Provoked: Debating a Pro-Choicer

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00:01

Brothers, what we do in life echoes in eternity.

00:11

I mean, this is what's wrong with the Christian church today. We don't know who God is, and we don't know who we are.

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This is where we hold them. This is where we fight.

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Officer, you need to repent of your lawless conduct. You don't know the law, and yet you pretend to represent it.

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That's not law enforcement, sir. That's being a thug. We will not stop fighting and bothering you all until this monstrous, barbaric practice of legalized abortion ends, and we are teaching our children to do the same.

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God's word says that the shed blood of innocent humans cries out for justice, and mark my words, they will have their day in court.

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Nobody gets saved by being treated nicely. They get saved by hearing the gospel. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.

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If we don't open our mouths and commend Christ, we're not loving him, no matter what we're doing with our hands.

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What's up, everybody? This is our fourth episode of Provoked, and I am Zach, one of the elders at Apology of Church, and sitting next to me, as per the usual, is my beautiful sister and co -host,

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Desi. How's it going? It's going great, and I'm Desi, and I'm here with my big brother, Zach, and how are you?

01:43

I'm doing good. I'm doing well. Did you sleep at all last night? Because I didn't sleep at all.

01:48

Yeah, I slept pretty good. Typically, Phoebe's still in the room, and she's been being cool lately.

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She's a year and a couple months, and she still needs her bottles, but she's funny. She's so different than the other babies, because she'll just scream, like a full -grown man, in a tiny one -year -old little baby girl's body.

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None of the other five kids ever did that, but she just yells, and we're like, okay.

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Some of them, in the past, they just get up and giggle, or move around, but just full -blown screaming yell.

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That's kind of tough, but she's been being pretty cool. She's found out what's effective after being, she's what, number six?

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Yeah, she knows. She knows how to get attention. Yeah, she's got to get her attention somehow. I've just had super bad pregnancy insomnia, so I just wake up at 12, and I'm up for two or three hours.

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Yikes. It gives me a good time to get in the word, and go watch Netflix, or pray.

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Yeah, that's rough, though, just back -to -back insomnia, not being able to sleep. Yeah, the Lord's way of preparing for when baby comes, and I don't sleep at all, but.

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So we are provoked, and what are we doing in the show? We want to provoke you, all of our listeners, to preach the gospel, and to go out and rescue babies that are headed to death at abortion clinics, and destroy cultural idols.

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That's the whole purpose of the show, is to come alongside of the Christian church, do our best to be supplemental. We're not ever taking the place of the local church.

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Of course, that is an integral place in the plan of God. What is Jesus doing right now?

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He says, I'm building the church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. So we're coming alongside of the church, and just trying to do what we can do, as humbly as we can, to help the church.

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What you can do to help us is go to ApologiaStudios .com, and become an All Access member.

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That is what you can do. So please do that now, if you could. Number one, it'll help you, because it gives you tons of access, and amazing information, second to none information you can't get anywhere else on this planet, to help equip you with reasoned answers, to defend your faith, to effectively evangelize and save babies.

04:02

I mean, there is a lot in there. So go there for you, and also go there for us, because as you learn from the show, as you receive from the show, we would ask that you would support us, give back prayerfully.

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But as you do that, that money is going to come in to help us continue what we do. All we want to do is fulfill the

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Great Commission. All we want to do is go about the continued effort of rescuing people out of cold, saving babies, preaching the gospel, building the kingdom.

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So if you could do that, we would love it, and we would appreciate it. Today, we have

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Bill Rooney back on the show, and we were so happy the first time he came back. And I've been telling people, because Bill's actually on the line right now.

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Bill, I've been telling people that you're probably the nicest pro -choicer I've ever met. Well, thanks.

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Yeah, you just hold yourself well, and we've actually went back and reviewed our discussion. You articulate yourself real well.

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We just thank you that we can have this conversation and show each other mutual respect and have it be civil.

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Absolutely. So that has been a blessing. So we're just going to go kind of in. We could talk about new stuff.

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I know I had left you at the conclusion of our discussion with some things to think about.

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So I have some different syllogisms I wanted to throw at you, but I want to go ahead and just have a good, meaningful back and forth.

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Ultimately, we want to share the truth. We don't come from the position that many people have in a debate or discussion that we're not here to change your mind.

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Actually, we do want you to change your mind. We do. We want you to know the truth. We want you to know the joy of being in the kingdom, the joy of knowing

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Christ. But we do want you to change your mind. Of course, that's not something that we can do.

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We just declare that truth to you, and then the ball is kind of in your court. So again,

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I do have a couple syllogisms, things that I would want to talk to you about, but I wanted you to kind of, if you would like, discuss what you were thinking about or things that you have kind of thought about in preparation for this.

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Would you like to start with a statement or an argument or kind of a direction you want to talk about? Sure. Well, firstly,

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I'd like to say that I noticed the last time I checked, the video had like 7 ,000 views or something like that, which was, you know,

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I don't know your audience, but it was more than I had expected. So that was pretty neat to see.

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And, you know, there was that comment section, and I just wanted to say that everybody was very respectful, and even if they disagreed, and I'm assuming most do disagree with me, there was no personal attacks or anything like that.

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So that's appreciated. Oh, good. Yeah, and like I said, I mean, it's ad hominem attacks, which it just means attack the man.

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When you start doing stuff like that, even in the comments section, we pretty much, you know, we allow it to a point just because in some videos there's so many thousands of comments, it's just hard to police them all.

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But just from our perspective as a ministry, we don't resort to that. You know, we want to hold ourselves professionally, and of course, we want to represent

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Christ and how he's commanded us and instructed us in his word, and the word of God instructs us to carry ourselves and to, you know, love people and to carry them along.

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But yeah, so we're glad you could look at that. Yeah, we have got a pretty big audience,

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I think 221 ,000 subscribers, so we're blessed. All right, so let's just go ahead and start the discussion.

07:34

Where do you want to start? Well, I think we last left off talking about morality and the basis of it, why somebody can, or how they go about deciding what they think is right and wrong.

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And I think your claim was basically that without God, there's no good basis for believing in right and wrong, not that somebody who doesn't believe in God or is questioning it is immoral necessarily, but they have no good basis for morality.

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Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, because, well, I mean, Jesus says this in the

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Scriptures. He says, no one is good but God, right? So I don't believe, according to the testimony of the

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Scriptures, that there's any good people out there according to his standards. Of course, people say that they're good, but you always have to ask, what standard are they holding themselves to?

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So I think we had discussed morality. Now, typically, people will use morality as an evidence for God, and I think it is a very good evidence for God.

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I don't believe there is any way of explaining objective standards of morality outside of God.

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I just don't think that you can. Of course, this has been a thousands -of -years -old discussion, but even further than morality, the objective standard of morality that most people agree on is not only good evidence, but you can't have an accounting for morality outside of God being the source of it.

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There is no accounting for that. And another way of saying that is from almost an evolutionary mindset where it's typically either two roads.

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It's God created. God is the reason. He's the source of all things.

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Or we came from chance processes that were unguided. It's just random chance through a long period of time, and here we are.

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So what I'm saying is we can't give an account for morality, meaning how does it make sense in a world, if we can even imagine it, where God is not the foundation of all things?

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That's what I'm saying. I hope I was clear. I can clarify myself if I was a little bit muddied there. Yeah, no, no.

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I understand where you're coming from. So firstly with that,

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I would say that no matter what, somebody who's a Christian or a

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Muslim or agnostic or an atheist, it does boil down to at some point you're filtering your experience of the world through your own subjective experience, not to be redundant.

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And because of that, ultimately every individual to some degree does decide what they think is right or wrong.

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Now somebody can come to the conclusion that they believe there's a God and they can further believe that the

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Bible is God's word, and because of that, they sort of default their morality to that.

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But there's still the event of deciding for yourself whether or not you think that's moral or whether or not one thinks that's moral, which

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I don't think is a very different experience for somebody who doesn't believe in God or is questioning it or believes in different scriptures.

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I think that experience is universal where you do decide for yourself.

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Now I understand that many Christians don't think that that is the process.

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They think that God reveals it to them or chooses them or however you want to put it, and it's not something they came to the conclusion of and decided on.

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They were called, right? Which I suspect is more along the theology that you guys hold to.

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So I understand that, but in practical terms, at some point every individual decides what they think about God and morality and whatever scriptures are associated with that.

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So it does still come down to a personal decision filtered through your own mindset, your own biases, what society has taught you.

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So I don't think the... Go ahead, finish your thought. I thought we would be...

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I don't think the claim that a person deciding their own morality is less than a

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Christian perspective because ultimately the Christian also decided his own morality when he or she decided to believe in God and believe in the

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Bible. It was still their thought process that led them to that point. So I think connected with that,

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I would be interested... Hold on, let me talk to that. Let me speak to that real quick.

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We were super nice, and I think that was good. We're getting to kind of know each other, but I think let's be a little bit more back and forth, not in any way to disrespect another or talk over one another or attack, and of course

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I already laid those ground rules in the last show, but I think it would be good just to kind of go back and forth a little bit more and kind of deal with the subjects as they come up.

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And you weren't necessarily guilty of running on. I think I was kind of guilty of that last time. But I think what you just explained in what you were going through just now is a subjective standard of morality that really morality has no basis in the objective category because everybody comes to the conclusion of their own moral code based upon their own subjective reasoning.

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Their senses and reasoning leads them to a code of morality that they live by.

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Now, so what you've done is you've defined a subjective sense of morality, but what

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I'm saying is there exists an objective standard of morality that we would all agree upon. We would never agree it'd be okay to put cigarettes out on little baby toddlers.

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So there is a morality we can't escape from that's intrinsic to every human, and the explanation of that, the accounting of that, how that makes sense within a

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Christian worldview is that God has endowed us with this type of knowledge as he's imprinted his law upon our hearts.

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That's why we don't believe it's okay to steal or to kill or to rape, right?

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There's standards within that moral code which we would define as a reflection of God's own character, that goes hand in hand with being made in his own image.

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You see what I mean? But what I was trying to get at is that how can you account outside of really a

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Christian worldview where God is the giver of these things, is the source, the supplier of this morality, how can you account for that in an atheistic worldview where we are just molecules in motion, that we are just the products again of random chance processes?

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I just don't believe that you can find the source of objective morality from that type of worldview or accounting.

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Does that make sense? It does, yeah. So I would say a couple thoughts on that.

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One is I would like to know your opinion on, let's say, a

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Muslim's worldview. So a Muslim who's adherent to their scriptures would also say that God handed down that law, and they firmly believe that.

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So I guess I would ask, do you think they have a good reason to believe in objective morality even though they're not

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Christian? Yeah. Because those standards that they believe, you know.

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Right. Well, what I think that you do, so we have all been given a conscience, right?

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We know intrinsically that some things are right and some things are wrong, which is hard to get to if we are just evolved animals, but we could save that discussion for another day, or we can get into it, whatever.

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But what I'm saying is that we all know now that scriptures give us a special detailing of that morality within the context of that revelation, but we all have the light of the conscience, right?

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God has given us the light of creation. Creation points to a creator. The light of conscience, we know right from wrong, and then the light of Christ, which shines in the hearts of us as we look to the scriptures, and God actually gives us the ability to see that.

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But what I'm saying is that the Muslim, the Mormon, the Jehovah's Witnesses, all the other religions, we still, even though they adhere to a certain book, a holy book, or identify themselves in a certain religion, they still have that moral code that God has written upon the heart, and that's elucidated or explained within the law of God in the scriptures.

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And I don't know if you're getting to this point, and I know in the Quran it does teach that you are to kill the infidel.

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And we believe that that is not congruent with the law of God revealed in scripture, that even though they might say it's good to do that, or the

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Muslim might say that this is something that God has commanded us to do, we would say no, this does not comply, or this is not congruent with the law of God.

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So therefore, it's incorrect. And so let me explain that a little bit.

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You can try to create your own moral code. You could say this is right, but if it flies in the face of God's law, or if it's not in agreement with, again, the law of God written upon our heart, or the law of God in scripture, then it's not an objective standard of morality, it's just another subjective standard of morality that you created for yourself.

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Yeah. So relating that to my original point,

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I think not only can you make your own sort of moral code, but you inevitably do.

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I think everybody does. I think even the Christian does. I think even within Christian circles, there's variation in it.

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Take, for example, and we can discuss this if you like, whether or not baptism is necessary for salvation.

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And I'm confident you have a well -thought -out opinion on that, but there are

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Bible -believing Christians who have a different thought process about it, and I would say that's a moral issue, whether or not somebody needs to be baptized to be saved, right?

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And there are disagreements within that. So inevitably there is at least a degree of forming your own moral code.

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Totally. I agree. I agree in the sense of man has always created his own moral code, right?

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You track that down all throughout the history of not only American history but world history, and people all around the world have their own standards of morality.

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But what I'm saying is that when man, certain segments of society or certain people groups or certain religious systems, when they create their own moral code, of course, that is not in harmony with the law of God, then that always equals destruction.

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So take, for an example, Hitler in 20th century Germany. Of course, he created a moral code that he propagated all throughout the nation.

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What did he deem? He deemed Jews homosexuals and mentally impaired. Of course, he killed millions of Russians that people don't even talk about.

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But he did create his own moral code, and I think that that is elucidated and explained in Mein Kampf, right?

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But that's a wrong code. It's a horrible code. It's a code that led to the death of untold millions.

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I mean, we don't even have an exact number. So what I'm saying is that if morality is left to consensus, if we're saying, okay, we all create our own moral codes and morality is left to consensus, then there is no objective standard of morality.

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There's no accounting for that because as many atheists say, well, what is the most moral root or the best moral code is for us to all do that which is the best for one another.

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So morality is defined by showing each human being the most amount of mercy, goodness, and love that you can give them and not harming them.

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If you talk to an atheist, they'll say this is my moral code. But what I'm saying is that if Hitler says, no, my moral code is that I think

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Jews are less than human, how can we contest his moral code if the basis of morality is left to consensus and it's actually just a convention of the mind of man?

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How do you contest him? Yeah, no, that's a fair statement.

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I don't necessarily think there is an objective morality any more than there is, you know, objectively any other concept.

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I think it's something conceptual. You've got gravity. It is consensus -based necessarily.

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I think some of the things you brought up about, you know, with Hitler and with killing infidels and all that,

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I would say there are instances in the Old Testament that were sort of like that.

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And if we're appealing to man's conscience, if that's really a

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God -granted thing to lead you to him, then there are quite a few instances in the

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Old Testament and even towards the end of the New Testament where on a purely conscience level, it seems sort of reprehensible to me.

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But the Bible -believing Christian would have to say that not only was, you know, we brought this up last time, the killing of babies from other countries, you know, women and children, wiped them all out to a man.

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Not only is that permitted, but that was a good thing. It was a great thing. It was a loving thing, merciful, all that, wise.

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And it's, for my conscience anyway, that seems kind of atrocious.

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If God commanded it, it's necessarily good. Okay, we could talk, I can give an answer to why

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God did, and he did, he mandated and he commanded the determination of people, groups back in the

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Old Testament. I'll get to that in a second. So, but you're saying this, you're saying that it's wrong that God did that, right?

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But who are you to say that? Not quite. I'd say it feels wrong to my conscience.

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Okay, so let's just say a guy, James, is a fictitious character, says it's wrong. How can God claim to be good and still do that?

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That's wrong to do that. Now, my question to James would be, by which standard are you appealing to to tell me that it's wrong?

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If my moral code can just be my own moral code based upon my own senses, reasoning, my own observation, my schooling, my past, my parenting, how do you find concrete morality within that?

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I mean, because all I have to do is say, well, so what? I think it's okay. If you think it's okay, then that's just your truth.

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That's just your own moral code that you've constructed for yourself. So what I'm saying is that in that model of morality, where do you find the objective morality?

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Now, what I would contest to is what you'd said earlier is, and Desi, I'm sorry I'm dominating all the time.

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No, it's fine. I like talking to this guy. Yeah, I like listening. Is that objectivity, and of course, and just for the sake of the audience listening to us, objectivity is something that's rooted in fact, right?

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It's not rooted in opinion or bias. It's rooted in fact. It's that which conforms to reality.

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An objective standard is something that's absolutely true for everyone, for all people, all the time, in any place.

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I think that's one of the best definitions for absolute truth or objective standards. It's a standard which is true for everyone, everywhere, at all times.

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Now, if a guy came up to you, brother, and said, hey, look, I think it's okay to put cigarette butts out on little babies' faces, you would say, regardless of what segment of society you may be in around this globe, regardless of what period of history you may find yourself in, regardless of your schooling or whatever, it is objectively true that it is never right to put a cigarette butt out on a baby's face.

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Right? So the question is, where does that come from, that objective standard?

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Why are we all so resolute and so convicted to believe that it's never okay to harm such an innocent little human being?

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I think that within a Christian worldview, of course, a Christian worldview, the way that we would account from that, account that, or the way that we would explain that would be we're created in the image of God, that God is good,

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God is not evil, and God has given within us internally this mechanism of the conscience that instructs us about what is good and what is evil.

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That's what distinguishes us from all of creation. We're created in the image of God. Now, Des, do you want to go ahead and talk about something, or do you want to add on to that?

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No. I kind of wanted to back up just a little bit because I just wanted to make sure you had a clear understanding of the basic Christian, the foundations of faith.

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You said that even the Christian would say that they would choose at some point to believe, and that's not what we believe.

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We actually believe that everybody is dead in their sins, that their hearts are darkened, our minds are darkened.

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We don't know the truth. We're unable to know the truth until we have the gift of salvation.

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And so at that point, God gives us a new heart. He opens our mind, opens our eyes to see.

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And so I think you alluded to that, that we would believe that it was given to us, not that it was a choice, but I just wanted to make sure that you understood that it was just kind of a passing comment.

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But we do believe that everybody is dead in their sins. We are all headed to hell.

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We are all separated to God until God grants us the gift of repentance and faith.

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So that was it for me for now. Okay, cool. Go ahead, and I just wanted you to have time to respond to that,

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Bill. Or respond to her or me or whatever.

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Like Reformed theology? No, no, what we were talking, you could respond to Des, whatever it means, or you can go along with the train of our thought that we were talking about morality here, and if we can account in an atheistic worldview for the actual existence of morality.

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So I'd said a lot, and then Desi went into what she said, so I just wanted to make sure you had time to say what you wanted to say.

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Yeah, yeah. Well, so insofar as the idea of an objective morality that we can all agree it's a bad idea to put cigarettes out on infants, you know, that's fair.

28:53

I can definitely agree to that. As a little side note, do you know what coining is?

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Have you heard that term before? I only know about it because of my job, actually. No, I don't. No, so it's a practice.

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I don't want to get it wrong. It's not an American practice. It's not a

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European practice. But some people from different groups around the world, there's what's called coining, and they think that putting the marks of coins, like burning marks on sick children helps them get better for whatever reason.

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That's part of their religion. That's part of their morality, I guess. And it's actually protected by the state.

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So I only know that, like I said, because of my job. Wow, that's absolutely atrocious.

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That's horrific. Yeah, but it is a thing, and like I said, it's protected by the state.

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Not something I would do. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I guess that would lead me into morality and the law, but I think that's maybe biting out more than we can chew for one conversation.

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But yeah, just an interesting side note that that does occur, and some people do think that's moral.

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Yeah, that's absolutely wicked, and that just goes to show you from our point of view the way that we can kind of account for that wickedness within the heart of a person, actually believe that that would be permissible, is because of the depravity of man.

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Man is born in sin. Sin, like Desi just said, it spiritually alienates us from God.

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Sin is the biggest problem of mankind, and it's this natural disposition to do that which is not right, and that is in the heart of everyone until God, by His grace, grants that person a new heart to be able to love the things that God loves and hate the things that God hates, and God is all about justice.

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God is all about goodness. And just to not get away from what you had said before,

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I want to give you an answer, and yeah, God did command folks back in the

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Old Testament. He did command the termination of people groups. The way that we explain that is that number one, regardless of our opinion of God, which most of atheistic disagreement over Christianity is their hatred for the

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God of the Bible and the explanation, and of course, the Bible even explains that. That's a byproduct of sin, that we are not right with God, that because we're born in sin, we're rebels against Him.

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We're at enmity. We're enemies with Him, and we naturally hate Him. Just like you naturally do the wrong thing, or you naturally struggle to do the right thing, but you naturally, doing the right thing is easy.

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Let me explain that a little bit better. I don't have to teach my kids how to do the wrong thing. You actually have to teach children how to do the right thing because we naturally know how to do the wrong thing.

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I don't have to tell my kids, and my dad got them a ping pong table because we're in this pandemic, quarantine type of thing, and you just go out there, and they're fighting tooth and nail over the ping pong, throwing paddles at each other.

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It's something I don't have to go out there and urge them to do. I have to be, hey, hold on, chill.

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Let's enjoy ping pong. You never have to teach your kids the word no and mine.

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Exactly. That actually is the fruit of the condition of the heart of man.

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We would say, from a Christian worldview, it goes to show you the natural disposition of man and his nature, which is corrupted, broken, dead, depraved by sin.

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Now, in saying that, when God commands the termination of specific people, groups, and segments of society, he has every right to do that because the

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Bible said he's the author of life, he has the authority to give life, and he has the authority himself to take it away.

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The Bible says that all that he does is righteous and all that he does is good. Now, you might retort and say, well, how can you serve this type of a

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God? Well, you get into the condition of man. Now, we believe that all men everywhere are entitled to goodness.

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Somebody asked this question, how can God let bad things happen to good people?

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But I think a more theologically precise question when you get into this type of subject is how can an all -good, gracious, loving

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God even do one good thing for rebellious people, for people that break his law?

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The Bible says drink in iniquity like it was water. So what I'm saying is that because we break the law of God day by day, each one of us, and Christians do too, a good explanation for a

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Christian is we're not better than anybody, but we're better off because Jesus Christ has forgiven us of our sin.

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But in my explanation here, everyone deserves the justice of God because we've broken his law.

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So if God does choose a vehicle by which he carries out capital punishment on a person, they have received their due because of their crimes against the

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God that created them. So if a particular people group of God says you are going to receive my justice in your death, well, he has the prerogative to do that, one, because he's the creator, and number two, because they have violated his law.

34:30

They are culpable for punishment. And we get that within our justice system. I mean, we walked into a courtroom and there was all sorts of people guilty of rape and murder, and all of a sudden the judge stands up and says,

34:42

I'm a good judge, I'm just going to let everybody go. I mean, we'd go crazy. The guy would be disbarred.

34:48

I mean, it would be a riot if this supposedly good judge let all of these criminals go away for free.

34:57

Because in the pretense that he's somehow good. Go ahead. If that same judge said, you know, you raped somebody, so I'm going to kill your one -year -old,

35:06

I would also disbar him, to be fair. Right. Yeah, so that's kind of the explanation from a

35:14

Christian worldview. Now, what we do at Apologia Church and Apologia Studios is we come from not an evidentiary model of apologetics or defending our faith based upon evidence, even though there's amazing evidence out there, but mainly from a presuppositional, apologetical platform.

35:32

And I don't know if you know what that is. But we all have innate presuppositions that we bring to the table.

35:40

We have presuppositions that we take for granted that actually, it colors the way that we view evidence.

35:46

It really determines our worldview. Now, when I talk about giving an account for something or escaping the realm of arbitrariness, what

35:57

I'm talking about is that if God is not the foundation of our worldview, if God is not the explanation of all things, and maybe this can be very easy to understand, hopefully.

36:10

What we're saying to anybody outside of the faith that does not have the God of the Bible as the foundation of all knowledge and everything else, as their explanation of the world, how do you make sense of anything if God is not the explanation?

36:30

What we're saying is that the God of the Bible in his character profile, in who he is, timeless, spaceless, all powerful, all good, this designer of all things, that in his character profile is the accounting for all things.

36:47

Now, let me say it this way. From an atheistic worldview, how do you make sense of your worldview?

36:54

How do you do it? And I don't know if you wanted to answer that, but that is our big question for the atheist.

37:00

Because we cannot... It's one thing to say we have certain things.

37:05

We have the ability to be moral, and we don't say that the atheists out there are just running around killing and eating people.

37:13

No. But what we are saying is that for anyone outside of the Christian faith to be able to make sense of what they believe, they are always borrowing from the

37:23

Christian worldview and attempting to do so. They're actually borrowing from the

37:29

Christian worldview when it comes to their own ability to reason. Does that make sense?

37:35

Hopefully I wasn't... Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no question that Christianity has impacted our view on morality and to some degree logic, although that's more

37:49

Greek than Semitic. But yeah, it's certainly an influence on how we feel about things.

38:01

Yeah. To be clear, I'm not an atheist. I was just going to ask that.

38:07

I'm not confident enough to affirm something like that. Okay, yeah. There definitely isn't.

38:13

I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. More questioning, I guess. Yeah. Okay, well, let's go back.

38:21

You can finish your thought. I'm sorry about that. Go ahead. Yeah, no, that's okay. Okay, Desi's next, because I've been hogging all the time.

38:29

No, it's okay, it's great. I just want to say something after Bill's done. Go ahead, Bill. You go ahead first, and then

38:34

I'll... Okay. Like I said before,

38:41

I think there's no way around that eventually you, as an individual, decide what you think is right or wrong, which is certainly related to a person's belief in God and then a step further from that, a person's belief in the

38:59

Bible, which one does not necessitate the other. But eventually it is you and your own decision -making process coming to that conclusion.

39:12

And I understand the theology of that you didn't do that on your own, that you had divine providence make that happen, which would also beg the question, why doesn't it happen for everybody?

39:29

Which I think is a moral question. But I think there's...

39:35

If we're meeting in the realm of, you know, all right, let's understand one another, let's make things understood for one another,

39:46

I think if the basis of the conversation is, well, I only know these things because God showed them to me and he hasn't shown them to you yet, so you're just not going to know.

40:02

There has to be some kind of meeting ground. And, you know, honestly, even if there really isn't,

40:09

I still certainly enjoy talking about all these things, and you guys are really nice and really articulate.

40:16

So I'd like to keep doing it. As far as appealing to things like conscience or reason, it feels like it can be appealed to, but ultimately, if anything is outside of what's logical or conscionable, then it can be invoked that, well, that's

40:45

God, and God can do what he wants. Yeah, I think that the accounting of that and the explanation, though,

40:52

I think it definitely has some philosophical undergirding there. I mean, what you're saying is we can just simply get

41:00

God off the hook by saying, oh, you know what, if God says it's right, then it is right. Well, ultimately, what

41:08

I was trying to get to is that there's no way of determining what's right or wrong outside of God being the explanation of that.

41:15

I could just kind of counter by saying, well, this is the way

41:20

I feel, and you feel the way that you feel. I mean, because it's all relative, there's no really way of coming to a conclusion.

41:29

But when we say that we gave you this explanation of God ordering the termination of a specific people group and that was done out of goodness, well, if the

41:39

Scriptures are true, then yeah, he has every right. So what I'm saying is it doesn't violate our own understanding of justice.

41:46

It doesn't violate the understanding of justice that God has given to each one of us, if that makes sense.

41:52

Now, I think you had talked about I'll never really get it unless God grants that type of truth to me.

41:59

Yeah, we do believe that. We believe repentance is a change of mind, and we pray that God would gift you that.

42:05

Ultimately, that is something that God gives you in his grace and his mercy, and it comes by way of the gospel message and the truth that we shared to you.

42:14

God, again, because he's the creator, he's entitled to do nothing other than his own will and pleasure.

42:21

I mean, he is... And I was talking to a guy the other day. I'd say, man, just take... because he was a pretty hardline atheist.

42:28

But I asked him this question. I said, even if God exists, does your opinion of him even matter?

42:33

Does anybody's opinion of him on the planet that he created matter? I mean, if God does exist, he is going to be the

42:41

God that he is. And our understanding of him and our like or dislike of him has no bearing on who he is in his own being.

42:50

He's the God that created us. This is the way that he set up the world. And you think that the

42:56

God... You know, we're not just appealing to some deistic God or some unexplanatory

43:03

God. We believe the only God that fulfills the preconditions of the intelligibility of our own human experience is the

43:12

God of the Bible and him alone. But regardless if we hate him or we love him, it's not going to change who he is.

43:18

He is who he is, and he best explains himself in the Bible. But we do know that this is not the end of the road for you.

43:26

We pray that this would be, hopefully, a road to where your eyes are open, that God, by his grace, would give to you, would gift you faith, would give you repentance.

43:36

That's what we want because we love you, man. We care about your life. We know that there is so much life and there is so much healing and there is so much abundance in following Christ that we want for you.

43:48

But let me... Can I switch gears for a little bit and just talk about a few syllables? Yeah, we'll go for maybe about 10, 12 more minutes.

43:56

Oh, no, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, but it's kind of coming back to abortion, actually. We haven't even talked about the topic of abortion, which we kind of are glad we've been talking only about abortion lately.

44:05

Yeah. So we're going to kind of shift gears in the future episodes. But I've got a syllogism for you and I want to hear what you think about it.

44:14

Here's the syllogism. Premise number one says, It is wrong and evil to intentionally kill innocent human beings.

44:22

That's the premise. It is wrong and evil to intentionally kill innocent human beings. Premise two,

44:28

An abortion is the legalized intentional act of killing an innocent developing human being.

44:34

I'll repeat that. Premise two, An abortion is the legalized intentional act of killing an innocent developing human being.

44:43

Therefore, the conclusion, abortion is wrong and evil. How would you respond to that?

44:51

I'd bring it back to our discussion last time, I guess, and defining exactly what is a human being.

45:01

And like I said last time, I guess the first issue would be with premise one.

45:09

Because I simply don't think something that's 16 cells old and a mass of just that is the equivalent of what could be described as an innocent human being.

45:25

Eventually, it'll be a human being. We can discuss innocence.

45:31

Not that I think anybody deserves it. I actually think that's more of a problem for a

45:37

Christian than an agnostic on deciding innocence. Like I said last time,

45:47

I think the quality of human experience is what defines a human. Not just simply

45:55

DNA, because then otherwise all sorts of other things would be, people would have problems with within the church, but they don't.

46:05

Right, so we would say a human being is distinct from any other creature that they have intrinsic, because they're created in the image of God, actually they're to be held to a greater value than other things.

46:16

I think we've gone through this. A little baby boy is not the same as a cockroach, even though they're creatures.

46:24

One is created in the image of God, it's a human being, and therefore more important. But what I'm trying to track is kind of your thought process here, is what you're saying is that because a human being, and the baby at the moment of fertilization is a human being, based upon their

46:40

DNA, it's a human, it's no other species. It's coded, the genetic code is human, homo sapien, right?

46:46

But what we're saying is that certain humans that are in a developmental period in their lifespan carry less value than others, so therefore they can be killed.

46:59

Is that correct? I would say at a certain period in the development, they're not what is properly constituted as a human being with rights.

47:11

And because there are other human beings with qualia and rights involved in that process, that sometimes have events happen that are outside of their control, sometimes awful events happen that are outside of their control.

47:33

There's more nuance to it than just those three statements. But yeah,

47:38

I would say that something that's a handful of cells old is really no more of a human being than the sperm or egg that, you know, sure it shares human

47:56

DNA, so does a sperm and an egg, so does skin. But is it something that has like a mental framework?

48:08

You know, is it something that experiences things? Almost definitely not. Sure. Yeah. It's fairly obvious there comes a time when it does, which makes the debate harder at those stages.

48:23

I definitely admit that. Like we talked about last time, you know, on a personal level, terminating a baby the day before it's meant to be born is not, you know, that's certainly a human being with human experiences.

48:42

Yeah, I don't know, because what you're saying is that still that's a developing, that's a developing human organism.

48:48

Now, when we're talking about sperm and an egg, you know, we hear it a lot at the abortion clinics, just a clump of cells. Now, we're all cells.

48:56

You know, we have, what, a trillion cells in our body, you know, at any given time, you know, kind of passing off old ones, get new ones.

49:03

But human body parts are different than a human organism. Right?

49:09

So when the sperm and the egg come together, then in that process, you know, we believe

49:15

God creates a human organism. So a human organism can't be compared to a human body part, like a sperm or anything.

49:22

Those are parts. Yeah, but they're not necessarily a unique human organism, you know, that has its own genetic structure.

49:32

It's a unique genotype. You know, if you just let that little organism, you know, stay in the mother's womb unimpeded or unmolested, it's going to come out with its own, you know, particular look, its own fingerprints.

49:48

Generally, yes. Right? It's a human being. You just let that, leave that baby alone.

49:53

It's going to come out and continue to develop. But I think following your train of logic, though, you know, you're talking about how it's wrong for a person to go up inside of a woman, right, the day before that baby is going to be born.

50:07

I don't see how you could defend that with your own explanation because it's a developing human being and it has a degree of qualia.

50:16

Right? It has a particular degree of qualia at that moment. Qualia is a little sticky subject, too, because we have all sorts of people that, you know, they go in and out of qualia in a coma.

50:31

There's horrible accidents. Some people can be, and they lose their qualia. They lose their human experience.

50:37

But I don't, I'm not believing you would say that it'd be okay to go in and kill a guy who, you know, got in a motorcycle accident and now his level of self experience or human experience is drastically mitigated and even his qualia, you know, there's all sorts of people with, you know, genetic deficiencies that have abnormal levels of qualia.

51:01

And so if qualia was, if we're saying a particular person needs a degree of qualia and able to be treated like a human, we're getting in a pretty scary realm, right?

51:14

Then the doors would be open to eliminate a whole bunch of segments of society who have, you know, deficient levels of qualia based upon their birth, based upon their experience, based upon tragic events.

51:29

You see what I mean? Right. What I'm saying is, go ahead. Yeah, I see what you mean. I'd say there's a difference between a diminished level of qualia and a qualia of zero.

51:40

I would also say life experience is important for what a human being is.

51:48

Like, you know, the Holocaust has been brought up a couple of times and I certainly think it's different to eliminate a 14 -year -old than it is something that's never experienced anything and, you know.

52:09

So what I'm seeing right here, Bill, and I hope you know that when I say this, we've already told you, you know, over and over again, we appreciate you and we love you and it's just a pleasure talking with you, but what you've done,

52:22

Bill, is you've made yourself God. So you are now, and this is what we, and when I say you,

52:28

I say this is what we all do outside of Christ. So we become the arbiter of truth.

52:34

Now we become the judge and jury. We become, it depends on our own experiences and so I'm hearing you talk and what you've done is you've erected an idol and you are now, it's based upon Bill's experience and what that comes from, it's just we, like John 3 .19

52:55

says, men love darkness rather than the light. So what we do is, you know, we love our pornography. We love our sex outside of marriage.

53:03

You know, we do the things against God that we want to do and if we had to answer to somebody, well that would throw a wet blanket on all of it because sin can be pleasurable, sin can be fun and enjoyable and so we don't want that.

53:19

We don't want to answer to anybody so what we do is we kind of come up with all these different things. I think we could talk for hours actually on the

53:26

Old Testament. We could talk about different religions. We could talk about different dynasties and cultures throughout the nation or throughout history.

53:33

We could talk about U .S. history. I mean we could go on for hours and hours but ultimately what you're doing is you're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness and what that is is just because you love your sin and like I said,

53:46

I'm not saying you Bill, this is not a personal attack on you but I am talking about you and I'm talking about me and I'm talking about everybody else before they come to Christ and are outside of Christ.

53:57

It's just kind of going through all this stuff. I think it's important to go through all of these things and presuppositional apologetics and stuff kind of shows what we see as the insanity of atheism although you're saying you're kind of on the fence but there's already just in creation itself there's proof of a creator and so why is it so far of a leap for you?

54:21

My question would be why is it so far of a leap for you? You're saying you may be open to the fact that there's a creator.

54:27

Why would that creator not make himself known in the person of Jesus Christ and not in the Bible? What is your main qualm?

54:35

Is it because he holds these standards in his word that you're saying you don't want to submit to him?

54:44

Is it because you're saying well in the Old Testament in your perspective it doesn't add up or is it because you love the darkness rather than the light?

54:56

You love pornography. You love sex outside of marriage. You love all of these things that all of us in our natural state love.

55:03

Do you consider yourself to be a good person? Like Proverbs 26 says many a man proclaims his own goodness and I did this before I was saved.

55:12

I would have told you until I was blue in the face that I was a good person because I hadn't done as bad of things as most people in my mind but do you consider yourself to be a good person?

55:25

Yeah, so let me go through those as best I can. Insofar as the idea of making yourself an idol and making yourself

55:36

God and deciding things for yourself I understand where you're coming from.

55:43

You know, I used to be Christian. Used to be quite Christian. So I understand what you're saying but I disagree.

55:51

I don't think I'm making myself God. I think I'm accepting that I'm a thinking person

55:56

Well I think and as you just for a point of clarification it's as valid as anybody else's including the people that have decided on their own terms that the

56:13

God of the Bible is God insofar as we didn't decide on our own terms what keeps me from being

56:20

Christian at the moment it's a mix of things

56:26

I'd say yeah, there's certainly issues that I take with with the

56:33

Bible both morally, especially the Old Testament morally and relating to history and the things that that again,

56:44

I know you don't believe in evolution or things like that or, you know, any account of human history that would disagree with the

56:51

Bible but there's good reasons to think that there are things there that maybe didn't occur or things that God commanded in the

57:01

Old Testament that talking about the subject of morality if anybody else did they'd be seen as a monster so I think that's a big thing but standard things too you know,

57:14

I think socially people conform to things and I know

57:22

I'm not immune to that I think people get into religion and Christianity for social reasons, largely and leave it for social reasons largely so I don't think

57:36

I'm outside of that but I don't think I'm foolish about it I definitely don't hate

57:43

God or am angry at God or anything like that as far as whether or not

57:51

I'm a good person I think I mean that's hard to say,

57:57

I do selfish things a lot of times, I do selfless things sometimes, you know what I mean it's hard to put myself on whatever sliding scale a good human is

58:09

I would say I don't do anything atrocious and I don't do anything overly heroic so I don't know how much

58:17

I believe in the idea of a good and bad person, I think that's a little simplistic, but you know,

58:23

I think you guys would agree with that, at least Well, no, we believe, actually, do you know what holy means?

58:31

The word holy? The word holy when we talk about God being holy Set apart, yeah, set apart not common, yeah

58:40

Yeah, so just going back a little bit, just taking a couple steps back, when we were talking about, you know, you being the arbiter of truth, your own

58:49

God we do believe that it's on it is on display in the heart of sinful man because what they do is they erect standards they erect whether it be moral standards, standards of goodness, and then they go ahead and live by these standards and so they do construct a way of thinking and a way of behavior and they do become their arbiters of their own standards of truth which, you know, let me explain it this way with all of truth as it is, you know we were talking about objective standards of truth absolute truth objective standards of morality we believe those things absolutely do exist, but again, there is no accounting of them outside of God as the explanation and when somebody says, well, you know it's just my opinion, you know,

59:42

I'm this is the way I see life and this is my moral code, then they do become an arbiter, the arbiter of truth, the quote unquote truth for themselves, because truth is not left open for us to invent, truth is not a product of our own bias or our own opinion truth is that which corresponds to reality truth is truth whether we believe it whether we not, and of course you know, we're held to that standard and we live in the world that God created, so when

01:00:11

Desi's talking about goodness you know, the Bible says every man believes that he is pure in his own eyes, that if you would ask a person and we've asked many, you know, if you were to stand before God today and he were to say why should

01:00:26

I let you into heaven the basic response is I'm a pretty good person, right and this is kind of the heart of the gospel explanation, is that according to God's standard right, not according to ours because you know,

01:00:41

I think in your saying I don't really believe that there could be good or bad, or I think it's maybe more complex than that I agree,

01:00:50

I think if goodness and evil were left open to anybody to explain, then you know, all person

01:00:59

A would have to do would be to contradict person B and who's right you know, we kind of said that last time so there is no grounding for good or evil in consensus there is no grounding for good or evil anywhere outside of an objective standard we all can appeal to and point to and say no, this is why this is bad because of this, right but we all know intrinsically regardless of our belief in the scriptures or our, you know, submission to God at all, we all can't get away from the objective standard of morality that's there and that's intrinsic and inherent to our own existence right, so we explained the gospel to you last time but the big deception of sin is that we believe that we're good we believe that we're going to fare well when we stand before God in our sin disconnected from Jesus but in reality, when we do stand before God according to the scriptures the

01:01:59

Bible says God is fixed a day when he will judge the world in righteousness and he's going to judge us based upon that standard that he's written upon our heart and the standard that's explained in his law, and if we've fallen short of that, then we'll be guilty criminals before a just God right, so the

01:02:16

Bible says many proclaim their own goodness, but in actuality if we were to view ourselves through the lenses of scripture and we were really concerned about how the

01:02:26

God of the universe views us outside of Christ, so we are culpable criminals, and that we're headed to a punishment there that we rightly deserved

01:02:35

I mean when we're talking about God according to the Christian worldview Christian perspective we're talking about this being immense, like Desi said and you explained it really well this set apart

01:02:47

God who is he's absolutely pure in all that he does I mean when

01:02:52

Jesus walked the face of the earth you can think for 33 years he never even said a sinful word or thought a sinful thought

01:02:57

I mean he was pure without sin but this

01:03:03

God who is absolutely pure and absolutely holy and absolutely righteous and good I mean if you were an absolutely pure being almost beyond comprehension,

01:03:11

I mean the littlest evil is a big deal the littlest sins, that's why people ask why can God exact this type of punishment upon unbelieving man, well it has to do with his own nature, his own goodness his own purity that standard to where to an absolutely pure and holy

01:03:30

God even the smallest thing can seem almost infinitely evil which would require a punishment that fits the crime and that's our explanation of hell which is an eternal jail cell for those outside of Christ so we don't want you to go there brother we want you to know

01:03:46

Christ, we're not going to pull punches, this is what we believe and we are not called to grab you by your throat and somehow shake it into you, we just in love tell you the truths of the scripture, the way to salvation, the way of being made right with God through Jesus Christ which is repentance and turning to him in faith and that's what we would want for you we could go into a lot more we're kind of getting long, we don't want to make our our sessions too long

01:04:15

I'm going to let you have the last word and then we're going to wrap it up and we can do something like this again in the future we're going to probably depart from abortion the topic of abortion, talk about other stuff for a while but I just want you to know that we appreciate your your collectedness and your ability to articulate yourself very well and your just your graciousness man it's something that we don't get a lot and we truly appreciate it yeah well

01:04:44

I appreciate you guys too I enjoyed last time

01:04:50

I called in and I enjoyed this as well thanks for the opportunity and if in the future you want me to come back in,

01:05:00

I'm open to it down to talk about whatever it's probably not going to be for a little bit because we want to shift gears a little bit if you want, we can correspond through Facebook, I'd love to hear your heart on some of the things

01:05:14

I know we tend to cover a lot of subjects and maybe we have a little bit run on sentences,

01:05:19

I just don't want you to feel like you weren't heard or you weren't able to kind of express your thoughts on a particular subject so I'm always open to talk via messenger if you want to kind of continue the conversation or if you have things that you'd like to challenge me on based upon all the claims that we've made we'd love to just be able to do that this show is not about saying look how we trashed

01:05:42

Bill we won the argument look how we showed up Bill and proved him wrong part of the

01:05:50

Christian mandate and commission is to dismantle certain ideological systems that we believe are at war and so we have to do that in submission to Christ, but ultimately we want you to know

01:06:02

Christ we don't want to just proudly or in a glory seeking way just say look how we demolished this person we want you to come to the truth this is all about bringing the truth to you and thinking these things through we stand on the scriptures as our base authority and what we appeal to of course but just to simplify we want you to know

01:06:29

Christ, we want you to know the truth we just want to deliver it to you the best that we can we're kind of green at this, we're kind of new at all this, but that's got to be the motive of the

01:06:38

Christian the Bible says we're not loving people in our communication of the truth and God doesn't bless that and it's just it's pretty much futile and impotent so yeah do you still have a

01:06:54

Bible at home Bill? I do not maybe after we get off we can message

01:07:02

Zach, we'd like to send you just a Bible I know you said that you have a background in Christianity but I would just pray that you, you're saying you're open minded to these things that you don't have it all figured out but I pray that you would just start reading that Bible and crying out to God for salvation because we do believe that that is the only way to eternal life and we believe that it's the only way here on earth to be set free from sin that we're actually slaves to sin until Jesus Christ sets us free so we're going to send you a

01:07:33

Bible and we're going to keep praying for you and we really do love you and we're so thankful for the time like Zach said, thank you for your graciousness and we're not going to give up praying for you

01:07:44

Bill alright brother, well I'll correspond with you on messenger, thanks man I appreciate you coming on, thanks

01:07:51

Bill alright, see ya, bye that was good, what did you think about the conversation?

01:07:59

it was good, yeah yeah hopefully I didn't get it too philosophical there, hopefully things were explained well we got into morality which

01:08:12

I didn't even think we were going to really touch on but now that I'm kind of thinking about our last conversation

01:08:17

I think that was a large part because what we're saying it's wrong, it's evil but he's pretty much saying hey morality is open to my opinion which if you say that, you're right you become the arbiter of morality you become the arbiter of truth and when you say that, morality doesn't exist so for me to say abortion is evil and for him to account for morality via consensus or just the subjective experience of an individual we have no right to call anything evil or to call anything good, if that was your accounting then there exists no evil or good and most, or a lot of atheists believe that, there is no evil or good until you do something evil against them and then we're like wait a second, now that's there is evil and good.

01:09:04

Yeah and it's funny because he kind of gave examples, he's like well what about this and what about that, I mean we could look at the different dynasties and all the different things throughout history and you know we talked about Nazi Germany and you know we talked about American history and you know it's just funny to me that an atheist, well he's not even saying he's an atheist he's like agnostic but on the fence.

01:09:26

It just proves that you've got all these different objections you know, people objecting each other when it comes to morality like this group over here would say this is right and this group over here would say this is right it's like how do we know what is truth without, outside of the word of God, there is no way to do it.

01:09:46

Exactly, yeah you got population A or just say group A, group B, this is my moral code this is my moral code.

01:09:53

How do we know what's right? Yeah, so what would you say to the person who is dealing with this at home or at their workplace, they've got a friend or a neighbor that they're in the same boat as Bill, they're kind of wrestling and they have all these questions, would you encourage them to just go through line item by line item or would you have any other kind of suggestions on how to direct the conversation back to the gospel because without a new heart,

01:10:25

Bill's not gonna Yeah, exactly you know, when we engage in presuppositional apologetics it's a command, the

01:10:32

Bible says don't answer the fool according to his own folly and then it says actually answer the fool according to his own presuppositions and what we're trying to do in that which is a scriptural command when we use presuppositional apologetics is we're trying to expose the folly of the world view, the inability of an atheistic world view, any world view out there, outside of the

01:10:57

Christian world view in their attempts to make sense of this world without appealing to God as the preconditions of intelligibility, does that make sense?

01:11:07

He has to be the finger that you, this is why I believe this is why

01:11:12

I believe and this is how we make sense of our experience this is how we account for the laws of logic by which we reason with or the uniformity of nature, believing that the future is gonna be like the past this is how we account for morality it's only based upon the revealed character and just the being of God himself, we point to him and say it's because of him, it's not that hard, so we use that as a way to show in accordance with the scripture the folly of abandoning

01:11:43

God as your authoritative base that you stand on for the claims that you make and the world view that you live by, that's the basis of presuppositional apologetics, but in that, and I'm glad you did that I think you pretty much demonstrated the way we had gotten to back and forth when it comes to morality, abortion you brought it around to the gospel so that's what we have to do in our presuppositional apologetical attempts, 1

01:12:11

Peter 3 15, having that reason, defense which God commands us, is we want to make sure that the gospel is communicated, and so you could say, hey we could talk about this for a little bit, we had already shared the gospel with him so it wasn't on my mind at the moment, because that duty has already been accomplished, but like you're saying, just in the general experience of the

01:12:33

Christian whether or not they're talking with a person on the street or their own family member, in your argumentation, which should be civil and loving and tempered and not crazy, you know you want to get the gospel message out.

01:12:46

Right, and like the truth of scripture is that like, there are no atheists, Bill knows that there's a creator, right, and it's not because there's not enough evidence, creation in itself is evidence enough to show that there's a creator, but the reason why

01:13:00

Bill and all of us in our natural state, separated from Christ, don't believe is because we love the darkness rather than the light.

01:13:08

We love our sin and we want to continue on in our sin and so bringing that truth forward and so I would just say too, you don't have to be afraid of these conversations.

01:13:19

When I became a Christian, I was like terrified that somebody was going to ask me these questions or what

01:13:24

I would say or how I would respond or when they start going into Levitical codes and you're like, where do

01:13:29

I go? You just bring them back to the gospel, because it's the gospel that saves the gospel is going to open up their minds and like Zach said, we are called to demolish these things, but we don't have to be perfect.

01:13:41

We don't have to be eloquent. We can say, hey, you know what, I don't know that answer, but I can get back to you.

01:13:46

I can talk about it with my pastor, but the important thing is engaging and showing, like going through that all today, it really shows the insanity of an atheistic or agnostic worldview is because there is no standard.

01:14:02

It's all chaos in that world. Right, and Bill, we're not saying you're insane when you listen to this, but we believe that if you abandon the scriptures, you abandon

01:14:12

God, the God that the Bible says that you know exists, because we're all going to be without an excuse, if you abandon him, then you live in the world of absurdity, right, to where claims are made, but there's no ability to explain those claims in an atheistic worldview, and it maybe to explain that a little bit better, if we believe that we're somehow complex in a manner that we can't even imagine, of course

01:14:41

Darwin didn't even believe that the cell was as incalculably and almost inexplicably complex as we can imagine.

01:14:49

Insanely complex organisms. If we can imagine that those things came by molecules bumping around, unguided, just chance processes, just mathematically, it's impossible for that to happen.

01:15:04

So what I'm getting at, is that if you look to evolution, if you say, hey look, we're just over 4 .5

01:15:09

billion years, you know, as stars blew up, and molecules bounced around, and somehow life was given to a...

01:15:18

through chemical processes, life was somehow created, you even have to use

01:15:26

Christian terms, because it's impossible to think that just through chance processes, and somehow natural events, all of this could occur.

01:15:36

What we're saying is, in that world view, given that explanation of the origins of life, it's absurd.

01:15:44

And that's the realm that you live in, outside of... Sorry. That's the realm that you live in, outside of the scriptures.

01:15:52

Now, just for a little story, I had a good friend a couple years ago, Christian, professing

01:15:59

Christian, sorry about that, professing Christian for many years, and then sends me a message that just says, you know what,

01:16:08

I don't believe it anymore. And from the fruits of his life, you know, I don't believe he was ever in the kingdom.

01:16:14

Me. But I remember writing almost 40 pages of information back to him, just kind of answering his claims and answering his difficulties with the

01:16:24

Christian faith. And I said, brother, you know, if you continue on in this path, you're going to live in this world that you don't want to live in.

01:16:34

It's a world of absurdity, it's a world of pain, it's a world of misery outside of the kingdom.

01:16:41

Right. That's where everybody lives, and that's why we go out and evangelize. But that's ultimately the basis of our motive here, is we want the truth to come out.

01:16:51

We want to tackle these philosophical systems, show them for the bankruptcy that they have in their ability to account or to explain or to make sense.

01:17:01

That's important to show people that's part of it. But of course, preeminently above all things is the gospel mandate.

01:17:09

You know, we're to share the gospel, and like you said, we don't ever want to, on this show, portray that we're some great intellectual minds, because that does no good for the church.

01:17:21

I want to talk about this on the next episode of Angelism, which I'm going to focus on. Actually, two shows ahead.

01:17:28

Is this is the fact that God uses broken people.

01:17:35

The Bible says he uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. We want in our attempts here, just to show the average

01:17:44

Christian that we're a bunch of average Christians, and you could share the gospel too. That is when the work of evangelism increases exponentially, when the body of Christ evangelizes and just doesn't say, oh, if I'm not like A, B, or C, if I'm not like this brother or that brother, then

01:18:01

I don't have the ability to evangelize. I have to be, like you said, some massive intellectual mind with encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to retain all the information.

01:18:10

I don't got any of those things, but I know, as a Christian man, God has commanded me to be a light, to be salt, to be a preservative, to be a gospel witness, and that is what

01:18:22

I've got to do and what we want to do. If the only thing that was accomplished in this show was for the average

01:18:29

Christian to just say, I can do it. I'm going to go out into my sphere of influence every day, and I'm going to proclaim the gospel, then that's a pretty massive victory.

01:18:38

Yeah, and I would say too, just as encouragement, it is like a muscle. It is like working out. The more you do it, the more you are disciplined in the

01:18:47

Word, and the more each day that you do, you participate in evangelism, the easier it will get.

01:18:55

The more natural it will get. It's like a muscle you work out. Yeah, practice makes perfect what makes progress.

01:19:00

Right. Okay, folks, that was a long one. Hopefully you were helped. Hopefully that was beneficial for you and your attempts to defend your faith and your attempts to share the gospel.

01:19:10

Send us a message. Let us know if we can do better. We've got to be open to critique. We've gotten some on YouTube.

01:19:17

Yeah, we have. We've gotten the speaking of the microphone and stopped saying huh or right.

01:19:22

I think we did pretty good right there. Again, we're new to this. We're just doing our best to try to glorify

01:19:28

God and help you do your best to be a light. Next time, next episode, we are actually bringing on a woman, and her dad was an abortionist.

01:19:39

Yeah. She's a reformed Christian. She was able to share the gospel with this abortionist dad before he unfortunately passed away soon after.

01:19:47

And his and her son, son -in -law, I think, or stepson. No, her brother.

01:19:53

Oh, her brother. Way off there. Her brother is actually working to be an abortionist.

01:19:58

Right. Yeah, so we want to talk with her. We want to hear her story, and we're going to do our best to reach out to the brother to tell him to put the brakes on.

01:20:08

He's actually in training to be an abortionist, so wouldn't it be amazing if somehow we could get through to him and stop the murders from occurring.

01:20:16

That's going to be our focus, and that's going to be our next episode. So we love you guys. Don't forget to go to Paul G .S.