Apologia TV | Conspiracy Theories

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What's up guys, welcome back to another episode of Apologia TV. I'm Jeff Durbin. They call me the Ninja. That's Luke the

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Bear. What up? And that's Joy the Girl. Hello. We're right now in the studios at Apologia Studios in Phoenix, Arizona.

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You can get more episodes at ApologiaStudios .com, ApologiaStudios .com, and I want to thank everybody who's watching this right now.

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If you're watching this right now, it's because you are probably All Access, and being All Access, you participate with us in ministry, you make everything we do possible.

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So first and foremost, thank you to all of you guys. And let's jump in right away.

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Let's do this right away. So we are going to talk today about conspiracy theories -ish, right?

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Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna talk about just about - It's kind of in that vein. Okay. So you go ahead and introduce us. It's more of an episode about how you know what you know, and being able to defend what you know.

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Very good. And what is not - Ways that are not acceptable in determining what you know or defending what you know.

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Right. So let's lay some foundations, right? So it's an epistemological question. It is a 50 cent word, epistemology, just means the theory of knowledge.

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And any person that goes to even community college first year, if you study philosophy or logic, or the philosophy of religion, you're going to study epistemology.

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And that is just, how do you know what you know? And so Christians have a particular view of how we know what we know, because we have a revelational epistemology, which means that we believe that we know with certainty what we know, because God has disclosed it.

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He has told us about himself, and he has revealed himself. He has spoken in the world.

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He's given us his word. And so if you were to ask a Christian a question like, what's that over there?

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That's a human being. Well, what relevance is there to the world and to the universe and to me, to that right there?

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I could say, well, that's an image bearer of God. Someone says, well, how do you know that? You just sort of do some dissecting and you found out inside there, there was a little sign that said, hello, image of God.

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Is that an empirical observation? You observed?

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Feels human. Yeah. It feels like image of God. So there's an epistemological view like empiricism that says that you only know what you know based upon observation.

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It has to be testable. You have to observe it. There's another view of epistemology that says rationalism has to be logical and reasonable.

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Some people have a view of epistemology that says pragmatism. It has to work. And so you have differing views of epistemology.

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Christians view epistemology through the lens of scripture that we know we know because God's said it. Now that might seem awfully

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Sunday school like, but let me tell you, it's philosophically devastating to say that you know what you know because God's revealed himself to us.

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Now that's how we know we know. God has told us in his word. Now this was interesting here too, is that reformed

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Christians in particular tend to say sola scriptura. So and what we think about with in terms of sola scriptura is we think about typically spiritual things, church related things like the scriptures alone are the only are the sole infallible rule of faith and practice.

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And what we say that to is typically and say a fight with like a cult or with Rome, we would say this is the standard, not your prophet's secret revelation and not even the confessions in history and the decrees of the church to any degree.

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We say it's what the word of God says. That's the standard. That's a litmus test. So what we forget often is that sola scriptura is not simply a claim against Rome.

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Sola scriptura is an epistemological claim. It's saying that God is the principium. He's the source of all knowledge.

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He's the foundation of knowledge and he's the centerpiece of it all. So we reason from God outward.

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We don't reason from what's around us to God. We only know ourselves truly if we know first God and then we can know ourselves.

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So knowledge starts with God and then our knowledge is coordinated with it. So our knowledge, and this is big stuff here, but it's important, our knowledge is all derivative, right?

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God's knowledge is foundational. And so that's an epistemological claim.

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How do we know we know? Well, God has spoken. So for instance, how come I love my neighbor and don't beat my neighbor?

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There's two choices and people do both, by the way, people do both. As soon as I said, that's stupid.

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Well, not really because people do both. They love their neighbors and then sometimes people beat their neighbors.

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And so which one of those two do I have any knowledge about as with certainty that I'm supposed to be doing,

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I ought to be doing. And as a Christian, I say, I know that I'm going to love my neighbor as I love myself.

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So you're about to say something. Well, you just said something great. That is the reason why

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I wanted to do this episode. Okay. And it's kind of a weird episode to try and format. Right. But you just said something that's silly.

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Right. So everything. So, so we have, this is where conspiracy theories come into play in this episode.

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So we've done episodes on the flat earth theory and we, people were upset because we said that's silly.

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But the thing is, is that, sometimes when you're describing biblical principles or just, what the

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Bible says in general, that would be the response of another person who's listening to you talk.

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So why is the flat earth theory different from Christianity?

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Because the reaction to it being described could be the same.

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So why is it not the same? So if we were to start with sort of foundational things and examining flat earth theory, right?

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We would start, we would want to start with asking questions like, is this theory consistent with God's revelation of himself?

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That's always the starting point. Sometimes you don't know. Like the Bible, the

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Bible itself here, this is 66 different books written over a period of almost 2000 years with a bunch of different authors, about 40 different authors.

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And it's not an exhaustive textbook on all knowledge in the universe.

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Right. So for example, the Bible does not tell you about the chemical composition.

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That's not a license to pick and choose whatever you want. No, no, no, not by any means. That was not us delegitimizing the word.

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Yeah. Whatever here is certain is certain, but it's not a textbook on all knowledge. Like it doesn't give you the chemical composition of water.

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Right. It doesn't tell you in the book of Bubba chapter one, oh, that's H2O, right? You know, two parts of this.

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And so it doesn't do that. And so the question we first ask is what does the

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Bible say about this subject? Does the Bible speak to it? And the answer is with the flat earth stuff. Yeah, it actually does.

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The Bible does just describe the earth as a sphere or a globe or a circle.

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And then somebody says, yeah, but it also talks about the four corners of the earth and everything else is like, well, wait a second. There's a manner of speaking in the

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Bible. There's phenomenological language in the Bible that's not to be taken literally necessarily, like the way the course of the sun goes, you know, that sort of thing.

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We don't take that always literally and we're running out of time here. So what we're going to do is this finish answering this question on the other side, play some video clips for everybody, actually, and some interesting stuff having to do with aliens on the

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Joe Rogan podcast. It's actually fascinating stuff. But when you dig into it and you get into the question you're asking, is this actually true?

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The word of God has spoken to it already. And you begin to see the New Age sort of hooey in here. So stay with us.

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We'll be right back. Hi, this is

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Walter with Apology Radio. I want to ask for your good friends of ours to go on and click that button there and become my friends on the book face.

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ApologyRadio .com. Hey guys, welcome back to Apology TV. So we are today talking about, sorry about that, we're talking about conspiracy theories.

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We're talking about knowledge, epistemology. How do we know something to be true? And by the way, if you're checking out right now, you're like, oh, that just sounds like something

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I'm not interested in. You had better get interested in it because you're going to have this conflict your entire life in terms of how do you order your family?

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How do you live with your wife or live as a single person? How do you raise your children? How do you live in your job?

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And when you debate, say, with an atheist who denies Christ as God, this is foundational. How do you know what you know?

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So believe me, while some might say, well, that's just icky epistemology. I don't like that word flowing out of my mouth because I'm just not, you know,

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I'm just not like that. Trust me. This is like bottom line. I'm just not like that. Everyone is like that.

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Everyone on the planet. So I'm sorry, but yeah, I'm just not like that. That's not, it doesn't work.

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We're all like that. Yeah. We all say like, don't do that. And someone says, but why?

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Yeah. Well, you better have a reason. Yeah. We all have beliefs about things that we think are right or wrong. You watch the news and you see something awful that happens in the world and you revolt against it.

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You get indignant against it. And somebody says, why are you doing that? Well, doing what, what you just did there.

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You just peeled away from the television. Why'd you do that? Well, you better have an answer. Or yeah, or even in the, in the instance of this show, there's going to be things that you hear, like certain major events that have happened in US history that were inside jobs caused by the government.

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And you're going to go, what? No. And there's going to be like, you're supposed to have a reason.

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It's okay to say that's silly or just be like, or laugh at how ridiculous something is, but you should have a reason as to why you think those things.

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Right. Well, so what's the biblical basis? So we were just ending the last segment on flat earth stuff. Like of course, the first thing is we say, does the

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Bible speak to it? And I think with flat earth, you can demonstrate that. Yeah. It's, it's a fiction in terms of the flat earth model on like the things that they, they speculate on.