D-Day in the History of both World Wars then Using Presupposionalism in Apologetics

June 6th, 2019 is the date today, and everyone knows what

June 6th is about. It is difficult to think back on what it must have been like to be amongst those young Americans as they stepped out of the cover that they had and began to experience immediately the effects of withering artillery fire and machine gun fire.

The Germans have always been good at designing weapons. For example, the German 88, what an incredible piece of artillery that was.

The 88 was a tremendous land -based artillery piece.

You could put it on a tank. You could use it to shoot up in the air.

I mean, the Germans are good at designing a lot of stuff, but the artillery fire and the machine gun fire, over the course of this one battle, there would be over 8 ,000 casualties.

And yet the Marines pressed on, and though it took quite some time, they accomplished their goal.

And you might be going, wait a minute, what are you talking about? Marines? It was the Army. Well, you're probably thinking what everybody's thinking today.

That's D -Day. And that's one of the problems. Sadly, I would imagine a large number of millennials and Z -gens are wondering what in the world we're talking about today at all.

But I wasn't talking about D -Day. June 6, 1918, U .S. Marines, Bellow Wood, World War I.

Up to that point in time, the greatest number of casualties taken by the Marine Corps in any one action.

And the descriptions of it that you can still find today, obviously that generation is now long gone.

And the generation that fought at Normandy is almost long gone, except for the one guy that did the parachute jump yesterday at Normandy again in 1995,

I think. Pretty impressive, gentlemen, very, very impressive indeed. Those guys were tough as nails.

But no, I'm thinking about a war that, to be honest with you,

I would be stunned if 20 % of the

American population would know who won World War I, as in being able to name who was on what side, and if 1%, less than 1%, less than 1 % of modern

Americans have ever heard of Bellow Wood, wouldn't know what country it was in, wouldn't know what it meant.

And yet it was, if you are in a Marine Corps family, you know, but the vast majority of people have no earthly idea.

And so it was, there's a lot we could talk about because there was only, there was less than 30 years between Bellow Wood and, you can't really do

D -Day because that wasn't the Marines, but the Marines were doing horrific things at Tarawa and Okinawa and Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal in the

Pacific at that point in time. And the thing you got to remember is in many of these battles, you would have casualties, deaths, not just wounding, but death, deaths in a single battle that would be greater than the combined deaths of both

Afghanistan and Iraq for all United States forces in single battles.

Though you also should take into consideration, and this is something that I think is truly amazing, is we've lost more

U .S. servicemen to suicide in these past number of years than any battle deaths at all.

That tells you a lot about the advance of the culture of death, and it also tells you that a nation that has become infected and taken over by the culture of death is a nation that will not be able to defend itself.

That's a whole other area of very important contemplation as well, especially in light of the

Christian worldview. But yes, it was June 6th, both, and the same enemy, and many of the same weapons, and what they faced in Belleau Wood, what the initial attack waves at Omaha...

Some of the other nations had it a little bit easier at the other beaches, unfortunately, but Omaha was ugly.

And the initial waves experienced 90 % casualties, and most of those were deaths.

Similar to the initial waves at Belleau Wood, for the same reasons. Obviously, if you've never seen

Saving Private Ryan, simply the best -done movie on D -Day.

And I only say that because everyone that I've heard... I was just listening to an interview on the way in, and one of our just -retired generals was talking about how his father had lost an eye at Omaha.

He was one of the drivers of one of the landing craft. And he had taken his father to see

Saving Private Ryan, and it was one of the most emotional... You could tell, he could barely even say it today, during the interview.

He could barely talk about taking his dad to see Saving Private Ryan. That's the reason I went to go see it, was because I was hearing about all these

World War II vets that were coming out of the theater just crying, because it was so stinking real.

All the other movies had just not done it right. If you're on a beach and somebody's shooting at you with a machine gun, you don't hear the machine gun firing.

You hear the bullets bouncing off of everything or going through flesh. The machine gun's a long ways away.

That's a distant sound. It's there. It's loud as all get out. Did you see the video someone posted?

I saw it in my Facebook feed. They had a flyover of World War II aircraft over the beach, and it was a relatively small number of aircraft in comparison to what would have been going over the beach back then.

And it was incredibly loud. It would have been a cacophony. So you're probably not going to hear the gun that's shooting at you, but you will hear the zip and ping and the thud when it hits a body.

And that's what they did in Saving Private Ryan, aside from also the fact that they wanted to make sure everything looked exactly right.

So I mean, all the tanks were the right tanks and the markings were the right markings and the airplanes had the right markings and the whole nine yards.

I mean, they really, really, really went overboard to make sure it was as accurate as possible.

But it was what really happened. That's what it was like. And, you know,

I heard the story many, many times. The people that came back talking about all their battle stuff were the people who never fought.

The people who were really there never wanted to talk about it. They didn't want to say a word because it was just horrific.

And I don't think it is much of a surprise to realize that the children of the people returning are the children of the 60s.

You look at the United Kingdom. Where does the precipitous fall off in belief in God, Christianity, and everything else?

It's after those wars. Now it happened faster in England because World War I had more of an impact, obviously, on them.

They had far greater casualties than we did. But it was the people returning, those veterans, that had seen such horrible things.

Nominal Christianity won't survive that. I'm sure someone has written a book somewhere documenting all of that.

But be that as it may. So today, as we think about 75 years and the fact that, in all probability, there won't be anybody left at 80 to be there.

There's just very few now. That generation is gone. And soon it'll be all the

Korean War veterans and eventually the Vietnam veterans. And we think about what is important.

And I asked a question on Facebook this morning. Have we not, in essence, betrayed everything that those men fought for?

Would they have fought for a nation filled with people promoting infanticide and the murder of unborn babies just simply for the sake of birth control and a kind of nation that is rushing headlong toward open, unrepentant communism via socialism, which never proves to be much of a stopping off point for anybody?

Has there not been a fundamental betrayal of what those men did in a very, very short period of time?

And it certainly makes me wonder, makes me think a lot about that and about the fact that a people who forget their own history, or even worse, a people who are embarrassed by their own history, are people without any connection to the past.

They have no guideposts for the future. But I also think about D -Day, what a providential thing it was.

If you've studied it, I've read a number of books about, as I've said many times before,

I've read lots of books about the Pacific War. But only a few. But one of the most interesting books

I read was a book on the relationship between Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower, which was really, really, really interesting.

But I've also read a number of books about seemingly the most brilliant tactician on the other side, a man by the name of Erwin Rommel, known as the

Desert Fox, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. He was not a Nazi. He was, in fact, forced to take cyanide and killed by Hitler.

Quite simply, if Hitler had listened to Rommel, we'd be speaking German. They would have won in North Africa.

Once Rommel was put in charge of the defense against the invasion, they knew it was coming. Rommel didn't believe they were coming across at Calais.

Rommel believed they would land at Normandy. And he did what he could to, basically, over against the objections of Hitler and his generals back in Berlin, he did what he could and was almost successful.

But he was constantly countermanded by Hitler, who thought he knew better. And that's the only reason we got a toehold.

That's the only reason we were able to do what we did. And so, what if?

All the what ifs. I mean, at the end of this day in 1944, we barely had a toehold.

We had not reached any of our objectives. And if Rommel had been given the panzer units that he requested at that time, because he knew this was the real thing.

Y 'all heard about the fake news that we use? We use CNN to win that. They had, you know,

Patton had gotten himself in trouble down in Sicily. And so they took him out of command and they knew that the

Germans were focused on the guy. They thought Patton was, wherever Patton was, that's where the action was going to be.

They put him in charge of a fictional army. They had blow up tanks, not blow up boom, blow up as a blow up tanks, cardboard tanks.

The first army group is, I think, is what it was called. And he wasn't a part of it and he hated it.

But man, did it work. And even days, days after the invasion had begun,

Hitler would not allow these panzer groups to be released from defending

Calais to go down to Normandy. If Rommel had had his way, we could have been thrown right back into the sea, right back into the sea.

But we weren't. It wasn't God's intention. And we can only see that in hindsight, obviously.

But it was fascinating. They were talking about FDR's prayer, leading the nation in prayer.

That wouldn't happen today. And the general I mentioned before was talking about how they had published a

New Testament for the soldiers to carry that had a brass plate in it that you wore over your heart.

And I know that that's the case because I've seen one. And it had a prayer from FDR and an encouragement for people to read that New Testament.

Totally different time, totally different place. But you can see the hand of God in it, and it is a fascinating thing.

So compare that with the fact that this happens in June, which of course is

Gay Pride Month. And I don't know about you, I am absolutely sick and tired of going to a website, following a link to something or looking for something online, and I get hit with rainbow flags every direction that I'm going.

Now, I happen to love the rainbow. It is God's promise not to destroy the earth after the last time, but it does seem incredibly stupid to use that particular thing as the symbol of absolute rejection of God's way of life and sinful pride in it.

But again, that is a betrayal of the blessings of God upon this nation in the

D -Day invasions. Absolute betrayal. Spitting in God's face.

There's no neutrality, folks. There is no neutrality. We have been,

I was, in public education, I was taught the myth of neutrality.

And you know what? When it is inculcated in you in your youth, it's almost like it patterns the brain cells in your mind, and you keep defaulting back to it.

That's why Scripture tells us to train up a child in the way he should go, and expose a child to God's truth, and so on and so forth, because those initial ways of thought.

And the enemy knows that, too. That's why they want your children, big time. But there is no neutrality.

And I see a lot of Christians running around thinking, you know, hey, as long as I don't engage in this, that it doesn't really matter.

Well, it does. You must understand that Gay Pride Month is, we are proud of our rebellion.

God, we hate you, we hate your law, we hate what you've told us is right, and we are going to spit in your face.

Now please bless us with continuing military superiority and economic prosperity.

That ain't going to work very well, is it? No, it's not going to. But that's what we are facing.

And it is just, it is becoming just so in your face. I hate to sit here and say, we told you so, but we did.

We can go back decades. I forget which dividing line it was, but it was nearly 20 years ago that I came up with the phrase,

Uber rights, that homosexuals do not want equal rights, they want Uber rights, they want to force the celebration of their chosen rebellion against God, of direct fulfillment of Romans chapter 1.

Very clear. Very, very clear indeed. So there you go.

Yeah, so we've got Pride Month. Now, shifting gears once more,

I am going to get into some discussion of presuppositionalism here in a little bit, if you want me grabbing your Bibles, I want to talk about some theology and apologetics today.

But we do have something really important going on on Facebook. I mean, this is vitally important stuff.

You know, I haven't asked, oh, by the way,

I did forget about this. For all my fellow Trekkies, oh, by the way, switch cameras a second.

Oh, man, there, there. See next to the treble, here, the

Picard facepalm, yes. I mentioned the

Picard facepalm thing. This is ThinkGeek did this. For those of you who are my fellow

Trekkies, that was one of the, that was the episode where Q lost his powers and Picard sitting there and he does that disgusted facepalm thing and it has become the thing of a thousand memes.

And I saw it on, I saw it advertised and I threw it out there going, oh, man, this, this, that's awesome.

That's awesome. Well, Sunday, I was installed as one of the elders at Apologia and I was given a couple gifts.

I didn't bring it in because I, I guess some people are scared by these things, but one of my fellow elders gave me a

Damascus blade knife. Have you seen, you know what Damascus blade is? It's got that, that hard to describe pattern on it, but they can just get so incredibly sharp.

They're, they're really super nice, nice knives. Anyways, he gave me a Damascus blade knife.

Thanks Zach. And Zach actually tried to call me a couple of times during the program today, obviously didn't know we're doing a live dividing line today, this early anyway.

Um, and, uh, so, but then I was given this other gift, which I didn't open there at the church.

I waited till I got home. It was a little gift bag thing. So I opened it up and that's what it was. It was the

Picard face palm, which makes you think just a little bit. If you give that to someone who's just been made one of the elders of your church, what exactly does that mean?

Is that the church going, oh no, or is that me going, oh no, I don't know.

But, uh, it was, uh, it was, I laughed hysterically, uh, when

I got my, um, my face pumping. But, uh, speaking of Trekkies, uh, Rick Walston had posted this and I, I do want to just mention this before I completely move away from it, but, um, cause we were talking about Facebook.

Um, but Scotty, uh, James Doohan, um, who's actually from Canada, uh, was in the

D -Day invasions and if there's only a couple of places where he didn't manage to hide it, but he lost,

I think two fingers on one hand and he'd, he'd hide that in all of his acting on, on Star Trek.

He wouldn't see it. Uh, but, uh, he was shot seven times, uh, in his

World War II service. And, uh, he took out two snipers up on the, up on the ridge and, uh, he was basically a war hero.

He really was. And then became Scotty and became a Star Trek hero too. I was

Scotty was always one of my favorite, uh, favorite people, uh, in, uh, in that.

But, uh, anyway, back to what I was saying, there is a

Facebook page called seven years of prosperous memes from Pharaoh's dreams.

You know what? I don't have a clue. And then when you go to it, um, you've got, uh,

John Piper petting a dog sort of, but not really.

Um, it's interesting. So anyways, um, whoever this is has put together, uh, this competition between webcasts,

Christian webcasts. I think it's 13 and six, two, then eight, you know, the standard

NCAA type thing. Um, and I mentioned it before because at some point, uh, over the next couple of days, it's going to be the dividing line versus apology radio, which

I found humorous simply because I win either way, it just doesn't matter.

And that's going to put us up against, um, uh, the bar podcast, uh, versus somebody else.

I can't, can't blow the bracket reformed brotherhood.

So whoever comes out of the bar broadcast versus reformed brotherhood will be going up against whoever comes out of the dividing line versus apology radio going into the final round.

And over on the other side, you got cross politic today versus white horse in, um, so you can be voting on that one.

No, no. That was yesterday. Was that yesterday? Or is that going on?

I don't know. Anyway, well, right now it's theologians versus theology gals.

And so obviously what we want in the final, because they're on the other side of the bracket, what we want in the final is, is either the dividing line or apology radio versus theologians.

Um, oh wow. Okay. Um, so if I could stop, uh, the, um, funny thing here, please go and vote.

Um, and, uh, and yeah, I, I, I just got the, the note I'm in the middle of the dividing line. I'm going to ask folks to pray.

I can't talk right now, so I'll, I'll get back with you as soon as I can. All right. Um, just got a note from Luke Pearson, and, uh, so I'd like to ask for your prayers.

Um, uh, Brother Jeff has had another seizure, um, while on the flight.

Um, a flight to, uh, uh, well, he was on a plane. And, uh, so I, that's why the phone's been going off.

And, um, so I would just ask that you would, uh, pray, uh, for that situation.

I don't know. I don't have any other details on that right now. Zach's trying to get ahold of me. Um, but, um, so, uh, in fact, if, if, if, if you could just for a moment, um, would you be able to throw some commercials up or something?

Um, so I could take that call eventually. Um, and so I can try to get some more information.

You know, we are live right now. And, um, uh, so I'd like to, obviously

I'm going to be highly distracted at, at this moment. Um, so it might be good to, um, have at least a little more information, uh, to be able to go with.

And, um, so, okay, thanks. What is

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Thank you. All right, well thank you for giving me a moment there.

Yeah, so I was on the flight, and the flight turned around, came back to Phoenix.

They're going to take him for observation. He seems to be, this does not seem to be as severe a situation as the initial one back in December was.

So that's good. He's recovering more quickly at that particular point in time, but obviously

I'm going to be visiting a hospital here later this afternoon. So we'll see what goes on there.

Just pray that this time, because the thing about these things is, you know, we thought we knew what it was, but so often with this kind of stuff, it is a long and challenging process to find out what the underlying causes are as far as, especially anything neurological.

You know, you just don't know. So pray for wisdom for the doctors and healing from our

Lord. All right, well there you go. So what

I was mentioning real quickly is, if you go on Facebook, if you go to that little thing, and Jeff found this to be a funny thing too, so I guess it's appropriate.

But today's battles between theologians and theology gals, it's 6832 right now, but we cannot take that for granted.

So you sort of know what I want to do there. If you want to go that direction and vote in that,

I think you'll find it to be enjoyable. And then we'll see what happens when

Apology Radio and us go up against each other. Did you do that for a reason?

I'm sorry? Oh, okay. Normally when you aim the microphone at you, there's a reason for that.

Oh, well, okay. There was another issue

I was going to address, but I was thinking about possibly doing a jumbo edition.

If you don't mind, we'll limit it to an hour today. Since obviously

I have things I need to do now. And this would be something that I'm sure

Jeff wouldn't mind my discussing today, because I had mentioned to him that we would.

It was interesting. There is a pastoral oath that is administered when you become an elder at Apologia, and one of the elements of it has to do with presubstantial apologetics.

Pretty strong commitment to that, and there's lots of discussion about what that means in these particular days.

A lot of you have wanted a review of the FESCO book. There are a number of those coming out from people who have significantly more time than I do.

The Reform Forum is, I think, just did a 54 -minute podcast that I have not had time to listen to yet.

We'll put it in the queue. There's lots of other things. There's 65 hours worth of stuff in the queue, but I'll try to bump it up.

And then I noticed... Let me see if I can give you a...

There it is. See if I can give you a link here. I think this is on the blog at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary.

I think. There's the blog, and it is going very slowly here.

Okay, there we go. So Dr. Waldron, Sam Waldron, began posting on his blog

J .V. Fesco's Reforming Apologetics, Retrieving the Classical Reform Approach to Defending the

Faith, A Critical Review. It is a four -part series. Three of the four have now been posted, so if you go to cbtseminary .org

and then click on Blog, that will pull that up.

And so it looks like it should be finished tomorrow if it's four sections.

So I'm sure that Dr. Waldron will have some very good information there.

Like I said, Reform Forum is also doing that. So slowly there are responses that are being provided, and I'm very thankful for that because it needs to be done carefully and thoroughly.

Knee -jerk reactions on something like this generally are not the best way to do things.

What I wanted to do was to comment a little bit on the video that was posted a couple weeks ago in response to my review of William Lane Craig.

Obviously, I'm not going to... I think the best way to respond to the actual issues that were raised is just to do so generically as to the issues rather than playing any portion of it because, as you know, there was an apology offered for some of the comments that were made, and so I think it's just best to not go back over...

certainly not go back over those elements, but likewise to not go over...

to actually replay a video that's no longer posted. But that doesn't change the reality that there are fundamental issues that were raised during the course of the video that I think are extremely important to address, and they are issues that, in my opinion, are commonly raised and represent fundamental misapprehensions of what...

Well, to give you a background here, when we talk about presuppositional apologetics, when we talk about covenantal apologetics as it has been described by others, by Dr.

Oliphant specifically, what you're talking about goes back to, in our modern context, the writings of Cornelius Van Til.

Now, Van Til was born in the Netherlands. That was always his primary language, and as a result, his

English -version writings are not... They're not as smooth as butter, let's just put it that way.

You can tell that they are written by someone whose mother tongue is other than English. They can...

And part of that is just simply some of the subject matter, but the

Dutch mind, the German mind, expresses things in a way that is sometimes rather opaque, difficult for us in our

English -speaking context to really grab hold of things, and I think that's one of the reasons that Van Til has given rise to a number of different schools of interpretation.

I don't think it's so much a lack of clarity in Van Til himself as translation and just the way of thought from which he was speaking, and so you've got

Bonson's interpretation of Van... Almost everyone I've ever met who themselves met

Van Til seems to think that they have the way of understanding Van Til. And so when you keep that in mind, you can understand why you have differences of opinion as to exactly what

Van Til was saying from everyone from John Frame to Greg Bonson and a number of people in between and on both sides.

But when I read Van Til, I don't find him to be all that difficult to understand.

You know, he did produce a fair number of works, but there's a good bit of consistency across the spectrum.

To me, the heart of Van Til's apologetic is an insight that arises from Reformed theology, which is why

I do not believe that you can consistently practice presuppositional apologetics as a non -Reformed person.

That was one of the things that came up in the video was that presuppositionalism should simply be one of a number of different approaches in the apologetic toolkit.

So the idea is that as an apologist, you have a number of different tools that you can pull out depending upon the situation you find yourself in.

And if with this particular person, a presuppositional approach might work, but then the next guy five minutes later, an evidentialist, and then over here a classical, and then over here, you know, maybe some other mixture of these things, and then over here, a water balloon might be the best way to do it.

Who knows? Just have to be free to do whatever you do given all the different situations you might face.

Well, I don't see presuppositionalism that way, and I certainly don't see that a person who believes in the autonomous will of man is going to have the ability to consistently utilize presuppositional apologetics.

It's not just one tool in a toolkit. It is an overarching foundational recognition of what it is you're dealing with in apologetics.

What are you dealing with in apologetics? If you take the idea that every single apologetic encounter is a unique, one -off situation, it just so happens it's this person, you are that person, and this is the context you're in, and this nation at this time, and everyone's unique, and so you need to have all sorts of different tools.

Well, okay, then that toolkit's going to be pretty complicated and pretty big. What Van Til states is that what you're seeking to communicate is a particular divine truth.

And that divine truth speaks to one particular God who cannot be edited, changed, or altered, or you're no longer dealing with anything relevant to the

Christian faith. So it starts with God. It starts with who God is, and Van Til's philosophy, he was a philosopher,

Van Til's philosophy, for example, would emphasize that it is the Christian God that is the foundation of our beliefs, not just a

God. That the quandary that you find historically amongst philosophers between the one and the many, the one and the many, philosophical systems tend to go one of two different directions.

If they go toward answering the question, is there a unity? Is there a oneness?

Then the individuality of persons and things gets swallowed up in these big categories of oneness, of unity.

If they go the other direction that emphasizes the individuality of things, well, then the problem there becomes you have no way of unifying all of this.

Everything becomes individual facts that don't necessarily have any meaningful relationship to anything else, and so truth becomes something that's very difficult to define, or to know, or to communicate to someone else, and so philosophy is always fighting with all this, the one and the many, and Van Til said in the

Trinity, the triune God, where you have one being of God and three persons, not just two persons, but three persons, because once you have three, then you have not only the object, but the one known, and the one who can be communicated to, so you have an ability to ground both the one and the many in the triune

God, that the answer to man's philosophy is found in the very nature of God himself, who created all things.

So he starts with that, and the incomprehensibility of defending just the idea of deism, or a

God, or anything along those lines, that what we are communicating cannot be a matter of singular step progression, where I'm going to get you a little bit closer, a little bit closer, a little bit closer, until eventually

I get you far enough that you're far enough along, that there is a particular

God that we are communicating, and that in light of that God, there is a particular man, woman, that we are dealing with.

And the insight from Reformed theology is that you have to have the right creator, and then you have to recognize who it is you're seeking to communicate with, and what the

Bible says that person is doing with truth already. If God has done what he says he's done in Romans chapter 1, and that is created with sufficient clarity so that mankind is, at the end of Romans 121, unapologetus, without an apologetic, without a reasoned defense of his rebellion against God.

It doesn't mean that they don't have arguments. They do. But there is no consistent argument that can be presented.

If you recognize that man is made in the imago dei, and that therefore every man and woman faces the revelation of God, it gets through to them.

It gets through to them. They hear it. They see it.

Since that's the case, then you can either ignore that and just give them more data to suppress and to twist, or you can do what you need to do, and that is, as a fellow image -bearer, do not encourage them in their rebellion.

Do not pretend that there's some neutral ground that you both can step down upon to reason with one another, because that is encouraging them in their rebellion.

Instead, you stand firm upon the ground that, by so doing, you are bringing conviction to the fact that they are suppressing the truth that you embrace, and you point out that they are unapologetus.

They are without an apologetic. You engage in an internal critique of their self -constructed worldview, and each person is going to be different, so you need to know the real worldview well enough to recognize the counterfeits, but there's always an inconsistency.

There's always a place where it collapses, and so the illustration

I've used many, many times is that you're dealing with a person who is holding that beach ball down in the water of the pool, and they are putting out effort.

Now, they may be doing this in many different ways. They may be doing it in the context of religion, atheism, scientism, drugs, immorality, apathy.

There's lots of ways to do it. It's all idolatry, and idolatry can express itself in many, many, many different ways, but you are dealing with an idolater.

You're dealing with a person who's set up a rival god. It can be their own mind. It can be scientism.

It can be their house, their body, sex, drugs, rock and roll, video games, whatever it is.

They've set up an alternate god, and they're using that alternate god to suppress the knowledge that gets through to them from the fact that they are made in the image of God, and they live in God's world, and so my job is to come along and not hand them another ball to keep underwater because they're going to get that one, and they're going to spread their fingers out, and they're going to do what they can, and they're just going to suppress it.

What I need to do is I need to come along, accept the fact that the ball that's already there is more than sufficient.

I need to start prying the fingers up. I need to start prying their fingers up. Now, they're not going to like that.

They're going to scream because they're working hard, and they've maybe spent their whole life building this, but I'm going to pry their fingers up, and now can

I use arguments to do that? Sure. Of course

I can. I don't think my debate with Dan Barker has been viewed by the gentlemen that were critiquing my presuppositionalism, but if you've seen the debate that we did a number of years ago, what was that?

2004, 2008, somewhere around there. I forget what it was. Sometime in the last decade. Not this decade, but a decade before.

Yes. Yeah. What I did in that debate is

I presented evidence. For example, I went through some of the incredible complication and design that is inherent in the very cells of our body.

I talked about how the mitochondria produce power and all that type of stuff.

It's fascinating stuff. There's probably even better videos than there was back then to talk about the mitochondria and the function of the cell and the production of energy and the fact that it's so plainly designed.

The production of adenosine triphosphate from ADP and using literally mechanical rotating engines in our mitochondria to do this.

It's just fascinating. It's awesome. But I did not present that evidence in the context that a classical or evidential apologist would.

I said, now I'm not inviting you to sit as judge over this information.

I'm presenting it as evidence of the fact that your worldview is incoherent and inconsistent and that this fits with my worldview, not with your worldview.

So I made it very plain before I even presented the material that I was not inviting

Dan Barker or the audience to continue sitting in the place of judgment of God.

I had already made the statement God will judge you. You don't get to judge

God. And in light of that, here is evidence of the fact that you are stealing from God's world and pretending that you're not doing it.

2009. I had said 2008, so that was fairly close. 2009. So presuppositionalists repeatedly say all evidence is

God's evidence. And it is. The fundamental, foundational difference is that theological truth that we derive from Reformed theology that speaks to who

God is and therefore tells us that we cannot simply present some kind of vague deity as something to move toward, but that we need to be, from the beginning, honest and open in saying that the

Christian proclamation is that the triune God created you and I.

That's why we can have this conversation. That's why we can have laws of logic by which to reason with one another.

And that's also why we can have true and accurate knowledge of who God is because he has revealed himself, not only in the universe around us, but particularly in Scripture and then in fulfillment of the prophecies of that Scripture in the person of Jesus Christ in the clearest, most amazing fashion.

So we can know, not just guess, at the character of God. And that you, made in the image of God, have no right to be sitting in a position of judgment upon the one who made you.

This is the foolishness of a cup that on the very bottom it says, made by, sitting there saying, well,

I'm going to judge whether there was one who ever made cups at all, let alone me.

When you recognize that you're made in the image of God, that you have a particular purpose, a particular function, then you don't have the right to pretend that you can judge whether your creator actually exists or not.

And so it was said a number of times that, you know,

I was not giving, my review of William Lane Craig was meant to be taken within the context of nearly two decades of review of William Lane Craig.

And so, as a result,

I left myself open, I suppose, to criticism because I didn't give a lot of the foundational stuff.

Because I've been doing this for decades. And so it was meant to be taken in that context, and in the review, the rest of that context was not included.

That needed to be there. But, what

I was trying to communicate is that when I talk about men judging

God, the point is, will we as Christians, by our approach and by our words, encourage the continued stance of judgment on the part of a creature of his creator, or will we, by the very way we approach, and by the very way we speak, and by the very way we present evidence, make it very clear that the evidence judges the sinner, not the sinner judging

God. That's the issue.

And the non -reformed person cannot go here. Because this would be suicidal.

The only way for this methodology to work is what? If the Holy Spirit of God is actually able to bring about regeneration.

If you're appealing to man as an autonomous creature, you can't be a presuppositionalist.

It's just not possible. Oh, I've seen, believe me, I've seen people reasoning presuppositionally as non -reformed people.

They just can't do it consistently. There comes a point where they've got to stop and begin to appeal to the autonomous man.

But they see how incoherent the creature is when he, for example, tries to judge

God and judge God's goodness when his worldview has no basis for him to even define what good and bad is.

So, just as the lost person is borrowing from a

Christian worldview, and we want to point that out to them, the Arminian apologist will borrow from our theology long enough to use presuppositionalism before putting it back away again.

And he's just as inconsistent. I'm saying that if we truly want to honor

God and we truly believe that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, then we will seek to do apologetics in such a way that is consistent with God's revelation and trust the results to Him.

That's the tough part. But I recognize, yes, man is judging

God. I want to, by my every word, by my stance, by my expressions, by the way

I present my argumentation, to cut that excuse off and say, you can't do that.

You can't go there. That's vitally important. Vitally important.

And so that's why I'm a presuppositionalist. That's why I think that a consistent application of Romans 1 at this point is vitally important.

Now, at some point in the future, not sure when, since I'm now preaching on Sunday at Apology of Church, but at some point, we're going to do a study of Acts 17.

That came up frequently. And I really think that my comments on that were badly misunderstood and badly taken out of context.

We want to take a look at Acts 17 and other encounters in Paul's life.

Was there something you wanted to add? Oh. I have a couple questions. Well, we're out of time, but make it quick.

I'll make it quick. First of all, I noticed a couple of what I thought were assumptions on their part, and I want to ask you directly.

Can the presuppositional apologist use evidence in their approach to witnessing?

Like I just said, I presented evidence in the debate with Barker. I just placed it within the context of using it to demonstrate the incoherence of their worldview.

So the assumption that is commonly made, I hear it all the time, so do you, that we're strictly restricted to using this presuppositional angle, and that's it, no evidence is allowed.

False. False. Okay. Is the presuppositionalist allowed to use what they would refer to as a philosophical argument or reasoning?

Well, of course, but again, the issue is if I present, and this was one of the issues that I was going to talk about, and that is at one point in my review,

I made reference to a place where I believe you can see the connection between what

I think is a valid theistic argument and presuppositionalism.

And it's in the form of something called the principle of sufficient reason. I've gone over this in a program before, we're going to do it again in the future, but the point is there was such a focus upon going after me personally that they did not understand what it is

I was arguing. So there are theistic arguments that are valid if the principle of sufficient reason is valid, and the principle of sufficient reason is actually a part of presuppositionalism.

It's part of what makes the presuppositional. It flows from the fact that God is God and we are

His creation. So yes, we can make arguments. The problem is those philosophical arguments only make sense within a

Christian worldview. Right, hence the issue or the question of whether or not theology is a subset of philosophy or vice versa.

Well, look, anybody can make the argument that as soon as you open your mouth you're doing philosophy. Well, the issue that I raised is what has preeminence?

The revelation of God, which is His self -revelation of Himself, or our reasoning capacity as creatures?

I think the fact that we are passive recipients of His revelation make it very plain that it's theology that determines philosophy, not

Deuteronomy. And then my last point, because I know we need to get going, but I personally observe on the other side what

I believe to be a lot of dependence in argumentation on the natural. And I believe, my observation in the presuppositional approach is a recognition being vital to argument of a recognition of the supernatural.

That the Holy Spirit is involved here, that God is at work here, and that the arguments that you put forward utilize that and employ that and recognize that's a real thing.

If you're going to get stuck in, I can only make reasoned defense from a naturalistic perspective, you're not doing

Christian witnessing. Right, yeah, and that raises the whole issue of the role of natural theology, issues along those lines.

We believe in natural theology. If anyone would like to read something between now and then, there is a article, it is available online, if you look up Westminster Seminary and Nature and Scripture.

It's called Nature and Scripture. It's from back in the 40s, but Van Til was very much involved in the writing of it.

You'll get a good idea. It's on the complicated side, goes a little deep, but it's, if you wanted that kind of reading, that would be available to you there.

So once again, appreciate prayers for my fellow elder

Jeff Durbin. I'm going to wrap up here and head to the hospital, and obviously if you are connected at all,

I'm sure we will be posting updates on the Apologia website, the

Facebook page and stuff like that, and we'll let you know what's going on. And as far as the program goes next week,

I don't know what's going to happen. I am scheduled to be in California doing many hours of question and answer work with Mark Spence and the folks at Living Waters, and that's going to be all day long.

So I don't know whether we're going to be able to work. About the only way

I could do it is if I put my phone on the dashboard and do one of those live

Facebook things while driving down the road that some people do. And I honestly don't know when else we'd do it unless we had to do like a late night type thing, which

Rich really isn't into that type of thing. So we'll see. We'll see what happens, but we'll keep in touch with you.