Presuppositionalism & The Problem of the One and the Many

Introduction to the Guest and the Topic of Presuppositionalism

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala, and today I have a special guest with me, Dr. Brant Bosterman. Those who have expressed interest in this episode, a lot of people have reached out expressing how excited they were that I was having Dr. Bosterman back on.

He is the author of a very, very awesome book entitled, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox, An Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til. Now if you're not big into apologetics, but you're, you know, you're interested in some of the things that that I talk about on this show, you do know that we place a great emphasis upon apologetic methodology, presuppositionalism more specifically.

So if you're interested in presuppositional apologetics, transcendental argumentation, and the doctrine of the Trinity, and how it relates to all of those things, you are in for a treat. This is my second time having Dr. Bosterman on.

I had him on a while back when the YouTube channel was pretty small, and we've grown a lot since then, and so I really wanted to expose people to the work of Dr. Bosterman, who perhaps have never heard of him, and since the channel has grown a little bit, hopefully we can give his book a little bit more exposure.

It's a tough read at times, but terribly fascinating, especially if you're interested in presuppositionalism, and the philosophical problem of the one and the many, and how how all these things work together.

Dr. Bosterman will also be taking questions. If you have any questions at the back end like we normally do, you can send them in and preface your question with the letter Q or the word question, so I can differentiate it from the rest of the comments.

Dr. Bosterman’s Background and the Cafe House Setting

All right, well, without further ado, we're gonna jump right in, and I'd like to welcome Dr. Brant Bosterman on the screen with me. How are you doing, brother? Well, thanks for having me, Eli. Well, thanks for agreeing to come on.

To be perfectly honest, the last discussion we had, which was, it was your first appearance on a YouTube channel in a long time, and it ended up being like a two-hour discussion. Is that correct? Sure did, man.

I came prepared tonight. Yes, that's right. So when I invited Dr. Bosterman on, he asked me if I can get some questions prepared, so that we can kind of be somewhere in the ballpark of like the direction that we wanted the conversation to go, and I've been so busy that I haven't, I wasn't able to do that, but he's prepared some talking points that I think you guys will find very, very fascinating, educating, and definitely will be very thought-provoking.

So why don't you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do? Well, I am, I'm a pastor, so.

I've been ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America since 2012, and church planted in 2013, and I did that shortly after I completed my PhD thesis. So it was literally April of 2013 that I gave my oral defense, and it was May of 2013 that we were gathering a church plant full of folks, and so it was kind of a whirlwind, went straight into the ministry.

Shortly thereafter, I think in 2014 or 15, I published my book. You asked me to have a copy, I'm not that vain, but here it is. And yeah, I don't even remember the exact publication date, but since then, yeah, I've been preaching, I've been on and off adjunct, you know, professoring, if you will, in the philosophy courses, logic, intro to philosophy, things like that.

And when I get spare time, writing, but progress is.

Slow. So yeah. The key word there is when you get spare time. That's right, that's exactly right. Now, folks might find it interesting, I kind of rushed here and just got here at the last second from my youth group.

I had a pretty long day, been up since 4 .30 in the morning, and I'm a full-time teacher, so I was working and doing things in the afternoon. So I just sat down here, and I was looking frantically for Dr. Bosterman's book, and I was like, I don't know where I put the book.

And so, Brant, why don't you tell folks why you have your book accessible, especially given where you are? Why don't you tell folks where you.

Are right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, that's a good question. So I've been going to the same cafe house for over a decade. And so I have, in the course of time, really gotten to know the management.

In the course of time, the owner received Christ on a Good Friday, right before a Good Friday service. And I ended up being involved in performing the wedding for him and his wife. And so they eventually just gave me a key to this place.

So I'm in this Viennese Austrian-themed cafe house, where there's actually a plaque behind me with my name on it that says, Here, Dr. Bosterman resides in quiet repose. And they actually have my book right above it.

So I didn't do any of that. But I suppose anytime I have a meeting here at the cafe house, I've got my book on hand. So.

That's awesome. That's why I had a copy. Yeah, he said that there was a shrine that was dedicated to like, we're trying to use some pagan temple or something.

It's pretty accurate. It's pretty accurate. That's how it is.

That's awesome. Well, let's let's jump right into the main topic. Again, folks who have expressed interest in this topic, I would imagine they have some background in the topic. But why don't we kind of walk through some of the talking points that that you mentioned, you have a point here, I have in front of me, you were interested in describing the one in the many problem, in just a general sense, first, what is the what is the problem?

Why is it a problem? And why is it even important to discuss in relation to like, apologetics and things like that?

The One and the Many as a Problem in Philosophy and Life

Right. So the one many problem is, is arguably one of if not the most pervasive problems in philosophy spanning really all of the subdisciplines from what is real to how do we know to how should we live?

And, you know, when we asked the question about the one in the many, I mean, all of us need a certain amount of consistency and regularity in reality to even exist, I mean, to make plans, we have to have an idea of what's coming, right?

At the same time, in order for reality to be livable, there must be a refreshing and healthy sort of diversity just the same. And so, you know, let me put it this way, this dovetailing with what I must do pastorally, you know, when you meet someone who's depressed, yes, there are sometimes, you know, chemical bases for that.

But there are also all sorts of other grounds of depression. And what you'll discover is that reality being monotonous is a source of depression, things not being refreshing, things not changing, not moving, not having sufficient variety.

At the very same time, reality or life being chaotic with all sorts of violent turns and unexpected changes can also be hopelessly depressing. So in a certain respect, we're all trying to search out and find some sort of equilibrium between a refreshing variety and change, as well as a restful consistency.

And this raises the question, you know, you might say this problem in its most practical form raises the question of what is ultimate reality? Is it even the sort of place where I should expect for there to be consistency?

Or is it all just chaos? Is it even the sort of place where I should expect for there to be ever more refreshing changes, turns and variations? Or is it a big ball of monotony? So in one respect, it is, it's just, it's about as practical a question, you know, the one in the many, and can I relate these two things?

How do I relate these things? But it really comes to bear, I think, classically, in the history of philosophy at the very beginning, with the pre Socratic says to what is real, because reality, ultimately, one and unitary, and maybe even unchanging, such that all change is illusory?

Or is it ultimately something that's always changing, maybe even passing from contradiction to contradiction, such that unity is really just kind of a mirage. And so in the course of our talk, I will talk a lot about the pre Socratic for a variety of reasons.

And I actually, I think a it's helpful sometimes to discuss this topic in a more unfamiliar realm. And then on top of that, I actually think in discussing the pre Socratic, you know, I know we have a myth, the majority of your audience, Christian listeners, I think it will actually help us to shed some light on the Old Testament scriptures, which were roughly contemporaneous with the, I mean, the latter part of it.

So okay, so that that's excellent. So that would be good if you went through, because you described what the one in the many problem is, maybe you can kind of define it more specifically, like, what is what is the problem?

What is it trying to solve? Right? Walk us through how some of the pre Socratic philosophers tried to answer that question, and then move into the Old Testament, you're going to and then eventually, I want to culminate into how this applies to say, pre suppositionalism.

But before we get into that, I want to ask a question. You know, a lot of people who do pre suppositional apologetics, and they'll use something like the transcendental argument, you'll hear pre suppositionalists say things along the line that the triune God provides the necessary preconditions for knowledge or intelligible experience, you know, the triune God can account for the one in the many, many critics of pre suppositionalism, especially online think that this is a problem that was like, it was like made up by pre suppositionalists, so that we can, you know, create this disease and claim to have the cure for it.

Without before you go into the pre Socratics, why is that completely wrong headed? I mean, is it the case that pre suppositionalists just made up this issue? It seems, you know, I've had a classical apologist friend of mine, he says, No one never discusses this in the literature, you know, it's you just you pre suppositionalists that bring it up.

Why don't you speak to that?

Well, I mean, it's almost unbelievable that someone would think of, you know, a such a relatively small group of people, which are, you know, pre suppositionalists, I mean, a niche group of people from the 20th century, and after creating this problem only so they could solve it.

I mean, first of all, I mean, this is a widely recognized problem in philosophy that predates, you know, pre suppositionalists, even if it isn't called by that name. But, but I mean, so it's just, it's frankly unbelievable to hear that that folks would speak that way.

I educated people I've heard with the practice of the person who told me this, I won't mention their name. But yeah, the PhD, apologetics and things. Yeah, no one talks about this sort of thing. It's not that important.

Yeah, well, I mean, so I don't know who said it. And I don't know how or in what context they said it. But I can only say that I find it baffling that somebody would say it who was white, well acquainted with philosophy.

You know, when it comes to the problem, I mean, just to discuss it more broadly than just, you know, what is real. And it really it comes to bear on, you know, virtually every aspect of philosophy. You know, one form in which the question has been expressed is how do universals relate to particulars, we both know that when I'm, you know, recalling a dog, I'm not actually bringing a tangible dog into my mind, that's not what's happening.

I have some sort of concept of a dog. And it's not even just the physical outline of the dog, although that might be evoked in my mind as well. But it's also all sorts of characteristics that just literally can't be pictured, like animal, animal being, you know, a genus is not, it's not a specific thing.

And, and so they're, they're rationally think things about that dog in my mind, that that differs from a dog in reality. And so, you know, one expression of, you know, the one many problem is how do universals, you know, universal forms, relate to material reality?

Do they relate to material reality is, is that concept of dog in my mind, you know, strictly artificial creation of my own subjective mind? Or does it have independent reality? If so, how does it come to express itself in a material thing?

Here, again, we have the issue of the one in the many, we have a universal, an idea of dog, you might say, which somehow can apply to truly a multitude of specific animals that are dogs. And, you know, how does that come to be?

How is that possible? Obviously, ideas, and, you know, physical reality are very different things. Sure. You know, so what, what, what gives me the assurance that my idea of dog is true to the reality that it's intended to describe, which came first, the idea or the particular, you know, those are the sorts of questions among so many others that arise when we, we talk about the one many problem.

So, so when you're talking about dog, animal, you're, you're, in essence, talking about an abstraction, right? There's no such thing as like, like, there's a dog, a particular physical dog, but the concept of dog is this abstraction.

So you have this universal concept, and there are these individual particular dogs. And we're asking the question, which came first, what is more ultimate in reality, this abstract, universal, or these individual particulars?

Is that is that what you're asking?

Absolutely, absolutely. And then you might say, which one gives rise to the other? Did I just form the idea of dog because I saw many four footed creatures who, you know, roughly the same size and had certain, you know, attributes that were the same.

And I created that artificial category, such that that's all that it is, it's just a name that I've given to things that, you know, I've arbitrarily grouped together? Or is there an actual essence of dog that limits the possible ways that any dog could be?

In which case, there's a sort of logical priority to the to the universal or concept that is somehow, you know, defining and determining what every dog ever, ever will be, or, or may or may not be. So, so that's, that's another permutation of the problem.

I mean, it arises in ethics as well, are there universal ethical obligations that come to bear on everybody? Or all ethics, you know, in all, you know, moral systems, relative, you know, the products of, you know, societal, you know, needs and differences?

You know, once again, we have the question, is there one right? Or are there many? You know, and what is the source of, you know, our, our ethical convictions? And, you know, comes into politics, you know, what has priority the whole of society?

I mean, this is right in our face with all things. I think last time we met, we were actually talking about Coronavirus restrictions, I mentioned in passing, we're still in it. So, so gone by the summer.

That's right. You know, a society, an artificial creation of a conglomeration of individuals, or are individuals the product of a society, such that, you know, we could have no, you know, self conception without the selves who birth us and things like that.

So the one penny problem is, again, it's a pervasive problem. It comes to bear in every every realm of philosophy, from political philosophy to ethics to epistemology.

Now, would it only be a problem, though, if the person asking this question presupposes the reality of universal, so you have folks like nominalists, someone, you know, you know, we're debating, you know, what's more ultimate, the universal or particular, and the nominalists just sitting over there, Amelia, you guys are weird, you know, these are just names, we, we apply to these things that are they're not actually these universal categories.

How would you speak to the to the nominalist?

Sure. So the nominalist has taken one side of the one many problem, they haven't discarded it by any means, they've taken their stand on the side of the many. And then, you know, one has to answer the question, if everything is fundamentally individual and diverse, there are no essences that things share in common, where did we ever get the idea?

Where did we ever get the idea to name things as generalities? Why? Why isn't all of reality? Why isn't our language like all of reality, an infinite number of words that only have one application and one correspondence?

And, you know, but we're going to talk about these things, actually, in the course of discussing the Socratics, but maybe we do jump to the Trinity and the sense in which we bring it to bear as,.

You know, yeah. Okay, so, so real quick, who were the pre Socratics for someone who's just popping in and be like, what are they talking about? Yeah, pre Socratics, and what questions were they asking?

And then maybe you can kind of walk us through how the pre Socratics dealt with this issue of what was more metaphysically ultimate unity, or morality. And I really want to eventually, when we get into more of the the apologetic application, maybe you can clearly define the problem with taking metaphors, the metaphysical ultimate reality as primarily unity, and taking metaphysical reality as primarily many.

So when you when you go from one extreme to the other, why does that I'm saying this early, and we can talk about it later. But why does that undermine the preconditions of intelligibility? And maybe we've got to talk about how the Trinity answers.

So that's where I want to go. My questions are kind of ill formed right now. But why don't you walk? Who are the who are the pre Socratics? And what questions were they asking? And perhaps you can kind of unfold that for us.

The Pre-Socratics and the Search for Ultimate Reality

Right. So the pre Socratics are philosophers, roughly contemporaneous with the Prophet Jeremiah. So we'd be talking sixth century, BC, seventh, sixth century BC, and they are primarily living in, you know, modern day Turkey.

But at the time, Ionia. Melesis, in particular, which is close to Ephesus, and roughly that region. And, you know, and then the other center of it would be, you know, in modern day Italy, and, you know, arising from them as if a synthesis are the, you know, the great Socratic philosophers, and there are some Greeks in that time period is I mean, really, Ionia is Greek at this point.

But, of course, the great schools of philosophy of Plato and Aristotle are, well, they're the Socratic philosophers, Socrates being, you know, the philosophical father of Plato and Plato of Aristotle.

So that's who these folks are. And they're, they're dealing with these, these questions about unity and diversity in the one of the many, almost primarily.

Okay, so then they're asking, okay, so if they're asking, what is metaphysically ultimate unity or plurality? Why don't you walk us through some noted, pre Socratic philosophers and what they how do they answer that question?

And what's wrong with their answer?

Well, okay, so that's what we're gonna do. And I'm gonna do one thing first, though. Okay, I want to say about this whole question is that the challenging thing about discussing ultimate matters is that we all already have an answer to these questions.

Even before we try to get better answers to these questions. We all begin with a conception of ourselves in the world around us, as being in certain respects, one and in certain respects, many. To even raise the question, we're already coming with an experience and with an idea about how we'd even begin to, to investigate whether reality was more the one or the other, or what is that principle which holds to disparate things like unity and diversity together?

And that's one really challenging thing for people when we talk about this, when we talk about our ultimate commitments. And when we talk about the Trinity, and I would say this from the get go, because this is important for us as we, as we go into investigating the pre Socratic answers to this question, we have to be clear in our own minds as Christians that we already have a specific answer to these questions.

And so here's what we mean when we talk about the Trinity as the absolute one and many. Every definition that we know, everything that we know, we know with certain contrasts and parameters and differentiations in it and around it.

Try to define something without reference to, you know, a multiplicity of words and concepts. Well, part of what we're saying when we say that the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are the solution to the one and the many, is that God has his own relationships and contrasts in himself in the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

This means that God is not subject to the problem of the one and the many as we experience it. God does not live in time such that the freshness and the life of the Trinity is supplied by his collision with something outside of himself or his victory over something outside of himself.

All of his life and definition is in and through himself. This is what the Trinity points us to, that one divine being is three co-eternal persons. Their unity is so deep and profound that it is a unity of one and the very same being, that they share one will together.

And yet, there are three distinct persons who give perfect expression to that divine being in one another. God, therefore, needs nothing outside of himself to unify himself. He has nothing outside of himself that he that he needs to look at or contrast with to have definition and life in himself.

And so, in that respect, we speak of God as the Absolute. He is perfectly self-sufficient and wonderfully in a way that we can know him truly but never exhaustively. This is what Calvary is.

You're touching on both the aseity of God and the incomprehensibility of God.

That's right. And it's important. So we're saying incomprehensible, but we're not saying that he's indescribable or inapprehensible. Calvin makes the point that unless we know God as Trinity, you know, nothing but the name of God flutters about in our brain.

Sorry. Because, you know, so frequently in human history, God has been defined just negatively. He's just not, he's not like this world. And when he's so defined, you know, he's also unpredictable for the very same reason as to what we can expect from him.

And of course, you know, in Islam, assurance of salvation. When you just have a one God with no personal relationship, love, faithfulness definition in himself, he becomes an arbitrary sort of a will.

And your capacity to be assured of salvation correlates with the ultimate unknowability of God. So that's what we're getting at is that God is absolutely self-sufficient and in a way that to us as persons, we can know him meaningfully.

And to call him the solution to the one of many problem is A, to say he's not subject to it in the way we are. He doesn't have an unknown future in front of him, which is one of the great problems, nor does he have any sort of subjection to any sort of power above himself.

And this renders him the solution to the one in the many problem. And this might sound strange in an ethical way. What this means is all unity and diversity that we have in this reality around us was created by the Trinity.

The reason we have unity and diversity on a created level is because all of creation reveals the God in whom those two things are equally ultimate. This means that we're first of all taught to never try to find some unitary source of everything else within the creation that's the source of all other parts of the creation.

That would be to give unity ultimacy. Nor are we ever to look at creation as comprised of such unique and individual parts that the only sort of unity in it is an artificial, you know, subjective, you know, product.

No, there's real unity and diversity in this reality. And if we want to navigate it in such a way that we can find both a sort of restful consistency and refreshing diversity, we have to listen to the one who made it and we have to follow his direction through it.

That's our solution to the one many problem. It's not us finding in created categories, you know, the one thing that explains everything else. The only one who knows and understands and perfectly comprehends everything else is the absolutely self-sufficient God who knows.

It just by knowing himself. And that's the important element within the Christian worldview of revelation, right? And if you were to think, if people were to think in terms of like platonic categories of say like you have the particulars and the universals, you know, these kind of the ideal realm, what connects the ideal realm to the particular realm?

How can we have access to that without the thread of a revelation? That's right. That's right. And.

So exactly what we have is we have, you know, a Genesis 1 account that says God created, you know, the various creatures according to their kind. And apparently there is some sort of ideal or universal which they share in common that resides in the mind of God.

And he, as the absolute one in the many, has the power and the prerogative to produce a one in many that is subject to him in every way. And if we want to navigate that, we need to carry on in submission to him.

And he speaks to us in a variety of ways. First off, we should note that on this view, all of reality reveals God absolutely immediately. Just as soon as anything appears itself, it immediately testifies to God because it is a unity of one in many, right then and there.

And the only reason we don't intuitively give credit to the God who resides above created universals and created particulars is because we have been living our lives suppressing the truth of God in unrighteousness.

And this is a supremely, you know, subversive claim, which shouldn't surprise us because all of the answers to the one many problem have really subversive claims as we're going to see in a moment. But what we're saying as Christians is that it's not just that we could look at creation and reason our way to God.

It's that we are always in the very atmosphere of divine revelation. In him, we live and move and have our being. And as we see this sort of equilibrium in our experience, that there's sufficient unity and sufficient diversity to get about in the world and to make sense of things that all, it's always immediately bearing witness to the God who resides above them both.

And then we also have, you know, verbal revelation. We had it from the very beginning. You know, Adam and Eve had that verbal revelation guiding them for how they should live and how they could arrive at places of deeper and more meaningful, you know, unity and diversity as well.

Take Adam and Eve. He begins as an individual. His bride is created from his side and they are to be one flesh together as they carry on in submission and obedience to God, a more profound sort of existence than the relatively unitary existence that Adam had prior to his wife.

And it would get more profound when they had children and there would be unity and diversity in society.

The Trinity, Revelation, and Knowing God in History

So right there. Okay. So when you mentioned Adam and Eve, I'm sure a lot I've been asked this question a lot is that if the triune God is needed to justify knowledge. So like we assume folks who are listening have background on the transcendental argument and how we argue that the Christian God who supplies these foundations for unity and diversity.

How could knowledge ever be justified without knowledge of the Trinity? So like, yeah, God reveal himself as a Trinity in the garden. What about people, you know, pagan nations when they were doing philosophy?

Were they never in a position to justify knowledge because they didn't have a concept of the Trinity? How would you address that question? I'm sure a lot of people have asked it.

Yeah, that question is, is universally birthed from the idea that we're treating the Trinity as some sort of deductive premise, without which you can't, you know, arrive at certain conclusions. That's just a fundamentally problematic way to think about knowledge or knowing something or knowing someone at all.

The way I tend to describe it is yes, we need the Trinity to justify knowledge. We don't need to necessarily acknowledge the Trinity as a Trinity to justify knowledge at every point in redemptive history.

Part of the whole matter of the one in the many problem is, you know, the fact is somehow every one of us as individuals and as a human race, we develop through time. Our understanding of the same thing can develop and it doesn't mean that we didn't know it at the beginning because it develops into something much more profound at the end.

And so what we the Trinity is that Adam and Eve knew the Trinity, knew the triune God, even though at that point, the development of their language and conception and understanding was not in a place to articulate their tacit knowledge of the Trinity as exactly that him being triune.

And I just compare it to a children's knowledge of their parents. You know, do my kids know me? I mean, what kind of fool would say they didn't? Of course they know me. But in the course of time, the way that they know me, my girls at 13 now is something very different than how they knew me when they were infants.

The fact of the matter is, is that they didn't have words for hands. They didn't have words for a voice, whatever sort of knowledge they had of those sorts of things. It wasn't the sort of thing that they could articulate it, maybe even differentiate it.

But did they know that their dad had hands and had a voice? Did they know their dad's hands? And did they know their dad's voice? They surely did in some infantile sense appropriate to their age. And we'd say something similar about Adam and Eve.

But I think I do fear if I go on like this, we will never get to the pre-Socratics. That's a great question. But at the end of the day, what I want to mention is the subversive story that we're going to tell as Christians is that the only reason why people do not immediately acknowledge this God, who is the supreme source of unity and diversity in all of our experience, is because we're sinners.

And we chose in the fall to quit reasoning and thinking about ourselves in the world in terms of divine guidance. What we chose to do when we ate the fruit and we elected to be, as it were, our own gods in pursuit of our own deity, is we began to treat ourselves as the ultimate standard.

And this is a fundamentally corrupt, fundamentally confused and wrongheaded way to go at life and reality. You could say it's like we chose to be drunk. We drank some alcohol. And this is, you know, 2 Timothy 2 .25 says, you know, repentant, you know, pray that God may grant them repentance.

They may come back to their senses. It really, it really says become sober. We elected to do something insane. We know ourselves not to be ultimate. There's nothing more obvious than that. We know ourselves to have not created ourselves.

Nothing could be more obvious than that. Which is as much as to say that we know ourselves to be utterly dependent, not just on some other, but on some other wiser and greater than ourselves. We know this immediately.

Every thought we think already presupposes that. And the only reason we don't admit that is because we're angry at the Lord. And that's a very subversive thing to tell the world. That's the condition that we're in.

But you'd say that the proof of it is that we can never justify our knowledge when we try to navigate the world, much less actually obtain the sort of harmony that we're all after. And then we all have some idea of, even though it's never manifested itself.

We're all trying to get somewhere better. You know, where did we get the idea of a better harmony of the one in many than the one we currently exist in?

I like what you said. You affirmed the biblical truth that all men know God and we are angry with him, right? We're suppressing our sin. But you didn't stop there, because I would know that unbelievers who are listening, they'd be like, well, Brant, that's a nice claim.

But then you qualified it with, but we know this because, right, when you operate on the assumption of not the triune God, you lack those, the ability to justify, you know, A, B and C. So it's not just an authority claim.

It's an authority claim that you believe can actually be justified and demonstrated as we kind of interact with the unbeliever and kind of internally critique and draw out that knowledge of God that we were saying is present in all men.

Right. And, you know, it's just funny when you really think about it. Why isn't it immediately obvious that it's just as subversive a claim to go about telling people that, you know, if you're ever going to find truth, you're going to have to do it on your own using your own rational faculties as totally unguided by any divine authority or source of guidance.

Like, why is that obvious? Why is that the neutral or natural position? I maintain it's not neutral or natural. It's filled with so many assumptions. And it's just as much asserting a story about you and I and what we are and what we should expect to be able to do.

So we both have these presuppositions. I just simply, you know, maintain, you know, what Proverbs 8, 36, that when we reject God from the beginning, we reject wisdom from the beginning. It says that he who sins against me injures himself and all those who hate me love death.

We end up in confusion. And so the last thing I'll just say about the one in the many and the solvency of the Trinity is that, of course, most importantly, is that the only way out of this confusion and this drunken stupor in which we are is that there is a God who is one in three, such that the second person in the Trinity can assume human flesh, you know, satisfy God's justice, giving him the obedience of which we've deprived him, die the death that we deserve, the eternal, infinite wrath of God and do so in a way that only the God man could in a finite lapse of time.

And that the third person of the Trinity would open our hearts and regenerate our very souls so that we can begin to walk on the right course again and enjoy communion and fellowship with God. And so obviously the Trinity comes in at the front end and the back end.

But let's let's jump into the pre-Socratics. So generally, yeah, let's.