Always Ready: Chap 29. Apologetics in Practice

Apologetics as a Moral Necessity for Every Believer

All right, we're continuing in our study in Greg Bonson's book Always Ready, studying presuppositional apologetics. And what we're up to now, we've finished sections one through four of the book. We're in section five, which is titled Answers to Apologetic Challenges.

And we're in chapter 29, which is Apologetics in Practice. This is where we've already started getting down to the nitty gritty of how do we apply all the principles that we've learned. And first thing we're going to look at is a review on how to approach the task of apologetics.

So what I'm going to do to give you an idea of how we're going to close this out, it'll be a couple more weeks. Tonight, we're going to do a review of all the principles. We've broken it down into 15 principles of how to approach presuppologetics.

And then we're going to, if the time permits, and hopefully it does, we're going to look at two examples of how to defend the faith. Tonight, we're going to look at Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell was the one who wrote the essay back in the mid -20th century, Why I Am Not a Christian.

And he supposedly has this intellectual reasoning for why he's not a Christian and actually why Christianity is bad for any group of people. That's his presupposition. And then starting next week, presuming if we get through all of this tonight, we're going to take Paul's sermon on Mars Hill and start going through that.

My guess is that it'll take us at least two weeks to get through the sermon, maybe even three, because that's a very controversial subject. I don't know if you realize that, but we'll get into that. Even within the Church of Jesus Christ, there are those who actually criticize Paul's sermon as though they could do any better.

So apologetics in practice, we're going to review first. Now, what we're doing here, we're pulling together all of the principles that we've learned from the beginning of the book. And the first principle is this.

Engaging in apologetics is a moral necessity for every believer. We must be always ready to offer an answer for the hope within us, 1 Peter 3 .15. Remember, so we're not just looking at this and say, oh, this is a special branch of apologists and that's what this book is written for.

No. According to the scriptures, it's a moral necessity for every believer to be able to give an answer. Not everybody is a professional apologist, but when I say professional, I mean doing it all the time, like Dr. White, Brother Anthony here.

But it is a moral necessity for everybody. So that's the first thing. So what we're going through is meant to help and assist everybody. Secondly, to avoid misconceptions, we note that apologetics is not pugnacious, a matter of persuasion, or based upon a different ultimate authority than theology.

Now notice, some apologists have a habit of being very acerbic, very pugnacious, very arrogant. And we've spent a lot of time, in fact, almost every lesson going through and saying that this is not how the scripture teaches us to defend the faith.

So that's the second principle that's important. It's not pugnacious. It's not a matter of persuasion. Remember, you're not going to persuade anybody. Your job is to present the truth, to present it in a kind and loving way, and let the Holy Spirit do the work.

Because remember, changing the heart is the job of the Holy Spirit, not yours. OK, three, for the Christian, reason should be used as a tool, not as the ultimate authority in our thinking.

OK?

This is a subtle distinction here, and a line that you have to walk. We do use reason, all right? But it's a tool. It's not our authority. Just because you can reason something out logically in your mind doesn't mean it's true.

And we'll see that, especially when we get to Bertrand Russell's essay later on tonight, to show here is a very intelligent man who virtually breaks every rule in the book of logic and apologetics. Four, our claim before the world is that believers know.

OK? That's important. Remember, if you go through the book of 1 John, you see that word know. It's 20-some times, I think, if I remember correctly, that we know. And it's not just faith is an issue. It's involved here.

But as believers in Jesus Christ, we can actually come to the point where we know the Bible is true. And we have adequate justification for believing its claims. It's not a blind faith. It's a reasoned faith.

But it does lead to knowledge. Five, the conflict between believers and unbelievers is ultimately over their differing world views. Remember that. It's not because we have a different view of abortion.

It's not that we have a different view of marriage. It's because our whole world views are different. And it's right at the most basic of our reasoning and our understanding. Number six, consequently, we need to argue from the impossibility of the contrary.

Now, we've spent quite a bit of time over the last, I think this is the 22nd lesson from the book. So over the first 21 weeks, we've spent a lot of time talking about this, the impossibility of the contrary.

What do we mean by that? Showing that only Christianity provides the preconditions of intelligibility. The only reason a non-believer can communicate and reason to any degree is he borrows from our world view.

If he were to be consistent with his world view, they could make no sense whatsoever. So showing that only Christianity provides the preconditions of intelligibility for man's experience and reasoning.

If Christianity were not true, the unbeliever could not prove or understand anything. You have to communicate that when you make a statement such as that. That's one of the ones that will get them very, very angry.

When you tell them, no, you can't think, you can't prove anything according to your world view. That's why I have to do it out of love and not condescending. Number seven, unbelievers are self-deceived.

They know the truth about God but suppress it, rationalizing the clear evidence within them and all around them. We have, mankind in particular, but even believers have the ability to rationalize anything.

In fact, that's one of my points that we're going to expand upon on Sunday morning's sermon as we're getting back into the book of Daniel and seeing how we have the ability to rationalize virtually anything.

Number eight, the true defendant, intellectually and morally, is the unbeliever, not God. All too often when you come to a debate or even an informal discussion with a non-believer, they have the tendency, they're going to put God on trial.

And if you allow that, you're shooting yourself in the foot right at the very beginning. You have to switch it around and have them show, no, you are the one who is on trial. God is true and you know he's true, you know he's real, you know that God exists, but you, again, you suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

And so you are really the one who's on trial. Now, again, you're not going to say it in exactly these words. You want to, you know, you don't want to alienate the person that you're trying to witness to.

Number nine, there are a large variety of different kinds of attacks upon Christianity and they cannot be dealt with adequately by defenses which rest upon subjectivism, relativism, or eclecticism. Now, again, this is just showing why we are presuppositional in our approach.

If you try to rest your argument on anything other than the presuppositions of scripture, you're going to fall into one of these categories, subjectivism, relativism, or eclecticism, and there you're going to lose your footing.

You cannot defend the scriptures if you do not hold to the truth and the authority of scripture. Does that make sense? You follow what I'm saying? Okay. Number 10, apologists must use argumentation. And again, we're talking about argumentation in a legal sense, in a formal sense, such as arguing a case in court, not engaging in an argument, you know, like in a backyard that's going to come to blows.

Sanctified argumentation need not be contentious. We find that sanctified arguing with unbelievers is warranted by biblical example. And we have so many examples in scripture of the apostles engaging in formal or sanctified argumentation with the enemies of the cross.

Eleven, an argument asserts the truth of a proposition based, proposition on the basis of others. And, of course, what is based upon the other's truth. This is why if you're going to have an argument based upon truth, you have to start on truth, which is why, again, we are presupposition.

I hope as we go through this, you see how all of this really just hangs together. You give away, if you give away the Bible as your ultimate authority and as the only source of truth, you're putting yourself right in the same position as the nonbeliever, and you're going to, your hope of winning the argument or at least presenting a cogent argument is going to be fleeting at best.

Twelve, rationality and argumentation is broader than simply using rules of syllogistic deduction. I hope, does everybody understand what that means? In other words, just because you're using formal logic or even some of the informal logic doesn't mean that that's all that you can use.

You still can't give away your basis. You have to, it's presuppositional, always presuppositional. You're presuppositional when you start, you're presuppositional in the middle, and you should walk away a stronger presuppositionalist.

Okay?

Thirteen, God wishes for us to master the tools of rationality in defending the faith. It is our task to refute challenges of unbelievers and to offer an internal critique of the position from which those challenges arise.

Okay, now notice, Bronson is saying it's our task to refute the challenges of unbelievers. When an unbeliever comes up and challenges your worldview, okay, depending, and it doesn't matter how he does it, our job is to show from his own argumentation the internal inconsistencies of his argumentation.

Okay, and that's what we're gonna do in a little while. We're gonna take four statements, the conclusion, basically, of Bertrand Russell's Why Am I Not a Christian? And show that based upon even the rules of logic that he would accept, he has internal inconsistencies, unarguably biased, prejudices, logical fallacies, all of that is gonna come into play.

And this is from somebody who supposedly is one of the most brilliant debaters of the 20th century. Okay, 14, the two key intellectual sins which are committed by people are, and you're gonna see these specifically with Bertrand Russell, inconsistency and arbitrariness.

Inconsistency, they'll state two principles that are diametrically opposed to one another. They'll state that there are no moral absolutes, and then on the other hand say, you remember I gave you the example of the student who cheated on a test, and the professor wants to fail him.

Well, how can you fail him when there's no moral absolutes? And it's basically that simple. So inconsistency and arbitrariness. In dealing with the unbeliever, the Christian should be alert to point out the critic's prejudicial conjectures, all right?

In other words, he'll make bold statements that are prejudicial, bias prejudicial, with no basis for them whatsoever, all right? Unargued philosophical bias, first cousins there. Presuppositions we do not comport with each other, that's what we just talked about, asserting two things that are diametrically opposed to one another.

And then logical fallacies, you know, behavior which betrays his professed beliefs. If you just look, have those four things in mind when you're listening to somebody who is spouting out humanism, all right, you'll find that they've, in most cases, you'll find that they violate all four of those, okay?

Those are the 15 points that we've broken down the first 21 chapters into. Any questions at this point? Now, again, you know, not everybody's going to violate all of those, but those are the main areas that you're going to see.

All right, Bonson calls the next section a fire to fight. And I liked it, so that's why I left it in. All right, so this is what he, continuing chapter 29, Apologetics and Practice, Bonson says, an excellent opportunity to practice our defense of the Christian faith is provided by one of the most noteworthy British philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell was the poster child, the poster boy in the mid -20th century for atheism and humanism, all right? Russell has offered us a clear and pointed example of an intellectual challenge to the truthfulness of the Christian faith by writing an article which specifically aimed to show that Christianity should not be believed, all right?

Now understand that. The purpose of his article, which is titled Why I Am Not a Christian, the whole purpose for that was to convince people that Christianity should not be believed. And if, we're not going to go through his entire article because it would not be fruitful to do so.

What we're going to look at is four conclusions. Now if you've read the chapter in the book, Bonson says three, but in essence gives us four. I don't know if that was intentional or not, so I broke it down into four, so I'm not taking license.

In essence, that's what he says. So in broad terms, Russell argued that he could not be a Christian because, and these are the four reasons that he gives in his conclusion. The Roman Catholic Church is mistaken to say that the existence of God can be proved by unaided reason.

And that unaided reason is the main reason right there, okay? So that's the first reason. Second reason, serious defects in the character and teaching of Jesus show that he was not the best and wisest of men, but actually morally inferior to Buddha and Socrates, okay?

These are his exact words, by the way. Third reason, people accept religion on emotional grounds, particularly on the foundation of fear, which is not worthy of self-respecting human beings, okay? Now I'm just, I'm not commenting on these yet.

I'm just giving you the four. Number four, the Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world, okay? I'm glad I got some comments from, because it is, I mean, you either have to be appalled by it or laugh at it.

I mean, and so now what we're going to do is we're going to take these four principles and show how he violates his own principles. And I'm not going to take them in an order, one, two, three, and four, because they're, well, I'm just not going to do that.

So I don't have to explain myself. I'm the teacher, right? Okay, apologetics and practice, internal tensions. That's what we're going to start looking at first. His own conclusions manifest what is, we call internal intentions, internal tensions.

Remember, we looked at this a couple of weeks ago, that internal tensions is that his argumentation itself has internal problems that do not comport with each other. All right, so first, arbitrariness and inconsistency.

Remember I told you just a few moments ago, keep your eye on this, arbitrariness and inconsistency. The second reason offered above presupposes some absolute standard of moral wisdom by which somebody could grade Jesus as either inferior or superior to others.

Now, that was the second one. This is just a repeat of the second one. This is what he said, remember, serious defects in the character and teaching of Jesus show that he was not the best and wisest of men, but actually morally inferior, all right?

So his reason is that some absolute standard of moral wisdom exists to grade Jesus. You have to put Jesus next to this standard, and then Socrates and Buddha next to this standard, and Jesus somehow fails.

Can you see any problems with that? Yeah, in his worldview, there is no standard. I mean, we have a standard, all right, which we hold to be perfect, so that we, the Christian can look at people and say, you failed us, you failed that test.

Why? Because it's the test that God gave us, all right? Now, it's easy for Christians, because we say, how many people in the world fail the test? We all do, except for Jesus Christ, all right? So now, we're gonna comment on this a little bit later, but I just wanna get to the third one, because Bronson shows that likewise, the third reason presupposes a fixed criterion for what is and what is not worthy of self-respecting human beings.

Now, this is still under arbitrariness and inconsistency. That's why I'm not taking them in order. I'm taking them lumped by the fallacy, okay? So, the third one that he says, people accept religion on emotional grounds, particularly on foundation of fear, which is not worthy of self-respecting human beings.

All right, now again, the word likewise gives us, gives us a clue there that it's, we're still looking at the same fallacy that we looked at in the second reason. Where is, who has this fixed criteria, and who says that it's not worthy to accept something on emotional grounds, or even the foundation of fear?

Now, I'm not saying that that's the best way to do it, but who's to say that it's not worthy of self-respecting human beings? What is a self-respecting human being, okay? Then again, the complaint expressed in the fourth reason would not make any sense unless it is objectively wrong to be an enemy of moral progress.

Indeed, the very notion of moral progress itself assumes an established benchmark for morality by which there is such progress. So, if you ask Bertrand Russell, well, he understands it now, by the way.

He died a number of years ago. But if you ask him at the time, what is moral progress? What does he have to do to be able to answer that question?

Yeah.

And incidentally, his ethic is basically borrowed from the Christian worldview. Because he, you know, what's one of the biggest arguments that you hear from the humanist about why we should or should not do something.

One, you shouldn't do it, why? Well, because that would hurt other people. You know, why is murder wrong? Well, because you have no right to take the life of another person. Question is, why? If there's no, if the commandment thou shalt not kill is not binding on us, it's in fact, the teaching of the scripture according to him is morally inferior, right?

Then why should I listen to the commandment thou shalt not kill? If it's morally expedient for me and it moves me ahead, well, then why don't I kill you? And again, moral standards can change from society to society.

One of my favorite lines from Greg Bonson, it was in his debate with Gordon Stein. And he says, in our society here, we're taught to love your neighbor. There are primitive societies where they're taught to eat their neighbor, right?

And who's to say which is right if you don't have a moral standard that is binding, okay? So, and I just repeated number four, the Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

I mean, we're talking technically here, but I mean, just I hate to say it, but I can't say that. I was gonna say, even if you put the Bible aside for a moment, which we'd never do, okay? You have to look at history and see that the Christian church is responsible for so much good and progress that has been made to say that just defies reality, all right?

But again, we don't put the Bible aside. Then we have, he also committed this, and we see this in terms of the unaided reason. In the first reason given by Russell for why he was not a Christian, he alluded to the dogma of the Roman Catholic church.

Now, here's where you have to be careful, all right? Remember what he said, the existence of God can be proved by unaided reason. Now, that's what the dogma of the Roman Catholic church says that by unaided reason, we can come to the conclusion and prove that God exists.

And who can tell me, what are some of the proofs that not only the Roman Catholic would use, but classic and evidentialist apologetics, what they would use if you would ask them, how can you prove the existence of God?

Cosmological, teleological, moral argument. Yeah, I mean, there's all different arguments. Do they prove the existence of God? It's been argued that it can prove the existence of a God. Maybe. Maybe.

Maybe.

But that's what the Roman Catholic church is. The Roman Catholic church says, and this is what rankled Russell is, they say that by not even using the Bible, because again, they're not priests up, all right?

They can put the Bible aside and we can still prove the existence of God. And that's what Russell is arguing against here, all right? So let's see what we say. He then turns to some of the more popular arguments advanced for the existence of God, teleological, cosmological, ontological, advanced for the existence of God, which are supposedly based upon this unaided reason and easily finds them wanting.

This is where you got to be careful, you know, the Roman Catholic church walked right into the trap that he lays for them, all right? But only to so far. It goes without saying, of course, that Russell thought that he was defeating these arguments of unaided reason by means of his own superior unaided reason.

Russell did not disagree with Rome that man can prove things with his natural reason apart from the supernatural work of grace. Indeed, at the end of his lecture, he called his hearers to a fearless outlook and a free intelligence.

So you're following what he's saying. He's agreeing with the Roman Catholic's position of unaided reasoning. He just says, but that reasoning will not leave you to the existence of God. But it leaves the Roman Catholic apologists flat.

They can't really argue that. Hope I left out all my little red lines. Sometimes I get ahead of myself, especially when I get excited. Russell simply disagreed that unaided reason takes one to God. In different ways and with different final conclusions, both the Roman church and Russell encouraged men to exercise their reasoning ability autonomously apart from the foundation and restraints of divine revelation.

You see? So now the Christian apologists should not fail to expose this commitment to unaided reason for the unargued philosophical bias that it is.

All right?

Unaided reason is unargued philosophical bias. You can't just say this because that's exactly what the humanist does, what the atheist does. They just say something and expect you to take that at face value.

It has to be proven. It's just a philos... Russell goes into his essay with the preconceived idea that there is no God and everything proves that. And so he'll say, unaided reason will not take you to God.

Why? If he makes that statement, he's got to be the one to prove it. And this is part of our job as apologists. When somebody makes a statement like that, I don't care how many degrees and letters they have after their name, you got to hold them accountable.

Why doesn't it take you? What are the reasons? He's going to be found wanting. Oh, I didn't? I didn't like the rest of it. No, I'm kidding. He speaks freely of his knowledge of what atoms do, of what science can teach us and of certain quite definite fallacies committed in the Christian arguments.

Okay. Yeah, this actually sets up the next slide. So he speaks freely of his knowledge. In other words, he'll say, no, we know what atoms do. We can observe them and we know what they do. We know what science can teach us.

We know that there are fallacies involved in argumentation and knowledge. He says that, all right. But this simply will not do. As the philosopher Russell here gave himself a free ride. He hypocritically failed to be as self-critical in his reasoning as he beseeched others to do with themselves.

Again, unaided reasoning. It just, I just, I said it. That means it's true.

Okay.

Oh, and by the way, Bonson doesn't say it, but this is where another fallacy will almost always come in. You get a guy like Russell who will quote some astrophysicist or something like someone with a lot of degrees and say, he says, and then brings it into his paper.

What fallacy is that?

Yes.

Faulty appeal to authority. Just because a guy's an astrophysicist doesn't mean he has the answer to that question.

Right?

Even though that's because astrophysicists have different views. And that's one of the problems when you're dealing with an appeal to authority. There is a legitimate appeal to authority, but you walk a fine line.

You better be able to prove that the person is in fact a bona fide authority or you fall into the logical fallacy trap. Does that make sense? Everybody follow that? The nagging problem, which Russell simply did not face is that on the basis of autonomous reasoning, man cannot give adequate and rational account of the knowledge we gain through science and logic.

If we don't have some sort of standard by which we're measuring things, unaided reasoning, autonomous reasoning, we don't even know. Well, let me give you an example. Science works. Well, you know what?

Nevermind. I'm coming up on another step. I'm getting ahead of myself again.

All right.

So let me just move ahead. Here we go. This is the point I was going to make. Scientific. I'm consistent. I was going right where my slide's going.

Yeah.

Scientific procedure assumes that the natural world operates in a uniform fashion, in which case our observational knowledge of past cases provides the basis for predicting what will happen in future cases.

I hope everybody recognizes this. The scientific method depends upon the uniform fashion of the universe to work. If the universe is not uniform, and then how can we, just because something happened once doesn't mean the same thing's going to happen again.

So it depends upon that. How do we know that it's uniform? Well, firstly, so it is with the knowledge and use of the laws of logic in terms which Russell definitely insisted that fallacies be avoided.

Russell would be very quick to point out logical fallacies, just as I've been doing to him.

All right.

Of course, he doesn't have the basis for it. He's got to borrow from our worldview.

All right.

The laws of logic are not physical objects in the natural world. They are not observed by man's senses. Moreover, the laws of logic are universal and unchanging, or else they reduce to relativistic preferences for thinking rather than prescriptive requirements.

We can observe the universe and make certain presumptions such as uniformity of the scientific method.

All right.

The laws of logic, how do you say it's always the same? You can't observe it, you can't pick logic up. Logic is immaterial, all right, which is another whole section.

All right.

However, Russell's autonomous reasoning could not explain or justify these characteristics of logical laws. If you don't have some standard, what standard do we have to know that the laws of logic work?

Yeah.

Russell's worldview, even apart from its internal tensions, could not provide a foundation for the intelligibility of science or logic. His unaided reason could not account for the knowledge which men readily gain in God's universe, and here it comes, a universe sovereignly controlled so that it is uniform and interpreted in light of the creator's revealed mind so that there are immaterial laws of thought which are universal.

Russell has no basis for that. What we just said, we accept. In fact, as I was reading it, I looked out, some of you were already nodding your head, right? We accept that, we understand it, we know it's true, not only because it's in scripture, primarily because we see it in scripture, but also because we know the scripture is true.

So we accept the uniformity of logic, and therefore we have logical fallacies. Russell has no basis for saying that. Then we have another section, prejudicial conjecture and logical fallacies. We must note, finally, that Russell's case against being a Christian is subject to criticism for its reliance upon prejudicial conjecture and logical fallacies.

That being the case, he cannot be thought to have established his conclusions or given a good reason for his rejection of Christianity. So the whole premise that he's writing this essay on and then giving a lecture on it is that it's foolish to be a Christian because it can't be proved when his whole reliance to disprove it is prejudicial conjecture and based upon logical fallacies.

Yes?

His whole case, his whole line of reasoning can't even be used to establish his own case. He cannot logically prove that atheism is true. So he fails under his own standard of measurement.

Yeah, and again, this is what we're doing here tonight. This is just a very brief summation of, I mean, we just took his conclusions. I mean, his whole article is riddled with logical fallacies. One stands in amazement, for instance, that the same Russell who could lavish ridicule upon past Christians for their ignorance and lack of scholarship could come out and say something as uneducated and inaccurate as this.

Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if he did, we do not know anything about him. I mean, the textual evidence for the existence of Christ is overwhelming. We have more textual proof for the crucifixion, just the crucifixion of Jesus, than we do that Plato existed.

Yes, exactly, another internal inconsistency. You're absolutely right. And the more you examine his paper, the more you see the logical fallacies and the internal inconsistency, all right? Let's just look, we have a couple of slides left.

And then Bonson says, even forgetting secular references to Christ in the ancient world, Russell's remark simply ignores the documents of the New Testament as early and authentic witnesses to the historical person of Jesus, given the relatively early dates of these documents and the relatively large number of them.

I mean, you have to take into, even if you don't believe the New Testament as a spiritual book, the fact that it's an ancient historical document gives it certain amount of credibility and then he comes, if Russell doubted the existence of Jesus Christ, he must either have applied a conspicuous double standard in his historical reasoning or been an agnostic about virtually the whole of ancient history.

Either way, we are given insight into the prejudicial nature of Russell's thinking when it came to consideration of the Christian religion. See what Bonson's saying there? He's either holding a double standard, holding the New Testament up to a higher standard than all the other ancient documents, or he's just an agnostic about all of ancient documents, that we can't rely on any of them.

That's the only alternatives that you can have for him to make that statement. By the way, if you have a question, and I don't see your hand, just shout. Nevertheless, toward the end of his lecture, Russell's discussion turns in the direction of fallaciously arguing against the personal defects of Christians, enforcing narrow rules contrary to human happiness and the supposed psychological genesis of their beliefs in emotion and fear.

That is, he indulged in the fallacy of arguing ad hominem. Everybody knows what the ad hominem, whenever you hear an ad hominem argument, you know the person is losing the argument. That's an ad hominem is where it takes, it takes away, you're not arguing the merits of the case, but you pick out some sort of a defect in the person.

And it could be anything, and some of them would get really ridiculous. We can't believe a word that Pastor Jensen said because he was locked up for petty theft in 1972. That's not true, by the way. I was locked up for something else.

No, no, I've never had so much as a ticket in my life. I know that's hard to believe, but I've never had a ticket. Who had their hand up? Okay, that's ad hominem. Even if what Russell had to say in these matters was fair-minded and accurate, it is not.

The fact would remain that Russell has descended to the level of arguing against a truth claim on the basis of his personal dislike and psychologizing of those who personally profess that claim. And this becomes more and more obvious if, I wouldn't even suggest, you know, well, if you want to read his article, I mean, with the idea of picking it apart, that it's good practice, because it is, it's a terrible, terrible article.

Russell's essay, Why I Am Not a Christian, reveals to us that even the intellectually elite of this world are refuted by their own errors in opposing the truth of the Christian faith. There is no credibility to a challenge to Christianity which evidences prejudicial conjecture, logical fallacies, unargued philosophical bias, behavior which betrays professed beliefs, and presuppositions which do not comport with each other.

You know, you realize what Bonson is saying. You don't have to be a Bible scholar to pick apart their argument. You can go into it and just pick apart what he has to say, and you can make a very good case without even being a scholar.

You don't have to know Greek, you don't have to know Hebrew, and you can still pick apart what he has to say. So, why wasn't Russell a Christian? Bonson concludes with this. Given his weak effort at criticism, one would have to conclude that it was not for intellectual reasons.

Questions?

No?

You good?