Apologetics For Everybody

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Welcome to Trueology, where we study Christian theology, philosophy, and apologetics.

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We do critiques on scholars, politics. We look into events in both classical and modern -day issues.

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We do interviews, debates, and much more. Our goal is providing a Christian resource to edify the saints and to engage the community.

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But most of all, we want to glorify the Lord through our hearts, minds, souls, and strength.

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So, stay with us as we open up the Word of God and look into everything pertaining to life and godliness.

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My name is Belushi Prevalon, coming to you from the Boston area. And right now, you are listening to Trueology, the study of the truth, as it is in Jesus.

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Welcome to Trueology. My name is Belushi Prevalon, and this is our first live stream for the program.

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And I am excited and grateful that I could do this podcast to hopefully help and encourage other believers.

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So, thanks for joining. And it may be a time of learning for you. My social media links to YouTube are

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Trueology, where you can find the rest of my content. You can also follow me on places like Instagram at studyofthetruth.

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On Spotify, you can find me also at Trueology. And the neat thing about Spotify is that you can vote for the next episode.

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Now, of course, I have a long list of things in the queue ready to go. But on Spotify, I like to allow the audience to participate in voting for what we will be discussing next on Trueology.

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So, if you'd like, you could go on Spotify, follow Trueology, and you'll be able to vote for what's coming up next on Apple Podcasts.

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You can also find me at Trueology. And if you'd like to see any updates and things

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I'm doing, you can follow me at X at Bprevalon. At any time during the live stream here, if you have any questions, feel free to do so by leaving them in the comments.

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And we will try to get to them if we have time at the end. On tonight's episode, by the way, if anyone is live at the moment, let me know how everything sounds in terms of audio so that I can adjust accordingly, okay?

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On tonight's episode, I've invited on Eli Aiella to be with me. I see him in the queue there.

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I've invited him on because of his expertise in apologetics, theology, and the

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Christian worldview. I'll have him formally introduce himself in just a moment.

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But just so you are aware, on tonight's show, we are specifically going to cover presuppositional apologetics, which is essentially a defense of the

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Christian worldview against all other worldviews. And in one of my earlier podcast episodes titled

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Apologetic Method, I introduced what I believe to be the more biblical approach to doing apologetics.

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And in that episode, I felt as though I didn't quite do it justice. So what

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I've done is I've invited on the professional on board to be able to help us to grasp this useful and invaluable method of defending the faith.

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And now I know some people might believe that apologetics is something that only theologians or those that are really gifted and talented with the intellect do.

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But in this episode, I hope that you'll be able to learn that apologetics is simply just biblical.

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And therefore, it is something that God himself has enabled us to do so long as we believe and understand his word.

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Apologetics is not just for those who simply have the gift of gab and are able to engage and be articulate.

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It's not for those who are only called to ministry. It's literally for every single believer who is simply willing to bring the

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Lordship of Jesus Christ to bear upon his method of defending his outlook on life.

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I personally believe that presuppositional apologetics, even presuppositionalism in general, is an application of the

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Christian life. Therefore, it's really something that the common person, once understood, can do.

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Too often, we tend to believe that the Christian life is segmented between a stark contrast of sacred and secular realities.

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Or sometimes we seem to compartmentalize our church life from our regular life without realizing that the scriptures teach the all -pervasive truth of the

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Lordship of Jesus Christ is overall. And I really do mean overall, including our thinking and our methods.

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Meaning that when we paint how we do business, work, our hobbies, or even evangelism, it's to be done in light of the

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Christian worldview explicitly taught and revealed by the scriptures and ultimately informed and governed by Christ's Lordship.

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I know that was probably a mouthful for you, but I want to encourage you to sit back, listen, maybe even take some notes as we drive smoothly along here talking about apologetics for everybody.

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And I really do mean everybody, everyone from the soccer mom to the middle schooler to even some of the PhDs among us can understand the biblical approach to doing apologetics that we are going to discuss on this episode.

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This is going to be simply just a biblical approach and method that I believe every kind of believer can comprehend and apply even tonight if you're really interested.

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So with that being said, I think I am going to go ahead and have

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Brother Eli introduce himself. So Brother Eli, I'm just going to add you onto the screen here.

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There he is. All right. You can hear me, right? I can hear you. I can hear you fine.

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How do I look? I didn't have time to adjust. You look good. You look good. You look good. Okay. All right.

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It looks like I'm watching one of your

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YouTube videos right now, except now I'm in it. It's very meta. Yeah. Yeah. Brother Eli, if you could just generally briefly introduce yourself, who you are, what you do for those who don't know you, your

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YouTube ministry, and just some of the online courses that I know you have on your website.

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Sure. Yeah. My name is Eli Ayala. I am a Christian apologist by night, by day.

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I am a school teacher. I teach middle school. I teach 7th grade

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Old Testament. We go through Genesis. I'm sorry. Yeah, Genesis. I taught New Testament last year, so I got confused there.

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I'll say Genesis to Revelation. Genesis all the way to the book of Malachi. We go through the major, minor prophets, and the

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Pentateuch, all that jazz for 7th graders. That's super exciting. Then I teach 8th grade logic and debate.

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We go through the laws of logic and different logical fallacies and these sorts of things, and we prepare our students to do a debate at the end of the year.

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So they do it for—at least in my class, it's worth two test grades, so they work really hard to prepare for that.

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But when I'm not teaching, I do apologetics. I'm a traveling speaker, so I travel the country, and I preach,

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I teach, and I do events. If anyone out there wants to have me for a speaking engagement or a conference, those are the sorts of things that I like to do.

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And, of course, I have the YouTube channel Revealed Apologetics where I interview various scholars or I'll teach myself on topics relating to apologetics and theology and really a wide range of different topics.

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I have a website as well. I haven't written a blog in a while because I do everything almost entirely by myself, and so I focus more on the

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YouTube stuff than the writing, although I want to get some more articles up there. But I also teach online apologetic courses.

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So on my website, it's called PresuppU. The website's revealedapologetics .com, but in my website, there's a section called

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PresuppU where people can learn presuppositional apologetics. And right now,

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I have two complete courses, so two courses of five lectures where I do different aspects of apologetics.

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And so folks, if they're interested in that sort of stuff, that's available on the website. But I'm happy to be here, and I often respond quite positively to invites.

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I love being on other people's shows because it takes a lot of pressure off me having to set everything up and reach out to people.

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So I'm happy to be here. All right. Yeah, I'm glad you're here too.

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I actually invited you on because I took your advice. I watch you quite frequently, and I think you mentioned something during your feature with Jason Lyle, and you said you basically just ask these scholars because they're just stuck at home during COVID.

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And I'm like, let me see if I can ask him. And he said yes, and he did. And I really appreciate that.

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I started this podcast back in late December, and I just endeavor to try to help people understand different aspects of apologetics and the

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Christian worldview and theology and things like that. So I just pretty much gotten my wheels started and rolling.

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So I really appreciate you coming along to hopefully help clarify and teach some things in regards to apologetics today.

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So I really appreciate that, brother. So Eli, for those who don't actually aren't familiar with apologetics in general or even more specifically presuppositional apologetics, could you just start by maybe defining apologetics and then presuppositional apologetics for the common person?

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Because as I've corresponded with you before, in my church community specifically, we don't really have an emphasis on apologetics, and most

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Christians that I've bumped into don't really seem to want to talk about apologetics or endeavor to learn more about it.

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So it's kind of like way out there and not really in the central focus of everyday

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Christian life. So for those that are not pretty much familiar on a daily basis, I would say, with apologetics or are acquainted with it through preaching in their church culture, could you define apologetics and presuppositional apologetics in simple terms for the common person?

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Yeah, absolutely. I think what's very insightful is that you asked those kind of the two -pronged questions of can you define apologetics in general and then define presuppositional apologetics more specifically.

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That's correct. So apologetics is kind of the broad category, and presuppositional apologetics is a specific kind of method that we use to defend the faith.

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So let's keep it very simple for your viewers. Apologetics is simply, literally, to make a defense.

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That's it. So when you offer an apology, that shouldn't be understood in kind of the modern context when we say something like,

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I'm sorry, we're not apologizing for being a Christian, right? We are, in the more ancient sense, to give an apology is to make a defense or to give a justification for why you hold to a certain belief.

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For example, in the ancient church, there was a early Christian by the name of Justin Martyr, and Justin Martyr wrote a defense of the faith, and it's literally entitled

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The Apology of Justin Martyr. So literally, to do apologetics is to defend the

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Christian faith. We do apologetics all the time, anytime we defend anything. So an atheist can be an apologist for his own position.

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Someone doesn't believe in God, they can defend that position, and that's called apologetics. Muslims can defend their position, and that's called apologetics.

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So anytime you're defending something, we can say that one is offering an apologia.

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That term itself is actually in the Bible, and the popular verse that typically people go to is 1

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Peter 3, verse 15, which reads that we are to set apart Christ as Lord in our hearts to always give a reason or to give an answer to those who ask us for the reason for the hope that's within us, yet doing so with gentleness and respect.

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So that word there in that verse in 1 Peter 3, verse 15, to give an answer, that word is apologia, literally to make a defense.

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So that's what apologetics is simply. Now, when we talk about presuppositional apologetics, one of the downsides is that it sounds complicated.

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So even people who do apologetics like I do, using this particular method that we're going to be getting into in this interview, we don't like the term because it sounds complicated.

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So the average person, as soon as you say, hey, you want to learn presuppositional apologetics, if they have a

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Pentecostal background, they'll probably think you're speaking in tongues. It sounds really weird. So I'm going to define this method in biblical categories.

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So folks who have a background in the scriptures can kind of resonate. And I think this captures well what presuppositional apologetics is.

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And so here's how I like to define presuppositional apologetics. So we begin to define it within biblical categories.

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Presuppositional apologetics is the attempt to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, even the thoughts of the unbeliever.

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I'm going to say that again. So presuppositional apologetics is the attempt to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, even the thoughts of the unbeliever.

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And notice how I tied in the scriptural reference there, 2 Corinthians 10, verse 5, which we are to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

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What does this look like in apologetics? Well, in defending the faith, it requires that the believer is to reason, to think, to function, and argue and intellectually defend the

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Christian faith in a way that is faithful to the lordship of Christ, faithful to the word of God, faithful to the faith being defended.

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And so this is going to require the defender of the faith to avoid unbiblical ideas when defending the faith.

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So oftentimes we can defend the faith in a way that does not assume the authority and the lordship of Jesus.

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We can adopt really what I call the twin poisons. We can adopt concepts of what we call neutrality and autonomy.

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Now I can dive a little more into those if you want me to, but I'm going to stop right there because there's a lot to unpack there, but that's pretty much what presuppositional apologetics is to me.

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I want to reason like a Christian under the authority of God, and I want to show that when the unbeliever fails to do that, when the unbeliever rejects the authority of God, he actually can't make sense of anything.

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And so to demonstrate that, there you have the conflict, you have the conversation between believer and unbeliever, and that will play out in various ways depending on the direction of the discussion.

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Yeah, that was very well articulated. Thank you for that. I think you should actually get into a little bit of what you mean by unbiblical ideas and defending the faith.

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Could you draw out what you mean specifically by that? Because I know maybe some people who might be watching this right now or will do so later on, maybe they do have a footing in apologetics already, and they're using maybe one of the other apologetic methods.

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What are some of those clarified unbiblical ideas that you were alluding to there?

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Yeah, well, we can defend the faith in very unbiblical ways, right? So, pardon me, if someone were to ask me the reason for the hope that's within me,

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I could take out a gun and say, well, here's the reason, and if you don't accept the reason, I'm going to blow you away, right?

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Am I defending the faith? Yes. Am I defending the faith biblically? No, right? Pulling out a gun on someone and threatening their lives is not in conformity with the latter part of 1

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Peter 3 .15, which is do apologetics with gentleness and respect, right? So there are various ways that we can defend the faith that is inconsistent with the faith that we're defending, okay?

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And so one of the ways is pulling out a gun. Another way is threatening someone with some other kind of violence or defending the faith through deception.

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We can lie to the person so that they could, you know, believe what we're trying to tell them about Jesus or whatever the case may be.

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The categories that I mentioned is, and this is very popular, what a lot of people who are defending the faith do, is they fall into categories of neutrality and autonomy.

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And I think once I define these terms for us, I think it's easy to see why we shouldn't assume these categories, okay, because they're inconsistent with the very faith that we're defending.

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So neutrality basically is a fancy word. It's basically the idea that one can approach a subject without any presuppositions or biases, right?

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This implies, you know, being impartial, right? But of course, not only is this option disallowed for the

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Christian who claims the Lordship of Christ over all things, right? If Christ is Lord over everything, then it's actually pretty inappropriate for the

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Christian to not assume his authority over some specific subject that I might be in dispute with with the unbeliever.

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And so that's going to be inappropriate as a Christian to not assume and presuppose the authority of God over the topic we're discussing and then proceed to defend the faith, not assuming that authority.

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So for the Christian, that's inappropriate. But then, of course, philosophically, this is untenable, given the fact that we all have presuppositions, we all have biases that we bring to every conversation, to every subject.

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And those assumptions that we have really impacts how we interpret the facts about the world.

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This comes across a lot in the creation -evolution debates, right? How is it the case that you have a

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PhD scientist who observes, for example, the fossils, and he sees similar relationships or similar characteristics between fossils in the field?

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They're called homological structures, so they see similarities between the fossils, and they conclude, look, there's an evolutionary relationship here.

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And then along comes a Christian who is a scientist who has a PhD, right? He's credentialed. He looks at these homological structures, these similarities in the fossils, and he concludes, look,

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God created these organisms with similar physical features. Now, how on earth did you have two educated scientists,

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PhDs, look at the same data but draw completely different conclusions? It's because we're not neutral.

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We're not quote -unquote objective. We all have assumptions that we bring to, say, science or philosophy or history, and those impact the conclusions we draw, right?

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And so it's impossible to be completely objective. We all have biases. We all have presuppositions.

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We all have commitments. The Christian is not called to set aside their commitment to the authority of Christ and the truth of his word in order to converse with the unbeliever in a way that is amenable to what they want to talk about or how they want to see things, right?

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I don't buy the idea, for example, that we just need to look at the evidence and, quote, follow the evidence wherever it leads because that concept,

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I think, is nonsensical, right? Evidence doesn't lead us anywhere. We have to interpret evidence.

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And so there is no neutrality. Neutrality assumes that God has not spoken and has not put his stamp on the world such that we can recognize

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God through the things that he's created. And we are not called to be faithless to Christ when defending the faith.

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Rather, we're called to be faithful. And so I think neutrality is something that we often fall into, but we should avoid standing on the authority of God's word when we're sharing and defending the faith with others.

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Now, there is another concept known as autonomy. And basically, it's the belief that human reason and human thought are self -sufficient and independent from divine revelation.

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And so that is the idea that individuals can determine things like truth and morality without reference to God.

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They are a law unto themselves, and I reject that. I don't think that man can define anything in a meaningful way independent of God and his revelation.

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And so we don't want to grant the unbelievers ability to do things without reference to God.

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I want to ask the unbeliever, hey, if you think you could have things like morality, like objective right and wrong,

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I want you to give an account for that without God. How do you account for those things without God?

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So I do not assume that he can make sense out of those things without God. And so when people defend the faith, they sometimes give the impression as though the unbeliever can make sense out of those things.

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We grant the unbeliever these things that I don't think he has a right to. And I think as apologists, we should point that out.

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So two things we want to avoid, neutrality and autonomy. They are unbiblical. They are philosophically problematic as well.

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And so those are some of the things we want to be careful with when defending the faith, if we want to do so faithfully.

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Yeah, thank you. That was exceptionally clear for sure. Neutrality and autonomy.

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You know, sometimes, you know, you know, in a practical sense, you know, you're not you want to, you know, you know, do some outreach.

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You knock on someone's door and, you know, you say, hey, can I tell you about we're going around the neighborhood? I just want to tell you about God or something like that.

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And they say, oh, no, you know, I grew up in church and, you know, I used to believe it. But I got a little older, smart enough to be able to, you know, do the research.

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And I've come to this conclusion that God doesn't exist. He's not real. The Bible is just a man myths.

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And, you know, I feel very satisfied where I'm at and I'm all set. And sometimes, you know, us being at the door, if we're not, you know, well trained in apologetics or being able to discern using a biblical anthropology, we kind of grant that, wow, he really did figure it out.

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He he gave it an honest attempt. You know, I think that's what Brother Eli is trying to communicate there in terms of neutrality and autonomy.

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We're granting the unbeliever what he believes about himself when really we should be seeing the unbeliever through the lens that Scripture already provides.

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Was that a good encapsulation of what you were saying there? Right. So when, for example,

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Romans one tells us that all men have a knowledge of God, but then the unbeliever tells us he doesn't know God. Then we're caught between the option of believing what the unbeliever says about himself versus what

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God says about the unbeliever. So as Christians, basically, the point I'm getting at is I want to believe what God says about the unbeliever as opposed to what the unbeliever says about himself.

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Right. So that's basically I think you hit the nail on the head there. Yeah, correct. Brother Eli, thank you for that.

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I want to now kind of move a little further along here. So in terms of apologetics, you know, you kind of made the statement that, you know, this is biblical.

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This comes one of the key passages in Scripture that we derive the word apologetics and the need for it is

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First Peter 315. But what other, you know, verses or passages of Scripture that would give a foundation for the need to do apologetics the way you've already described?

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Well, I mean, there are references. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So there are scriptures that can give us the expression of apologetics in general.

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And then there are scriptures that kind of lend to the particular method that I that I support, which is the presuppositional method.

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In a more general sense, I think Jude chapter one, verse three is good, where Jude says that I found it necessary to write to you concerning our common salvation.

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It's like I found it necessary to write to you to contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered. And so Jude literally was writing to his audience.

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He wanted to write about a particular topic, something pertaining to their common salvation. But he says, but I found it necessary to write rather to encourage you to contend for the faith once for all delivered.

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And of course, interestingly enough, if you actually think it's interesting to read, let's actually go there real quick. In Jude chapter one, this is

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I think this is fascinating. Jude chapter one, and then we'll read a couple of verses after three here.

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Let's see here. Jude one. OK, so here's what he says. This is verses three through three and four.

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OK, here's what Jude says. He says, beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation,

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I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

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Now, check this out in verse four. This is interesting for certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation.

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Ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only master and Lord Jesus Christ.

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This is interesting because when we talk about defending the faith, we often think of like the atheist, someone who rejects

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God, right? Someone who says they don't believe in God. But Jude here is saying that he found it necessary that we contend for the faith because certain people crept into the church.

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That's interesting. So apologetics has this as this aspect of talking to the God denier and then, of course, defending the faith against those who might affirm

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God, but corrupt right doctrine, these sorts of things. So defending the faith is needed, not just from the church going out there into the world.

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But apologetics, I think, is key in properly defending God's truth within the four walls of the church, so to speak. So do chapter one verse three,

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I think, is a good one. Hey, hang on one second. Hang on one second. Hang on. I think

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I just looked over to the comments while you were talking there. I think this guy, it seems like this comment is kind of relevant to kind of what

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I just asked you in regards to giving a foundation. Would you mind answering this question real quick?

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I think it's relevant to what you kind of just said there. I'm going to pull it up. Okay. It's like, do you believe apologetics are to be used for the church age?

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Would love to hear your defense on this subject. So Vander Sal, I don't think he's the one.

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I'm not sure what he means by church age. It sounds kind of like, I don't know, is he talking in terms of like. Maybe like right now, like in the church age, you know, generally people would assume right now we're living in the church age.

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And this is, so during this period, you know, does Jude chapter three, is it sufficient enough to give, you know, proof to the fact that we need to do apologetics or defend the faith?

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Not only against unbelievers, but also people who creep into the church, teaching false things.

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You think you think you could answer that in light of what he asked? Yeah, absolutely.

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I think it's very relevant. So, yeah, if apologetics is the defense of the faith, then we are called to defend the faith every time falsehood creeps in.

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Right. We have the truth. We have God's word. Jesus says in the Gospel of John, sanctify them in the truth.

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Thy word is true. If we have the truth of God's word, we are called to use that standard to bring correction when error creeps in.

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Oftentimes it can creep in unintentionally. Ignorance can produce false doctrine, in which case we bring someone to the word of God for correction.

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And sometimes you have deceivers, people who intentionally try to deceive and bring falsehoods within the church. And in that case, we want to use the standard of the truth of God's word to defend, you know, defend the gospel because of that.

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Look at look at the writings of Paul and the book of Galatians. I mean, the book of Galatians is a perfect example of the need for, you know, being wary of false gospels that come into the church.

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Let's take a look in Galatians chapter one. He says here in verse six and on. This is the Apostle Paul speaking.

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I call the gospel. I call the book of Galatians the angry letter. Paul is very angry at the beginning of the letter.

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He says, I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you into the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.

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Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.

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Literally, the word anathema literally means to be damned to hell to condemn that person be condemned, as we've said before.

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And he says it again. So now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you receive, let him be accursed.

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Now, let me ask this question. How do I know that someone is bringing a false gospel if I don't know what the true gospel is?

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You see, the ability to identify falsehood requires that we know what is true. So when the error comes, we can identify it.

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And of course, we don't simply identify it. We fight for content, contend for the truth, contend for, as Jude says, the faith once for all delivered.

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What is the faith once for all delivered? It's that body of Christian truth that Jesus taught, what the apostles taught and what has been laid down for us in the word of God.

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We're called even today to defend those truths. And of course, especially today, we have popular preachers and popular pastors and things like this completely independent from, like, the scandals in the churches and things like that.

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Just the bad theology out there requires that we need to step up and proclaim the truth of God's word and bring correction to these areas that really are distorting and corrupting the truth of God.

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And so, yes, I would say that apologetics is not simply needed with a lowercase n needed.

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It is essential, or as Jude says, I think it is necessary that we're able to contend for the truth.

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Thank you. Any other passages of scripture that seem to kind of build that foundation underneath us?

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Absolutely. Proverbs 1 .7, I think, is good. Proverbs 1 .7 says that the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the

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Lord. I think Proverbs 1 .7 teaches that true knowledge starts with a reverential fear of God.

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And I hold that all understanding and wisdom are grounded in acknowledging God. So I hold that without that foundation, any attempt to attain knowledge about anything is flawed.

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And so when I'm arguing about knowledge claims and truth claims between myself and the unbeliever,

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I start from a foundation that is standing upon the word of God. Because if I'm standing on some other foundation,

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I will lack that which is necessary to know truth, right? In order to know truth,

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I need to be standing on the one who is truth. Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Notice that Jesus in the

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Gospel of John says, I have the truth. He says, I am the truth. And, of course, his word is truth as well, as word reflects his nature, these sorts of things.

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And so I think Proverbs 1 .7, that principle that states that the beginning of knowledge, if I want true knowledge, true wisdom,

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I start with a reference, a fear, not I'm scared, but a reverential respect for God and what he has revealed in his word.

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What does that look like? Well, when man says, for example, that we have arrived here through lower life forms, there is appeals to say biological evolution, these sorts of things.

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Am I standing on what man says or am I standing on what God says about the nature of man? Am I evolved from pond scum or am

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I made in the image of God? Right? So I want to start on the wisdom of God. Now, if you adopt the idea that we've evolved from pond scum, that's not starting with the wisdom of God.

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That is not beginning with a fear of the Lord because you're starting from a place that rejects what scripture teaches.

32:23

And so in the reject, and interestingly enough, if you start there, there are other absurdities that throughout the course of the discussion, we can point out to that position will lead to absurdities.

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Whereas starting with God's word and his truth and what he says about us, when we start there, we can have a worldview, a perspective that can make sense out of human experience and all these sorts of things.

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And so I think Proverbs 1, 7 is important. Of course, Romans 1, 18 through 21 is very important as well.

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For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress. Talks about suppression of the truth that knowing

32:58

God, they did not give thanks to God. Romans 1, 18 through 21 teaches that all men have a knowledge of God.

33:05

And people ask me this all the time. What about people who, who never heard of the gospel? Never heard of Jesus. They never heard about God. Well, the

33:11

Bible says that God has revealed to himself to everyone. And so whether, uh, whether you have a

33:16

Bible or not, the Bible says all men have a knowledge of God that is sufficient to make them without excuse.

33:24

And so, uh, that's biblical revelation. We can think about what they have. How could they possibly know?

33:29

Because if the Bible were true, whether they have a Bible or not, if the Bible were true, then

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God has created all men in their image, in his image, and they have a sufficient knowledge of him. Now, in doing apologetics, this is important because when

33:43

I confront the unbeliever, I need to understand, am I giving information to an otherwise ignorant person?

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Or am I, right, unmasking the unbeliever's genuine knowledge of God that he actually has?

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But the Bible says that he's suppressing an unrighteousness. And so Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through 21 can give me a proper context as to how to view the state of the unbeliever and his suppressed knowledge that he has of God.

34:08

I think 1 Corinthians chapter 2 verse 14 is important as well. Not a lot of people use this verse.

34:13

I actually want to read it. 1 Corinthians, let's see here. 1

34:18

Corinthians chapter 2 verse 14.

34:24

A lot of people don't mention this in the context of apologetics, but I think it's, I think it's important. And so here's what the apostle

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Paul says in verse 14. He says, the natural man or the natural person does not accept the things of the spirit of God, for they are folly to him.

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And he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. In other words, the things of God are discerned spiritually.

34:43

But of course, the natural man is not of the spirit, and so he does not discern them. Right. Now, this is important because I think this verse, 1

34:49

Corinthians 2 verse 14, highlights the spiritual inability of the unregenerate person to understand the things of God.

34:54

And so the apologetic application here is that we recognize that a natural unaided intellect cannot grasp spiritual truths without the elimination of the

35:04

Holy Spirit. And again, this places an emphasis upon the need for starting with the truth of God's revelation as the only lens through which one ought to interpret and understand reality.

35:13

Another important aspect of 1 Corinthians 2 verse 14 is that it allows us to put into perspective what we're called to do and what we're not called to do.

35:20

What I'm called to do is to give an answer to anyone who asks. What I'm not called to do is to convert the heart of the unbeliever.

35:27

For if I want to be a theologically and biblically informed defender of the faith, I will want to understand the fact that the conversion of the unbeliever, the fact that they find what

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I say persuasive and convincing, is going to be an act supernaturally of the

35:43

Holy Spirit removing that person's heart of stone and giving them the heart of flesh. Conversion is of the Lord. As my favorite

35:49

Christian philosopher said, our job as defenders of the faith is to shut the mouth of the unbeliever. It's God's job to change their heart.

35:55

And I think that's really important, especially in evaluating what is considered defending the faith successfully.

36:02

Success doesn't necessitate conversion. Success is when we're faithful to God's word and defending and proclaiming

36:09

God's truth and trusting God for the results. I think that's very important. Yeah, I know that's something you said there.

36:16

Just quick question. Maybe you could clarify this. What would what would you say to someone that says that?

36:21

OK, on one hand, you say, OK, Romans, a passage like Romans chapter one says, you know, everyone has a knowledge of God.

36:29

And then on the other hand, you bring in 1 Corinthians 2 and you say they can't understand the things of God.

36:34

What would you how would you respond to someone that thinks that we're in a contradiction or in a schizophrenic kind of endeavor there?

36:42

When we say, yeah, you know, God, but you don't really know, understand God. How would you, from a presuppositional apologetic standpoint, respond to that kind of, you know, objection?

36:55

Well, first, I don't think it's a contradiction. Let's let's define what a contradiction is. A contradiction is a violation of the second law of logic, which states that a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same way or at the same time and in the same sense.

37:09

So I would say in one sense, the unbeliever has a knowledge of God. And in another sense, he does not have a knowledge of God.

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And of course, there are different ways that one can know something or know someone. I'll give you an example with Jesus.

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Jesus on Judgment Day will say that Jesus says this. You will say to me,

37:26

Lord, Lord, did we not, you know, cast out demons in your name, perform miracles in name? And what does Jesus say? He says, get away from me.

37:32

I what? If you remember that passage never knew you. Now, that's an interesting phrase by Jesus.

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I never knew you. Is Jesus God? Of course. Yes, that's right. So Jesus is

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God. He is equal to the father, correct? Absolutely. Does the father have omniscience?

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Does the father know all things? Yes, he does. Certainly. And does he know all persons? Yes. Is Jesus omniscient?

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Yes, he is. Does he know all persons? Mm -hmm. And so how can

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Jesus, the all -knowing judge, say, get away from me? I never knew you. There must be a sense in which he does not know them and a sense in which he does.

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Now, when we say that the unbeliever knows and does not know God, the sense in which he knows God is that he has an inescapable knowledge of God in the fact that he exists within the context of revelation.

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Everything around him is revelatory of God, and even his own existence and conscious life, his own thinking, is revelatory of the

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God he knows, and he suppresses the truth. However, he does not know God in covenant relationship.

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He knows God in rebellion. And in that sense, I would say that, yes, he has a knowledge of God, but his sin causes him to interpret reality in ways that are contradictory to his maker.

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And he does that because he is, A, a rebel, and, B, he is self -deceived.

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So the Bible speaks about self -deception. And interestingly enough, self -deception is actually a very interesting topic within the realms of psychology and philosophy.

39:03

Maybe we'll get into that somewhere down the line in our discussion. But I would answer that question. I don't think it's a contradiction.

39:08

I think there are different senses in which the unbeliever knows and does not know God just as there are different senses in which

39:13

Jesus knows all people. In a sense, in another sense, he doesn't know all people within the context of covenant relationship.

39:22

Very good. I want to continue to move on then. So there are several apologetic methods.

39:31

You clearly just disclosed the presuppositional apologetic method, which is taking the lordship of Jesus Christ and God's revealed word as true in order to be the lens through which we see everything else and understand all other things.

39:48

But what are the other apologetic methods, and what is the exact contrast to them, and why they're not precisely biblical in their approach?

40:00

Sure. Yeah, that's a great question. So I can't be comprehensive because there are a wide variety of ways that people defend the faith.

40:07

I can throw out. Yeah, if you could. You don't have to go completely expanding on it.

40:12

But for the common person in the pew, right now you're at the pulpit, and there's many people in the pew, and they've hardly ever heard of apologetics, and you want to explain to them how to defend the faith.

40:26

Take it like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm going to explain it in the super dumbed -down way, and then

40:34

I'm going to add some terms and explain them. So here's the super simplistic way to explain the other methods as opposed to the method that I've been promoting.

40:45

So the classical kind of traditional way that people have defended the faith is what

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I call a bottom -up approach. They work their way up to the conclusion that God exists, and they do that by appealing to certain evidences and arguments that they use.

41:00

So it's a bottom -up approach. That's the traditional way, right? Hey, let's set aside our assumptions, and let's just follow the evidence where it goes, right?

41:09

So that's kind of what we call the evidential, right? Presuppositional apologetics is a top -down approach.

41:15

We start with God and his revelation, and we argue that if you don't start there, you lose the foundation for everything else.

41:21

That's it. That's the difference. Now, if I want to be more specific, two methodologies that are kind of cousins of each other, but they're different but similar.

41:31

The more popular method is called the classical method. Hence, the term classical means that it's been classically used throughout history.

41:38

And basically, it's really easy to understand. Basically, it uses a two -step approach in defending the faith. Think in terms of boxing, like a one -two punch, right?

41:46

Number one, the first punch is to establish the truth of theism, or to establish the existence of God.

41:53

And they establish this. They try to establish this by using certain arguments. Now, for people who've never heard of apologetics, these arguments sound super fancy, but really, they're kind of basic.

42:03

If I were to give a presentation of these methods, you can kind of get a grasp on these arguments. They're pretty popular in philosophy, and even just in, if I were to say, in terms of an educated layperson, they can kind of follow the arguments pretty easily.

42:16

But I don't want to overcomplicate things. So step one of the classical approach is to prove that God exists through using certain arguments.

42:24

They're typically called the traditional proofs. One of the arguments are called the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument.

42:33

We don't have to get into all of the details of that. But that's one of the ways that this method would try to prove the existence of God.

42:41

The second punch is to narrow down which God this is. So how do I move from the existence of a general theism, a general

42:49

God, to the specific Christian God? And so the classical apologists will then focus their energy on providing historical evidence for the support of the resurrection of Jesus.

42:59

Now, this is interesting because a lot of people think that the resurrection of Jesus is just something you believe on faith.

43:05

There's really no data we can point to, and that's actually false. Historically, there can be a very powerful case that can be made for the resurrection of Jesus, which, of course, is not the topic of this video, but it is a very rich topic, a very heavily written -upon topic.

43:19

So that's how the classical apologists will do it. Punch one, establish God's existence through various arguments.

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Punch two, narrow it down by giving historical arguments for the resurrection of Jesus. If we could establish punch one and punch two, bring it together,

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Christianity is true or highly probable or a reasonable position to hold.

43:39

That's typically what they would say, okay? So that's the classical apologetics. Now, the cousin of classical apologetics is what's called evidential apologetics, evidential.

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And so evidential apologetics focuses on providing direct evidence for the truth claims of Christianity.

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And so this will go straight to historical evidence, archaeological evidence, scientific evidence to support the reliability of the

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Bible or the resurrection of Jesus or other doctrines within the Christian faith. Now, it's similar but different from the method

44:09

I just gave, the classical method. The classical method will give theism arguments and then historical arguments.

44:14

Evidential will just appeal to certain data points, right? Like, hey, what's the best explanation for this data point over here?

44:22

They focus more on empirical observation and examination of evidences, whereas the classical approach will depend heavily on rational argumentation, right?

44:33

So if I was an evidentialist and someone said, well, how do you know Christianity is true? I might say, well, have you considered the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus?

44:40

Let's take the New Testament, for example. When you take the New Testament as kind of a generally reliable source of history, you'll find that using the proper methods of historical analysis, that it's reasonable to conclude that the best explanation that we have for the

44:55

New Testament documents and internal and external evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. And that hypothesis of Jesus rising from the dead better explains the data than naturalistic explanations.

45:08

You know, someone stole his body, the disciples stole the body or the disciples were hallucinating. So an evidentialist will appeal straight to the data, whereas a classical guy will give you kind of a rational argument.

45:20

Well, how do you know God exists? Well, have you considered the Kalam cosmological argument? It has two premises and a conclusion.

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Whatever begins to exist as a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause.

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And they'll try to support those points to get to the conclusion. And then from that conclusion, show you why that entails that a transcendent

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God creator of the universe exists. So that's kind of what those approaches look like, okay?

45:44

Now a presuppositional approach, again, is not working our way up, right? It's working our way down.

45:51

So I would say that the presuppositional apologetic method can be summarized in this way.

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God exists. His word is true. We argue from that position, not to that position.

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Think about it. I argue from that position because God is my authority. I don't put him to the test. I'm putting you to the test.

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You reject my God, make sense out of anything. Make sense out of science, history, all these sorts of things. The other methods I think are unbiblical because they put

46:18

God to the test. Right? Let's assume God doesn't exist. And then we'll work our way up to conclude that he does.

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When he's the standard of truth, not our ability to reason our way up to him by using certain, you know, evidence.

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And by the way, evidence and class, evidential and classical apologetics internally assume those categories

46:36

I told us that we needed to avoid at the beginning. They inherently have these categories of neutrality and autonomy.

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Let's not stand in the authority of the Bible. Let's just treat the New Testament as though it's just any other historical book. And then we, on our own autonomous basis, will work our way up to the conclusion.

46:54

Right? Without recourse to revelation, work our way up to the conclusion that, yeah, I have determined based on the evidence the

47:00

Bible's true. As opposed to allowing the Bible and God to be that ultimate authority upon which we build everything else.

47:07

So that's how I would differentiate the different views in a very simplified way. Yeah. I'm glad you kind of concluded with going back to, you know, neutrality and autonomy because it almost seems like evidentialism and classical apologetics, you know, those who favor those approaches tend to think it's more biblical when in reality it actually begins with I'm not really sure

47:30

God exists yet, but I'm sure we can get there. It kind of places the emphasis first on human rationale and human anthropology rather than the biblical perspective of man.

47:43

I think that's a good way to kind of segue into the next question I'd like to ask you if you could expand on this.

47:49

The reality of self -deception in the believer in general then, you know, what is, you know, ultimately, you know, you did allude to this before when speaking of some of the passages

48:01

I asked you for a foundation on, but like maybe just briefly then if you could kind of add the cherry on top to what you said earlier.

48:08

You know, what is the concept of self -deception specifically and how it ultimately affects, you know, our view of mankind?

48:19

Hmm. Yeah. Well, self -deception is basically the notion that unbelievers deny the truth of God's existence.

48:25

However, in their heart of hearts, right? They do in fact have a knowledge of the very God they verbally reject. And so they're deceived.

48:31

They say one thing with their mouth, but they believe something in their heart of hearts. And they believed the lie. They believe the lie they tell themselves.

48:38

Okay. Now, again, I want to be careful. That's very easy to say, right? If an unbeliever is listening to this, well, you know, that's the kettle calling the pot black, right?

48:49

It's like the Christian is the one that's self -deceived. Well, of course, anyone could make the claim to self -deception.

48:55

However, the difference between the atheist, for example, calling the Christian self -deceived versus the Christian calling the atheist self -deceived is that at least within the

49:02

Christian worldview, it makes sense for me to know that the atheist is self -deceived because I'm resting my view on that based upon the word of God.

49:10

So if Christianity were true, it makes sense. God could reveal to me the fact that the unbeliever is self -deceived.

49:16

However, within an atheistic worldview, how would he know I'm self -deceived, right?

49:21

So he has no revelatory ground for that. He's just giving us his opinion, okay? So I'm not kind of doing the pointing the finger game like, you know, nananana, poopoo, you're self -deceived, and that's it, okay?

49:33

Actually, the idea of self -deception has a very rich history in psychological literature and things like this.

49:40

And I think it can be explained, I think, very nicely within the context of what we can call first -order and second -order beliefs, okay?

49:49

For example, first -order beliefs are our direct beliefs about the world.

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So for example, I believe it is raining outside. That's a first -order belief, okay?

50:01

Now, a second -order belief are the beliefs I have about my beliefs. So I believe that it's raining outside.

50:09

That's a first -order belief. But I believe that I believe it is raining outside.

50:15

That's a second -order belief, okay? So within the context of the self -deception of the unbeliever, they have first -order beliefs that are in conflict with their second -order beliefs.

50:26

They, in essence, have beliefs that are contrary to what they know to be true at a deeper level, okay?

50:33

Their first -order belief may be, for example, that God does not exist or I don't believe in God.

50:38

But then their second -order belief at a deeper level and often at a subconscious level acknowledges the truth of God's existence but is suppressed due to their unrighteousness, right?

50:49

So for example, a first -order belief would be something like I did not take the cookie. So if a kid, you know, is being accused of taking cookies from a cookie jar, right?

50:57

I did not take the cookie. That's the child's conscious assertion, right? But then along comes the second -order belief.

51:02

I know that I took the cookie. Now, notice that the child's first -order belief is an outright denial of the action, right?

51:10

While the second -order belief, which is being suppressed, acknowledges the truth about the fact that he took the cookie. So the child's insistence on the first -order belief despite the second -order belief is an act of self -deception.

51:21

So he has belief over here when he spits out with his mouth, but he has another belief in here that's being suppressed and is in conflict.

51:27

And that's basically what's happening with the unbeliever. He says with his mouth, I don't believe in God, but he doesn't live that way.

51:33

People act upon what they believe not upon what they don't believe. And it's interesting that when the atheist, for example, says human beings are nothing but matter in motion, a result of a blind evolutionary process, and then what does the unbeliever do?

51:45

They go to work, and then they go home, and they kiss their wife, and they act as though their relationships they have have deeper meaning than just biological activity going on in the body.

51:54

And that's just an example of the inconsistency. That is the image and knowledge of God seeping out of their pores while they verbally deny it in their everyday life.

52:04

And that's why God is upset with unbelievers. That's why in Romans 1, it says that the wrath of God is being revealed.

52:11

Notice that it's present tense there. It's not has been revealed. It is being revealed because God is angry with sinners every day because they don't give thanks to him for the things that he so graciously gives us.

52:22

And so there you go. I think that's a helpful way to explain the concept of self -deception.

52:28

It's not simply me pointing out, oh, you're self -deceived. There's actually some rational foundation for this assertion.

52:35

Excellent. Could you continue to kind of build on that with this in mind?

52:41

The idea of common ground. Common ground is, for the presuppositional method, is essentially acknowledging that the person that you're dealing with is made in the image of God and that they have a general knowledge of God that's being revealed from heaven.

53:04

They have the law of God written on their hearts by which they can discern between moralities.

53:10

Though they don't outright worship the Lord God, but in a deeper sense, in their second -order beliefs, they do act upon it.

53:20

Though an atheist, for example, might believe that he is just down the chain of Ponscombe throughout evolution, he goes home, like you said, and kisses his wife, as if this thing called love is a real reality.

53:38

With that in mind, can you kind of just explain and maybe give a practical way of doing an internal and external critique of the unbeliever's worldview to be able to point out the image of God in them?

53:52

I hope that makes sense. Do you know what I'm asking? Right. First, you want to make a distinction between neutral ground and common ground, so the context for those terms.

54:02

For example, I would argue that everyone has a worldview. Everyone has a kind of lens by which we see the world, right?

54:08

I have a worldview. I have Christian presuppositions. I believe the word of God is true, and I start from that foundation. The unbeliever has some other foundation.

54:15

If he's an atheist, maybe it's science. Maybe it's some philosophical outlook or whatever the case may be.

54:22

And so if our worldview impacts how we see and interpret everything, how can we communicate with each other, right?

54:28

Everything he says to me, I'm going to interpret in light of my Christian commitments. And everything I say to the unbeliever, he's going to interpret in light of his non -Christian commitments.

54:36

And so, you know, is it simply the case that when we speak with unbelievers, it's just as though we're just two ships passing in the night?

54:43

There's just no connection. And this is where, you know, the issue of common ground. What is the common ground between us?

54:51

Is there a way that we could actually have a meaningful conversation and discourse with the unbeliever even in light of the fact that we have such differing outlooks?

55:00

Okay. Now, what's important here is that I don't believe there's neutral ground. A lot of people in trying to communicate with the unbeliever, they try to find neutral ground.

55:10

Well, what's some fact that we both agree on that we can make sense out of? Let's start there.

55:16

Well, I don't believe the unbeliever can make sense out of anything without God. So there is no neutral ground. But what is the common ground?

55:23

Well, the common ground is exactly what you said, Belushi. It's this fact that even the unbeliever is made in the image of God.

55:29

And so I could appeal to the image of God within him, knowing that when I appeal to that image of God, we can communicate.

55:37

So one of the ways that I would show that he has a knowledge of God or she has a knowledge of God is

55:43

I take what they verbally express with their mouth and show that they don't live that way. You live as though God exists in some context, but you verbally express your disbelief in God.

55:56

And I point out, you know, when you appeal, for example, to things like objective morality, when you condemn the rapist, when you condemn the murderer and you say, hey, look at all this evil that I see around me.

56:08

When you affirm that there is a thing called evil, I would argue that that is the image of God and the knowledge of God seeping out of your pores, so to speak.

56:18

In other words, well, wait a minute. How do you make sense out of murder and rape being objectively evil in a world that is purposeless and without a creator?

56:29

How do you make sense out of that? Is evil and suffering evil and evil simply because you don't like it?

56:36

Is it evil because a majority of people don't like it? How do you make sense out of something being genuinely evil?

56:42

You see, to say that something is objectively evil assumes an absolute standard of good by which to measure.

56:49

And so when the unbeliever says, I don't believe in God, I don't believe in an objective standard called

56:55

God. And then, of course, they'll condemn things as evil. They'll call the cops when their wallet is taken as though something wrong has been done, you see.

57:03

So in that sense, I would say that those are evidences that they actually know the

57:09

God that we're talking about. It's an evidence that the God that they know has his law written upon their hearts, right?

57:16

So that's one of the ways that we can appeal to this. When I say that you know God, it's not an empty claim.

57:22

It is actually a claim that is evidenced by their contradictory actions. Their actions are contradicting what they verbally express when they verbally express their unbelief.

57:32

And so those are some of the ways that you can do that. There are many other ways as well. You know, we live in a random universe, right?

57:38

Chance universe, yet the unbeliever goes into the science lab and assumes what? He assumes the complete opposite of chaos and chance, right?

57:45

He assumes order. He assumes the uniformity of nature, that nature works in a particular way and follows certain rules.

57:53

And so, you know, the unbeliever is just a bundle of contradictions. Our job as the apologist is to point those contradictions out.

58:00

Why are you so inconsistent here? And I think doing that respectfully and with gentleness, right?

58:06

I think we could have a very fruitful discussion with our unbelieving friends. Yeah, you know, it kind of seems what you just said there kind of reminds me of,

58:16

I believe this might have been a quote from Aristotle or some other philosopher. You know, if someone believes, you know, they're not really here, you know, hit them in the head with a stick.

58:27

You know, in other words, you know, common ground helps us to point out the obvious. You know, you're not just in a world that's not governed by the laws of logic and the uniformity in nature and all these things.

58:40

And, you know, with, you know, abstract, you know, concepts of love and gratitude, right?

58:48

But rather you're made in the image of God and intrinsically you do know, you know, you bear witness to the God that I'm talking about because you are his very creation.

58:56

So in other words, we're pointing to what the unbeliever is not only saying, but being in the fact that it's contradicting what he's grounded on.

59:06

You know what I'm saying? So, yeah, you know, we're kind of pointing out the obvious. We're saying, hey, you're suppressing something and that what you're suppressing is the knowledge of God in you because you cannot live consistently with what you're saying outright.

59:20

Well, no, we'll notice they're suppressing the truth. But think about that. In order to suppress the truth, you must possess the truth.

59:28

You must have the truth in order to suppress it. And again, that's what the Bible. So the Bible says they do have the truth, but their unrighteousness causes them to suppress that truth because they don't want to be held accountable to the

59:39

God who calls them to repent. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. We're already at like 58 minutes.

59:46

I know. I knew this was going to happen, but I'm not in a rush. I'm a teacher. So I'm on summer break.

59:51

So if you have the time, I have the time. I don't mind at all. OK. I actually really appreciate that.

59:57

Yeah, I plan for an hour. But like just talking to you right now is like, wow, you know, usually when

01:00:02

I watch you on YouTube, it seems like, you know, the one hour shows you put on takes forever.

01:00:09

I sometimes watch them at like 1 .5 speed. And I'm just like, wow, this is kind of long. It's already like an hour we've been discussing.

01:00:17

No, but I appreciate the fact that you're not in a rush. But we were trying to, you know, do a little more hustle.

01:00:23

Next thing I want to ask you is, OK, now putting down all that you just said in terms of what presuppositional apologetics is, giving us some aspects of biblical anthropology and our approach to bringing out the obvious, the image of God in the nonbeliever, not really believing what he says, but actually pointing to what he stands on.

01:00:48

With those things in mind, you know, what would you, are you saying that's what it takes to be effective in apologetics?

01:00:55

Or is there more to it than just the head knowledge? What do we need to like kind of put those things together in order to be successful ultimately?

01:01:05

Yeah, well, success, I mean, you're going to need, you need to know the biblical standard of success, right? And I think the biblical standard of success is faithfulness, right?

01:01:13

Have we defended the faith in a way that is faithful to how God has commanded us to defend the faith? And so we want to be faithful to his word.

01:01:20

We want to be consistent with what the Bible teaches, right? And so I think that's how we measure success.

01:01:28

Now, of course, avoiding neutrality, avoiding autonomy, pointing out contradictions within a person's worldview, all of these are biblical concepts, by the way.

01:01:38

And so using those and mastering those, I think are ways to be, quote unquote, effective and faithful, right?

01:01:44

Jesus did this as well. Jesus often pointed out internal inconsistencies with those that he was arguing and debating with.

01:01:51

And Jesus argued and debated a lot, right? But what happened when Jesus's critics said, we know how you cast out demons.

01:01:57

You cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub. And what does Jesus do? He actually shows the contradictory nature of that very claim.

01:02:04

He actually does in logic what's called a reductio ad absurdum. It reduces their position to absurdity. He says, well, wait a minute.

01:02:11

If I cast out demons by the power of demons, then by what power do you cast out demons when you do the same thing

01:02:17

I'm doing? So in other words, in condemning me, you condemn yourself. And that's absurd, right? So yeah, when we master the skills of critical thinking, we are being faithful to God.

01:02:28

When we master the tools of logic, we are thinking God's thoughts after him. It honors

01:02:33

God to be clear thinkers, to be logical thinkers. A key component of truth and logic is consistency.

01:02:40

Of course, consistency is a reflection of God. God is consistent as well, right? I'm not to contradict myself.

01:02:46

God never contradicts himself, right? I'm made in the image of God, and so I'm called to think and reason and argue in ways that reflect that image within me.

01:02:53

So effective apologetics is faithful apologetics, and faithful apologetics includes consistency, logical thinking, being biblically grounded, and being biblically faithful.

01:03:05

So I think all of those make for a quote -unquote successful or effective apologetic.

01:03:11

I would not judge the effectiveness of an apologetic based upon the unbeliever's response.

01:03:18

A lot of people are evidentialists in their outlook. In other words, if I don't see evidence that I've been effective, then therefore

01:03:26

I'm not effective. But that's a non sequitur. That doesn't follow, right? I can be effective if I was faithful to God and I've done my apologetic in line with how

01:03:35

God has taught me to do it in his word. That's effectiveness, even if I never see or hear the results of that discussion.

01:03:44

Maybe I defended the faith, the person walked away shaking his fist at God and was like, I hate God. You don't know what

01:03:50

God is doing in that person's heart, right? I had a friend, he was an atheist friend of mine at work.

01:03:55

We used to talk about God all the time. He invited me to his house one time with a bunch of his atheist friends.

01:04:00

He says, hey man, I found this video on YouTube that completely refutes Christianity. I was like, would you, would you be willing to come and watch it with us?

01:04:09

I'm like, yeah, sure. And that's when that popular YouTube video, the Zeitgeist came out. I don't know if you're familiar with that, where it tries to show that Jesus is.

01:04:16

I'm too young. I'm too young. That's that's all right. Jesus is just a copycat savior.

01:04:22

You know, there are other savior figures in ancient religions and Christianity just kind of cut and pasted and created their own religion.

01:04:29

And so, of course, I responded to those things. You know, we engage, we debated, blah, blah, blah. And years later, I met,

01:04:34

I met the same friend in the parking lot of a hospital. I got out of my car. I was visiting my mom and I got out of my car and he wraps his arms around me.

01:04:43

And I thought I literally thought I was gonna get mugged. I was like, oh, what's happening here? And I hear his voice. He says, Eli. I'm like, oh, wow.

01:04:49

You know, he's like he said he doesn't say hi. It's been a long time. He says, thank you. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, remember those conversations we had all those years back?

01:04:56

I was like, yeah. And he's like, I'm a Christian now. And I'm and I'm going to I'm going to be a

01:05:01

I don't think it was a youth pastor or something. And he invited my family out to listen to his first sermon where he talked about his conversion.

01:05:09

So, yeah, sometimes you see the evidence. Sometimes you don't. But whether I see it or not, that does not dictate whether my apologetic is effective.

01:05:19

Effectiveness comes in being faithful to what God has commanded. The results are up to God.

01:05:24

That's that's the domain of God. I can't change hearts. Only God can do that. Well, you know, based on what you just said, you know, it seems like the presuppositional apologetic method is, you know, dependent upon what the spirit is doing and how he is sovereign to use your witness to affect the person's heart.

01:05:45

You know, and I like how you said, you know, our success is really predicated upon faithfulness.

01:05:51

You know, that almost sounds Christian, doesn't it? We're not we're not we're not dependent upon what we see externally or, you know, whether the person has an aha moment, but rather it's, you know, have we actually been committed to what

01:06:05

God's word has said about the person and how we should engage with them? That's I think that's a great distinction between presuppositionalism and the other methods of apologetics.

01:06:17

So, yeah, that was that was great. I want to move now on to, you know,

01:06:23

I think I don't know if you would agree if this is the linchpin to the presuppositional apologetic argumentation, but what is the ultimate proof for God's existence?

01:06:35

You know, if you were going to use one argument, I already know which one you're going to use, but I want you to explain it to the audience if they're not familiar with this argument.

01:06:45

What how would you what is the ultimate proof for God's existence? I know other apologists like Jason Lyle have written on this, but if you could, you know, give the lay person in the pew right now an explanation of how we know for sure that God exists according to the presuppositional method.

01:07:04

Yeah. So the ultimate proof for God's existence is that without God, you couldn't prove anything. In other words,

01:07:10

God and his revelation are must be true in order for something like proof to make sense in order for something like logic to make sense in order for something like morality to be a thing in order for something for science like science to get off the ground.

01:07:22

Basically, we're arguing that without the Christian God and his revelation, we don't have the proper foundation to do any of those things.

01:07:28

Now, of course, we make the claim, but part of the argument is to demonstrate that claim as well. And so we show that given the

01:07:35

Christian worldview, we can make sense out of things like logic, you know, universal, conceptual, immaterial laws of thought that we use to do science and history and math and so forth.

01:07:46

Without God, you can't make sense of those things. Give an example. An atheist says, oh, I can make sense out of logic.

01:07:52

And then, of course, what does he assert? And depending on the atheist you're speaking with, many atheists assert materialism, the idea that all that exists is matter and motion.

01:08:01

There's no spiritual entities or anything like that. All that exists is matter. But then again, you run into a problem because if all that exists is matter, is logic matter?

01:08:10

Is logic something that's material? Well, no. So on his own view, he wouldn't have something like logic.

01:08:16

Yet here he is using logic to try to argue against the Christian worldview, right? So the ultimate proof for God's existence is that if you don't assume

01:08:25

God, if you don't acknowledge God, then you actually lose the foundation for knowing and arguing and doing science and all the things that we take for granted.

01:08:32

That's the ultimate proof. Now, in the philosophical literature, when we speak of proof, when we speak of argumentation, there are different ways to prove things.

01:08:41

In logic, there are what we call deductive proofs, where we have a premise, a premise, and a conclusion that we draw.

01:08:49

And if the argument is valid, valid in the sense that the conclusion follows from the previous premises and the argument is sound, the premises are true, then the conclusion follows logically and necessarily.

01:09:02

You have deductive proofs, you have inductive proofs, and you have other proofs, and you have what we call the transcendental proof.

01:09:08

And that's basically what I've just illustrated. So in shorthand, we call it TAG. That's what makes it easy to remember.

01:09:15

I argue by using TAG, which is short for the Transcendental Argument for the

01:09:20

Existence of God. Okay? And so basically, it tries to demonstrate the necessity, not the probability, the necessity of God's existence for the intelligibility or meaningfulness of logic, morality, science, philosophy, mathematics, all of these sorts of things.

01:09:37

So it basically argues that things like logic, morality, science, knowledge, presuppose the existence of the Christian God because only

01:09:43

His nature provides the absolute, unchanging foundation required for these concepts to be meaningful and coherent.

01:09:51

And so that's basically the argument, generally speaking. Now, if you want me to get into more of the specifics, I'll allow you to let me know if you want me to get into the logical structure of the argument itself.

01:10:02

But that's up to you because I can go further on this. Yeah. Yeah. I guess you could just a little bit, you know, like I said, you know, keeping in mind like our audience that at least my audience and my context and who

01:10:16

I'm trying to reach with this, you know, the untrained person as best as you could, you could feel free to expand on it just a little bit more.

01:10:25

And some of your other podcasts or streams that I've watched, you know, you put it this way. You said, you know, what must be true in order for the things that we, you know, believe already to be true?

01:10:35

I think I'm phrasing it correctly. You know, in other words, you know, kind of like second order beliefs, you know, you know, what must be true in order for us to be even able to speak logical

01:10:45

English, you know? So, yeah, feel free to expand on exactly how we would use that as an example for the ultimate proof for the existence of God.

01:10:57

Yeah, so let's unpack the logical structure of the argument. So in logic, when we try to talk about these sorts of things, we will give statements, letters.

01:11:06

So like, if it's Tuesday, you know, we will go to the beach. It's Tuesday.

01:11:13

Therefore, we will go to the beach. And so in logic, they will say like, X stands for the statement. You know, the conditional if it's

01:11:19

Tuesday, right? So it's Tuesday is X. We will go to the beach is Y. So that you can just think in terms of X and Y as like letters that represent like a statement.

01:11:29

So basically, the logical structure of the transcendental argument, the thing that I've been arguing here is that X is the necessary condition for Y.

01:11:40

So in order for Y, whatever statement it is, whatever in order for that statement to be true, this other statement

01:11:45

X must be true. So X is the necessary condition for Y. Y is the case.

01:11:52

Therefore, what? X, right? Yeah. So basically, the argument is saying that in order for the possibility of something over here, there's this other thing over there that must be first in place, right?

01:12:05

Right. So to give an example, we can say oxygen. Oxygen could be X. Oxygen is the necessary condition for fire.

01:12:13

Let's say fire is Y, right? So oxygen is X. Fire is Y. So oxygen is the necessary condition for fire.

01:12:19

Fire exists. Therefore, oxygen exists, right? And this is the case because fire can't occur without oxygen.

01:12:25

So the presence of fire implies the presence of oxygen. So we're basically saying that oxygen is the necessary precondition for fire, right?

01:12:36

So now you apply this to God, right? Let's say God is X, right? So God is the necessary condition for logical, moral, and scientific principles,

01:12:45

Y. So God is X. Logical, moral, and scientific principles is Y. So God is the necessary condition for logical, moral, and scientific principles.

01:12:53

Logic, moral, and scientific principles exist. Therefore, God exists. So this means that because these principles cannot exist without God, their existence implies the existence of God.

01:13:05

So in other words, in order for knowledge to be the case, in order for you to know anything,

01:13:11

I'm arguing God must exist and reveal himself. We do have knowledge, and so it follows that God must exist.

01:13:18

Now, how do we work that out? That takes more detail, of course, but that's kind of the basic outline of the argument.

01:13:23

Why is it called the ultimate proof? Because unlike other arguments for the existence of God, which try to argue that God very probably exists or that God is the most reasonable conclusion, the argument that I'm using is that it's trying to argue that God must exist.

01:13:40

He must exist in order for anything to make sense. And this is powerful because if the argument is a good argument and it proves what it seeks to prove, then that would entail that any argument against God must presuppose

01:13:57

God. So even arguing against God proves that there's a

01:14:03

God because God must exist in order for arguments themselves to make sense.

01:14:09

So that's kind of what the argument is trying to set forth. Now, what that looks like in actual discussion, obviously, that would take more detail, but that's the general, the broad outline.

01:14:18

Yeah, it seems like it is an inescapable reality. You know, the man, one of my favorite illustrations of this is the person that tries to argue the existence of air has to be breathing air while he's arguing against the existence of air.

01:14:37

You know, there's not many arguments or facts that impact every aspect of reality.

01:14:45

You know, I think Greg Bonson put it this way, you know, you know, the world record for the biggest cereal bowl doesn't really impact too much other than like sales and cereal.

01:14:56

But when you have a claim like, you know, except the Christian worldview be true, you can't prove anything that really affects everything from gardening to ballet to nuclear physics, whatever you want to put there, you know.

01:15:09

So I think that's why, you know, tag or the transcendental argument for God's existence really is very impactful and credible and very effective in evangelism.

01:15:22

Think of it this way. Knowledge presupposes logic, right?

01:15:28

In order to have no things, logic needs to be the case, right? And logic and knowledge presuppose truth.

01:15:34

So the question just becomes in a very simple way. How do you get? How do you have truth without God? As a if you reject

01:15:40

God, the revelation doesn't exist. There's no one who knows all things and reveals. How do you know anything to be true with your own limitation?

01:15:48

Well, I see it right in front of me, blue sheet, right? I can see it. Well, how do you trust your senses? Why should we trust our senses?

01:15:54

Oh, that's a silly question. Everyone believes that the senses are reliable. Everyone. That's a false statement.

01:16:00

There are people who don't. But how would you prove that your senses are reliable? And of course, they're going to try to prove their senses are reliable by what?

01:16:07

Using their senses, which is not allowed. You can't assume the very thing you're trying to prove in that sense, unless you're dealing with something, you know, ultimate.

01:16:15

Right. So, yeah, basically, what I'm saying in a non -complicated way is how do you how do you have truth without God?

01:16:21

Now you turn the question. How do you have truth in your Christian worldview? Oh, well, God, who knows all things, reveals himself.

01:16:26

Yeah. Well, I don't believe that. Well, I know you don't believe it. But when you reject it, then you lose the foundation for truth. You might not believe what

01:16:33

I'm saying as a Christian, but at least it makes sense to say that if the Christianity is true, there's a God who reveals and I could know the nature of the world he's revealed.

01:16:41

And that's the blessing and beauty of being a Christian. It creates a foundation for science. It creates it creates a foundation for mathematics and history.

01:16:47

And we could have a wonderful, beautiful worldview that we could make sense of this wonderful world that God has created for us. And it's that foundation that gave birth to science that gave birth to all of these wonderful things that we use today.

01:17:00

Yeah, that's really good. I think something you said there in terms of the nonbeliever attesting to his sensory experience in order to be able to prove his sensory experience kind of brings us to what

01:17:15

I wanted to ask you. And near the end of this right now is, you know, some presuppositional objections.

01:17:21

One of the most common ones and using the presuppositional apologetic method is we'll get accused of circular reasoning.

01:17:30

I believe a broadcast you had not so long ago with Jason Lyle. I think

01:17:35

I asked you this and you answered it live. You know, if you could, brother Eli, when considering objections, responding to objections, presuppositional apologetics, how would you deal with the objection of circular reasoning?

01:17:49

Oh, you're assuming the Bible to prove the Bible. That's, you know, you're going around in a circle.

01:17:55

You can't do that. That's a logical fallacy, you know, and beyond that, you know, other objections like, you know, you know, presuppositional apologetics is basically doesn't utilize evidence at all.

01:18:09

You know, you don't you don't need evidence. You just basically say God exists and that's it. And you move on or things things along that line.

01:18:16

You know, how would you respond to accusations such as that? Well, first, you have two questions there.

01:18:21

So let's deal with the one regarding circular reasoning. Not all circular reasoning is fallacious. And then we got to make a distinction between circular reasoning and circular argument.

01:18:31

Some people conflate that. Now, it is true that when we deal with someone's ultimate foundations by necessity, their circularity.

01:18:37

So if I were to ask you, why do you believe a why do you believe this over here? And of course, the person be like, well,

01:18:43

I believe that because of this over here. I say, well, why do you believe this over here? Well, I believe that because of this thing over here.

01:18:49

And you keep going. If you don't have a stopping point, then you go forever. And you can never give me a reason why you believe the first point we had.

01:18:57

Right. So you have to have a star, a stopping point. And that stopping point is your ultimate foundation.

01:19:02

You do not justify or prove that stopping point by going to something more foundational.

01:19:08

Right. So, you know, if your foundation is your reason, right, we come to know things through using our reason.

01:19:14

I'm like, well, how do you know your reasoning is reliable? How are they going to prove the reliability of their reasoning without assuming the reliability of their reasoning?

01:19:22

So at a fundamental level, we all have a level of circularity. Circularity can be fallacious and often is.

01:19:30

But it's not always, especially when we're dealing with our ultimate foundations. Okay. Now, to draw the distinction between circular reasoning and circular argument, presuppositionalists are often accused of engaging in circular argumentation.

01:19:42

And that's just false. A circular argument is an argument in which the conclusion is stated in one of the previous steps or premises.

01:19:52

So if I were to say, I don't know, the Bible is, if my conclusion was the

01:19:59

Bible is the word of God, but one of my steps in the argument is the Bible is the word of God, I have the conclusion and the premise like stated, right?

01:20:07

I can't do that. So no presuppositional form of argument has the conclusion stated in the premise.

01:20:14

None. There is no such thing as a legitimate transcendental argument that has the conclusion stated in the premise.

01:20:22

Notice the logical form that I shared with you before. X is the necessary condition for Y.

01:20:28

Y, therefore X. Notice that, that's not circular, that's a logically valid argument.

01:20:35

You might disagree that X is the necessary condition for Y, but in terms of its structure, the structure of the argument, there's nothing wrong with that structure.

01:20:44

Now, do I presuppose that God is, that God exists when

01:20:49

I give that argument? I sure do. I presuppose that God exists. But the presupposition of an argument is different than the premise or the step in the argument.

01:21:02

And so I presuppose God at the beginning, but I don't put God in the premise and in the conclusion of my argument.

01:21:08

That would be fallacious. So to answer your question simply, at the fundamental level, we all must have some kind of circle, whether it's reason, empirical data.

01:21:17

So, you know, I believe that we come to knowledge of the world through our sense experience, right? If I see it, if I can touch it, and then if I ask, well, demonstrate to me that we should trust our senses.

01:21:26

Well, of course, in order to do that, you're going to have to what? You're going to have to assume the reliability of your senses. But again, you can't do that because you're assuming the thing that you're, that we're trying to prove.

01:21:36

And you're saying that I can't do that with God. You see? So at a foundational level, we all have, quote unquote, circularity.

01:21:42

And it's not always fallacious. It often is. But when we're dealing with that ultimate level, it's not.

01:21:48

Now, to your other question about evidences. Yeah, presuppositionalists use evidence all the time.

01:21:53

We do not, however, endlessly talk about evidences because the issue and the dispute between the believer and unbeliever is not simply a dispute and disagreement over evidence and facts.

01:22:05

We need to, we need to, it's nothing wrong with giving, giving evidences, but there's going to come a point in the discussion where we now have to look beyond the evidence and look at the assumptions that impact how we interpret the evidence.

01:22:18

Why is it the case that when we give a list of evidences for Christianity, the unbeliever can throw those evidences over their shoulder and say, yep, not convincing, not convincing, not convincing.

01:22:28

It's not because your evidence was bad. It was because the unbeliever has different presuppositions and assumptions that he brings to the discussion.

01:22:37

You know, the popular way to describe this is everyone is wearing a worldview pair of glasses. So everything

01:22:42

I see gets filtered through my lens. If I have an atheistic way of looking at the world, every evidence you give for me,

01:22:49

I'm just going to interpret it like an atheist, right? If you tell me, well, man, you know, I had some disease and the people at church prayed for me and the disease is gone.

01:22:57

Look, God healed me. And then of course, what is your atheist friend going to do? He's going to take that and filter it through his lens of unbelief.

01:23:03

He's going to be like, well, you know, I'm glad you're cured from this disease, but that doesn't mean God did it. You know, there could be any number of naturalistic explanations, so on and so forth.

01:23:12

He might be right. What was that? I would say he would say perhaps the doctors didn't see something in the x -rays.

01:23:19

They must have missed something. There's an explanation for that. Right. And maybe there is maybe there is a naturalistic explanation.

01:23:26

The point of what I'm saying is that anything that will give him, he's going to interpret it through his lens, right?

01:23:32

Right. So when someone asks me for evidence, so for example, you know, someone says, hey, how do you know Jesus rose from the dead?

01:23:38

I'm not going to get into all this presuppositional stuff. I'll give them the historical evidence. But then when they start saying, well, no,

01:23:43

I don't think that's not possible, then I realize, well, wait a minute. He's not accepting what

01:23:49

I say for multiple reasons. Maybe I'm arguing. I'm not really arguing. Well, maybe I'm not really accurate, or maybe my information is great, but there are assumptions that he's holding that are that are stopping him from seeing the evidence in the proper light.

01:24:02

And at that point, I'm going to have to move beyond discussion of the evidence to his worldview, right?

01:24:07

Your worldview is so important, Belushi. It determines for the person what one deems possible or impossible.

01:24:16

When you say something is impossible, that's a reflection of your worldview. That's a reflection of how you see the world.

01:24:22

And the Christian and non -Christian are going to disagree over what's possible and impossible. When the unbeliever says, well, miracles are impossible.

01:24:30

That's a worldview. That's a worldview perspective. Your worldview is making you say that, so to speak, right?

01:24:36

So yeah, I believe in evidences. I think I'm more evidential than the evidentialist because I think that everything is evidence for God, literally everything.

01:24:45

So we can appeal for evidences, but as Vantill has taught us, Cornelius Vantill is the, considered the father of presuppositional apologetics.

01:24:53

He says we can talk about the evidence, but we shouldn't speak endlessly about the evidence without talking about, or he says, we can talk about the facts, but we shouldn't speak endlessly about the facts without pointing to one's philosophy of facts.

01:25:06

What makes them consider something a fact, right? We need to get to those deeper issues. So, so yeah,

01:25:12

I'm not against evidence. I think evidence is in our favor, but we need to be able to speak about the evidence as well as issues of worldview and the assumptions that people bring to these discussions.

01:25:23

Yeah, for certain, absolutely agree with that. How would you, you know, apply presuppositional method to like other religious views?

01:25:34

You know, okay, we have the Bible. We presuppose the existence of the triune God. We presuppose the lordship of Jesus Christ overall.

01:25:43

We have our lenses on, which is provided by scripture. Well, what about Muslims that have their worldview glasses that is predicated upon the

01:25:52

Quran and what it teaches about their transcendent God and their revelation or other, you know, quasi -Christian groups like cults,

01:26:03

Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses. They have the Bible too. You know, how would we apply, you know, engaging with them in light of what you just said?

01:26:15

Well, first, I think, and that's an excellent question, by the way. First, I think it's important that we learn a little bit about those religions, right?

01:26:21

We want to make sure we kind of have some kind of grasp on the religions. What we're going to do in applying a presuppositional approach is we want to critique.

01:26:29

We want to critique the unbeliever's perspective, right? And Islam would be a great example because Islam accepts certain aspects of Christian scripture, right?

01:26:40

The Muslims call Christians and Jews the people of the book. They believe we have a revelation.

01:26:45

The problem is the portions of scripture that Muslims and Christians agree on include portions of how we are to test new revelation.

01:26:56

Of course, new revelation from the Christian perspective, if you're asking a Christian to accept the Quran, Muhammad doesn't come around until around 600 years after the time of Christ.

01:27:06

600, 700, something like that, after Christ. So when we take a look, for example, if someone wants me to accept the

01:27:13

Quran, we need to take a look at that, right? Islam instructs people to judge new revelation.

01:27:19

The Quran teaches that we are to judge new revelation based upon what came before, specifically referring to the

01:27:24

Torah and the Gospel. But again, when discrepancies arise between the

01:27:29

Quran and these earlier scriptures, what do we hear? Muslims will claim what? The Bible is what?

01:27:35

Corrupt, right? So the problem here is that the Quran in Surah 548 commands people to test new revelation by what came before, but then when

01:27:45

Christians point out conflicts between the Quran and the Bible, what does the Muslim do? He asserts the corruption of the

01:27:50

Bible. Now notice the problem here. If the Bible is corrupted, the command to test new revelation by it becomes meaningless.

01:27:58

Isn't that true? Yes, correct. So it implies that one must judge the Quran by a corrupted standard, which really is illogical.

01:28:05

And so Muslims accept the Bible is true when it agrees with the Quran, but they reject the

01:28:10

Bible as corrupted when it disagrees. So that's kind of very convenient for them, right? This selective acceptance is inconsistent and undermines the reliability of the command in the

01:28:20

Quran to test new revelation by previous scripture. So you see what I just did there? I just did in thumbnail sketch an internal critique of Islam.

01:28:28

I did not adopt the foundation of Islam. I did not act neutrally like, well, let's just look at the bare facts.

01:28:36

Nor have I assumed autonomy that we could answer the question about Islam independent of divine revelation.

01:28:42

What did I do? I hypothetically granted that Islam were true and showed that if it were true, it actually implodes upon itself.

01:28:49

And one of the ways in which it implodes upon itself is that the portions of our scripture that it accepts actually refutes their own position.

01:28:57

And the Quran itself commands us to do something to test it that's literally impossible to do if the

01:29:03

Bible is corrupted, as they tell us. And so those are one of the ways we can apply what we call an internal critique of competing religious perspectives.

01:29:11

And of course, the Muslim is free to do that to the Christian as well. The Christian, the Muslim could hypothetically grant the truth of the

01:29:17

Christian worldview and try to show that there are contradictions within the Christian worldview. And of course, that's where the task of apologetics comes in.

01:29:23

We welcome that. And one of the ways to survive the internal critique done on us is to simply know the

01:29:31

Christian faith. You need to know your Bible. You need to know solid biblical doctrine, right?

01:29:39

And this, I don't know if this is one of your questions, but later on, but how can we equip ourselves to be apologists, effective apologists?

01:29:47

We need to know the faith that we're defending. And so that means you need to know what the doctrine of the

01:29:52

Trinity is. You need to know the hypostatic union. Oh, he's using fancy words and flexing his muscle.

01:29:58

No, these are basic, like elementary principles that every

01:30:03

Christian ought to know. And if these words like hypostatic union or justification, propitiation, all these sorts of, if these are terms you've never heard of, that's not because apologetics is too fancy and too scholarly.

01:30:16

It's because the church has failed to educate the average Christian on these essential. These are non -negotiable facets of the

01:30:23

Christian faith. We must know what the Trinity is. We must know that the hypostatic union relates to the idea that Jesus is one person with two natures, both human and divine.

01:30:31

And we need to know how to explain to people and defend from scripture why those things are true concerning Jesus or concerning how we are saved and the content of the gospel and things like this.

01:30:42

These are vital and they are elementary. They are things that everyone ought to know and all churches should be teaching on.

01:30:50

They are not things relegated to people who pay lots of money to get seminary educated. I'm not against seminary.

01:30:56

I have two masters from a seminary in theology, but you don't need seminary to learn those basic principles.

01:31:03

They should be being taught from the pulpit and in Bible studies and things like that. So I think that's very, very important.

01:31:10

Yeah, I think you hit it on the nail there when you said the way that we survive an internal critique or objections now coming towards us and our perspective of life and worldview is we need to know what we believe in the first place.

01:31:29

Things like the hypostatic union and justification by faith. These aren't just big, ambiguous terms, but they're very basic teachings of scripture.

01:31:38

They're doctrine. And if we do not know what the scriptures explicitly teach about Jesus Christ, nature of man,

01:31:45

God himself, then how can we survive and stand when the wind starts blowing, when the rocks start being hurled at us?

01:31:54

Truth is we can't stand because we'll be timid, we'll be nervous, we'll fold or give a heretical response or an unfaithful response and therefore perhaps it'll be a testimony to whether the

01:32:09

Christian worldview is actually valid. And ultimately, I think it's if failed worship because the success of the presuppositional method is measured by faithfulness.

01:32:21

And faithfulness implies that you know what you're being faithful to. So, thank you.

01:32:27

That's right. And everything you're saying makes me think of May 4th 6th. My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.

01:32:34

You're right. You hit it right on the head there. Yeah. All right, Brother Eli, I think

01:32:39

I've had you on for long enough. Do you think you have time for just like maybe two or three questions? As long as you want.

01:32:46

I have all the time in the world. No worries. Okay. Excellent. Let me see. Thank you for all of that.

01:32:51

I think that was very good. Your explanations were very clear and lucid.

01:32:57

I think those who will view this later and those who have been popping in and out, I'm sure if they've watched long enough, they've grabbed something to take along with them.

01:33:07

Let me see. I wrote some questions in case I didn't have too much in the comments here ahead of time.

01:33:12

I'm going to just make just a few here. Let me see. What's...

01:33:18

By the way, this is the first time I'm using StreamYard. It's awesome. I had to watch a bunch of YouTube videos on how to use this.

01:33:23

I feel like a pro at it already. We're doing a StreamYard commercial.

01:33:30

I love StreamYard, and you should try it too. Yeah. Okay. I found one of the questions

01:33:36

I wrote here. I'm going to bring it up. It's, which area of theology should

01:33:42

I grasp first before doing apologetics? In other words, what is the most important piece of theology that will ground me enough to be able to do apologetics?

01:33:53

I might not be well -versed in all the apologetic terms and stuff, but what piece of theology that will really settle me so that even when

01:34:07

I don't know the answer to some question outside will help me stay firm?

01:34:13

Yeah. Okay. First, I want to go more fundamental than theology and the soil out of which theology grows.

01:34:23

The soil out of which So you will be... I'm sorry. Hang on. Can you say that again? I think in my headphones you kind of cut off a little bit.

01:34:29

So the soil, the soil out of which theology grows are the scriptures.

01:34:35

Oh, okay. And so, I know this sounds like the super generic Christian answer, but if you master the scriptures,

01:34:42

I mean the scriptures described as the sword, right? It's the sword of the spirit, right? It's the word of God. If you master the scriptures, even if you are not masters in all these other topics, you will still be sufficient to cut the enemy, so to speak.

01:34:56

Right? Even not being an expert in sword play, when you swing the blade around, you're going to cut something, right?

01:35:03

So being familiar with the scriptures I think is foundational. Think about it.

01:35:08

Not everyone you're going to run into is an atheist and you have to try to get into all these philosophical arguments. Most of the attacks upon the

01:35:14

Christian faith are misunderstandings of the Christian faith. And so if you just know the Bible, that's like more than half of the work.

01:35:22

Right? So know the scriptures. Memorize scripture. Key scriptures. These sorts of things.

01:35:28

And you can do, you can correct error when it comes. You want to be so familiar with the truth that you're able to recognize error when it rears its head.

01:35:36

Now, what flows out of scripture is theology, right? But the Bible teaches theology. I would highly recommend someone purchase a systematic theology.

01:35:45

A systematic theology is a super intimidating book that's the size of an encyclopedia, but it is not meant to be read from front to back.

01:35:54

Okay? As a matter of fact, I did that in the beginning. Oh, yes. The systematic,

01:36:00

I can read portions of systematic theology in 10 minutes. Like, hey, what's the hypostatic union? They're like two or three pages on just that.

01:36:07

So a systematic theology basically takes all of the theological truths in scripture. You know, systematic theology basically asks this question.

01:36:14

What does all the scripture have to say about any given topic? So Jesus is

01:36:20

God. What does all the scripture have to say about that? And a systematic theology will lay out the scriptural foundation for that doctrine.

01:36:26

That helps you understand the doctrine. It helps you to find where in scripture the doctrine is taught. And systematic theology is just that.

01:36:34

It is a study of God in a systematic way. So not only do we learn specific doctrines, we learn how they relate to other doctrines.

01:36:42

Yeah. So for example, if I deny the deity of Jesus, the fact that Jesus is God, that will impact my view of the atonement of Christ, his death on the cross.

01:36:51

If Jesus isn't God, who died on the cross? Was it just a man? If it was just a man, can a man truly carry the weight of my sin and the sin of the world?

01:37:00

Right? So, you know, you get different things this way. For example, John says in his book, 1

01:37:06

John, he mentions the word. This is the only two books in the Bible that the word mentions the word, the Bible mentions the word antichrist.

01:37:11

A lot of people, I always test people, say which, which book of the Bible mentions the word antichrist the most revelation, right?

01:37:18

It's almost 99 .9 % of people say revelation. Actually, the book of Revelation mentions the word antichrist zero times.

01:37:25

Yeah, it's not. The word antichrist is found nowhere in the book of Revelation. The only two books of the Bible that it's mentioned is first and second

01:37:31

John. And John, interestingly enough, says that this is the antichrist. Anyone who denies that Jesus came and that Christ came in the flesh, that's a weird definition of antichrist.

01:37:41

Who's denying that Jesus came in the flesh? Well, there was this group of people back in the day, they were called docetics.

01:37:47

There's a view known as docetism in which they had a very Greek mindset. They believe that the physical, the material world was evil and the spiritual world was good.

01:37:56

But if the material world is evil, then Jesus is this great guy, this great teacher. He couldn't have been material because material is evil.

01:38:04

So Jesus is good. And so therefore, Jesus was a spirit. And so these people denied that Jesus came in the flesh.

01:38:11

They affirmed that he was simply a spirit that appeared to be a flesh. And so there are even suggestions that when

01:38:19

Jesus walked on the beach with his disciples, he didn't leave footprints because he was a spirit, right?

01:38:24

So now John is saying that's antichrist. Why? Because if Jesus didn't come in the flesh, guess what? He didn't die on the cross.

01:38:31

You can't nail a spirit to the cross. And if Jesus didn't die on the cross, then you're still dead in your sins. And so that's antichrist teaching, right?

01:38:38

So notice that the denial of Jesus's manhood impacts our view of the death of Christ on the cross.

01:38:47

So systematic theology equips us to not only learn the specific doctrines, but also their relationships.

01:38:53

So I would say that pick up a systematic theology. You want to study the doctrine and attributes of God, okay, his attributes.

01:39:02

What does it mean for God to be omnipotent, all -powerful, omniscient, all -knowing, omnipresent, everywhere present?

01:39:10

What does it mean for God to be transcendent? What does it mean for Jesus to be both

01:39:18

God and man? Explores the scriptures that lay out both his manhood and his divinity and why those are important.

01:39:25

What is the Trinity? What isn't the Trinity, right? What are false definitions of these common doctrines so we could avoid false doctrine?

01:39:34

What is salvation, creation? How did God create? What impact does the doctrine of creation have on how

01:39:42

I view human beings and the role of gender, male and female, these sorts of things? Pick up a systematic theology, look at the table of contents, and just little by little, part of your devotions, read through portions of that.

01:39:55

And I think that's a good start. Your Bible, a good systematic theology, and checking out YouTube channels like Truology.

01:40:02

So I think that'll be helpful for people. Or reveal apologetics. You can't go wrong either way.

01:40:09

All right, thank you. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's a great question. Yeah, next question I'll bring up here is this one.

01:40:16

What is the hardest question to give an answer to? So, you know, as we endeavor to use apologetics biblically through using the presuppositional approach, you know, what would you say in your experience in teaching and lecturing?

01:40:33

What is the hardest, you know, a very honest question. What is the hardest question to give an answer to from our presuppositional perspective?

01:40:43

Yeah, so for me, in my experience, especially doing like debates and stuff like that, the hardest kinds of questions are questions that relate to topics that I'm not familiar with.

01:40:53

So if someone brings up some philosophical objection, I'm like, I'm not really familiar with that term or concept. But of course, when you're in a debate, the way you present yourself is being perceived in a certain way.

01:41:04

So if I appear ignorant, then the viewer is like, oh, he didn't know that. Look at that. You know, the Christians have no answer. So that can be difficult because how do

01:41:11

I navigate answering a question that I don't know much of the background? At that point, it requires humility and say, you know what?

01:41:17

That's a great question. I've never heard that term before. I'm not familiar with that concept. So I really am not prepared to answer that question.

01:41:23

So those are the hardest questions, you know, for me, ones that relate to things I'm not really familiar with.

01:41:29

And I need to answer their question in a way that doesn't diminish the case that I've been making, but at the same time doesn't pretend that I know more than I actually do.

01:41:39

So those can be, those can be difficult. Another hard question are questions relating to Old Testament ethics.

01:41:45

So, for example, slavery in the Bible or the idea that in the Old Testament, like a rapist had to marry the woman he raped, you know, when you have those particular portions of scripture.

01:41:56

And there are answers to that in particular contexts that are important to understand with respect to those questions. But those can be difficult because A, not everyone is familiar with Old Testament ethics and how to answer those within the context of the

01:42:09

Bible because those are portions of scripture that you don't hear from the pulpit and they're not part of your daily devotions. Right. We tend to say, unless you're a theonomist.

01:42:18

Well, yeah, correct. Unless you're a theonomist. So we're not typically familiar with those.

01:42:23

And even if we are, because biblical ethics is so different than secular ethics, it's hard to answer those questions in a way that a person would accept because they're already so bent against God.

01:42:38

And of course, when they press this, it has an emotional impact. Oh, well, God commanded the Israelites to wipe out the

01:42:44

Canaanites. Oh, what a terrible God. There are easy answers to that. But it comes with an emotional thrust that even though we have answers, the emotion's already set and the audience already is looking, oh, that's so terrible, right?

01:42:56

So you have to kind of know how to navigate. That can be difficult sometimes. Also, other hard questions include sometimes apparent

01:43:04

Bible contradictions. I think that the Bible is the word of God. It's true. One key ingredient to truth is consistency, and I think the

01:43:11

Bible is consistent. However, the Bible is 66 books, 39 books in the Old Testament, 27 books in the

01:43:17

New Testament. That's pretty big when you put it all together. And so when someone asks a question about an apparent

01:43:23

Bible contradiction, man, there are a lot of different things someone could bring up. I haven't memorized every way to reconcile every single passage, right?

01:43:32

So sometimes someone will bring up a passage. I'm like, well, I don't know. I'd have to read that and look at the context. And you can't really always do that in a conversation or in a debate or something like that.

01:43:41

So those questions can be a little hard to navigate. Other than that, I think,

01:43:46

I don't know, unbelief is not, I mean, I've never heard of an objection that like, oh, my goodness, this is the death knell to Christianity because I really,

01:43:57

I firmly believe that when you don't stand on the truth of God's word, you really have nothing. It really is nothing.

01:44:04

You have fancy words and fancy concepts that cloud the fact that you really don't know what you're talking about, you know, when you're coming from an unbelieving perspective.

01:44:12

And I could use fancy terminology and, you know, tout my education. But when push comes to shove, you know, unbelievers don't have a foundation.

01:44:20

And I think our job is to learn how to be skilled to expose that fact. You know, perhaps we can do it a little bit better than we did before, but, you know, that's part of the task of becoming a better apologist.

01:44:32

Yeah. Yeah, that's an excellent answer. And, you know, one of the things you said near the end there was, you know, ultimately, you believe that nothing, it can give a death knell argument to the

01:44:46

Christian worldview because, you know, something that helped me kind of agree with what you just said there was in the beginning of doing apologetics was passages like First Corinthians 121, where it says,

01:44:59

Has not God made foolishness the wisdom of the world? You know, the way that I've always applied that was, hey,

01:45:05

I may not know the answer to your question, but I know that, you know, you know, there's nothing that, you know, can surmount

01:45:11

God's wisdom, you know, man's wisdom, whatever you're relying on ultimately is, you know, biblically foolishness, you know, not like name calling, but this describing the person in his mind who has rejected

01:45:24

God, you know, and become dull in his thinking. You know,

01:45:29

God has made foolishness the wisdom of the world. So I might not know the answer to your question, but, you know, that's something

01:45:34

I can think about. And exercising a little bit of humility, you know, First Peter 315, you know, with meekness and fear.

01:45:40

We're not, I'm not trying to be puffed up. There's no hubris in me. I'm just, if I don't know the answer, hey,

01:45:46

I'd like to consider that, get back to you when I study it a little bit more, if you allow me to, if you're really serious about wanting an answer to your question, you know, it's okay to be able to say,

01:45:57

I don't know sometime and come back with, after some further study. So yeah, that's, that's, those are, that's a great answer to, and considering the hardest questions that we can come across.

01:46:07

So one last question, and I think it'll kind of like put together and our title here, apologetics for everybody.

01:46:17

And it's this, where is it? Okay, right here. You know, what's the best way to encourage the lay person about apologetics?

01:46:27

You know, brother Eli, if you could, in this final question, you know, how would you encourage the person in the pew, you know, after laying out all you just did, how would you encourage them?

01:46:37

Hey, you can do apologetics and this is how. Yeah. So I don't want to give the impression that,

01:46:46

I mean, one of the blessings and the curses that I have is that I am well -spoken.

01:46:51

I could speak well. I can speak clearly. I'm a teacher, right? And so when I speak about these things, it can sound very fancy and flowery and like, oh my goodness.

01:46:59

Well, look at him. He wears glasses. He has, you know, he's, you know, he's got his headphones on. He's got his own

01:47:04

YouTube channel. Like, yeah, right. That's like, I can't do any of that stuff. And the impression is that because some people appear a certain way that that's apologetics is for those people, right?

01:47:18

But that's not the case. In First Peter 315, you have to recognize that the audience that Peter is speaking to are just regular

01:47:25

Christians. They're just normal Christians. First Peter 315 is not written to scholars. It's written to a church that was undergoing persecution and he was encouraging them to stand firm and to always be ready to give a reason.

01:47:38

Now, if the lay person is a Christian and believes the Bible's true, I would encourage the lay person by pressing them for consistency.

01:47:47

If you believe the Bible's true, the Bible commands you to always be ready.

01:47:53

And I'll ask them, what are you doing to always be ready? Even if it's as simple as, well, I'm studying my

01:47:58

Bible as best I can. That's good enough for the average person. I mean, not everyone's going to have to, you know, we

01:48:04

I can talk about transcendental arguments. I can talk about sophisticated, you know, deductive arguments and logic and all that kind of stuff.

01:48:11

But the average person obviously doesn't have the time and sometimes doesn't have the resources to get into all of those details.

01:48:18

But we do need to be students of the word of God. And I think being sufficiently knowledgeable and equipped in scripture will actually be very, a very, very powerful tool for the average person and the scholar.

01:48:34

Right? When we're doing apologetics, we're defending the truth of God's word. And so the more you know

01:48:40

God's word, the better you'll be able to defend it. I mean, you don't have to do all these other things.

01:48:45

Yeah. Like it helps. Right. I know people who I mean, I have two master's degrees. I have a master of arts and theological studies and a master of divinity with a theological focus.

01:48:54

I'm educated. Right. And I'm also in thousands and thousands of dollars in debt. But that's neither here nor there. I know people who know more scripture than I do and do debates with people.

01:49:05

And they only have the scriptures and a firm grasp on some theology. And they're better apologists than I am.

01:49:12

They can quote the scripture. They memorize it. They could explain it. That's because they primarily are living in the scriptures.

01:49:19

Okay. Now, again, it doesn't mean theology books are not important. They are. I'm not trying to be kind of an anti intellectual just your

01:49:26

Bible and nothing else. But being grounded in the word of God is going to help you be a powerful defender of the faith.

01:49:33

And so I would encourage the lay person. Keep reading your Bibles. Keep praying that God opens up opportunities for you to share the gospel and to be able to defend it.

01:49:43

Doesn't have to be super sophisticated. Here's one thing. People who watch apologetics on YouTube make the mistake that average apologetics is the sort that you see on YouTube.

01:49:54

When you watch a debate on YouTube, that's not the average experience for people. And I speak to people online.

01:50:00

I speak to these people very differently than I speak to someone face to face because the person face to face doesn't have the background of those that are that like my channel and are interested in those deep topics, right?

01:50:12

The average person is going to be the average person who's like, I don't believe in God because I don't see him, right? That's going to be your average.

01:50:19

How do you respond to that, right? You know, you have biblical responses. You can use kind of some basic logical principles, but you don't have to be an expert.

01:50:27

And you know, God has blessed the church with pastors and preachers and theologians and apologists and authors.

01:50:32

We can glean from them, but we don't have to be omniscient to be able to just give an answer when the opportunity arises.

01:50:40

So I would encourage that person, read your Bible and start talking to people and you'll be amazed.

01:50:46

You know, when you can't think of the words, though, you don't do it on your own, right? The Holy Spirit will give us words.

01:50:51

And it's I know I can't explain how he does that, but I found myself in that position too. I'm like, how in the world am

01:50:57

I going to? And then words just come it. The spirit goes with us. And so that's how I would encourage the lay person.

01:51:05

Yeah, excellent. I think that's a good message to end on. And I, you know,

01:51:11

I want to thank you. For joining us. Brother Eli, this has been great. I've certainly learned it's it feels different learning from, you know, side by side on the screen here with you.

01:51:22

And you've been a great encouragement to me in your ministry. I hope that you just continue to do what you're doing before we end here.

01:51:29

I just want to say thank you to those that will be watching this later on and those that have popped in and out for joining our first live stream on Truology.

01:51:39

As always, you can always follow me subscribe, like, and share my content by just searching

01:51:45

Truology on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. You can also follow me on Instagram at studyofthetruth and on Twitter or X.

01:51:55

You can follow me at Bprevalon for more updates, information, and future broadcasts.

01:52:00

I hope you were able to track with us and learn something new. I know

01:52:06

I personally feel very grateful to have Brother Eli on to explain and teach us a few things tonight.

01:52:13

Brother Eli, thank you very much again for just your contribution to us this evening.

01:52:21

I look forward to seeing the impact you continue to make in the realm of Christian apologetics because you've been very helpful personally to me just looking up your content, taking notes, and trying to apply it practically and in life in general.

01:52:38

Before we close this out and before you go, could you just once again maybe plug in some of your content and information and how people can get a hold of you and follow you if they'd like to get more of what you can offer?

01:52:52

Sure. So again, my name is Eli Ayala. My ministry is Revealed Apologetics. I have a website, revealedapologetics .com

01:52:59

if they want to read some of the articles that I've written. If they want to learn apologetics in a more structured way, they can sign up for my courses.

01:53:07

I have two courses. One is an introduction to biblical apologetics and my second course is

01:53:14

Priest Up Applied. And I've also held conferences that were recorded with some noted theologians and speakers that can be ordered on my website.

01:53:22

It's a good way to support the ministry as well. If you have any questions like theology questions or bible questions, you can totally just email me at revealedapologetics at gmail .com

01:53:32

and I respond to those or sometimes I'll take a question and I'll literally do a video on the question.

01:53:38

So people can reach me that way. If you'd like me to speak at your church or your event, that's totally a thing.

01:53:45

I do that. The past year alone I've spoken in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Indiana, Arizona.

01:53:52

I travel the country as someone invites me. I try to come and share in person if that's something that is what you're looking for.

01:54:01

I also speak on channels like this. So Belushi, if you ever want me back on again, all you need to do is ask.

01:54:07

It's totally not a bother and if there's someone watching and they're like, hey, I'd love to have you on my show to talk about such and such a topic, you guys can reach me through emailing me.

01:54:16

I was going to say something else but I think I forgot. Did I miss anything? Oh, yeah.

01:54:23

Go ahead. I wanted to let people know, my YouTube channel, the topics we cover are pretty complicated and kind of advanced so some people that are just getting into apologetics might be kind of, you know, discouraged if it's difficult.

01:54:38

I actually started a second YouTube channel called Revealed Apologetics Plus and it is basically just shorter videos that cover basic theology and apologetic questions.

01:54:49

Right now, I have only two videos that are up right now. One on the Trinity and I don't remember what the other one was but as questions come to me,

01:54:56

I'm going to be making shorter videos that are much more introductory and easier to follow so if you want to subscribe to Revealed Apologetics Plus as well as Revealed Apologetics and then

01:55:06

I'll also have and more questions that come to me at my email revealedapologetics at gmail .com

01:55:12

I will use those questions and make videos out of them to help people, you know, learn little by little so there you go.

01:55:19

Yeah, I was going to say Brother Eli, do you have, do you recommend at least one book for someone to kind of get started and chew on in terms of apologetics?

01:55:29

Yeah, so if someone wants to learn presuppositional apologetics in a really easy to understand way and especially within the context of like discussions on evolution and creation,

01:55:40

I highly recommend Dr. Jason Lyle's Ultimate Proof of Creation. It's an excellent book.

01:55:46

It's got pictures so if that's your thing, you like to, you know, it's got some pictures to help illustrate some points there.

01:55:51

You got, you know, there you go and it is I'm definitely getting it now. I'm going to get that now for sure.

01:55:59

I, I, I'm supposed to be an expert in this area. I still return to this book to capture kind of easy ways to explain difficult concepts and so and I've had the author on my show multiple times.

01:56:12

Dr. Lyle is an awesome brother and this is an excellent book. I highly recommend if folks want to just get started.

01:56:20

There are many other books but I suppose my recommendations can go on all night. yeah, yeah.

01:56:26

All right. Thank you so much brother Eli for coming on and yeah, I will certainly keep in mind maybe inviting you on a future podcast some other time.

01:56:37

Certainly I have your email so I'll reach out to you once I, you know, get some things done on my end but thank you for the opportunity just showing up and just being excellent and an encouragement to the audience.

01:56:53

Well, folks, that, yeah, thank you. Oh, well folks, this is, this is it.

01:56:58

Thank you for watching Trueology. I hope that it has been a benefit to you and that through what you have seen and heard today and tonight that you'll just continue to serve and love

01:57:10

Christ biblically. So with that being said, brother Eli, thank you for coming through.

01:57:16

Have a good night. God bless and we'll see you next time on Trueology, folks. Thank you.

01:57:22

Trueology is a podcast that seeks to equip, effect, and engage the world through Christ and His wonderful gospel of the kingdom against which

01:57:31

He has promised that the gates of hell shall never prevail but increased by His government, His law, and grace till it be presented a glorious church without spot or wrinkle.

01:57:42

If there's any fear, threat, or worry, remember that the one that has called you according to His purpose and grace has also promised that all enemies will soon be placed under His feet.

01:57:54

Now, I want you to believe that not because I said it or because it sounds really nice and spiritual but primarily and wholeheartedly and only and biblically because it's the truth.