Bonson was apt to say, God can strike a blow with a crooked stick.

01:02:40

And if you think about it, we're all crooked sticks in some way or another. So that's important to keep in mind.

01:02:46

All right, let's see here. Let me see here. Slam RN said,

01:02:56

I think they said somewhere. Okay. What'd she say? I cried when Bonson died. It was so sad.

01:03:02

I just wanna make a note on that. Cause again, I was six months old when he passed. When I listened to his memorial service,

01:03:10

I bawled. Like after I grew a relationship with him, I'd listened to his lectures for a year or two.

01:03:16

You know. You know him. Yeah, in my heart, you know. Like I know he's in my room with all in my ears all the time

01:03:22

I'm listening to him, you know. And I'm hearing just, oh my gosh. I don't remember the last time

01:03:27

I cried that hard. It's on my computer and I just refuse to ever listen to it ever again. I've just, I can't.

01:03:33

The pain is so much. And I just. He went out like a thug though. He preached his own, his own funeral service.

01:03:41

I mean, come on. Someone should have the video clip of Bonson preaching his final sermon, which was so appropriate given that a week or two later he passed and he gets little thug life glasses pop in, you know.

01:03:54

Because it was just such a picture perfect, you know. But, but, you know, when you, when you keep, when you take the time to listen to him, just to really listen to him and just, he was such a gifted teacher.

01:04:04

Even if you disagree with him, he just had a way of making simple, very complex ideas.

01:04:09

And he definitely was a gift to the church that unfortunately is no longer with us.

01:04:16

So, and it's cool to talk to someone like yourself who started in 2017. Bonson died in 1995.

01:04:22

I mean, he's still making waves, especially amongst, among young, young apologists.

01:04:28

So I think he would be very happy with how God has used what he's laid down as a foundation as to how

01:04:34

God's using it today. I certainly hope so. You know, he had so many hardships in his life, you know, and his college got shut down and then his wife left him.

01:04:42

And, but he stayed faithful, you know, the whole time. And he's impacting the world now in ways that only

01:04:48

God could have done in his providence. If there were not these tapes, you know, and these series of lectures,

01:04:53

I would have no clue. I wouldn't know how to defend the method. I wouldn't know how to answer Stroud. And so I just, you know,

01:05:00

I owe Bonson basically everything I've learned. You know, and I give glory to God, of course, for providentially guiding that.

01:05:06

But yeah, he had a way to dumb down philosophy. That's how you know someone knows something.

01:05:12

If they can explain it to a five -year -old, they've got it in their hand. The toothpaste proved for God's existence.

01:05:18

I mean, it's just like flexing at that point. Well, he woke up that morning for the debate and like, yeah, toothpaste.

01:05:25

Let's just argue from toothpaste today. And then, you know. That's awesome. Philip Guzman says you can use transcendental arguments until you have to identify and define who and what the ultimate and absolute is.

01:05:39

Well, that's wrong on its face, but why don't you unpack why that's wrong? Unless you agree with him.

01:05:45

Yeah. It seems to be assuming that we're trying to argue for some ambiguous notion of God.

01:05:53

It's almost missing the very point that we're starting with the God we know. He's identified at the very start.

01:06:01

I mean, from a secular point of view, you could.

01:06:07

I mean, but even then, and whenever you give a transcendental argument, you're already assuming, even if it's temporary that you're the ultimate, you're assuming your own authority and your own reasoning.

01:06:16

That's when we get back to autonomous self -sufficiency and stuff like that. But yeah, I'm not entirely sure.

01:06:22

You have to identify and define who and what the ultimate and absolute is. Oh, but in terms of a

01:06:29

Christian approach, no, you don't. Because we start. Yeah, you start with God and his revelation.

01:06:37

He defines who he is at the outset. God, we would know who God is if we didn't even have an argument for the existence of God.

01:06:43

That's how being made in his image works, basically. So it's not like we can use a transcendental argument all the way to a certain point.

01:06:51

Well, now we've got to define who God is and what the absolute order of the universe. Well, that's just not the case at all. We start with God because we're made in his image as we alluded to earlier.

01:06:59

Right, very good. I'm not sure if this is a rhetorical question or a question for you, but how can a

01:07:04

Muslim know he's not being deceived by Allah that he's the precondition of intelligibility? Is there some notion?

01:07:10

I mean, I'm not a Muslim scholar, but is there a notion within Islam that it is possible for Allah to deceive people?

01:07:18

Yes, and there's a, I don't have the verse off the top of my head, but it says something to the effect that Allah is so transcendent he can't be known, truly speaking, or something like that.

01:07:29

So whereas in Christianity, God is transcendent, he's also eminent. You know, he literally walked the earth for 33 years of his life, you know.

01:07:38

Allah is not like that. He's not triune and he's far above his creation. Now who can know him? And so the issue of deception

01:07:46

I think is very valid against Islam or Muslim worldview. All right, let me just scroll on down.

01:07:54

Okay, this is a good question here. So Maximilian strikes again. He asks, as someone brand new into this, where should

01:08:01

I start or maybe what to read? Keep in mind, he's literally describing me.

01:08:07

Keep in mind, I have three children and I run a business. So a lot of my time is allotted to them.

01:08:13

So basically, how do I do apologetics when I have three kids and have no time to read or listen to anything?

01:08:21

Yeah, and we literally had this phone call last week. For me -

01:08:27

After you give your answer, I have three kids. So I'll be more than happy to tell them how I do it, but go ahead.

01:08:33

Yeah, I'm a young man. I'm not in a relationship or anything. I don't have any kids.

01:08:38

So fortunately, I have that blessing, I guess. I have the luxury of studying whenever I want to.

01:08:45

But on that note, I went through different methods of how do you study? What's the most effective way?

01:08:51

And I went through, okay, well, let's handwrite because that's better. And maybe there's something to it, but then that didn't work. I bought a whiteboard, not too big.

01:08:58

And I would literally draw the concepts and define all the words and verbally, audibly explain it.

01:09:05

Like I was in front of a class, because if you can explain it, that's good too. Well, it works too. But what

01:09:10

I found is, and we talked about this, you just listen to the tapes of Bonson or whoever over and over and over and over again.

01:09:19

You're gonna read a book and I guarantee you you won't get everything in that book the first time. You read it a second time, you're still not gonna get everything in that book.

01:09:26

You gotta read it over and over and over again. And so every time I'm in the car, I used to listen to music. I don't really do that anymore.

01:09:33

I listen to Bonson. If there's a subject that I know I'm weak in, I would purposely go to that specific tape and listen to it over and over and over again.

01:09:41

And I speed it up 30, 25%, I think, so it's not as long. But while I'm driving, that's when

01:09:47

I take it all in. And Maximilian's like, that sounds great, but where do I go to find

01:09:52

Bonson's lectures? Well, guess what? The Lord has smiled upon you. Because just recently, all of the lectures of Dr.

01:10:02

Bonson that were available on Covenant Media have been bought out by the folks who are running the

01:10:07

Bonson Project, okay? And they have now made all of Bonson's lectures free, available on Sermon Audio.

01:10:14

Go on Sermon Audio, type in Bonson Project, and have a field day. There are countless of hours and hours and hours of not only his apologetics material, but his theological material and his exposition through books of the

01:10:29

Bible. So there is so much there. I'd have to say that the primary way that I've learned of Bonson, and even the stuff when you guys, if you've listened to my debates and things like that, and you're wondering, where did this guy learn all this stuff?

01:10:39

I learned primarily through listening to lectures as well, okay? The cool thing is, in order to read a book, you need to sit down.

01:10:47

And it is impossible to sit down and concentrate on a book when you have three children running all over the place, okay?

01:10:54

So when you say, how should I get started? I'm telling you from a person who has three kids, how bad do you want to learn it?

01:11:03

If you want to learn it bad enough, you will stay up late or get up early. It's as simple as that.

01:11:10

Pick which one works best for you. And you take that a lot of time and you listen to lectures, get a notebook, start writing down.

01:11:18

This stuff, whether you choose to read or to listen, it needs to be a part of your thinking, right?

01:11:26

Biblical apologetics, just like the Bible itself, needs to be the background music of your thinking.

01:11:32

And that only comes through repetition, repetition, and application. Find opportunities to use what you're learning, okay?

01:11:41

So listening to things while you're driving, while you're cleaning, when the kids take a nap.

01:11:48

Phones, whatever, you know, even mowing the lawn. I just can't put my headphones in and just listen.

01:11:54

And another thing with tapes is it's not a book. Books are so formal. When you're listening to these tapes, these

01:12:01

Bonson tapes, you're either gonna be listening to a seminar or a single lecture or an entire course. When you listen to tapes, it's so much more pragmatic because he's having to explain it to an audience.

01:12:12

It's not some generic, you know, I'm gonna publish this book and it'll go out to everyone. Books are great, you know, but there's a pragmatic aspect to it where he will stop what he's doing and explain a difficult concept here, there, whatever.

01:12:24

And he'll even take Q and A. You know, it's hard to hear because, you know, 90s, 80s, quality's not -

01:12:29

But it's still pretty good. I mean, it's not, you know, unbearable. And also the value of listening to him speak is that you learn how to say what he's saying.

01:12:40

Not that you're parroting him. Obviously you wanna understand the concepts, but I think it's more practical to learn how something is said in conversation than simply reading it off a page.

01:12:50

Yeah, and again, like I said at the beginning, I want to be an example for someone

01:12:58

I've solely studied under Bonson and his tapes. And this is the outcome of it after just four years, you know, and so I wanna be an example.

01:13:06

It's doable. Of course, I don't have three kids and a family or anything, but I find the time to listen to tapes all the time.

01:13:13

He's an organ player. If an organ player could be a presuppositionalist, so can a father of three. And I practice for anywhere between two to four hours of my day is just practicing at the organ.

01:13:22

And I don't even - Well, he's listening to Bonson. That's how good he is.

01:13:29

That'd be impressive, actually. My cousin just botched Bonson's name, but sorry,

01:13:37

Laura. All right, so Phillip has another question. Maybe you could answer it. Maybe you can.

01:13:42

It's kind of an abstract one, but how do Herman Duivier's 15 modal aspects of reality fit into TAs?

01:13:50

If you're not familiar with that, we can move on, but maybe you are, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not really well -versed in it.

01:13:58

Bonson touches over Duivier's aspects. It's more of like an abstract philosophy.

01:14:07

There are these 15 different modes of how we view things and how it relates to transcendental argumentation,

01:14:13

I'm not sure. Duivier had his own criticisms of Van Til, namely that he called it a, quote, a transcendent apologetic.

01:14:21

Well, Van Til started with the Bible at the outset. Well, that's not right. We can't do that. But in terms of his modal aspects,

01:14:27

I couldn't really tell you how that fits into transcendental argumentation. Okay, fair enough.

01:14:33

John Myers asks, in Romans 1 .25, does the phrase exchange the truth of God for a lie mean that the unbeliever loses his knowledge of God so that they no longer know him after exchanging it for a lie?

01:14:49

They lose their knowledge of God if there was any knowledge in terms of saving grace, but no, in terms of the existence of their own creator, it's irradicable.

01:14:59

You cannot just lose knowledge of the Almighty. He's indelibly engraved in our hearts.

01:15:04

We're made in his image. You can't get out of that image at all. So anything we do, we're faced with that.

01:15:10

As Van Til put it, a ball in a pool, and he pushed the ball into the pool and the unbeliever's sitting on it, puts his hands up, says,

01:15:17

I don't have a ball. Where's the ball? But what's he doing? He's sitting on it. He's actively suppressing that truth. And so, no, it's impossible to lose any sort of knowledge of the

01:15:25

Almighty. Otherwise, you'd have, where's the accountability for your sin or anything like that? Where's the moral law in your heart?

01:15:32

So no, you can't lose that knowledge. That's not what that verse means. Very good. FTB asks, is there a correspondence theory of truth in Christianity?

01:15:42

If, for example, it is whatever corresponds to the mind of God, are we able to,

01:15:48

I guess he kind of messed up there. Are we able to truth apart from direct revelation of God?

01:15:53

Are we able to have truth apart from direct revelation of God? No, because if truth is whatever corresponds to the mind of God, then you can't have truth if there's no mind of God involved in their correspondence transaction.

01:16:06

Van Til called it a correspondence theory, but also a coherence theory, because there has to be full coherence with our thoughts and God's thoughts.

01:16:15

But whatever, if, for example, whatever corresponds to the mind of God, are we able to have truth apart from direct revelation?

01:16:20

No, because direct revelation is inescapable. You can't have it. There's no way you can have knowledge apart from direct revelation.

01:16:27

You can't even posit the hypothetical. Well, if God didn't exist, well, that already assumes he exists. So I can't even give you a hypothetical where there is no

01:16:35

God and there is no direct revelation. Okay, very good. Let's see here.

01:16:41

Boom, boom, boom. Um, whoops, whoops, whoops. Okay, I'm clicking through windows here. Okay, have you, let me see here.

01:16:48

Have you ever read the conversation between Balint and Stevens on the

01:16:54

Stroud critique? Again, I don't know how you pronounce his name. There's a, there's a little, I think it's

01:17:00

Balint. Okay. I think he's Hungarian. I don't remember, but anyway, I have not read that, but my 44 page or 45 page paper that responds to the

01:17:10

Stroudian objection is centered around Balint's paper in which he sides with Stroud. So I haven't read the correspondence between Balint and Stevens, but I have read

01:17:19

Balint's entire objection against Van Til against the Stroudian challenge. And that's where I responded in my paper to how his criticism doesn't apply to Van Til and all that sort of stuff like that, so.

01:17:30

Okay. Ricky Roldan of Urban Reform Podcast says, good stuff, brothers, with some firecracker emojis.

01:17:38

Man. That's good. I'll take it, man. I'll take it. Freddie Carrion says, such an underrated channel.

01:17:46

What you gonna do about it then? Make it, make it over. I just looked, I just looked. Right now we have 1 ,900, 900 and something subscribers.

01:17:58

So we're almost at 2 ,000. Maybe we'll do a celebration or something if we hit 2 ,000. For those who have subscribed and shared and done all those other things and supported financially,

01:18:07

I am very grateful for that. And definitely enjoy those who support and those who interact in the comments.

01:18:13

So thank you very much. Let's see here. Moving along. How are you doing? You okay?

01:18:19

I'm totally fine. Okay. Chris says you should have wore a bow tie. Chris, so for those of you that don't know,

01:18:26

I would wear like Victorian clothing. Like I'd have a trench coat and an ascot and a vest and a shirt and all that sort of stuff.

01:18:33

It's just like how I felt comfortable in, you know? And then a day came and I got too lazy and I'm like, whatever. I don't care anymore.

01:18:39

But yeah. It's only a two -eyes show. I don't need to dress in that. It's what it is. I still have. But no,

01:18:45

Chris knows me. We've gone back a few years. I haven't spoken to him in a while, but thank you, Chris. Yeah. Okay.

01:18:50

We have, oh, wait, wait. Oh, no. Here we go. We'll get to that one here.

01:18:56

So Laura asks, would Bunsen. I forgot how to pronounce. There it is. It's trying to be super nice.

01:19:02

It is B -A -H -N -S -E -N, but that's okay. Would Bunsen be a good starting point if you are extremely new to apologetics or is there somewhere

01:19:12

I could learn the basics? I'd like to answer this question because folks might be interested to know that I just purchased a book entitled

01:19:25

Every Believer Confident by Mark Farnham. Okay.

01:19:30

I'm gonna spell that for you so that you can write it down. Okay. It is

01:19:35

Every Believer Confident. It looks like this.

01:19:41

Let me see if I can get it in the camera. I don't know if you could see it. It's pretty ghetto. See how we do things here on Revealed Apologetics?

01:19:46

Okay. Every Believer Confident. It's like five bucks. And the author I have just reached out to, and he is willing to come on my show sometime in May.

01:19:55

So I have to respond to that email and set a date and hopefully we can get them on. Every Believer Confident is literally a super duper introductory kids level what's presuppositional apologetics?

01:20:10

I have no clue. It comes at it from a very basic level. And I think that's an excellent place to start.

01:20:17

But Bonson is also good to start as well. Always Ready is always a good one. He uses a lot of scripture there so it's not terribly difficult to follow.

01:20:25

But if you're looking for super duper elementary starting point, Every Believer Confident is definitely a good place to start.

01:20:32

Any other suggestions, Josh? Yeah, I think it's back in print. I think Slam said it in chat.

01:20:39

Pushing the Antithesis is another posthumous publication by Bonson. That's even more basic.

01:20:45

And my edition has a glossary in the back. It has Q &A at the end of every chapter and has answers to those.

01:20:51

That's the most - Don't be fooled. Pushing the Antithesis sounds complicated. It's actually hard to high schoolers.

01:20:57

Yeah, and you can get the video lectures where it's based off of.

01:21:02

But Pushing the Antithesis by Bonson is by far the easiest. It's easier than Always Ready. And it's certainly easier than his other two or three books out there.

01:21:11

But yeah, so Pushing the Antithesis by Bonson would be my starting if you went with Bonson. All right, very good.

01:21:18

Maximilian says, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, nope, I was the wrong one. Here we go.

01:21:25

Is determinism necessary? I suppose if I can guess where they're asking since the context is presuppositional apologetics, we understand that Cornelius Van Til was purposely trying to construct a reformed apologetic.

01:21:38

And so when we say reformed, that is usually associated with some form of determinism, compatibilism, whatever.

01:21:44

Is that a necessary feature of the presuppositional method? If so, why? Yeah, well, if we have indeterminism, then we have a problem, don't we?

01:21:55

Because the universe could be totally chaotic at any given point if God's not determining all things.

01:22:01

Now, and again, it would depend on the extent of the determinism that's being asked. If we get into compatibilism,

01:22:08

God predestined the pizza I ordered, things as mundane and trivial as that, that's another debate.

01:22:14

But in terms of the overall worldview apologetic, there has to be determinism. Otherwise we lose justification for the uniformity in nature, the inductive principle, the causal principle and all that sort of stuff.

01:22:25

So it is necessary in the broad sense, for sure. Right, and if someone says, but you were determined to say that, then watch my four hour double video with Guillaume Vignon, who answers all of those questions, both philosophically and biblically.

01:22:38

So we won't get into that. That's another can of worms there. Okay, Proverbs 1 .7

01:22:44

says, great discussion guys, keep the videos coming. Why don't you give me a thumbs up if you guys would like to see Joshua Pillows back on in the future.

01:22:51

I think you did an excellent job today. And when I have big names on, I usually have 30, 40 to 50 people watching at once.

01:22:59

And we've gotten as high as 30 something while you were on. So people are really enjoying your conversation.

01:23:06

And so I think you did an excellent job today. So keep it up and I'd love to have you back on in the future as well.

01:23:12

Thank you. But relax, we're not done yet. We're almost done. Okay, so Supreme Leader Kim, that's a pretty intense.

01:23:24

Supreme Leader Kim asks, how do we respond to atheists who ask, you got your worldview from the

01:23:30

Bible. How do you trust your senses to read the Bible? To that,

01:23:35

I would respond that they weren't listening. That sounds bad, but. Come on, man.

01:23:41

You have to be nicer. We get a bad rap for you. We need to reiterate the point.

01:23:48

We're not starting neutrally. We're not starting autonomously. It's not like, well, we've got to justify our senses. Okay, now we can go to hop over to the

01:23:54

Christian worldview and get into the circle here. We start with the Christian worldview. We start with God and knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves made in the image of God.

01:24:02

And so it's not like we have to formulate some abstract argument to justify our senses a priori or before we even get to an apologetic.

01:24:08

Our senses are justified in nature of who we are, you know. And secular man has that problem for sure.

01:24:15

It's been for thousands of years. No one's had an answer to it. You know, it either ends in infinite regress, vicious circularity or skepticism.

01:24:24

So, you know, but yeah, we start with the Christian worldview and that's how our senses are justified. If you want to say, oh, well, you're arguing circularly, that's begging the question.

01:24:32

Well, you're doing the exact same thing, just not Christianity, so. Okay, very good.

01:24:37

And we have two more questions unless one magically pops up. That happens sometimes.

01:24:43

All right, when interpreting a passage of the Bible, how can I know that my interpretation corresponds to the mind of God?

01:24:51

And how do we determine between two brothers giving a different interpretation? This was an issue

01:24:58

I was really struggling with. I think we talked about this last year. You know,

01:25:03

Protestantism comes along and now we have 5 trillion denominations and everyone has their own interpretation. 5 trillion's a little much,

01:25:09

Josh. Don't give the Catholics too much. We're the Protestant channel, right? He didn't say 5 trillion.

01:25:19

What was I gonna say? Well, we have all these denominations and this comes from Sola Scriptura and you put the

01:25:25

Bible as the ultimate authority. Well, now we got to interpret that. Now we have all these divisions.

01:25:31

Well, what do you do with that? It's really important to note that not everything is essential to salvation.

01:25:39

If every minute doctrine was essential to salvation, we'd all be lost. You know, no one has everything right.

01:25:47

There are essentials and then there are non -essentials. Non -essentials like eschatology and probably baptismal methods and stuff like that.

01:25:53

But even then that would depend on who you ask. We can know, if God saves a person, they know the fundamentals, if you will.

01:26:01

We don't have full assurance of the non -essentials. We do our exegesis, as it says, I can't remember the verse in Acts, when they studied the scriptures daily to see if the things came to pass.

01:26:11

But we study the scriptures and just because, oh, we're fallible, I guess we can't know anything for certain, we should just not do exegesis or theology or anything.

01:26:19

That's not the case at all. But the main point is we have the essentials that are necessary for salvation.

01:26:26

Non -essentials, not so much. But then again, as I told you, Eli, there's a difference between proving something with absolute certainty and knowing something with absolute certainty.

01:26:35

So you can know a doctrine, perhaps hypothetically, that's not essential. You just wouldn't have an argument that would prove absolutely as well.

01:26:45

So we have to delineate between proof and knowledge and persuasion and stuff like that. So yeah, the way we know the doctrines which correspond to the mind of God are those that are necessary for salvation.

01:26:57

And also FTB, I don't know what that's short for, so I apologize. The existence of competing interpretations does not negate the reality and possibility of having the correct interpretation, right?

01:27:12

So the existence of competing interpretations does not mean it's impossible to ascertain the correct one.

01:27:18

Okay, so if I were to give a math test to a class and my students gave different answers to two plus two, and then

01:27:26

I look and I say, well, Johnny says two plus two is four, and Stephen says two plus two is nine, and Stephanie says two plus two is 23.

01:27:35

Well, look at all these answers. I guess I can't know which one's correct. Well, that's ridiculous, right? God has spoken to us with clarity in human language.

01:27:44

And because God has chosen to communicate to us in human language, human language is sufficient for that communication.

01:27:51

Now, with respect to areas of disagreement, I would agree with Joshua here that with respect to the essentials,

01:27:57

I think they are clear. We can know that they are true, the essentials, and we could argue given the language that God uses and reveals to us in scripture.

01:28:04

However, even the Bible itself gives us precedent for disagreement, especially with respect to the, specifically with respect to the non -essentials, where in the end of Romans, Paul says with respect to one person seeing one day as holy and another one keeping another day as holy, says, let every man be convinced in his own mind.

01:28:23

So the Bible even gives us some leeway for disagreement, but not with respect to essentials.

01:28:28

Essentials can be known, they can be demonstrated, and it doesn't matter if there's a million different interpretations, the wrong ones are wrong, the right ones are right, and we can know that we're right with respect to those essential features of the

01:28:41

Christian faith, all right? Hope that makes sense. All right. Some people saying this was really fun.

01:28:47

Thank you so much. Thank you. Slam RN says, if you like the content, subscribe.

01:28:53

Yes, I'd highly appreciate that. This is my favorite, this is my favorite thing. I'm gonna put this on the screen, okay? All right.

01:29:00

This is awesome. I don't want your head to get big, Joshua, but this is cool, man.

01:29:07

All right. They call him pillows because he puts his debate opponents to sleep.

01:29:15

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? That's good, you knock him dead, bro. Oh, wow.

01:29:21

I appreciate it. Yeah.

01:29:26

Okay, someone's asking a question about Darth Dawkins, who's very well known on Discord. Are you familiar with Darth Dawkins?

01:29:32

Yeah. I actually recently started an apologetics page on TikTok, and man, it's like a cesspool on there, but on some of my videos, they would just say like, okay,

01:29:44

Darth Dawkins wannabe, you know, and I don't respond. I know who he is, apparently. From what I've heard anyway, I think you had him on recently, but like from what

01:29:51

I've heard, he's not, I mean, he's not very loving from, and I could be totally wrong, but I've never met him.

01:29:58

I don't know what he looks like. I don't know anything about his background, but yeah. Okay.

01:30:04

All right. Someone's asking, Chris is asking, who's your go -to living apologist today besides Eli?

01:30:12

There you go. Well, I mean, I already answered that, I guess. Oh, of today, of living.

01:30:21

All the dead ones are the best. That's right. My favorite living presuppositionalist is a dead presuppositionalist, because he lives in my heart.

01:30:30

I'm sorry, Dr. White. I mean, you know, but I mean, Bonson was a genius, and I know I have prejudices against him, but he was so articulate.

01:30:37

I mean, you couldn't debate him. He would just slice and dice you. Today, it would depend.

01:30:43

If you want a down -to -earth, on -the -street sort of apologist, it would be Psy. If it would be more scholarly, it would be

01:30:50

White or Oliphant, you know? You know, Jeff Durbin's on the streets too, you know?

01:30:55

So again, I don't listen to modern apologists today, not because I think they suck or anything like that, but I just,

01:31:02

I'm still learning from Bonson right now. I'm not done, but I don't have any go -to at the moment.

01:31:08

Okay, all right, very good. Is there anything we can do if atheists or pragmatists say, my worldview is irrational, but I don't care because it works for me?

01:31:22

I say, okay. Like, and this was a pervasive problem, and Bonson brought this up repeatedly in the

01:31:29

Transcendental Arguments course. We have nothing to say to those skeptics or atheists who just say, we don't wanna talk to you at all, you know?

01:31:38

Okay, fine. If you're not gonna get on the court, as Bonson put it, you know, to play the game of the game of apologetics, then, you know, what are you doing?

01:31:47

Why are you talking to me? You know, either get on the court and let's debate or get off the court and just say, that's that.

01:31:53

I don't wanna be rational. You know, so if someone doesn't wanna be rational, that's their problem. You know, we don't have the power in ourselves to convince people to be

01:32:00

Christians. That prerogative lies with God alone, but apologetics is interested in rationality and discussion.

01:32:06

So if someone says, I don't wanna discuss and say, okay, too bad. Imagine that as an objection. Oh, well, take this pre -supper.

01:32:13

What if I wanna be irrational? The pre -supper just says. Okay, Bonson often said, speak into the mic.

01:32:22

Let everyone know that to reject your humanity, you have to be irrational. Yeah, like that's like me not having, being a

01:32:27

Christian, I don't have an argument. An atheist says, well, you know, what do you believe if you don't have an argument? Well, I don't wanna listen to you.

01:32:35

That's irrational. There's no argument there, so. All right, well, we have survived.

01:32:41

We went one hour and 32 minutes. I bet you it felt like only 10 minutes, right? It goes quickly, I told you.

01:32:47

It does. Cause this is my first time. Like you said, I've written all these articles and essays and engaged in Facebook groups, but I've never been, why this is my first public appearance.

01:32:58

And so I've never, I didn't know what I stutter, what I just go blank and look like a doofus.

01:33:03

You know, I didn't know what would happen, but of course, as you said, I was totally fine, so. When you know the topic, it's fine.

01:33:11

You know, we have a conversation and you know, you and I are very passionate about this topic. We are both students of Bonson, and we're talking about a topic that we've learned so much from him.

01:33:20

So I didn't doubt one bit that you would do an excellent job. And I'm sure folks wouldn't mind seeing you on again, and maybe perhaps we'll cover, you wrote a paper on the ontology epistemology issue.

01:33:32

Maybe we can focus an entire episode on that and deal with R .C. Sproul's objections,

01:33:39

Jacob Brunton's and Cody Leibovitz's objections. And that's just one of the things that, again, it irks me because they get corrected on it, but it just, they keep repeating it.

01:33:52

And you know, I mean, I'll be more than happy to, you know, with, I'll have to reread my own work because I need to freshen up on it, but.

01:34:00

I remember reading it and I thought you did a fantastic job and you were very thorough. So, you know, give that another read and we'll get you back on in the future.

01:34:07

I thought this episode was excellent and I'm gonna listen back onto this. I like how you answered some of the questions and hopefully people found it beneficial.

01:34:16

All right, yep. Did you wanna say something before we sign off? Not, I mean, well,

01:34:21

SlamRN, thank you for saying that. That does mean a lot because I often, you know, I don't really have any shame in saying this, but there have been times

01:34:30

I've disclosed to friends that I would cry, particularly in a dark time, you know, cause

01:34:38

I'm already way down with stuff, but I would just cry because I miss my teacher so much and God took him when

01:34:43

I was just a few months old, you know, and he's had such an impact on my life. Why did he have to go? And I would just weep in pain because I wanna continue his legacy and he's not here and I can't talk to him face to face, even though that's like what it's like when

01:34:58

I listened to his tapes. And so that really does mean a lot to me. I'm glad you said that. I really hope I'm keeping his legacy going by listening to his tapes.

01:35:07

But other than that, thank you, Eli, for having me on. I'm glad things went well and that Stroud could be answered at the very least in a succinct fashion.

01:35:16

You know, the paper I wrote against Stroud and Bailey's 45 pages, it's like 15 ,000 words, but if you want the gist of it, then that's what we talked about today.

01:35:26

Well, you did an excellent job. Thank you so much. Once again, guys, if you have not subscribed to Revealed Apologetics on YouTube, do so now.

01:35:33

And if you are not described to the podcast, as I said before, there are some episodes there that will be not available on the

01:35:39

YouTube channel, but will be just independently a podcast. So if you wanna get some of that content, please subscribe to the iTunes, the

01:35:48

Revealed Apologetics on iTunes. Also, what would be super helpful, if you enjoyed this show, if you could do me a favor, okay,

01:35:55

I'm gonna put this on the podcast also. If you can go over to iTunes and write a positive review, I've gotten great reviews so far, but I heard it helps with the algorithm.

01:36:04

So if you feel as though you've been blessed by this content, go over to iTunes, write a short couple of sentence, a positive review, give it the stars, and it would be greatly appreciated.

01:36:14

Well, that's it for tonight's live stream. Thank you so much for listening. Take care and God bless.