Sudden Clarity of Black Racism (Louis Farrakhan) Then Jonathan McLatchie on the Noetic Effect of Sin

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line, James White along with you on a Tuesday afternoon along with the pride and joy of the French nation, Rich Pierce on the other side of the The only man in the city of Phoenix that can sing the French National Anthem in French.

You'll have to ask him to do that sometime. I'd like to see that, that'd be sort of funny. Anyways, what? Anyway, wow, the cello maker in Texas just pointed something out. I just popped over to the ERLC Twitter feed.

If you don't know what the ERLC is, it's supposed to be the religious liberty arm of the SVC. It's supposed to be the people that are actually defending religious liberty and stuff like that. But what it is is the woke, the Southern Baptist Convention funded woke group headed by Dr. Moore, of course, and who himself has gone through quite the evolution over the past 10 years, as so many other people have.

But I started looking through this thing and I mean, we've got some serious issues. I mean, California is going back into lockdown. Last week, you weren't allowed to sing, now you're not allowed to meet.

And there is a picture of a worship service in one of these ERLC tweets. And it's just, you know, six people in a massive room with all these chairs empty and covered with stuff and this kind of thing.

Anyway, you would think there would be something questioning this and going, hey, wait a minute. The facts don't seem to back this up at all. But no, I'm just scrolling down and it's just a huge celebration of wokeness.

I mean, that's just all it is. It's just woke, woke, woke stuff. Yeah, here's that picture of this church and with the temperature check thing and all the rest of stuff and big old signs, you know, six feet.

By the way, that six feet thing is completely random. It is completely random. You know, they do not do that in Europe. In some places, it's four feet, four and a half feet. I've heard as short as three feet in Europe.

Yeah, right. It's probably due to being meters or something like that. Yeah, which they have in France, too, as you would well know. But but it's completely random. I mean, it's just it's just something that someone grabbed and said, let's let's use this.

And it. OK, I finally broke down and I watched V for Vendetta. Now it's it. I don't know what it's rated. It had profanity in it and stuff like that. But what was creepy? Because it was the whole underlying thing of how this government took power was.

I mean, it's set in 2020, first of all. And secondly. This totalitarian government took control in London. Through the exact exactly what we're seeing, exactly what we're saying, it's just like. And when did they make this movie?

Wow. OK. And there are some interesting references to United States being in civil war and all the rest of stuff. And it was probably sort of like 1984 fake stuff. But it was interesting to see all that stuff.

But so anyway, it just sort of fits in with what I'm with, what I'm seeing on this stuff. But it's it's it's just so woke that, you know, seven hours ago, it is our calling as citizens of heaven in the United States to fight for truth, justice, righteousness and peace, the glory of God for the good of our neighbors.

That sounds wonderful, isn't it? And it's a article about how covid -19 disproportionately affects minorities. And so, yeah, there you go. OK, Jeff, I'll do my best for you, bro. I wish I could turn the notification of that off.

I'll just have to turn that off. But OK, Jeff, gotcha. I'm not sure why you're doing that. But anyway, so Jeff's listening and I'm I'm I'm helping Jeff out right now. So that's a that's a that's a good thing.

Anyway, yeah, ERLC, man, I'll tell you, I fully understand why churches that resist the neo-Marxist woke isms taking over the SBC don't want their money going to the ERLC because it's sort of like sending, you know, be like sending money to Pravda during during the age of the USSR is the same same stuff basically going on there.

And then earlier today, earlier today, U .S. Conference of Mayors. Do you see this U .S. Conference of Mayors support you sitting down six point two quadrillion in reparations payments to black Americans.

Now, if you wanted if you wanted clear evidence that that the mayors of our cities don't have any concept of basic economics. This is yeah, this is this is where it is. I don't believe that there are six point two quadrillion dollars in entire monetary existence in the universe.

And that includes the Federation, which we haven't run into yet. What? Yes, the Leonard Nimoy. Someone I was just putting away today, but someone sent me one million dollar Leonard Nimoy dollars. Thank you very much.

That's what we're that's reparations will be printed in in Spock millions. I'm not I'm not sure what you're going to get out of that. But seriously, U .S. Conference of Mayors support six point two quadrillion.

So that would be six thousand two hundred trillion. OK, so, again, I do not believe that all the economies in the world together have ever produced six point two quadrillion. And so you're just you're just like, who came up with this?

Well, you've got Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from from Texas and and, of course, Senator Cory Booker. Neither one of which have ever demonstrated that they could ever balance checkbook if their life depended on big time.

Except I can't say that. So anyway, Jackson Lee submitted the bill in the House last year to, quote, begin the long delayed process of atonement for slavery. End quote. Though the proposal did not receive as much attention a year ago, recent Black Lives Matter protests and riots have thrust the issue into the spotlight.

Oh, I bet. So here's the number. The six quadrillion number was calculated through a complex process that attempts to account for unpaid slave hours, a fee for the cost of discrimination and additional penalties for massacres plus interest.

The authors of the estimate conclude. Ready for this? That would amount to approximately one hundred and fifty one million dollars to each black descendant of slaves. So every black descendant of slaves becomes an NBA player and a cost of.

This is serious. I'm reading this. Eighteen point nine six million dollars for every taxpayer. So you get to owe nineteen million dollars to pay the reparations there. They're talking about that. That's why I was saying I've I'm not sure how many I've got here, but I'm paying mine out in in Spock bucks.

I've got mine right there. There's you can have all the Spock bucks you want. But yeah, the U .S. Conference of Mayors, which tells us that our cities are completely gone. It's done. Just done now. That's laughable.

Obviously, it's laughable on every on every possible level. This whole movement, that movement is laughable on every possible level because of the reality of history. These people don't understand history.

They don't realize that all of us could demand reparations for what was done to our ancestors as far back as we want to push. All of us, including blacks, have slave owners in our ancestry. All of us, including whites, have slaves in our ancestry.

Everybody that that's that's the reality of history. These people never read about Alexander the Great. They don't know anything about the Caesars. They don't know anything about the role of of slavery in every nation on the planet.

Every single continent. It's been everywhere. And so you want to start doing the reparations thing and everybody is going to have to pay it and receive it all at the same time. And no one can figure it out.

It's impossible. So we look at something like that and we just go right. Six point two quadrillion dollars. Right. But here's what's scary. I also saw Adam Ford posted a clip from Nick Cannon. I'm going to get this plugged in appropriately here.

And I have brought it out to the whole screen here. Now, here's here's the problem. I forget where I was at. I remember that. It's interesting. I remember what the church looked like inside. I don't remember what city it was in, what state it was in or anything else.

But sometime, maybe as long as 14 years ago or so, I forget when it was. I was at a conference with Votie Balcombe and Votie was asked to speak. About some of the cultic movements popular in black America, not just America, but primary areas.

Specifically, you know, the beginnings of the black Hebrews, white stuff, and especially, especially the nation of Islam. And Minister Farrakhan, Louis Farrakhan, the most racist man you will ever hear speaking from platforms in the U .S. government.

But again, we've been being told for a long time now blacks can't be racist. So that has produced a tremendous amount of black racism, a huge amount of black racism. And Farrakhan, I mean, Farrakhan teaches people that white people are demons.

We're demons. So our lives have no value. We're demons. That's how it works. So there has been warnings about this kind of stuff for a long time. But most of us are sort of like, that's, that's out there.

You know, let's support the black ministers that are trying to fight this stuff. And, and, you know, we've done our, our part in dealing. I mean, I've talked about Farrakhan in the past and I've exposed him along with James Cone.

And of course, Elder Aka still has a twitch today from what happened only a couple of years ago when we debated. So we've done some stuff in Black Hebrew Israelites and things like that. All of a sudden, remember last week I read from the young lady up in Canada about melanin.

Now, let me just mention this. I don't talk about this a lot. But when I was in college, I was a double major. I was, I started my initial intention when I started at Grand Canyon College was medical missions.

I was, I was going to become a medical doctor and do missions work. That's, that's what I was thinking, you know, as a freshman, I wasn't even married yet. I got married between my freshman and sophomore years.

And so I was, I completed a biology major and I was department fellow in anatomy physiology. So I majored in biology, Bible, and I minored in Greek. Interesting stuff. And I've told the stories about the day I was, I was demonstrating our cadavers to high school students.

And I looked at my watch and like, ah, I'm late for Greek. Thankfully, Telescience building was right next to Fleming classroom building. And so I just ran over and ran into class and it was second or third year, second year, I think.

But I forgot to take my smock off. And so I've got that white lab coat type thing. And I've been demonstrating the cadavers and we, we, we preserved our cadavers, not with cold storage, but chemical storage.

Something called phenol, which they don't use anymore because it's been said to cause cancer. Yay. So, so, but phenol, once you've smelled phenol once, you'll never forget what phenol smells like. And so I sit down, I'm getting my Greek text out and I'm noticing the guys are sort of, sort of moving, moving their chairs away from me.

And my dear brother, Mike Baird, Dr. Baird, the professor who put up with me for seven years said, Brother James, if you would like, we will wait for you to go back to the Telescience building and deposit your odiferous garment.

And I'm like, oh, sorry. Because after a while you don't smell it yourself. I mean, those, those olfactory nodes just burn out. There's, they're, they're gone. Anyway, so I was, I know a little something.

I mean, that was a while back, but I was Department Fellow in Atom Physiology. I knew my stuff. And so I know a little something about melanin. And I know a little something about the mechanisms that produce melanin.

Everyone has melanin. Unless you're an albino. I mean, an albino has a genetic issue to where you, you don't have pigmentation really at all. There are some genetic abnormalities that would keep a person from having any melanin.

But melanin is extremely important. Melanin is a clear example of the fact that God has created us to live upon this planet. The Neo-Darwinian micro evolutionary advocate is going to say that by accident, melanin was produced in some ancestral creature of some type.

And now here's, here's the problem from the evolutionary perspective. To produce something places more of a tax upon a system. You have to, you have to get more food. You have to process more energy. So if you all of a sudden can produce something and it has no benefit to you, that's deleterious and your genes are going to get wiped out of the gene pool.

Being able to produce something as amazing as melanin, in of itself by some random mutation is pretty freaky weird. But you have to do that millions of times in the Darwinian timeline. It's the luckiest timeline that's ever, you could ever, ever think of.

I mean, from the Darwinian perspective, people have been throwing snake eyes for billions of years. They really have. That's the only way it could work. But anyway, the idea is that you all of a sudden you got this melanin stuff and lo and behold, melanin helps to protect bodily systems from some of the most harmful rays of the sun.

Now, from our perspective, God designed it that way. Knew that we would need that capacity. But some people needed a whole lot more than other people needed. And that's simply due to how much you are exposed to solar radiation.

So everybody knows, us white people know, that you can get yourself a decent tan during the summer. But during the winter, it all goes away. I mean, I have had some serious biker tans. And if you've seen biker legs, you know, there's this one point where cycling shorts stop and you get real dark below that.

I try to avoid that as much as possible because I understand the destructive force of ultraviolet radiation. Anybody in Arizona does. Anybody in Arizona who's ever left like a plastic tarp in your backyard during the summer?

By the end of the summer, it's gone. I mean, you can just go... One of my... I've put up those sail shades. They're only going to last a couple of seasons. I'm going to have to replace them. Because ultraviolet radiation simply destroys stuff.

And one of them came down because I had a rope on one end. The rope was destroyed by the sun. It hasn't rained. So it's not that stuff. It was solar radiation. You need the protection of melanin. But if you live in northern climes and you're, for example, indoors for most of the winter because it's too cold to be outdoors, it's a waste of energy, of your bodily energy, to produce melanin.

There's no reason to have it. It is deleterious to you to have that excess energy going into producing that melanin. And so, anyway, you understand that melanin is a wonderful thing. But it's a part of how much you need, so it depends on where you are.

And people who live in particular areas where they are constantly exposed to solar radiation need to have the maximum amounts of it. Well, all of a sudden, remember last week? Melanin connects you to cosmic energy.

And melanin is all of a sudden the most important thing on the planet. Melanin makes you intelligent. And melanin makes you brave. And melanin makes you a god. And all of a sudden, the wacky, crazy, disgusting racism of Louis Farrakhan is now mainstream and acceptable.

Acceptable in our society because of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. So, here is an example. Let's listen to this clip. Nick Cannon. And just behold what is happening in our society.

Let's go to what it really is then. When we talk about the power of melanated people.

When we talk about who we really are. Everybody, except for an albino person, is melanated. Just so you know. It's just a matter of how much.

Guys, in understanding that melanin is so powerful and it connects us in a way that the reason why they...

Melanin has no connective power. There is no scientific evidence that melanin communicates with other melanin in some other person's body. There is no connective power. It is a filter for ultraviolet radiation.

Turning it into some magical woo-woo stuff is destructive. And racist, by the way.

Fear black. The reason why they fear is because the lack that they have of it. So then when you see what Dr. Francis C. Wellesley talked about.

Is that... So now you see how these falsehoods... You start developing quote-unquote scholarship. It's not really scholarship. It's not peer-reviewed. It's not defensible. But... We've also been hearing people talk about decolonizing science.

And getting rid of the Western emphasis upon things like logic. Issues like that. That fits into all of this stuff. Fear in that...

Genetic annihilation. That deficiency of when you have a person that has the lack of pigment. The lack of melanin. Right. That they know that they will be annihilated. So therefore, however they got the power.

They have the lack of compassion.

Melanin comes with compassion. Melanin comes with compassion. Think about that for a second. Melanin comes with compassion. A mechanism for protecting your body against solar radiation is somehow connected to compassion.

So when we see... When we see what happened in... Well, Siberia, for example. Well-known as a place where Russia and the Soviet Union sent people to die. Okay? And so... They didn't have enough melanin, so they had no compassion.

Okay. How about all of the constant tribal warfare in Africa? Where, to this day, tribes kill each other. Murder each other. And in fact, in some places, eat each other. How about the people of color in the South Pacific?

Where you still have that kind of tribal warfare going on. Lots of melanin. No connection to compassion. No. You see, this is connected to a very materialistic view of man. Where you have chemicals determining these things.

Has nothing to do with the heart. Has nothing to do with the soul. This is anti-Christian. Anti-theistic. And from a scientific perspective, absurd on a level that's extremely difficult to express.

Extremely difficult to express. Melanin comes with soul, that we call it. We call it soul. We soul brothers and sisters. That's the melanin that connects us. So the people that don't have it have... Are...

Are... And I'm going to say this carefully. Are a little less... And... Catch that?

Little less. A little less. Now, we rightly identify anyone who says that black people are less than white people as disgusting racists who should be rejected. This man is a racist who needs to be rejected.

It's the same thing. If you can't say that, you no longer have any basis whatsoever for ever objecting to real, sinful, destructive racism. Because this is real, sinful, destructive racism. It's based on ignorance.

But it's still a matter of the heart. It's a matter of the soul. Now, he's been lied to.

It needs to be corrected. But it's still racism. And where the term actually comes from, because I'm bringing it all the way back around to Minister Farrakhan, to where... Catch that? To whom?

Minister Farrakhan. Remember, Farrakhan says white people are demons. They're subhuman demons. That's where this is coming. This has been in the community for decades. White devils. White devils, yeah.

That's been in the community for decades. It is a form of black supremacy. It has no advantage over the Ku Klux Klan or anything that came out of that time period at all. It's just as bad. It's just as reprehensible.

It needs to be condemned just as clearly. It needs to be refuted just as clearly as anything like that. So there's no difference between this and a Nazi skinhead doing the same thing in reverse. It's all lies.

And it's racism. The real, ugly kind of racism, which you can't talk about anymore because the term has been redefined to mean all sorts of other stuff, like, well, you're not a Marxist. And that allows this stuff.

Notice the communist symbols in the background. That allows this stuff to then do its thing.

They may not have the compassion or when they were sent to the mountains of Caucasus, when they didn't have the power of the sun, that the sun then started to deteriorate them. So then they're acting out of fear.

They're acting out of low self-esteem. They're acting out of a deficiency. So therefore, the only way that they can act is evil. The only way they can they have to rob, steal, rape, kill and fight a flight in order to survive.

Exactly. So then these people who didn't have what we had. And when I say we, I speak of the melanated people. They had to be savages. They had to be barbaric. They had because they're in these Nordic mountains.

They're in these rough, torrential environments. So they're acting as animals. Right. So they're the ones that are actually closer to animals. They're the ones that are actually the true savages. And then they built up such this, I don't want to say warrior, but they built up such this conquering, barbaric mentality.

Okay. That's all I've got in that clip. I'm not sure why that was.

Wow. I mean, you have to, of course, completely rewrite all of history. So Leonardo da Vinci, he was an animal. Just like, you have to completely ignore the history of Europe. And has every people had their savages?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. In many instances, those people are, for some reason, combined tremendous genius. I'm thinking again, I just, like I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I just finished a book on Alexander the Great.

Wow. It is hard to hold Alexander the Great together. Because I think you could probably argue there has never been a greater military genius or a more brave warrior than Alexander the Great. He would not ask his men to do anything he wouldn't do.

He led his men to battle. He was in the middle of himself. He was wounded. I don't know how many times. Just an incredible warrior. And as far as a tactician, his battles are studied to this day in war colleges around the world.

He was brilliant. But he was as evil as the day is long. Enslaved hundreds of thousands of people. Killed hundreds of thousands of people. And extended the Greek Empire all the way to India. Nobody has ever done what Alexander the Great has done.

Did that have something to do with melanin? Nope, didn't have anything to do with melanin. Anybody who says that had to do with melanin is completely out of their mind. Completely out of their mind. Has nothing to do with melanin at all.

He defeated people with little melanin. He defeated people with lots of melanin. He invaded Egypt. Conquered Egypt. He defeated Africans and Arabs and Indians and Caucasoids. He defeated the rainbow. He really did.

These people don't know anything about history. Or all they've heard is the stupidity, the racist stupidity of Louis Farrakhan. And they simply believe it. They simply believe it. And we have had black brothers fighting this stuff in the black community all along.

And they've probably felt they're pretty much alone. And part of it is because most of us just couldn't even... We can't wrap our minds around... Because I don't... I've never met... Honestly, I've never met a white person that thinks like this.

In reverse. I just haven't. Are they out there? Yeah, but they ain't gonna have to be talking to me because they know better. But it's all over the black community. And that's black supremacy. Black racism.

But we're told today there's no such thing as black racism. You can play it. And I will be attacked for saying there's black racism when you listen to people saying white people are closer to animals.

They're savages. They're lesser than us. Well, that's not black racism. Yes, it is. By any meaningful definition of the word, it is. That's just stunning. See, the reparations thing is just silly. Because there ain't that much money in the world.

This results in people dying. This results... Unless God intervenes, this will result in death in the streets. It will. It will. Little less. Closer to animals. True savages. Acting out of a deficiency.

Where your body actually regulates how much energy it allocates to producing stuff that shields you from the sun. Your body is actually smart enough to know. Well, it's not the body that's smart enough to know.

It's the mechanisms that were built into the body by the Creator. Or the Neo-Darwins will say, that developed over millions and millions and millions of years, unguided, complete accident. There you go.

Wow. That's just... And Ken, Ken1689, good brother on Twitter, he is melanated, as to use terminology, had said in a tweet, this is the fruit of sin, the teachings of Farrakhan. There is a time when blacks were called savages, animals, less than human, and this was deemed racist.

Well, the woke have been given a pass to call white people closer to animals and true savages. Fascinating times. Yeah. Fascinating sad times is really what that's all about. Amazing stuff to see that kind of thing.

It really, really is. Um... I don't see any... Oh, okay. Daryl Harrison. No kidding. Just look at the major cities. I didn't even bother to look how many people died in Chicago this weekend, how many people died in New York this weekend.

Yeah, well, the nice thing is nobody died of COVID in New York, but many more people died from this stuff. Might tell you a little something about the lack of priorities or the upside-down priorities today.

What I think of when I watch that clip... The one I played? I hesitate to bring this up because I know what happened to him, and you probably might remember, too. Do you remember Jimmy the Greek Snyder?

Um, yeah. Early 1980s. He was asked a question, and his answer, he was never to be heard from in media again. Yeah. But he was a white man giving a less racist answer.

A racist answer, but a less racist. Wasn't he asked why black athletes succeeded so well or something?

Yes. And he tied it back to the breeding that took place during slavery. Ah. Okay? And he was never... He was drummed out of media forever. Yeah, most people never heard him again. Never again. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yeah, I hope, I honestly hope that that clip goes far and wide. It needs to. You know what the other thing is?

No? Do you know who has Nick Cannon's old job right now?

I don't... I'll be honest with you, I recognize the name, but I don't know who he is.

Terry Crews has his job now. Really? What was his job? He was the MC on America's Got Talent. And Terry Crews is now. Oh. Well, for now. And then Nick's now over on.

A Masked Singer. Oh, that's where I've seen him. That's where you've seen him before. Okay. I'm not real good with names of stars and who's doing what on what programs. I don't spend enough time in front of a TV to follow that stuff.

But that rings a bell now. Yeah, that rings a bell. Appreciate that. Okay. We will... I will try later today or tomorrow to get posted the links for Friday's roundtable discussion slash debate where...

What's that? I'm getting questions. Yeah, well, you should be. I think it's seven o 'clock my time. No, six o 'clock. Six o 'clock my time. I'll check out. But Friday, we're going to do a program on Thursday.

Well, I'm going to do two programs this week. It's going to be like a regular dividing line week for the first time in a long time. On Friday, though, you'll get to get a couple more hours in if you want because Friday evening is an apologetics roundtable slash debate.

And it will be live on YouTube similar to this. And it will involve four different positions, but I'll be perfectly honest with you, only three different positions on apologetics. Randall Rallister is going to be presenting his reformed epistemology perspective.

I don't really see that as an apologetic methodology. I'm not really sure how it fits in, but he's going to be one of the four. And then you've got Jonathan McClatchy will be presenting evidentialism.

And Dr. Howell from SES. There's two Dr. Howells at SES, but the Dr. Howell that I had my dialogue with on presuppositionalism, whenever that was, that we went back there. I forget what year that was.

It's been in the past six years, somewhere around there, I think. Anyway, he's going to be presenting what's called the classical or Thomas Aquinas style perspective. And then I am the panel's presuppositionalist.

So that's going to be, I think, really interesting. I'm going to be doing it from home. I'm going to be trying to set some things up tonight and testing some things to see how it's going to work because we're all going to be on Zoom and then that's going to be fed into a some way of getting that onto YouTube, probably similar to the way how we do things when we do the same type of stuff.

And so that's going to be Friday evening, a comparison of these forms of apologetics. And so I hope folks will be looking forward to that. I'm certainly focused upon that right now. That's an important thing to be preparing for.

And so one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to sort of preemptively respond to one of the folks that I'll be speaking with. Jonathan McClatchy wrote an article, says updated July 7th, so it's fairly recently.

And it is entitled The Noetic Effects of Sin and Apologetic Methodology. Now, noetic effect, of course, the nous is the mind in Greek. And so noetic effect is the impact upon the mind of man of sin. And what you're going to hear coming up over and over again, certainly come out of my mouth during this discussion, is that theology determines apologetics.

And therefore, the reason I'm presuppositionalist is because when I apply the same methodologies of interpretation, that's what I come up with when I'm also presenting the Doctrines of Grace. We just started a Doctrines of Grace series at Apologia.

Jeff started Sunday night. Going to be continuing that this coming Sunday and then the Sunday after that, I'll be joining in that particular series as we present the Doctrines of Grace. Eventually, Jeff is going to get back to Matthew.

But it's just simply, we've had so many people joining us and new folks that it's good to make sure people understand where we're coming from and stuff like that. And so anyway, the fundamental assertion I'm going to be making over and over again is the necessity of recognizing that we have to start with what the Bible teaches about who God is, who Christ is, and who man is in doing apologetics.

We cannot, since the Bible teaches us there is no such thing as a neutral ground, since the Bible presents the myth of neutrality, since the Bible teaches us the radical idea that everything that exists, exists because God created it and defined it, then our apologetic methodology cannot abandon that foundation out of some misguided idea that mankind will stop being a rebel sinner and will stop suppressing the knowledge of God and will just listen to our arguments from an unbiased perspective.

We have to recognize that's simply not going to happen. And therefore, those presuppositions that are a part of the rebellion of the sinner's worldview have to be dealt with. They have to be kept in mind.

We cannot grant them a standing that they should not have. So, the noetic effect of sin is simply a recognition of the Biblical teaching that the Fall impacted all of man. When we talk about total depravity, we are not talking about depravity that results in man being the worst he can be.

We are not saying that the image of God is destroyed in man. It is altered, it is diminished, it is warped, but it is not destroyed and done away with. It's common for Reformed people to be misrepresented in saying that the image of God is gone.

It is not. But what does happen is you have consistent rebellion. You have the suppression of the knowledge of God. And so, when I was reading Jonathan's article, I was a little taken aback, to be honest with you.

Let me read some of it here for you so you can get a sense. He says, Proponents of the presuppositional school of apologetics typically stress the vitality of reckoning with the noetic effects of sin, that is, the effect of the Fall upon the mind from the Greek word for mind, nous.

Ventilians argue that sin has corrupted man's ability to properly comprehend the things of God and understand spiritual things. Well, that's what Paul says in 1 Corinthians, and Romans. In particular, sin is understood to have impacted our ability to reason and think rationally, especially in relation to God.

Well, if you're constantly suppressing the knowledge of God, that's correct. Of the apologetic systems, the noetic effect of sin is emphasized only by presuppositionalists. Presuppositionalists. Now, I would question that.

I have thankfully talked with evidentialists, classicalists. There's a lot of people that don't really make much of a distinction between the two. But I've talked to a number of people that do recognize the noetic effect of sin and do recognize that apart from the reparative work of the Spirit, maybe in some type of prevenient grace-type idea, but still, some supernatural impact of the work of the Spirit of God, you're not going to get past that fundamental rebellion that the sinner is in.

Cornelius Van Til gives the following analogy to illustrate what he means by the noetic effects of sin. Now, what's interesting here is I want you... He quotes from Van Til. I'm going to read you Van Til's example.

It's one of the ones that's well-known. If you've read Van Til, you've already read this one. But I want you to hear what Van Til said and then notice how Jonathan McClatchy interprets it, because he does not...

He misinterprets what Van Til says. And it seems extremely common, and it goes back to your theology. Theology determines apologetics. And it goes back to what you believe about man. So listen to what Van Til said.

The intellect of fallen man may be compared to a buzz saw that is sharp and shining, ready to cut the boards that come to it. Let us say that a carpenter wishes to cut 50 boards for the purpose of laying the floor of a house.

He has marked his boards. He has set his saw. He begins at one end of the mark on the board, but he does not know that his seven-year-old son has tampered with the saw and changed its set. The result is that every board he saws is cut slantwise, and that's unusual because too short, except at the point where the saw first made its contact with the wood.

As long as the set of the saw is not changed, the result will always be the same. So also, whenever the teachings of Christianity are presented to the natural man, they will be cut according to the set of the sinful human personality.

Okay, so Vantilla is saying is that in that set of the saw, if you don't have that set to where it's going to cut straight, it's going to consistently miss the mark. It's going to produce something that's going to be twisted and warped and basically unusual, and it's going to do so consistently over time.

That's his analogy. That's what he's saying, and that's Paul's point in Romans chapter 1. The rebellion of man in sin impacts all of human thought. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

Their foolish hearts were darkened. That darkening of the heart is the very inner aspect of man. There's nothing more personal than that. So notice what Jonathan says. He says, I would argue, however, that while the imago Dei is effaced by human sin, it is not erased.

Stop. Vantilla never said it was. We don't believe it was. I know Geisler said we said that, and I've heard lots of it. It is a common myth. It's a common myth. We do not teach that the image of God has been erased, and Vantilla didn't say anything about erasure of the image of God.

He's talking about the set of the saw is the function that presuppositions have in the determination of a worldview. And so if you have a person who is suppressing the knowledge of God, and there are many ways of doing that.