Discerning Truth: The Biblical Basis for Laws of Logic

Biblical Science Institute

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Hi folks, Jason Lyle here with the Biblical Science Institute and our webcast Discerning Truth.

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It's been a little while since we've done one of these, but I've been pretty busy. I'm busy now with leading a

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Sunday school class actually where we're doing a series covering logic from a

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Christian standpoint of course. And I thought I would take this time to kind of zoom in on one aspect of logic, namely the biblical basis for laws of logic.

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I think this is a really powerful illustration of the truth of the Christian worldview, one that no one can rationally deny.

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And so this turns out to be very useful in an apologetic situation. So laws of logic,

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I would assert, are a reflection of the way God thinks. They reflect his mind, his character.

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And since God always thinks rightly, we need to use laws of logic to reason if we're going to be right in terms of our thinking.

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God's mind is the standard for correct reasoning. God's mind is a little different from ours in a number of ways.

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He's infinite, we're finite. But also God's mind doesn't go out searching for truth.

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God's mind determines what's true. The universe is what God has decreed that it will be according to his will.

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And we can't do that. We can't make the actual universe anything that we want it to be.

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We can do that in our imagination. We can create in our mind a universe that is controlled by what we want it to be, perhaps much in the same way that the actual universe is determined by God's mind, the way he wants it to be.

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And therefore, that which is true is that which corresponds to the mind of God.

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Something is true if it's something God would say. And so if we're going to be truthful in our thinking, if we're going to have true beliefs, we need to learn to pattern our thinking after God.

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And that's interesting because everybody, Christians and non -Christians, have to use laws of logic that stem from God's mind in order to reason correctly.

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And that illustrates two things. One, it illustrates the truth of the Bible, that God's mind really is the source of truth.

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Jesus is really correct when he says, your word is truth, or when he says, I am the truth, the way, the truth, and the life.

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And it also illustrates that the fact that everyone, whether they profess a belief in God or not, does know

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God. Even people who deny it. Atheists know God. They have to because they wouldn't be able to use his laws of logic, you see.

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And so, but then the problem is, no non -Christian can make sense of laws of logic, their properties, their existence, their usefulness, on their own professed worldview.

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Okay? Now, see, I can make sense of laws of logic, their properties, their usefulness, because they stem from the mind of God.

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God controls the physical universe. So of course, laws of logic are going to be useful in my reasoning about anything else.

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That makes sense. But I would argue that in a non -Christian worldview, there is no basis for having laws of logic, let alone them having the properties that they have, which we'll talk about.

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And yet, they still have to use those laws without being able to give a good reason for them. And that is irrational.

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You see, rationality, by definition, means you have a good reason for something, right? That's what it means to be rational, to have good reasons.

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Rational people have good reasons for what they believe. That's what makes them rational. And it's to our advantage to be rational, because beliefs with no good reasons behind them, that we just pick arbitrarily, oh,

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I just believe this, no particular reason, those beliefs are very likely to be wrong. And that just stems from the fact that there are more wrong answers than right answers to a particular question.

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Consider two plus two equals, now if I'm just arbitrary, if I just arbitrarily pick an answer to that, randomly, like seventeen, chances are it's going to be wrong.

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Because there's only one correct answer to two plus two, and there's an infinite number of wrong answers.

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And so you see, if I don't have a good reason, if I just pick a belief at random, it's very likely to be wrong.

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And I will grant that sometimes a person can have a belief that has no good reasons behind it, and it turns out to be true by accident.

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But that's not common. Generally, beliefs that don't have good reasons behind them are wrong.

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We sort of know that. So we say that beliefs are justified if they have a good reason behind them.

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That's what it means to justify a belief, to show that there's a good reason for believing it. That makes sense.

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And knowledge requires true, justified beliefs. If you believe something, well, just believing something doesn't make it knowledge, right?

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It would have to be true, but even that doesn't quite make it knowledge. Because if I believe something that happens to be true by accident, do

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I really know it if I don't have a good reason for it? If I say, I just know that next year, on this date, it's going to be raining,

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I just know that. Do I really know that? No, I couldn't possibly know that. We can't predict the weather a year in the future.

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We can barely do it two weeks in advance with any kind of accuracy. So I don't really have a good reason for that.

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It's not knowledge, it's a belief. Now suppose that a year from now, it is raining out, okay?

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And so that belief happened to be true, and I say, I knew it all along. Well did I really know it all along?

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Of course not. I had a belief. It happened to be true by accident. But because I didn't have any good reasons for it, we can't consider it justified.

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We can't consider it knowledge. Knowledge requires true, justified belief.

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But here's the kicker. Our reasons for belief. So I have this belief, and I give a reason for it, okay?

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So the belief is based on this reason. That's good. But that belief would only be justified if my reason for it also has a reason.

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How do I know the reason is true? I'm going to have to appeal to a greater reason, aren't I? As an illustration of this,

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I suppose I say, you know, a fire drill is being scheduled for next week. Somebody says, well, how do you know that?

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Is that, do you really know that? Is that justified? I say, of course. I know that because Jenny told me, okay?

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And so my belief that there's going to be a fire drill next week is based on Jenny told me that. That seems pretty good, okay?

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Because I have knowledge. I have a reason for my belief. Unless the person responds, well, wait a minute,

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Jenny is a pathological liar. She rarely says anything truthful. So you can't believe a word she says.

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Now is my belief really justified? Because you see, the reason that I had for my belief is itself potentially false.

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Namely, what Jenny is saying, if she in fact is a liar. And so in order for my main belief that there's going to be a fire drill next week to be justified on the basis that Jenny told me so,

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I would have to have a greater belief that Jenny is basically truthful in what she says. And then of course, somebody is going to ask, but how do you know that?

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And so on and so on. And so there's actually a chain of beliefs that will, it has to terminate.

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That chain has to stop somewhere because we can't know an infinite number of things. We're finite.

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And so the chain of beliefs, I have a reason for this belief, and then I have a reason for that belief, and a reason for that one, and so on.

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That has to end somewhere. There has to be an ultimate reason, an ultimate belief. And then of course

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I have to ask eventually, how do you know that ultimate belief, the one that doesn't have anything below it, how do you know that's justified?

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Now I can't appeal to something beneath it because it wouldn't be the bottom one. I'm saying let's go all the way to the bottom one, the ultimate reason, and how do

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I know that I have a reason for that? How do I know that's true? Now there's a few answers that people will give to this.

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Some people would say, I guess I don't. I don't know that my ultimate standard is true, I just assume it, and then

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I can have these other beliefs. But if that's the case, if your ultimate standard is not, there's no good reason for it, if you don't know that it's true, then you don't know that anything on top of it is true.

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In other words, you don't know anything. If you can't know that your ultimate standard is true, you can't know that anything is true.

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Knowledge would be impossible because all of your beliefs are ultimately unjustified.

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They're resting on an untested, unproven assumption. Now it seems to me the only escape from this is to recognize that an ultimate standard must justify itself.

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Somehow it has to establish that itself is true, and that bothers people, but there's no alternative.

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Right? You can have an unjustified belief, you can have a chain of beliefs that goes forever, in which case we couldn't complete it.

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Now see, I would accept that the mind of God is the ultimate standard for all truth, and I would say, well

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God's mind determines what's true, because it's not like our mind where we discover truth. God's mind determines reality.

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Something is true if it corresponds to the mind of God. Now that's something the Bible itself teaches, that Proverbs 1 -7, the fear of the

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Lord's the beginning of knowledge. You see, so my ultimate reason for anything is

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God, as revealed in the Bible, the biblical worldview. And I would argue that the biblical worldview justifies itself, it demonstrates itself to be true, by making knowledge possible for human beings.

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Proverbs 1 -7, fear of the Lord's the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

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So Proverbs 1 -7 gives us a choice, we can submit to God and have knowledge, or we can reject

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God and be foolish, abandon knowledge. So those are our options. And I would say the

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Bible demonstrates itself to be true by making knowledge possible, and no other worldview can do that. And I want to show you why that is, as we go along today.

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One of the things that the biblical worldview justifies, gives us a good reason for, is the existence and properties of laws of logic.

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Now what are laws of logic? They are the rules of correct reasoning, and there are a number of them. You pick up a logic textbook and you'll see certain laws of logic, like the law of non -contradiction, certain rules of inference, like modus ponens, or modus tollens, and so on.

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But what are they? What are these laws? Take the law of non -contradiction. The law of non -contradiction says you can't have

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A and not A at the same time and in the same sense. That's very intuitive. If I say my car is in the parking lot, and it's not the case that my car is in the parking lot, you would know that statement is false, because you can't have

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A and not A at the same time and in the same sense. But what does it mean for that to be a law?

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Is a law something you can touch? Can we see a law of logic?

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Now we can write down a law of logic, like the law of non -contradiction. I can write down on a piece of paper, you can't have

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A and not A at the same time and in the same sense, and you say, well, that's the law. That's a representation of the law, because if I take that piece of paper and rip it up and burn it,

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I haven't destroyed the law of non -contradiction. It's still the case that you can't have A and not A at the same time and in the same sense.

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The law itself is abstract. It's conceptual. It exists in the mind. We can write it down, but that's not the law.

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That's just a written expression of the law. So laws are non -physical.

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It's not like you can stub your toe on the law of non -contradiction. You can't see the law of non -contradiction in a telescope.

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You might see instance, I mean, it's true that physical reality never violates laws of logic, but we can't see them because they're not physical.

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Laws of logic do not exist physically. They're not made up of atoms. They're not extended in space. So you can't stub your toe on the law of non -contradiction or pull it out of the refrigerator and accidentally swallow it.

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They're abstract. They're conceptual. They exist in the mind. Now whose mind?

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Whose mind do laws of logic exist in? Well, to some extent, all of us, right?

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Anyone who knows them has the laws of logic built into their mind, and even if you can't recite laws of logic, you instinctively know some of them.

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It's built into you. That's a gift that God's given us. But I would argue that it's God's mind that establishes those laws, and our minds receive them or discover those laws as God reveals himself to us.

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I haven't as yet proved that, but that's the Christian claim. That laws of logic reflect

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God's thinking, we're made in God's image, and so we have access to some of these laws by God's grace.

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He's revealed himself to us, and so laws of logic exist, and we have some knowledge of what they are, and we can discover what they are because of the facilities that God's given us.

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Laws of logic are conceptual. They exist in the mind, but they're also universal, meaning they apply everywhere.

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We all assume that. If you walk into a room that you've never been in before, do you say to yourself,

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I wonder if laws of logic will work in this room? I mean, I've never been in this room before. I hope laws of logic work here.

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Or do you confidently assume that they will work in places you've never visited before? When the astronauts went to the moon back in 1969, they had a lot of concerns because there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong with that mission.

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It was a complex, the machinery was very complex, but you know one of the things they weren't worried about?

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Boy, I hope laws of logic work on the moon, right? Otherwise we might die, and not die.

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That wasn't one of their concerns. They had confidence laws of logic will work on the moon, but why is that?

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How do we make sense of that? How do we know that laws of logic are universal? It can't be by experience, right?

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Have you visited every location in the universe to check? Have you gone to Mars to see if laws of logic work there?

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Have you been to the Andromeda Galaxy? Now, astronomers assume that. Astronomers assume that laws of logic work the same in the

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Andromeda Galaxy as they do on Earth, but how do we know that? Somehow we know, but how?

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Laws of logic are invariant, meaning they do not change over time. They're the same on Tuesdays as they are on Fridays, and we all expect that.

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We don't get up and say, oh, you know, it's Wednesday, laws of logic might not work today. They've worked in the past, long before you were born, and they will continue to work long after you die.

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We all assume that, right? Nobody comes out and says, gee,

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I hope laws of logic will work tomorrow the way they did yesterday. Somehow we know that, but how?

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How can you know that laws of logic will work in the future as they've been in the past? Did you get in your time machine and go to the future and check to see if they still work?

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I mean, these things are true. Well, of course we know they'll work in the future. Okay, but how? How do you know that?

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That's my question. Laws of logic are exceptionless, right? It's not like they apply 99 % of the time, but every now and then, you know, two contradictory statements can both be true.

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We would all reject that. They always apply, reality never violates them.

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We assume that, but how do we know that, or do we know that? How do we know that there is not some spot on one of Saturn's moons where two contradictory statements can both be true at the same time?

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How do we know that? And so, you see, these properties of laws of logic, they're conceptual, they exist in a mind, they're universal, they apply everywhere, they're invariant, they don't change with time, and they're exceptionless.

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They work 100 % of the time. These properties of laws of logic, I would argue, make perfect sense in the

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Christian worldview, but any other worldview cannot make sense of those things, or how we could possibly know that laws of logic have those properties.

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See, if the Bible's true, we can know all those things, because God's mind is the standard of all correct reasoning, because his word, the expression of his mind, is truth.

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Right? That Jesus said, thy word is truth, referring to God's word. The laws of logic stem from God's character.

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The reason we have a law of non -contradiction is because God cannot deny himself. That's what the

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Bible says in 2 Timothy 2 .13. If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.

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Now we're made in God's image, and therefore we have the capacity to emulate his character.

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Granted, it's been tainted by sin, we need the help of the Holy Spirit, but Ephesians 5 .1 tells us we're to be imitators of God, we're to emulate his character.

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And God has revealed some of his thoughts to us in the Bible. That's what the

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Bible is, the expression of God's mind to us. He hasn't told us everything, I mean, his mind's infinite, but he's told us enough that we can know some things about God and his character, and how those traits are reflected in laws of logic.

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So you see, if laws of logic reflect God's thinking, then that justifies all their properties.

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Of course they would be conceptual, universal, invariant, exceptionless, right? They're conceptual because they exist in the mind of God.

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That's what a concept is. This concept exists in a mind, but that explains why we can have laws of logic before people.

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People didn't invent laws of logic, they discovered them over time. Laws of logic existed before human minds existed, because they existed in the mind of God.

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It explains why laws of logic are universal, because God is omnipresent. His power is immediately available everywhere.

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He fills heaven and earth. Indeed, heaven and earth cannot contain him, the Bible says. And so we would expect laws of logic will work on Saturn, because God's mind is controlling

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Saturn the same way it's controlling the earth. We would expect that laws of logic would be invariant, because God is beyond time.

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Laws of logic do not change, because they reflect God's thinking, and God's thinking does not change. He's beyond time.

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Malachi 3 .6, right? God says, I the Lord do not change, therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed.

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Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. And laws of logic are exceptionless. They have no exceptions, because there is no truth outside the mind of God.

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God's mind determines what is true, and therefore laws of logic reflecting God's thinking always apply.

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There are no exceptions to them. Now unbelievers are also made in God's image.

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They might deny that, but they can't escape it. And God has revealed himself to them too. Romans 1 makes that very clear.

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Therefore, unbelievers also know something about the laws of logic, because they do know the biblical

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God. The problem is, they don't want to know the biblical God. They suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

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That's what the Bible says in Romans 1. But the fact that they are able to use laws of logic shows that they really do know

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God in their heart of hearts, right? Because how would an unbeliever possibly justify the existence and properties of laws of logic while simultaneously rejecting

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God who is responsible for those laws and their properties? How can an unbeliever, on his own professed worldview, explain, account for the existence and properties of laws of logic and how we're able to know that laws of logic indeed have these properties?

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Well, let me give some possible answers that some critics have given in my experience. Some people would say, well, laws of logic are human conventions.

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They're useful, and so that's how we account for them.

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They're inventions of people, and we find them useful, so that's why they catch on. Well, there are a number of problems with that.

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If laws of logic were conventions, a convention is something that a group of people gets together and we agree on it, and we are consistent with that.

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Like driving on the right side of the road is a convention that is used in the United States of America. We drive on the right side of the road.

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We all agree to that, and that reduces traffic accidents. But you see, if laws of logic were conventional, then different societies could have different laws of logic, just like in Australia, you drive on the left side of the road, and that's the convention there.

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Everybody agrees to that, and that works, and it reduces accidents. So are laws of logic like that?

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If you go to Australia, do you have a different set of laws of logic? Are contradictions acceptable in Australia?

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Of course not. So that doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, laws that are made up by people, like civil laws, can change over time.

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There was a time when the national speed limit in the United States was 55 miles per hour. I remember those days, and then at some point, people decided that's just not a good idea, so they did away with that, and states can set their own upper limit.

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Human invented laws can change over time, but laws of logic don't do that. It's not like we could decide next

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Thursday to all get together and say, you know what? No more law of non -contradiction. Now contradictions, two contradictory statements can both be true.

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That wouldn't make it so. That's not going to work. They're not conventions. Some people have said, well, they're chemical reactions in the brain.

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That's what laws of logic are. They're reactions in human brains. Well, that's not going to work, because I have different chemical reactions in my brain than yours.

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I've got a different synaptic pattern. We couldn't have the same laws, and how would that even be a law, anyway?

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How can a law be a chemical reaction? That doesn't make any sense. It wouldn't explain why they're universal, why laws of logic work on Mars, because no one's mind is on Mars, at least not a human mind, and so that's not going to work.

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If they were simply chemical reactions in the brain, there's no reason to expect that laws of logic would continue to apply outside the brain, and yet they do.

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They work everywhere, whether there's a brain there or not. Some people have said, okay, well, maybe laws of logic are not actually chemicals in the brain.

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They're simply descriptions of the way people think. That's interesting. Okay. But if laws of logic were simply descriptions of the way you think, then you could never violate one, because you always think the way that you think, right?

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So you see, if laws of logic were merely descriptions of how people think, then why would we need laws of logic to correct the way that people think?

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Now, see, this answer is not far from the truth, because I would argue laws of logic are descriptions of the way

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God thinks, and the reason we need laws of logic to correct the way we think is because we don't always think like God thinks.

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That's the problem. We need laws of logic to correct our thinking so that we can have truthful beliefs, beliefs that correspond with the mind of God.

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Some people have said, well, laws of logic are simply reflections of the way the physical universe works. I think that's very hard to defend, because if you think about it, laws of logic are not about the physical universe.

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You know, if I say a proposition has the opposite truth value of its negation, am

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I talking about the physical universe? Am I talking about galaxies and atoms? No, I'm talking about reasoning.

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Laws of logic are about correct reasoning. Now, they are applicable to the physical universe, and I can explain that as a

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Christian, because God's mind controls the universe, and God's mind is responsible for laws of logic, so yes, they do apply.

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But they're not about the physical universe. Moreover, the physical universe is constantly changing, it's expanding, stars explode.

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If laws of logic were reflecting that, then wouldn't they change too? Laws of logic are not a reflection of physical nature.

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One guy asked about this. He said, well, we use them because they work. That's not an explanation of anything.

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I know they work. They work because they're true. They're useful in this universe because it's upheld by the mind of God.

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But that's not an answer to say, well, they work. I know they do. That's not my question. If I came into a room and there was a

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Volkswagen there, and I said, how did this get here? How do we account for this? And somebody starts it up and says, well, it works.

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That's not my question. I want to know how it got here. I want to know how you account for this. And unbelievers can't account for the existence and properties of laws of logic.

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Some people might say, well, laws of logic, they're just there. They're just these eternal truths. And they might say, well, you

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Christians, you believe that God has eternally existed, right? Yeah, we do. So laws of logic are like that.

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They're just eternal, and they don't require a cause. OK. But I think that's going to be a problem because, first of all, laws of logic are conceptual.

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A concept is something that exists in a mind. Now, how can you have an eternal concept without an eternal mind?

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Laws of logic do transcend time because they reflect God's thinking, and God's thinking transcends time.

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But apart from God, how can you have a thought without a thinker? That's what I want to know.

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That doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, if somebody says, well, you know, I find them useful.

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They're just there. I guess I can't account for them. But it's more than that because the unbeliever cannot possibly know about the properties of laws of logic, like they're conceptual, universal, invariant, exceptionless.

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Take universality. How is it that an unbeliever on his own professed worldview can know that laws of logic are universal, that they apply everywhere?

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How can he know that? He can't know it on his own personal experience because he's not been everywhere. In fact, our experiences are extremely limited.

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Most of us have not even left the planet. And so to try and extrapolate on our very limited experiences to everywhere else in the universe, that's a hasty generalization fallacy.

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It would be like saying, you know, everywhere I've visited, Spain, Antarctica, whatever, everywhere I've gone, there's been breathable oxygen.

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Therefore, everywhere in the universe there's breathable oxygen. Well, that is totally false.

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Because, you see, our experiences are limited, most of us, to Earth. If you were to go to Mars without a space suit, you would die very quickly because there's no free oxygen in Mars' atmosphere.

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So how do we know that laws of logic are not like that? Like they work in our experiences, but they don't work out in distant space.

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Somehow we know they do. The astronauts were not concerned the first time anybody had gone to the moon.

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Nobody had been to the moon before. And yet they had confidence that laws of logic would work there. How is that?

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See, in the Christian worldview, I can explain that. I can say, well, I know God, and God's mind determines truth.

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God is omnipresent, so of course laws of logic will work everywhere because God's mind controls the entire universe.

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I can answer that. But how can an unbeliever possibly know that laws of logic are universal?

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And it won't do for him to say, well, I guess I don't know they're universal, but I assume that, and it's worked out for me pretty well so far.

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Because, you see, that's irrational. It's irrational to believe something with no reasons.

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Because he does assume that they work everywhere. He goes into a room he's never been in before, and he assumes laws of logic will work there.

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But he doesn't have a basis for it on his professed worldview. His belief is irrational. Now, his confidence in the universality of laws of logic, it's true.

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But on his worldview, he could never have a reason for it, and therefore it's irrational for him to believe that. How can the unbeliever know on his own worldview, in his own experiences, that laws of logic are invariant, that they do not change with time?

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How can he know that? He'd say, well, they've never changed in my experience. He'd say, so what?

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He'd say, well, therefore they never will. You don't know that. You can't assume that just because something in your past has always been a certain way, that it will continue to be that way in the future.

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You can't know that. I mean, by the same logic, I could argue, I'm immortal. After all,

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I've never died before. I've lived a lot of days, and on not one of these days have

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I ever died. Therefore, I assume in the future I never will. Well, that's not going to work.

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How do you know laws of logic are not like that? That they've worked in your past experience, but at some point they won't work anymore.

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Now, some people say, well, I guess I don't know that, but I continue to assume them and it works out for me.

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That is irrational. Children think that way. Children don't have good reasons for their beliefs.

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They just act on them. They believe there's a monster in the closet. They pull the sheets up over their head to protect them from the monster. And hey, it apparently works because they're still alive the next morning.

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That is not logical. It's time to grow up. As we become adults, we should learn to have good reasons for our beliefs and to relinquish beliefs that do not have good reasons behind them.

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Nor will it do for the unbeliever to say, well, in my past experience there's been a consistency with laws of logic.

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They've never changed. And so I assume that at least probably in the near future they won't change, at least not by tomorrow.

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I mean, maybe 100 years from now. But when you say probably, whenever you use past experience as a basis for what will probably happen in the future, you're assuming a principle called induction.

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And induction is only justified in the Christian worldview. There's no other worldview that can make sense of it. Now, that's a different talk.

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I have written on that subject, though. So anyway, so even there they have to rely on the

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Christian worldview in order to make sense of their own. How can the unbeliever know that laws of logic are exceptionless on his own professed worldview?

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If I say, my car's in the parking lot and it's not in the parking lot. You've got to come out and see this. It's really cool to see a car that's there and not there.

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Now, what's he going to say? He's going to say, come on, I don't believe you. We know that there's a law of non -contradiction.

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You can't have A and non -A at the same time in the same sentence. I say, oh, but this is an exception. This is a rare exception.

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You've got to come check this out. Come on, look. I don't think anybody would fall for that.

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But how does he know that? How does he know that that's not an exception? How does he know that laws of logic have no exceptions to them?

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Has he investigated every possible pair of contradictory statements to check? I don't think he has because he doesn't have time because there's an infinite number of possible statements, possible propositions.

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No one can know about the properties of laws of logic based on his own experiences because his experiences are not universal, and they're not infinitely extended in time.

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So there's no way he could know that laws of logic are invariant and universal. It's only on the basis of revelation from the biblical

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God, whose infinite mind determines truth, who is omnipresent and beyond time, that we can know that laws of logic have these properties.

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That's the only way we could know that, is on the basis of someone who has the nature of God.

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Now, rational people have a good reason for their beliefs. That's what it means to be rational. But only the biblical worldview can provide a rational reason for the existence and properties of laws of logic.

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Therefore, only the biblical worldview is rational. Any alternative reduces to absurdity because it cannot justify the very laws of logic that are needed to justify everything else.

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And let me give some illustrations of how competing worldviews fail to justify the existence and properties of laws of logic.

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One thing that a person might do, a critic might do, is appeal to a different God. Because I think we can see that there's no way an atheist could possibly know about the universality or the invariance of laws of logic on his own experience because he doesn't have universal experience and he's not beyond time.

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We would have to appeal to a God who has universal knowledge and who is beyond time to tell us that laws of logic have these properties because they are a reflection of his nature.

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So somebody might say, OK, granted, atheism can't account for laws of logic, but there are lots of religions in the world, lots of gods to choose from.

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Now I call this the ABC maneuver. Anything but Christ. You see, once you demonstrate that the biblical

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God, Jesus, is the basis for laws of logic and their properties, and people recognize that that makes sense, but they don't want to submit to that God, so they try to come up with another

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God, one that's more suitable to their preferences, that can justify laws of logic. But it's not going to work.

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You see, it's not some abstract conception of deity that is the foundation, the beginning of knowledge.

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It's the fear of the Lord, Yahweh. The living God of Scripture is the basis for knowledge.

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And so some other God is not going to work. One of the main reasons is because those other gods are fictional, and a fictional

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God can't justify anything. But nonetheless, even if we take for the sake of hypothesis that these other gods and other religions, even if we take for argument's sake that they're real, they cannot account for the existence and properties of laws of logic the way the biblical

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God can. For example, when we consider world religions, those that have a god, most of them are polytheistic.

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Multiple gods. And you cannot justify the properties of laws of logic in a polytheistic system.

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Why? Well, logic reflects God's thinking. But if you have multiple gods, then which

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God's thoughts should we follow? Do we follow Zeus or Apollo or Hera or Aphrodite or Ares?

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And these different gods, at least in Greek thinking, had particular areas of nature that they ruled over.

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And so when you're in battle, you might follow Ares' thinking, because he's the god of war. But when you're on a boat at sea, then you might follow

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Poseidon, the god of the sea. Different situations would call for different laws of logic that reflect these different gods' thinking.

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I don't know what you'd do if you were in battle, in ships on the ocean. Would you follow

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Ares or Poseidon? See, if laws of logic reflected the different thinking of multiple gods, then there would be different systems of logic out there.

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And I'm not just talking about linguistic conventions. I'm talking about different rules for correct reasoning that would reflect the nature of these different gods in different places.

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So laws of logic would be different in different parts of the world. They would not be universal. Laws of logic would not be universal if they're reflections of the thinking of different gods.

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In fact, the pagan gods tended to be very whimsical. They would change their mind. They're not eternal. Zeus supposedly came into existence at a certain point in time, and the gods reproduced, and so on.

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So laws of logic would not be invariant. If you have these gods who are fickle and changing their mind, and logic reflects their thinking, then laws of logic would change.

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They would not be invariant. So you can see how no polytheistic religion can possibly account for the existence and properties of laws of logic.

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Laws of logic being universal and unchanging and conceptual and exceptionless. That would not be the case if they reflected the thinking of multiple different gods.

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In fact, some religious systems have irrationality built in at their foundation. Hinduism, for example.

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Hinduism is monistic. Monistic means that they believe that all is one. Everything in the universe is actually one.

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And if we think we're seeing distinctions, that's illusion. That's maya. Now that's a problem because laws of logic call for distinctions.

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Laws of logic distinguish between true and false. And many

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Hindus would... I don't know, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them would admit that. They would say, oh yeah, we don't follow your western logic.

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We don't buy any of that. All is one. And your logic calls for distinctions. We reject that. It's very easy to refute that because if someone says,

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I don't accept the laws of logic, then I would say, well therefore you do accept the laws of logic. Now what are they going to say?

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Well you can't say, I said I don't accept them. I know, and I said therefore you do.

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Well you can't do that, that's a contradiction. Yeah, but you just said you don't believe in the law of non -contradiction because you don't believe in laws of logic.

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So you see, that's not going to work. Of course the other thing you could do is you could say, yeah, that's right, your religion is illogical.

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You reject laws of logic. Please step up to the microphone and let everyone here know that the only way you can avoid the truth that Jesus Christ is the living

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God is to be irrational. Because it is. So having refuted any polytheistic system that comes along, those can't possibly justify the existence and properties of laws of logic.

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In terms of world religions, that leaves three. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

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We might also consider Christian cults, but some cults are polytheistic, like Mormons.

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Mormons believe that Jesus is a different God from the Father. And so that's not going to work.

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So that's eliminated. But let's start with modern Judaism. Now, I'm referring here to religious

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Jews who embrace the Old Testament scriptures but who reject Jesus as the Messiah. Now, the problem with that worldview is it's inconsistent with itself because the

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Old Testament is all about Jesus. Isaiah 53, Psalm 22. Those Jews who reject

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Jesus have rejected the God who justifies the laws of logic. So that worldview is not rational.

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It can't be. Of course, there are Jews who have embraced Jesus as the Messiah, and we would call those

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Christians. So it's not just Messianic Jews, but Christians. And I would argue that the

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Christian worldview does make knowledge possible. It justifies the existence and properties of laws of logic.

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What about Islam, then? Well, without going into a lot of detail, because there's a lot of different ways we could approach this, but the

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Quran, the holy book of the Muslims, actually endorses portions of the

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Bible. Did you know that? It endorses the Torah, the books that Moses wrote. It endorses the

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Psalms of David, and it endorses the Gospel of Jesus, indicating that these were previous revelation from God, which they refer to as Allah.

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So here's the problem, though. The Quran contradicts those portions of the Bible. Right? And so can it be the basis of laws of logic if it's contradicting the very thing it endorses?

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No, it cannot. Now, let me give you an example of this. The Quran is divided into chapters called surahs, and in Surah 3, 66, and 19,

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Mary, the mother of Jesus, is mistakenly confused with Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, the daughter of Amram.

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And that is a whopping big 1 ,400 -year mistake. That's the time span between when

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Miriam lived and when Mary lived. And you can just tell that the person who is responsible for this information heard a sermon and got those names confused because they're the same in Arabic, I believe.

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And so they got confused on which Mary is which. But that contradicts what the Bible says in the

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Torah because Miriam is in the Torah, one of the sections the Quran endorses, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, is in the

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Gospels, another section that the Quran endorses. And so it's endorsing and simultaneously contradicting that which it endorses.

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You might say, well, but maybe the Torah and the Gospels got it wrong. But the problem is the

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Quran endorses the Torah and the Gospels. So that's not going to work. It's endorsing that which it contradicts.

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In Surah 4, the Quran insists that Jesus was not crucified. It merely appeared that way. That contradicts the

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Gospel of Jesus, the entire point of the Gospel. The Quran teaches that Jesus is not

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God and that it is the sin of Shirk to claim that he is, that he's the son of God.

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But Jesus claimed to be the son of God, and he claimed to be God. Before Abraham was, I am.

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He's using the name of God, one of the names of God, in that instance. Now, can a worldview that is self -contradictory as Islam is be the basis for laws of logic?

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No, it can't. And I'll grant there are Muslim apologists who will try to answer these things, but I haven't heard a satisfactory answer.

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I haven't heard one that makes sense. I would argue that the Quran endorses that which it contradicts, and therefore it cannot be the basis for laws of logic because it's self -contradictory.

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None of the world religions are rational except for Christianity because they cannot justify the existence and properties of the very laws of logic we use to reason about anything.

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Now, as one other possibility, a person might say, well, I have, you know, I have my own private religion.

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I don't follow any of the world religions. I've got my ideas about God, and they don't necessarily line up with any particular established religion.

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And there are two different ways in which this can manifest that I've experienced, and both are easily refuted in the same way.

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The first is someone who says, you know, I don't follow any particular religion, but I do believe in God, just not the

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God of the Bible. I don't believe, you know, maybe they'll say, you know, I don't think God would send anyone to hell because I think

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God is all loving, and I think this and I think that. Now, those beliefs are inevitably very arbitrary.

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How do you know what God is like? How do you know that? He says, how do you know what

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God is like? I said, I've read his book. God's told us in the Bible what he's like. He hasn't told us everything about himself, but enough to know his basic characteristics.

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But somebody who's just making up his beliefs about God can't really know any of those things. People often feel free to be very arbitrary when it comes to their beliefs about God, the afterlife, and so on.

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I think one of the reasons for that is that they're not immediately refutable. If somebody said, you know,

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I just think the sky is pink, well, they could go out and check that it isn't. Not normally, anyway.

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But, you know, if you say, well, here's what I think happens after you die. I think everybody goes to heaven. See, there's not an immediate repercussion for that because you won't find out that you're wrong until you die, at least in terms of your experience.

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So people feel free to be very arbitrary, but it is arbitrary, and it doesn't justify the laws of logic.

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So having established that, let's say I'm interacting with this person and I've already gone through and established, hey, the biblical

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God, Yahweh, justifies laws of logic because of his nature. He's omnipresent.

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He's beyond time. And so laws of logic are universal and invariant. Now, this person might say, okay, but my

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God also has these characteristics. He too is omnipresent and unchanging, and his thoughts are reflected in laws of logic.

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So I can justify laws of logic too, but here's the problem. How do you know that?

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I'm going to ask this person, how do you know that your God, who is not the author of the

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Bible, as you've admitted, has any of those properties? How do you know that?

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How do you know that your God doesn't change his mind and is omnipresent and is the basis for truth?

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Again, he might turn it around and say, well, how do you know? And I say, I've read his book. The biblical God has revealed himself.

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See, that's one of the big differences between these private religions and the Christian religion. The biblical

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God has revealed himself, and he's done it objectively in his word. He used multiple eyewitnesses to the various events that have happened in history to record his word, and it's objectively open to inspection.

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But someone who says, well, I mean, the person might respond and say, well, my God told me that he's universal.

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He just kind of impressed it on my heart. But then I'm going to say, how do you know that? How do you know that it was

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God that was doing that, your God, and not Satan? Or a bit of undigested cheese in your own imagination, right?

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How do you know that? Now, I would submit at that point, there's no answer. He can't know that, because you see, that's the problem with private, subjective revelation to just one person, as you could never know if it's from God or Satan or his own imagination.

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That's why God used 40 different authors over a time span of 2 ,000 years to write his word. That makes it impossible for it to be any one man's opinion.

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It isn't. It's all the word of God. It has a common theme throughout. It constantly says, thus saith the

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Lord, right? And the people who wrote the Bible, they didn't just hear from God privately.

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I mean, some of them did hear from God privately, but they saw him. They saw his power publicly, and they recorded it.

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A lot of the Bible is history. It's just recording what happened. So it can't be from Satan, because it condemns what

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Satan does. A house divided against itself will not stand, as Jesus put it. It claims to be from God.

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Again, how many times did the Scripture say, thus saith the Lord? And yet it was written by 40 different authors over a period of 2 ,000 years with a consistent theme.

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And here's the kicker. The God described in the Bible makes knowledge possible, which is something the

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Bible itself teaches, and we've now seen that illustrated. He justifies the laws of logic. His nature, being omnipresent, beyond time, sovereign, justifies the fact that laws of logic are universal and invariant and exceptionless.

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So the person who makes up his own God, you just say, how do you know anything about your God? And the answer is he can't ultimately know anything, because he might argue about private revelation, but he has no way of knowing that his private revelation is actually from a

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God, and not from Satan or his own imagination, because it's not objective. It's not two or three witnesses.

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It's just his own opinion. Now, the other way in which a critic might try to respond to this, the previous position is someone who sincerely believes in a

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God, but has arbitrarily decided what the characteristics of that God should be.

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And you point out that he doesn't have a basis for knowing anything about his God, because his God has not revealed himself objectively, like the biblical

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God has in the pages of Scripture. But the other kind of critic would be someone who responds in a mocking way and is not sincere.

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Someone who thinks, maybe he's an atheist, and he says, well, you know, if the Christian can make up this

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God and that justifies laws of logic, so can I. And so he says he'll make up a

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God, but he's not being serious. And then he appeals to that invented God, that fictional

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God, as the basis for laws of logic. So he invents the flying spaghetti monster, or whatever.

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He creates this silly God and says, see, now I'm as rational as you are. No. Because you're going to have to point out to that person that a fictional

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God cannot justify anything. Right? I mean, it should be obvious.

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We can't explain any aspect of reality by appealing to an event or person that is fiction.

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Fiction doesn't affect reality. The events that are within fiction can't have any effect outside that fictional world.

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It's kind of like Vegas, right? What happens in a fictional story stays in a fictional story. Fiction can't justify anything in reality.

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And so the person, you know, I've invented this God. I actually had somebody respond to me one time.

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It was a conversation over the internet. He said, well, yeah, my God also can do what your

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God can do. And my God, she lives in a tree outside my house. Well, then she's not omnipresent, and so you have all these kind of problems.

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But the fact is, I would point out to that person, well, you're making that God up.

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Right? I mean, let's be honest. You don't really believe that there's a God living in your tree out there, right? You don't really believe that.

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You were lying. You were lying, perhaps for the sake of argument. But you see,

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I'm not lying. When I tell you about the biblical God, I believe in that God. I believe he's real, and therefore he can justify laws of logic.

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Now, see, he might try to come back from that and say, well, your God is fictional too, and therefore can't make knowledge possible. Well, actually, only the biblical

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God makes knowledge possible by justifying laws of logic. And knowledge is possible.

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A fictional God cannot do that. So the conclusion you should draw is, therefore, the biblical God is real and not fiction.

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If the biblical God were fiction, we couldn't know anything, because that's the only way to justify laws of logic.

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We could have beliefs that happen to be true, but we could never justify them in an ultimate sense, because our ultimate standard would be asserted rather than demonstrated.

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So I would say to my unbelieving friend, that's the conclusion you should draw.

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That's the conclusion you would draw if you were reasoning rationally. But you're not reasoning rationally, because you hate

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God. You hate him so much that you would rather be irrational than bow the knee to him.

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The God who created you and has blessed you and sustains your existence and has created laws for your benefit, you've broken his laws, you've committed high treason against your creator and king, and despite all that, that same

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God graciously offers you salvation to pay for all your sins by his death on the cross, to offer you eternal life with him if you just repent and trust in him.

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And yet you continue to spit in his face and would prefer to live in intellectual absurdity, to be irrational, than to receive his offers of grace and mercy.

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That's a problem. And in doing all those things, you've demonstrated the truth of the

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Bible in places like Proverbs 1 -7. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. What does the rest of the verse say?

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That fools despise wisdom and instruction. See, Proverbs 1 -7 uses antithetical parallelism to contrast the knowledge that submission to God brings with the foolishness that results from the rejection of the wisdom and instruction of God.

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Proverbs 1 -7 is telling us you can submit to God, his standard, his laws of logic, and have knowledge, or you can reject

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God and be a fool. And so the unbeliever in preferring to live in absurdity rather than repent and submit to God actually illustrates the truth of the

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Bible. See, the Bible is inescapably true. If you reject it, it demonstrates that it's true because it shows that people would rather live in absurdity, they would rather live in darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.

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So anyway, I hope these comments will be helpful to you as you share your faith, as you defend the faith against the critics.

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And really, what it comes down to is this. There is no rational alternative to Scripture because the

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God of Scripture alone is the foundation for the laws of logic that we must all use in reasoning.

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That's why there cannot be a good argument against the biblical worldview because whatever that argument is, it would have to use laws of logic which cannot be justified apart from the biblical