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Intro to Apologetics, and Ultimate Authority
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All right. So definition of apologetics. Reasoned arguments or writings in justification of something. Typically a theory or religious doctrine. The classical Greek word, apologia, referred to a formal speech or an explanation delivered in response to a charge.
So think of court when you think of the word apologetics. You are giving a defense for something in a formal setting. You're giving something that's well-reasoned. I can give a defense that just says, you're wrong.
That's a defense. But this is something different. This is a well-reasoned defense. The apostle Paul employs the term in his trial speech, Tefestus and Agrippa, when he says, I make my defense. That word defense there in Acts 26 .2 is the word apologia.
There's a cognate term for it. So a word that is joined to the word apologia is found in Philippians 1, 7, and 16, where Paul, again, it's defense. He's defending the gospel. And then in 1 Peter 3 .15, which we're going to be looking at, believers must be ready to give an answer for their faith.
The word also appears in a negative in Romans 1 .20. We're also going to be reading Romans 1. Unbelievers are without an apologetic. So here's how, right off the bat, just defining the word, we see something kind of come out here theologically.
Believers can have an apologetic. They can have a defense for their faith, people who know Jesus and are Christians. Unbelievers don't have that. In other words, this is very important. Any argument given against the God of Christianity is not really a valid argument.
And we haven't even got past the second slide. So this is going to be kind of the core of the presuppositional approach, which is what we're going to be going over in the next three sessions. And you'll see more of what that means as we go on.
But we're not used to thinking that way. So I think it's worth emphasizing over and over. The unbeliever does not have neutral ground with us. It's not like he's got facts, we've got facts, we can go reason together.
The unbeliever is, as the Bible says, dead in his trespasses and sins. So his reasoning faculties have been corrupted. So he can't give an argument that's actually going to be a valid argument for his position.
So very important to understand that. Why study apologetics? What's the purpose? What are some reasons for you guys coming out? Like why are you here tonight? I see a smirk over there. Because you got a chance, because you're playing guitar.
Yeah, yeah. You had that experience where your heart's in your throat, someone challenges you and you're like, what do I say? Or it's disagreement, you want to run away from it, and it's hard to know, to get a response.
Even later on you might think back, oh I could have said this, but in the moment it's hard, right? Anyone else have that? That situation happen to you, yeah? Other reasons? That's probably the primary reason people are here, but are there any other reasons for learning apologetics?
That you, that you. There, I think that's my first one actually. The Lord commands us, right? It's worship, right? The Lord commands us to be ready to make a defense. To strengthen your faith, that's a good one, yeah.
These are just the ones I came up with, this isn't right or wrong. I mean, these two are right, but it's not an exhaustive list. We want to please Christ, right? We want to be used by God to reach others with the truth.
So communication is part of that, that's what apologetics is, communication. We want to have confidence in evangelism and under persecution. The reason I put under persecution is in 1 Peter, when we're given the charge to make a defense for our faith, if anyone asks us, it's actually in the context of persecution.
As you read the chapter, he's talking about a fiery trial, he's talking about people basically being charged by the government because they're Christians, because they're not following really the Roman, the emperor worship, and Paul says have confidence, be ready to make a defense.
So as things get darker, even in the Western world, apologetics becomes, I think, more important. We want to think about the world around us through the lens of scripture. And this is something I was actually talking to Brother Colin over there about earlier this week, because I was saying, in my normal day-to-day life, you go to work or school or wherever you're headed, you don't usually get into aggressive, apologetic discussions.
You're not talking about how do you know truth with everyone around you, it's just not brought up, people just assume that. And usually, if you bring up Christianity and you do evangelism, people, by and large, don't want to get confrontational.
I'm in the service industry, so maybe it's more so in my industry, but they're dependent on me to fix their furniture, right? So I don't think they want to sort of fight with me. And so it doesn't, apologetics doesn't, it does happen, but it doesn't get brought up an awful lot.
Like, it's not like they're attacking me, they'll be like, well, you know, I believe it this way. And they don't want to challenge. And so I was saying to Colin, I was saying, well, what would be the point of knowing apologetics if a lot of the interactions in life are like that one?
And I think the point is, because you want to think about the world through the lens of scripture. If you understand how to defend your faith, you have, even if you're not using all the tools that God has given us, you have them at your disposal if you need them, and you know how to think about things.
When the news is on, you know how to think about it. You know how to think about things that you hear from your children when they come home from school. You just, immediately, it's right there. You know, okay, this is what the word of God says and how to approach it.
This is what the world is saying. And you can think through it more clearly. I know when I was going to college, those discussions were like, aggressive apologetic discussions happened all the time. But as we get into the world, I think people get into habits, and I still come across people who want to challenge Christianity, but with postmodernism, it seems like it's less and less.
People just want to kind of like say, this is how I believe, and I'm not pushing it on you. But we're going to talk about that, too, because that's actually a very subtle argument that they're using. Those are the reasons.
So here's where we want to look at scripture. So I want to do a lot of scripture in this, because what's the point of saying how to defend the Bible if we're not going to go to the Bible, right? So if you have your Bibles, if you don't have one, raise your hand.
Anyone have one? Under the sea. Oh, yeah, there are some under the sea, that's true. All right, everyone has one? Let's go to 1 Peter 3, 14 through 16, and I'm going to have a volunteer read that.
Go for it, Jeff. But even if you should suffer for righteousness' sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ, the Lord is holy. Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.
Yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
Anyone else have a different translation of that verse? Would you have any, SP? ESV. Oh, ESV. You want to read it? It's not that he had a bad translation. I want to read it twice, though. I think sometimes when we read scripture, it can just, okay, that's the scripture.
I want to read it twice. This is a really important verse, so go for it. One more time, yeah.
But even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear. Always be ready to give.
This was written by Peter. The picture, this is an artist's rendition of Peter on the day of Pentecost. And one of the interesting things about Peter, I think, just from a biographical sketch of him, is how bold he was that day.
Because you see him fleeing, you see him being a coward, in a sense, and then you see him on the day of Pentecost getting up, and he basically tells everyone, you killed the Messiah. You know, you think that, I mean, I can't even imagine how scared I would be.
And he does it with confidence, and then he proclaims, basically, the gospel. He says, this was God's plan, and he goes through prophecies. So I love that picture, because that tells us that any of us can be that, right, with the power of the Holy Spirit.
If we have the Holy Spirit, we can do what Peter did. The results are up to God. I'm not saying that the amount of people that got saved that day are gonna, it's gonna, it might, though, you know, but we can have that confidence.
And so when Peter writes this, do you think he defended the faith? Yeah, I think he had some firsthand experience with defending the faith. And he tells us, what's the first thing he tells us in that passage, before even making an argument?
What does he tell us to do? Okay, not to fear. Okay, after that. Well, why shouldn't we fear? He says, sanctify Christ as Lord, right? Sanctify Christ as Lord. That's gonna be really important for the way that we defend the faith.
We don't start defending the faith by saying, all right, let's just assume Jesus isn't who he says he is. He's not God, all right? You know, you're Jehovah's Witness. You know, let's forget about Jesus being God.
You and me, we'll just look at the evidence together and we'll come to a conclusion. We don't start that way. We start with, Jesus is Lord. That's the way it is. That's what scripture proclaims. Jesus actually defined himself when he came to this earth.
And what did people say about him? Well, the Pharisees said that you're demon-possessed, right? That you're an illegitimate son of Mary. And, you know, no prophet ever came from your town. That was really worth anything.
Actually, they say no prophet, which isn't exactly accurate. But they shunned him. They said that you're not the Messiah. And what was Jesus' claim? I am this Messiah. I am the son of God. I and the Father are one.
I was sent from the Father. I do the will of the Father. And Jesus defined himself. So, apologetics, you know, that's where we get started. Who is Jesus? Jesus is the Lord. And we don't negotiate with that fact, right?
So that's the first thing. So in order to defend the faith, we must be saved. I think that's kind of a given. Be bold. We must sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts. And the next one is we must be ready.
So that means any time throughout life, if someone is gonna ask us about our faith, we need to be ready to make a defense. If someone is gonna challenge us and say that our God can't be real, Jesus Christ isn't real, we need to be able to defend that fact.
Then Peter also says, have an attitude of gentleness to men and reverence to God. And I think that's a very important aspect of this as well. We wanna be careful that when we're doing this, we can really pound people into the ground when it's possible to do that and be an arrogant jerk with the method that we're gonna be learning.
And we don't wanna do that. We wanna have reverence for God and we wanna be patient with men. Remember what you were like before you were saved and then treat other people that way, all right? It doesn't mean you don't have convictions.
Jesus had convictions, right? But we're not gonna be arrogant about it in and of ourselves, right? It's not us and our argument, it's Jesus Christ using us, okay? All right, so now let's talk about different ways of doing apologetics throughout history.
That is St. Thomas Aquinas and I'm not sure if he was having a bad day in that picture or what. I Googled the pictures of him and I saw a couple that I was like, I gotta use that one. Especially since I'm not too fond of this method exactly, even though he was a very smart man and did some good things.
But he was one of the pivotal guys in what's called classical apologetics. And classical apologetics is probably the most popular form of apologetics that's used today. It hasn't always been, but it's definitely up there.
If you heard of people like William Lane Craig maybe, he's probably one of the most popular classical apologists. It's kind of like when you learn apologetics, that's usually what you learn. And we're gonna show why that's probably not the best way to do it, but let's know what it is first.
Reason undergirds faith. So in other words, in order to get to the Christian faith, we need to start with reason. So we need to make some good arguments for Christianity. If we make these good arguments, we might be able to convince unbelievers that Christianity is true, right?
Does that work? I mean, this is not God's way though, right? It's the Holy Spirit using a bad argument if anyone gets saved by that. Because unbelievers have what's called rescuing devices. Unbelievers will hear you give evidence and then they'll come up with a way to explain it somehow that fits maybe their worldview.
To give you a really quick example, layers of rocks, right? There's certain areas out west where there's layers of rocks and evolutionists will say each layer represents a certain amount of time. Have you ever heard that?
And creationists will point out what's up with the tree growing through it? Was that tree there for millions of years? Well, an evolutionist will develop a rescuing device for how the tree got there, right?
And it may not make sense, but it's a way that they'll try to rescue their worldview. They'll make an excuse, okay? So offering up evidence ultimately doesn't exactly work the way that we want it to. We use evidence, right?
But if it's only based on evidence, if we're evidential, which is the next one that we're gonna look at, but classical apologetics has the same issue, the unbeliever is going to come up with ways of interpreting the data differently.
The unbeliever is also gonna come up with ways to account for philosophical arguments we may bring. So if we bring an argument that says, hey, everything that began to exist must have a designer of some kind, right?
Must have a beginning, must have someone who gave it complexity, well, what's the unbeliever gonna say? Well, it was evolution, or not necessarily. Why does there have to be that? Or they'll say something like, well, yeah, everything we observe does that, but not the universe.
Because if everything that we know of had to be created or come into being, then God also had to come into being. So you can see how you're gonna go back and forth, and you're gonna butt heads, and it's gonna be over interpretation of data, interpretation of philosophical issues, and you're not gonna get at the meat of it, you're not gonna get at the real issue.
And so if that's confusing for some of you, it's like a cloud, and it will clear up, I promise you, as we go. Here's some of the arguments that classical apologetics uses, teleological, cosmological, ontological, there's more of them, but those all sound complex, but I just actually gave you one of them, but teleological is argument from design, ontological, cosmological would be like the argument, there was a beginning, so there must have been someone who started it off, and that must be God.
So here's the strategy. If we can use these arguments to progressively build a case for the Bible, starting with blank theism, then we can maybe get the unbeliever to convert to Christianity. So if we start with, there must be a designer, and we can get the unbeliever to say, I look around and I see design, there must be a designer, which God wired us with that, we should be able to look around and see a designer.
If we can get him to say that, then we're gonna go to the next step. The next step is, well, let's prove now the resurrection, or something that's specific to Christianity. And it's this long process that we go through.
So these arguments don't prove the God of Christianity. What they do is they prove some kind of blank theism. I mean, it could be Hinduism that you're proving. You don't know. You could prove the existence of God, let's say, to someone, and then go off and join a cult.
It's not specific to the God of Christianity. So here's some of the people that, Plato obviously wasn't a Christian, but a lot of these arguments started with Plato. That's how you know that it's not a specifically Christian apologetic.
Thomas Aquinas, he's the angry looking guy. R .C. Sproul, actually, surprisingly, he's a theologian that uses this. William Lane Craig. I want to show you, this is a clip of William Lane Craig at Biola University, and he's talking about how he does this apologetic.
The cosmological argument is actually a family of arguments, different arguments, that all attempt to prove, on the basis of the existence of the world, that there is some sort of a first cause, or sufficient reason for the existence of the world.
And what are some of the subsets of these arguments?
Well, for example, there's the so-called argument for contingency, that has been defended by various philosophers, such as Leibniz and others. And it would go something like this. Anything that exists has a reason, or an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature, or in some external cause.
Now, if the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation would be God, a transcendent being beyond space and time. The universe... I want to stop right there. Why would it be God?
I mean, I could see, I'm just playing skeptic for a minute. There is a good thing about this argument, but the way he's presenting it, why? If I just ask the question, why? I mean, I don't know what...
Well, I've listened to some of his debates. I think I know what he might say, but it doesn't seem to follow that that necessarily means it's gotta be God, okay? I just wanted to point that out, or especially the God of Christianity.
If something that exists, obviously, and therefore it would follow that the universe has an explanation of its existence, and that that explanation is God, that would be a kind of quick and easy summary of the basic premises of the contingency argument, and then one would need to talk about why one believes those premises.
Some other cosmological arguments.
Yes, another version would be the argument for a first temporal cause of the universe, and it's very simple if we go like this. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Okay, do atheists believe the universe began to exist? They believe, a lot of the materialists don't believe it. They believe matter is eternal. So this doesn't, I mean, if you're thinking some of this makes sense to you, there's a reason it makes sense, but the way that he's framing it, an unbeliever, I think, could easily, he doesn't have to be forced into.
What William Lane Craig is suggesting. And that would be, in our view, it began for a transcendent creator of the universe. So any questions about that before we move on to evidential?
All right, we're gonna talk about evidential. This is another school. This is actually, in my mind, evidential and classical are kind of the same thing, in a way. The difference might be that in classical apologetics, what we just saw, it's more of a deductive argument.
So you start with premises, and the premises follow with a conclusion. In evidential apologetics, it's more of an inductive argument. So what you're doing is you're looking at history and things that really can't be scientifically necessarily tested or things that really can't be logically just assumed.
You're looking at evidence. A rock doesn't have a label on it telling you where it came from, right? But we can make some certain guesses about where it might have come from, given its molecular components and so forth.
So that might be the only difference in my mind, but I think they get you to the same place. The guy pictured here is B .B. Warfield, who was a theologian who used this a lot. The idea is to defend the Christian faith by appealing to the unbeliever's capacity to reason using historical and scientific evidence, and man, again, is the final authority.
Man was the final authority in both classical and evidential. In classical, it was reason undergirds faith, and this one, it's evidence undergirds faith. So in other words, we gotta start with the evidence, and then we'll get to faith.
We can prove Christianity through the evidence. The resurrection argument is the most common one. Creation arguments, fulfilled prophecy, these are all good things, by the way, but they're not evidentialism, where we say that these are the only things.
That's where we get a problem. So I'm gonna explain that in a minute. So here's the strategy here. Prove a bare-bones or mere Christianity by proving that certain truths in the Bible are accurate based on modern historical methods.
Mere Christianity just means general. You're trying to prove, at least this is better, in that you're trying to prove some kind of Christianity, but the way you're doing it, you're not proving maybe a specific type of Christianity.
It could be the Christianity of the Mormons, right? It's just, well, we just generally have, we know that there's a God, we know that Jesus also has something to do with that because he rose from the dead.
That's all you're getting from it, really, at least with the resurrection argument. And here's just some people that have forwarded this idea. I wanna show you the video. This is actually pretty new, this video, and it's from a pastor, Andy Stanley, who's, some of you might have heard of him.
I think it's Charles Stanley's son or grandson, son, I think. But he's got a church, and this is what he said on a Sunday morning not too long ago.
He died of sores, and, you know, is the earth 6 ,000 years old or 6 million years old? The issue isn't, you know, when I was growing up, my parents got divorced, and the church kicked my mom out. That's not the issue.
The issue isn't, well, I used to work for this Christian, and he said he was a Christian, he ripped me off. That's not the issue. The issue isn't, was there a literal Adam and Eve? The issue isn't, are there mistakes in the Bible?
The issue will always be, did Jesus literally, physically rise from the dead? If he didn't, game over, game off, you might as well have a baseball holler.
So, comment here. He just reduced everything in Christianity down to one thing. So, if someone disproves or comes up with reasons why maybe Jesus didn't rise from the dead, you just disproved all of Christianity.
And he's saying, ignore everything else. Ignore every other question you might have. It's self-defeating on so many levels, but one of the most obvious ones to me is, did Jesus believe the Bible, the Torah that he was given?
Yeah. So, the issue of how old the earth is, is that kind of relevant? Well, yeah. If the Bible does not give us accurate understanding of the origin of the universe, then Jesus was a false prophet, right?
Because Jesus believed that. Here's the motivation behind it. You could memorize so many different things trying to come up with all the evidences and the arguments against what non-believers bring towards Christianity.
There are attacks. You would have to just, you'd have to get like bullets for everything, right? Because I got to know about this. I got to know about that. You have a mountain this high of stuff you need to know.
And Andy Stanley's saying, I don't want to know that much stuff, right? That's what, and it's very appealing, right? Because if we can just say, this is one argument, and we memorize this one argument and use this, and it seems like a powerful one, then we don't, we can ignore everything else.
But everything else is pretty important. When God speaks, he doesn't just speak about the resurrection. He speaks about a whole bunch of stuff. So I'm giving kind of a critique of him, but let me finish the video.
If he did it, it changes everything. You must, you must, you must become a follower of the only man in history who predicted his own death and his own resurrection and pulled it off. So why must you become a follower?
I mean, let's say you prove that something strange happened to one guy 2 ,000 years ago, and the skeptic says, uncle, you win. Something strange happened here. Why does that mean that he's God?
Why does that mean you have to worship him? I mean, he's making some leaps here. Because if Jesus rose from the dead, that touches down on every single component and aspect of your life. He, above all men, he, above all teachers, he, above all prophets, is worth following if he rose from the dead.
And every New Testament writer says, the foundation for everything you're about to read, the foundation for everything I believe, is the literal, physical resurrection.
I don't know if any New Testament writer said that, but it's kind of, it's, we agree with the conclusion, right? We agree that that's really important. Paul says our faith would be in vain if Christ didn't rise from the dead, right?
That's the fulfilled prophecies, that's conquering death. There's doctrine here that's very important, right? We agree with his conclusion, but the argument he's making to get there and the way he's reducing Christianity down to this one thing creates a problem.
Do the Mormons believe Jesus rose from the dead? Yes. Are they Christians? No. Okay, so we can see some problems with that approach. Now here's, now that I've sufficiently bashed everyone, here's the approach that we're gonna be learning in the next couple sessions.
And we're gonna be interacting, it's gonna be fun. You will, my guarantee to you is if you come back the next two times, you will know this apologetic and how to use it. But it's presuppositional, and I know it's a big word, but it means that we presuppose the Bible, we presuppose the Christian faith, which might sound weak at first, but you're gonna find out it's actually very strong.
It means that faith undergirds reason. And this is something Thomas, not Thomas Aquinas, sorry, Augustine said. He says, I have faith in order to understand. In other words, I can't understand anything unless I first have some kind of faith commitment.
And you're gonna find every worldview boils down to that. There's a faith commitment somewhere. By the way, the guy I have there is Cornelius Van Til, reading the book. He's kind of the guy that systemized this mode of thought in the early 20th century.
So the idea is to defend the Christian faith by appealing to what the unbeliever already knows concerning the Christian faith using scripture as the final authority. Now this is the main difference between the two we just looked at in this approach.
In this approach, God is the final authority. So who gets to determine what truth is? In the last two approaches, it's man, right? Think of it as a court analogy. If you go into court and God is sitting on trial and you are God's defendant and man is the prosecutor, he's saying, God, you did this, you did that, or saying you don't exist, or whatever argument he's bringing, and you're trying to get God off the hook, that's the first two approaches.
This approach is different in that God is sitting on the judgment seat when you walk into court. He's the judge. The unbeliever is the one that's sitting in the judgment seat. He's waiting for his sentence, right?
And you are the one that's trying to show the unbeliever. You're not appealing to the unbeliever in his own autonomy, but what you're doing is you're saying, the judge is right there and he's giving a verdict.
Repent, right? It puts God in the place where he needs to be and it puts man in the place where he needs to be. And the thing is, man knows that the judge is there. Man knows God exists. It's the God of Christianity.
And we're gonna use that knowledge to show him, to make himself aware of it. Because Romans 1 says he suppresses the truth. He knows there's a judge there. He doesn't wanna face the judge. He doesn't wanna know God for the same reason a criminal doesn't wanna know a police officer, right?
This is the method that we're gonna be learning. And I'm kind of excited about it. So it's called, the main argument's called the transcendental argument. I'm gonna give you kind of the brief, kind of nutshell phrase to describe this.
The proof for God's existence is that without him, you can't prove anything, all right? I'll say it again. The proof for God's existence is that without him, you cannot prove anything. Another way to put it is, this is I think one of the Van Til's quotes.
He said, atheism assumes theism. So in order to be an atheist, you first have to assume that God exists. It's kind of a crazy thought, right? The atheist would say, no, I don't. But we're gonna see that that's true.
The idea here is to prove the biblical Christian worldview, not a blank deity, not just a God, right? We're not proving one component of Christianity. We're proving the whole Christian worldview, right?
The whole enchilada as a package deal. So it cannot be rejected without appealing to logical absurdity. That's the claim. If you want to try to reject this argument, it's gonna, you have a choice. It's either God or absurdity.
Those are the only two choices you have. And this apologetic shows that. And here's some of the, I put the Apostle Paul in there because so much of his writing in Romans one, I think, in Acts 17, where he demonstrates this apologetic is where Augustine got it and where Calvin got it.
And then Cornelius Mantilla's the guy pictured there and Greg Bonson. And you can go check out Greg Bonson's stuff actually online. He's got a lot of stuff. This is Cy Timbrug and Kate. He's a presuppositionalist.
Here's how he defends a Christian faith. Everybody wants a method.
A methodology for this apologetic. And I say, well, I think the method takes a two-year check. No matter what the person says, that wisdom is a scripture. The first move, that's not the Bible.
No matter what the objection is, that's why this apologetic drives you back to scripture. No matter what they say, think of any objection that you hear out on the street. You don't even know it's art.
Are you kidding me?
All those animals on that boat? What, you believe they're talking donkey? You don't believe the flood? No.
So you don't believe the Bible's true? No. What most Christians do, well, the ark has so many cubits and so many floors. There are probably daily animals.
There's plenty of room, because there are only so many kinds of animals at the time. Plenty of room to fit them all in the ark. Evidence, evidence, evidence. You're making them the judge. That evidence is wonderful.
Scripture's for Christians. But I don't do that. Someone says to me, you believe Noah's ark? I say, yeah. I say, you don't? No. You don't believe it's true?
And then you see the absurdity. That's not what the Bible says. Where do you get proof about God? And it's over. And that works for any objection to scripture.
Okay, some of you may be wondering, how does that work? We're gonna flesh that out. But that, do you see how simple that is? You don't have to memorize stacks of information. Now, some of that information is good, and there's compelling reasons maybe we should look at resurrection arguments and those kinds of things.
But when we're dealing with an unbeliever who rejects all of that, we don't have to get philosophically in depth. We have to say that's, we can say the two-step method that he said. That's not what the Bible says.
Where do you get truth without God? And you can always remember that. And after this, you definitely will remember that and some other ways of approaching conversations in a presuppositional way. So before I move on, any, that's a lot of information, and a lot of this is gonna be fleshed out.
I don't know if I'm talking fast. But any thoughts on any of that, any questions? No, Ken Ham is a presuppositionalist, yeah. Yeah, I'll explain why. Actually, the next slide, I'll explain why he can do that.
Yeah, we believe in evidence, and we believe in logic, and we believe in philosophy to an, not philosophy based on the world, but legitimate philosophy. But we are not evidentialists, right? The final authority isn't what, how the man interprets evidence.
The final authority isn't how man sees philosophy. God's the final authority. He is the one that defines the evidence. God's the only objective standard. So an easy way to see this is morality. When we talk to atheists, and I'm using atheists because it's a very easy example, but when they don't have a moral standard, what do Christians typically do?
How do you have a moral standard without God, right? He says, how do you have knowledge without God? But, which is another way, you can use it for anything. You can make the toothbrush arguments for God's existence.
How do you brush your teeth without God? And we can make an argument for it with a presuppositional framework. But we do believe in evidence, right? It's just not interpreted by autonomous man. It's interpreted by God.
So what you can do is you can actually, you can use something like the complexity of the eye, right? That's used by a lot of creationists to say, look, this is so complex. Evolution could not have produced this.
And evolutionists will give his argument for why it could be produced by evolution. It's not wrong to bring that up because what you're doing is you're saying, we naturally would interpret this as something designed.
Why would we naturally do that? We would naturally do that because God's wired us in a certain way. So you're assuming God from the get-go. You're saying, look at God and how he designed this. Don't you see it?
All right, you're not starting with, look at the design, let's go to God. You're saying, you're starting with God, okay? So we can use evidence in a presuppositional way. I'll show you that in a minute, but we don't believe in evidentialism.
So does that make sense? Starting to make sense? All right. So here's the advantage of the presuppositional formation. So I'm gonna use a classical argument, one of the classical apologetic arguments, our argument from design.
But I'm gonna show you how this argument can be framed in a presuppositional way. Just to show you that we can use evidence and we can use logic, but we just start with God's existing. So here's the classical argument.
Senses and the mind are reliable. That's our starting point. Everyone just assume with me that senses and the mind are reliable. All right? We see design in the universe. Design requires a designer. God is the designer.
That's an argument, a classical argument. Now here's the way the presuppositionalist can make this same, it's similar. It's using that idea of design, but starting with God. The triune God of scripture is the designer.
We start there, right? Jesus is Lord. We don't give that up, we start there. Therefore, the senses are reliable. We see design in the universe. Design requires a designer. The triune God of scripture is the designer.
Now does anyone notice anything that's peculiar about this argument? Yeah, it looks like it's circular, right? And that would be maybe an objection that an unbeliever would have right away to it. They'd say, hold on, you can't make an argument that proves itself.
And we're gonna get into, actually next week, I think we're gonna be talking more about it. But I'm gonna give you kind of a quick nutshell of why this argument is actually a valid argument. We don't usually accept circular arguments because it's assuming what it's trying to prove.
But in the case of what's called transcendentals or final authorities, we have to use a circular argument. Now let me give you an example. This is probably an easy one to understand. If an atheist, let's say, I know I'm picking on the atheists a lot.
It's just because it's an easy group for me to kind of explain this, and then we can go to other religions. But if an atheist walked in and said, hey, I have this argument against God's existence. And he uses reason to base his argument.
And he says, it's just reasonable to believe that God does not exist. And then you ask him, you say, well, hey, Mr. Atheist, could you use your reason to give me an argument for reason? You know, I don't accept your premise that reason is the final authority.
Give me an argument for it. And then he proceeds to give you reasons. What has he just done? He's doing a circular argument too. He's using his reason, his atheistic reason, right, to validate atheistic reason.
So what I'm gonna suggest to you is every single worldview breaks down into a circular argument. And this isn't anything that's like earth shattering. This isn't something that we're just figuring out now.
Philosophers have grappled with this stuff for a long time. I think, therefore I am. You ever heard that? What does the conclusion assume that he thinks? Who's the I? He is. He's trying to prove his existence by assuming his existence.
He's saying, I think, therefore I exist. You just assumed you existed in the first part of the argument. So going back in philosophy, this has always been the case. If we wanna take another religion that might be similar to Christianity, the Quran, right?
They assume the Quran in order to prove the Quran. Here's the difference between this argument or a Christian transcendental argument and an unbeliever's transcendental argument. An unbeliever has an argument that is arbitrary.
So an atheist saying, I'm gonna give you atheistic reason to prove atheistic reason, it's just a circle. And you can deny it and be okay. You can still have logic. You can still have morality. You can still have all these things and function in the world.
The difference is in Christianity, if you deny the creator God, then you can't have any of those things. So the argument is the proof for God's existence is without him, you can't prove anything. That second part is the escape hatch.
That second part is the important thing that distinguishes Christianity from everything else. Without him, you can't prove anything. So in other words, if the atheist or another worldview denies the God of scripture, they're left with absurdity.
They can't have logic anymore because that's based on the character of God. He doesn't tell lies. He's a logical God. They can't have uniformity of nature because God is the one that keeps nature uniform.
Another way to put this is in inductions, the problem of induction and philosophy. How do you know the future's gonna be like the past? Well, you can't because you haven't been in the future. The only worldview that actually lets us know that we can know the future's gonna be like the past is Christianity because you have God upholding the universe.
So we can go on and on. We can go to morality. We can go to different fields. But the idea here is that the character of God, and it's the God of the Bible, is what sustains all of these things. So you deny him, you can't even use logic anymore.
I know you might have questions about that for now. We're gonna get into that more. I wanna give you like previews here so it's not completely a foreign language so you're kinda getting used to it. But this actually is a valid argument.
So the way that we do apologetics is gonna be determined by our worldview. The three philosophical fields of study are epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, or value theory. Epistemology asks the question, how do we know?
Metaphysics, what can be known? And ethics, or value theory, what types of things are good or bad? And we come up with worldviews based on these three things interacting together. We try to create a cohesive unit that answers these ultimate questions.
And here's an example. I just kind of used just a picture to kind of show. If we think of a worldview as a house, and we think of the foundation as being the presuppositions, in other words, what you assume to be true.
They're not proven scientifically, you just assume that. We would have a theory of epistemology, metaphysics, and value theory to build that house. So here's what a humanism house would look like, right?
Sense perception would be their epistemology. I just know it because my senses tell me. Metaphysics, what exists out there, well, just the material world. There's no spiritual world. That's all that exists.
And then value theory, I've used kind of a Marxist theory. It's equality of outcome. So everyone needs to, as long as everyone has the same amount of stuff, then that's my moral standard. That's what things ought to be.
And this is the house that humanism is gonna give us. Now, in evidential and classical apologetics, they don't even really dive into this stuff. They just assume that a person with this worldview will be able to look at the evidence objectively.
And that's not the case. That's the problem with it. Here's a Christian house. Revelation from God is the epistemology. Everything that we know comes from divine revelation. All right, so that's scripture.
That is creation as well. Psalm 119, the heavens declare the glory of God. But I'm gonna caution us against what's called natural theology, where we just say, some people actually will say, you can get to salvation through looking at the stars.
You can't, you can't. We need a way to interpret what's around us. God does communicate to us through creation, right, so that we're without excuse. But we rely on the doctrines in scripture to interpret the data that we're seeing.
We'll explain that a little more later, too, when we read through Romans 1. Metaphysics, what's out there? Well, it's not just the natural world. We believe in that, but there's also a supernatural world.
And what's value theory? It's based on Christ. Obeying Christ is the value system that we have. All right, so that's the introduction to apologetics. I wanted to take a break, but before we do that, I wanna read Romans 1.
Some people call presuppositional apologetics the Romans 1 apologetic. Let's start at verse 14, maybe.
Yeah. I am under obligation both to greece and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the poor. For my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also, who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew, to the purse, and also to the Greek.
For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written. But the righteous man shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness.
You can keep going, go to the end of the chapter. Actually, you know what, we'll go to verse 25.
Because that which is known about God is evident whenever, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world is invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen.
Being understood through what has been made, so that many are without excuse. For even though they knew God and did not honor him as God will give thanks, but they became defiled in speculations and had closed hearts with darkness.
For blessing to be wise, they became fools. In exchange of glory to God, they had an interruptible glory for an image in the form of a crumpled lamb that murders in court with animals and crawling pigeons.
Therefore, God gave them overs and the busts of their hearts and tombs buried, so that their bodies would be sovereign among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for their lives and worshiped the spirit of the creature that is the creator, whose blood is forever, amen.
I'm gonna read a couple more verses in here. It says, for this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. In the same way, also the men abandoned the natural function of the women and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.
And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper. And then it goes through a list of these things that aren't proper.
And I'm not gonna read through that. What's the issue here with man? Is man a neutral being that's just waiting for someone to give him some evidence or a good argument? The problem is sin, right? The problem is men are truth suppressors.
It says in verse 18, they suppress the truth. And not only do they suppress it, they do it in unrighteousness. They do it for sinful reasons. Verse 19 says, that which is known about God is evident within them.
Why, because God made it evident to them. How? It says creation of the world. And now stop right there. Is it just creation, we know there's a designer? Is that the cosmological argument? No. Or the teleological, the design argument?
No, that's not what he's saying, because he goes on. He says it's not just that there's a designer. God made it, God made this evident. His eternal power and his divine nature, having been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.
So, do unbelievers know God? They're both right. Yes. Yes and no, right? Exactly. Yeah. So they're suppressing something. So if they're suppressing something, they must know about that something. Now they don't know him on a personal level.
They don't know him the way, they're not in a right relationship, right? But they know who God is. It's evident within them, as verse 19 says, and then 20, the external world shows that. Psalm 119 might be another chapter we could go to, and look at how the heavens declare the glory of God.
The firmament shows his handiwork. And then it talks about special revelation, and how God has given us the word. But even if you don't have the Bible, there's certain things men know. It says, for even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks.
But they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. So what's the difference between someone who's not saved, right, and Christians? Other than just the grace of Jesus Christ in redeeming us, what's the difference here?
What do we do that they don't do? What do we do? We glorify God. We worship God, right? They know who he is, and they don't worship him. That's the problem. That's the root issue. So are we gonna use an apologetic system that doesn't honor Christ?
No, we're gonna worship Christ even in our apologetics. Christ is Lord. In the Great Commission, go into all the world and preach the gospel, right, to all nations. What does it say before that command is given?
All authority under heaven has been given to me, and heaven and on earth has been given to me. Jesus Christ says he has authority before he gives that command to make disciples. So the authority of Christ cannot be, we can't throw that out and start with an apologetic that says man is God.
Now, what do they do? They engage in false worship. That's the next thing, right? God gives them up to it. They become idolatrous. They seek to worship things that are, I think of the environmental movement, certain aspects of it.
My brother's in D .C., and they're having their march for the climate, I guess, today or something, and there's people that are marching in this who worship the earth. They don't care about babies in the womb, some of them, but they will care about the dolphins or the polar bears or other aspects of creation.
They deified a certain part of creation, or the world, the Gaia, right? The world is deified. This is no different than idolatry, where they make themselves God, and they worship an image of themselves, and then what's the next step?
God gives them over to the logical outcome, and the logical outcome of these worldviews is sin. They're just gonna engage in sin, and it gets deeper and deeper and deeper, and I find it very interesting that, in verse 26, he says, the women exchange the natural function for that which is unnatural.
Things that our parents and grandparents would have said, they would have said, this is completely obvious. That guy's in the supermarket. That's not a girl, that's a guy. They wouldn't have even understood how someone could pretend to be a gender that they weren't, and that's now the world that we live in is suppressing the truth so much, they can't even interpret biology correctly, and biology is completely obvious, right?
We would think that it's obvious, but we're in a Christian worldview, right? We believe there's a creator who actually meant to design us in a certain way, and it's not just sexuality, but the hardware he's given us, but there's other things.
There's psychological things he's given us to show that our gender is something that he's ordained that's different. All married men know that their wives think differently than they do, right? And all married women know the same thing.
There's something different about the genders, but now that is being suppressed. So we see this in our culture. I'm gonna give you an example. This is something that Greg Bonson uses, but it's a story of a woman who has two sons that are rabble-rousers, and I mean, they're just terrible sons.
They have been in jail. You leave a wallet out, they're gonna take it. They're gonna find money in it, and they're gonna use it, and that's who they are. They beat people up. They're bad guys. The mother, though, thinks that they're great kids, and she says that to everyone, right?
My boys are good boys. They get into some mischief here and there, but you know what? Their intentions are good. Their heart is good. They're good boys. Now, the question is does the mother really believe that they're good boys?
Yes, on one level. She's convinced herself that they're good. On another level, no, because when the boys come over to spend the night or whatever, she takes her purse and she puts it in a place they can't find it.
She's showing that she really doesn't, deep down, think they're good boys, but she's convinced herself that she believes it, so she's suppressing the truth. Her belief about her boys is that they're bad boys, but her belief about her belief about the boys is that they're good.
Did that make sense? I should say that again. Her belief about the boys is that they're bad boys because she hides the purse, but her belief about how she perceives herself, her belief about her belief about the boys is that they're good boys.
That's what's going on in Romans 1. Mankind, when they reject God, their belief about God innately is that God exists. We know that God exists. He has a moral standard. He shows us his design and creation.
We know that he exists, but their belief about their perception of that, their belief about their belief about God is that he can't exist, and it's for reasons of sin. That's why they suppress it. So that's a little bit of, I guess, a tour into anthropology, who man is.
Man is, lost in sin, a truth suppressor, but he knows God, and so our apologetic task isn't to bring more evidence to man. Man already knows. Why would we say to the woman, hey, look at this police transcript, mother of these two scalawags.
Look at this, not transcript, but look at this ticket that they got. Look at this court order. Look, they were in the paper for robbing a bank. She's all right. That evidence is not gonna make a dent.
Oh, they're good boys. They have good intentions. They got a rough time because people don't really understand. That's not gonna work. What we want to do is show her, you move the purse. You know. We're gonna try to awaken her inner sense of what she already knows, and that's the presuppositional task.
Let's take a break. We end at nine, so we got, you know, I'll try to make the next one maybe 20 minutes or so. All right, we're gonna talk about ultimate authority now. Definition of ultimate authority.
An individual's ultimate or final authority can be defined as his ultimate standard by which all is measured, being last in a series, process, or progression. It is an independent standard that relies on no other source for authentication.
All worldviews, and thus all people, have a final authority, though most are not conscious of this fact. Our duty as the apologist is to make people epistemologically self-aware. In other words, we attempt to shed light on their ultimate faith commitment, which, if humans are to be rational, must be the word of God.
So what that means is that with the example we just talked about at the end of the last slide show, we're trying to show that the person who has these two rabble-rousing sons actually does know that they're bad sons, right?
That's all that's really saying. They know God exists, right, the unbelieving world, but they suppress that truth and they replace him with an idol. That idol is gonna be their final authority. So we wanna show that that final authority doesn't work and you know that the real final authority is the God of Scripture.
Let me play you a video. This is in a debate setting, so it's an atheist debate, and this question comes up, and here's how two presuppositionalists handle it. All right, I guess I'm gonna have to forego that one.
I'm gonna explain, though, what essentially happens. Someone in the audience asks, this is Dustin Seeger and Saiten Bruggenkate, and asks them, who God without using the Bible? And he starts quoting Romans 1.
So everyone starts laughing. They're like, you can't do that. And I'm giving the summarized version. And so then he goes and he shows what we just looked at in Romans 1, that all men know that God exists, they just suppress that truth.
Saiten Bruggenkate then gives the example of atheistic reason, which I also went over earlier, and says that in order to argue with someone about their final authority, they have to appeal to their final authority.
Otherwise, it's not a final authority. So if a little boy, we'll call him John, were to ask his mother, why is the sky blue? And then his mother were to say, well, because, I don't know. Actually, I don't even know why the sky's blue.
I did, I'm trying to remember. Yeah, some basic thought, and I don't even remember. But she starts explaining why the sky's blue, giving scientific facts, and then I ask the next question, well, why is that, why is that, why is that, why is that?
Eventually, the mother says, because I said so, and she becomes the final authority, and that's the end of the discussion, right? But really, there has to be a bedrock somewhere. There has to be, there is an end to this progression of questions, and that goes for any question.
Why are you here tonight? Because we want to learn about apologetics. Why do you want to learn about apologetics? Because I'm a Christian, and I want to share my faith. Why do you want to share your faith?
Because Christianity's true. It just keeps going and going and going. Eventually, it has to come back to something, all right? Does that make sense? You can't have an infinite regress. So eventually, the ultimate authority has to prove itself.
Otherwise, it's not an ultimate authority. If I said the God of Scripture is the only true God, he is the great I am, when he came to Moses, he said, I am, that's the God I worship. And then you were to say to me, well, why don't you prove that God exists?
And I say, well, okay, the universe had a beginning, so therefore, God exists. Well, what did I just do? I went outside of God to try to prove God. If he's really the ultimate authority, then I shouldn't have to go outside of him, okay?
So this goes for every ultimate authority in every worldview, right? Allah, in the Muslim mindset, has to be an ultimate authority, right? In cults, usually it's their founding leader ends up being the ultimate authority, because he's the one that tells them how to interpret truth, okay?
That's what an ultimate authority does. All right, so now that we know what ultimate authority is, let's talk about what the unbeliever's ultimate authority is according to Scripture. I'm not gonna make you look up all the passages, there's a lot of them, though, out there.
So I have a list of all of them. This is the unbeliever's ultimate authority. Number one, it's not God's word. An unbeliever will tell you, my final authority is not the word of God, right? It is in opposition to what he knows is the ultimate authority.
We already read Romans 1. He knows that God exists. It resides in creation itself. And we actually, that's also in Romans 1. Colossians 2 .8 talks about, I believe that's the passage, it talks about the fundamental principles of the world.
Don't be captive by philosophies that start with the fundamental principles of the world. That's where the atheist tries to start. They say, hey, or the non-believer, let's start with just some reason, the fundamental principles, and then we'll try to get to a worldview.
The ultimate authority does not reside in creation. That's what they believe, though. And then it results in foolishness. Romans 1, I think, even kind of talks about this because we saw that there's a bunch of sins that accompany these things.
But let me give you some of these scriptures here. First Corinthians 2 .14, but the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, right? They're foolishness to him, right? That goes along the lines that it's not God's word.
So if we give them the Bible, they're not gonna accept it. That's not their final authority. It's in opposition to what he knows. Matthew 7, 26 through 27, and everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act upon them will be like a foolish man who builds his house upon the sand.
And we know what happened to that house, right? The rains came and the house did not stand. A great was its fall. It resides in creation itself. Colossians 2 .8, I just mentioned, talks about don't be taken by the tradition of men, by the philosophies of the world that start with the elementary principles of the world.
We talked about Romans 1, and then it results in foolishness. 1 Corinthians 1 .20, has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? And in the Greek language, there's an answer to it. It's assuming, yes, God has done that.
Proverbs 12 .15, the way of the fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man is he who listens to counsel. Proverbs 1 .22, how long, O naive ones, will you love simplicity? And scoffers delight themselves in scoffing and fools hate knowledge.
We can go on and on and on. I mean, and these are just a couple of the verses, but you're gonna wind up in a problem. And to give you an analogy here, what the presuppositional apologist is doing is we're kinda like getting in the car of the nonbeliever, and we're running it into a ditch.
We're showing this car can't drive. This car doesn't work. And we're showing, if we take it to its logical conclusion, we're not gonna be on the road anymore. We're gonna be in a ditch. And so that's kind of our task.
Now, what about the believer's ultimate authority? Believer's ultimate authority is God himself, right? Colossians 2, two through four, Christ himself, in whom is hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Where are all treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden? Christ. Matthew 28 .18, Jesus said, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. That's the Great Commission verse. 2 Corinthians 10 .5, we are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
So we gotta take every thought is under the lordship of Christ, even apologetics, right? Proverbs 1 .7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. We don't start with the fear of the Lord. And remember, not every God is to be feared.
The God most people believe in, he's a quote-unquote loving God, but he doesn't have any standard of justice. The God that scripture says we have to start with is the God who is feared. The God, he has a moral standard.
There's some attributes to this God. Proverbs 9 .10, the fear of the Lord, again, is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. So you want understanding, you want knowledge, you gotta start with God.
It's understood through God's word. Matthew 4 .4, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. John 17 .17, sanctify them in truth, your word is truth.
Isaiah 8 .20, to the law and to the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn or light in some translations. Second Timothy 3 .16, all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.
It is self-authenticating as well, the believer's ultimate authority. And I already mentioned this, but in Exodus, what does God say when Moses says, identify yourself? He says, I am, I am the self-sufficient one.
That's what he's saying. There's nothing outside of me that defines me, I am. And Jesus took that term for himself and the Pharisees, the Jews wanted to stone him. John 5 .26, for just as the Father has life in himself, even so he gave to the Son also to have life in himself.
The Father has life in himself, he doesn't need life from anything else, he's self-sufficient. El Shaddai literally means all sufficient. First John 4 .8, the one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Now love requires an object. Before the world existed, God was still love, wasn't he, before the world? He didn't need us, he loved, he had a loving relationship within the Trinity. So God does not need us for anything, he's self-sufficient.
So we're doing theology right now, we're gonna get to the apologetics, but we gotta understand who this God is. So he is our ultimate authority and we don't give that up. So how do you defend an ultimate authority?
Well every worldview ultimately terminates in a circular argument because of the nature of the final authority. So we already talked about this, but the question why being asked, eventually you gotta hit bedrock somewhere.
So I'm gonna show you a video here actually, this is someone, a presuppositional apologist, that's actually a friend of Lance's, this is Mark Spence at a university, and he's explaining kind of why this circular argument really isn't an invalid argument.
I must hold God to the same standards as everyone else and I'm not convinced that he is in fact.
Deserving of worship. Yeah, if I can prove to you that the God of the Bible is real, would you be willing to value me in worship? I dare to say that to their satisfaction. Here, let's turn that, that's.
See, but believing. Is always fallacious. It is one of the major fallacies. Yeah, is circular reasoning always fallacious?
It doesn't prove anything because it uses itself as proof.
Circular reasoning, to you, is it always wrong? Yes.
Same reason everyone else in this room was, they were taught a certain way of reasoning from a young age, they use external sources, hopefully to back up their opinions and thoughts, and when that is not sufficient, they hopefully attempt to find out as much as possible about the thing before making a decision.
So you use your reasoning skills to validate your reasoning skills. Is that circular? A little bit, but there is no other way to gain reasoning skills. However, there is other ways to back up God if you in fact have faith in God.
Faith does not require proof, but that does not mean faith is correct. Okay, thank you.
Well, with that, besides the fact that you mentioned that circular reasoning is always fallacious, and then you just gave, and in fact, it's not virtuously circular, it's viciously circular. If you were to say, prove to me God is real, and I say God is real because God is real, and I just say it louder and louder, you wouldn't accept that as evidence from me.
You know, if I say, how do you know your memory is valid? You say, well, I took a memory test two weeks ago. Do you remember taking a memory test two weeks ago? And we use our memory to validate our memory.
You know, I talked to the nice gentleman earlier, right before you, or two people before you, you know, could you be wrong about everything you think you know? He said, yes. The question for you, Mark, could you be wrong about everything you think you know?
And I say, well, not everything. There are certain things that I can know. Remember, not that I have to know everything, but I have revelation from somebody who does. Mark, how do you know that this isn't the matrix?
This is taking place. This is real.
And my source of authority, which is. What do you guys think of that? Good? Yeah, no flaws in it? He just used a circular argument and showed a whole room full of, presumably, college students there, that it was actually okay that he did it.
He used two terms there. He used virtually circulous, or I guess he meant virtuous, as in good. I never heard that one, but, and then the other one, though, is the one I wanted to talk about, viciously circular.
And he said the viciously circular argument is the one you can't use. That's where the fallacy comes in. Now, his example he gave is if he just said God louder and louder, God exists, God exists, God exists, that would be a circular argument that's viciously circle.
And it doesn't work, because you're not saying anything interesting. You're not saying anything that actually is moving the conversation forward. But if you say God exists, and then you stop and you say, and without him you can't prove anything, that's a different matter.
Because now you're saying, I'm arguing for a final authority. There's three attributes of God I have listed up there, invariable, absolute, and unchanging. These are attributes of the triune God of scripture.
These attributes, everyone believes in on some level. Even if you don't believe in God, you have to believe in some way, and we're gonna take morality as an easy example, that morality is invariable, absolute, and unchanging.
I'll give you an example. Is it wrong to torture babies for fun? Yeah, it's wrong, right? Well, why is it wrong? Now, I did a debate on this subject. It wasn't that the babies, but it was on morality and where it comes from at New Paltz a couple years ago with a young man.
And he, I think, just used about every, it's funny, Kara was there, she's smiling. We had a lesson about morality at a Bible study at the college. And I said, here's all the possibilities that an atheist would have for accounting for morality.
They could go to, everyone thinks it's this way, therefore, the crowd is right, or I feel it's this way, therefore, that's how morality has to be. Or they can try to come up with some principle of, well, morality is that which does not do harm, which really doesn't say anything, except it just, it makes the chess game one move farther away from the checkmate, because then I can ask, why is it wrong to do harm?
But an atheist has all these different places they can go. And now, in that debate, the guy was debating, he used all of them. When one didn't work, he just jumped to another one. And the reason is, is because in his mind, he knows it's wrong to torture babies for fun.
But he knows that requires a moral standard that is invariable, that's absolute, and that's unchanging. Invariable, in other words, it doesn't ever vary. That standard is always going to be in place. There's no situation in which it might be right.
If we're in Africa, is it right now? Well, no, it's still wrong to torture babies for fun. Absolute, in other words, it always holds. It's over everyone. In other words, just because it's not right for me, it doesn't mean that it's not right for another person.
Well, no, they also are held to that same standard. So, no matter who you are, that you shouldn't be able to torture babies for fun. It's unchanging. There's never gonna become a point in time where that becomes right.
Now, what do we know that's those three things? God, right? It's the God of scripture. And this isn't the God of every religion, all right? This isn't blank theism that we're talking about here. Islam, God can change his mind.
I just talked to a Muslim lady the other day, actually from Turkey, it was very ironic, because I saw written, she had a Quran prayer book, and it was written in Turkish, and I was like, I was just in Turkey a couple days.
She's like, oh, I was born in Istanbul. So, we started talking about Islam, and it turns out she was more of a secular humanist when we got through, because she didn't really believe in hell, which the Quran teaches that.
But the point is, she has a standard, though, that requires those three things. The God of Islam, though, can't match those things, because he changes his mind. I asked her, do you know you're going to heaven?
Nope, she has no assurance. And any true Muslim is gonna tell you that. They can't know, because God, it just matters. It's Allah's will once you get there, right? So, we could go through every worldview and show that the Christian one is really the only one that has these three things.
We all believe this on some level. Now, it's not just morality, though. It's also logic. The laws of logic are invariable, absolute, and unchanging. There's no place in the universe where the law of non-contradiction, where things can contradict, works.
There's no time that will ever happen, right? So, we can go through science. We can go through all sorts of different fields of study and show that we have to assume, to even get off the ground in our reasoning, that this God exists, the God of Scripture.
Make sense? That's why we can defend an ultimate authority using this circular argument, right? Because if you deny that this God exists, then you can't prove anything. You're lost in absurdity. That's the difference between the vicious circular argument and virtuous circular argument.
So, it's Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. And without him, you can't prove anything. So, we add that, and I don't know how to, you know, how to come up with a melody for that, I guess, right?
We're singing in church. So, why not? I just wanted to go through. This is a little philosophical. If you get it, then that's fine. I just wanted to show you, though, how an atheist might object to this.
He'll say, why can't I just use my reason? I have reason, why can't I? Now, reason, in our worldview, is really good. It's a tool God gives us. It's not the ultimate authority, though. But an atheist will say, I wanna use my reason as the ultimate authority.
Why doesn't that work? Number one, reason is inadequate in and of itself to account for the preconditions of intelligibility. And those are the things I just talked about. Morality, sense perception, uniformity of nature, existence of the external world.
You can't get there from reason. We just accept all these things, but reason can't give those things to us. Rene Descartes, I think, therefore, I am. He tried to get there. He tried to, he actually locked himself in a cabin.
And he, you know, during the winter. And he tried to come up with one thought that he could actually get off the ground on, so he could actually have a philosophy that made sense of the world around him.
And finally, he said, I got it. I think, what he actually said was, I'm doubting everything. I'm a skeptic against everything. I keep asking these, you know, how do I know questions, and I just get lost in it.
And he's like, finally, he said, but I, because I'm doubting something, that means doubting's going on. And if doubting's going on, something is doing the doubting. It must be me. So he started his whole philosophy with, I exist.
I think, or I doubt, therefore, I am. Now, I pointed out earlier why that can't work. He assumed that he existed in order to prove that he existed. And assuming that you exist can't give you these other things.
In and of myself, I can't have objective morality, because I'm not invariable. I'm not absolute, and I'm not unchanging. At the most, maybe I can say what I, what my morality should be, but I can't impose it on anyone else, right?
And so that's the problem. The second problem, and this is, I think, a more interesting analysis of why we can't use reason as a final authority. There's different kinds of reasons out there. There's different kinds.
If you go to the Eastern world, contradictions all of a sudden aren't a problem. There's whole religions, Eastern religions that are built on the idea that contradictions are good things, and if you meditate on contradictions, you'll get lost in nirvana eventually.
That's the way of losing yourself. And so what do you do with that kind of person, right? He says, I believe in reason too, and my reason says that contradictions are okay. So you're assuming a form of reason is not something that's just fixed, unless you have a God to give it validity.
You have to have a personal aspect to give reason validity. In the material world, there's no way to have reason. Reason comes from a mind, all right? So those are the two reasons you can't use, two reasons you can't use reason.
So here's the Christian escape hatch. I just put it kind of in more of a logical terminology here, but rationalist says, he's trying to prove reason here. So the rationalist will say, without reason, existence is absurd.
Existence is not absurd, therefore reason exists. I can use this reason. So you ask the question, how do you know existence is not absurd? Their only response can be basically, I don't know. If they want to say that existence is not absurd, they have to say, well, I don't feel like it is, and now we're not using reason anymore, are we?
So we have a problem. In the Christian worldview, we say, without God's word, existence would be absurd. That's our final authority, God's revelation. Existence is not absurd, therefore God's word is not true, or God's word is true, wow.
That's gonna be pulled in the recording of John saying God's word is not true. How do you know? That's the funniest thing I said was a heretical statement. How do you know existence is not absurd? Existence is not absurd because God has established a rational order based on his mind.
And that answers the question. There's a rational order to things because God has declared it to be so. There's no fact that's neutral out there. Everything that is a fact has been made a fact by Jesus.
Creation was created for him and by him and for him. So here's the conclusion. When engaging with someone from an anti-Christian viewpoint, we must put on their glasses by entering their worldview. That means through having an internal critique, and we're gonna talk about that next week.
When we enter their worldview, we will find it to be a world of inconsistencies, contradictions, arbitrariness, and the inability to provide the preconditions for intelligibility. There is only one final authority that gives meaning to life.
That's the invariable, absolute, and unchanging triune God of Scripture. So I ask the question, which is a true court of justice? Is the one that has contradictory laws, changing laws, variable laws, and unappointed judges?
In other words, they're dependent upon God. God thinks this way, therefore we ought to think this way. We're supposed to be perfect because he is perfect. We're supposed to follow his example. That's why we should reason.
It's dependent upon his character. If it's not, then we don't have logic anymore. And you see, this works for every single worldview out there, not just atheism. Because you start delving into the theology of any cult that tries to ape Christianity, any Eastern worldview, you're gonna find they are devoid of these characteristics because they don't have a God that matches them.
That's why the Christian worldview, that's why this apologetic you're gonna find is so powerful, and it's so simple. Once you understand it, it's so simple to use. So I wanna kinda end here, yeah, that was the end of the show, with a story for ya, just to kind of, I guess, whet your taste for next week.
Can I pick on you, Ed? Is that okay, for the story? You own an automotive, it's gonna be called Ed's Automotive, where you fix cars. Ed is the head mechanic at Ed's Automotive, he's a business owner. And pretend that you're a worker at Ed's Automotive.
And Ed does a good job on his cars, I'm sure you would, right? You're gonna make sure that you get the best parts, it's clean in there, the customers are satisfied, and you're gonna hire the best mechanics to do your work for you.
Now, imagine Ed's Automotive is across the street from his building, is a property that, let's say, brings all the other houses in the area down in property value. It's a mess. There's half-buried cars, and it's just, it's dirty, and it's horrible, and no one wants to look at it.
But you, working for Ed's Automotive, every time you open your bay door in the morning, guess what you see? The house across the street. And you're like, man, why do I have to work here and see that? You know, oh well, let me get to work.
One day you come in, and you notice all your tools are missing. And you can't find any, you can't fix anything because you don't have any tools. And you look across the street, and there's the neighbor.
And he's using the wrench like it was a hammer. And he's got all your tools sprawled out all over the lawn, and they're a mess. And you're like, well, what is he doing with Ed's tools? Ed gave you the tools, they're not your tools.
You know, he provided them for you, but they're nice tools. So you go over to the neighbor and you say, hey, listen friend, I appreciate that you're trying to clean things up, I guess, around here, trying to fix some things.
But those are actually, those are my tools. And he says, no, they're not. So no, no, they are. You look at them, they have a label, it says Ed's Automotive. And he looks on them, and sure enough, it says Ed's Automotive on every single tool.
And then he says to you, well, I don't believe Ed exists. And you look at the building, you're like, but it says it right there, it says Ed's Automotive. He says, well, if Ed does exist, I've heard he's a bad mechanic, and he runs a bad operation over there.
Customers are not satisfied when they leave Ed's Automotive. I mean, it's a mess, it's because it's so dirty, they just let oil leak all over the place, and it's the worst place in town. I've heard that he rips people off all the time.
And then you get angry, and you say, now listen, I know Ed, and he treats me well, and these are his tools, and he does a good job at his shop. Why don't you come over for a non-confrontational cup of coffee, and I'll show you around Ed's Automotive.
You can look at our books, you can see that we're not cheating anyone. Look at all the awards that we have for customer excellence. And look at the work we're doing, look at all the fluids are right, and all the vehicles, and it's clean, we always sweep up.
And so he says, okay, sure, I'd like to come over. So you give him a cup of coffee, and you tour the place. And afterward, he says, you know, I was wrong about Ed's Automotive. It's actually a pretty nice place.
They do good work here. You know what, I'm never gonna say anything bad about Ed's Automotive again. And he walks over to his house. And you're standing there, and you're looking at him, and you're like, I showed him.
He knows that Ed's a good guy now. Well, let's say Ed walks in, and he says, it's, you know, it's half past 12. Why haven't you done any work? And you said, oh, that's simple. I don't have any tools. And he says, why don't you have any tools?
Oh, then the neighbor has them. But don't worry, he said you were a bad guy, and he didn't even think you existed, but I proved that you did, and that you're a really good guy. So he's not gonna say anything anymore bad about you.
Now, what would Ed say? Where are your tools? I don't care what he thinks about me, right? Yeah, I don't care that he, you know, now he thinks I have the best looking head in the world. That doesn't matter to you, right?
You want the tools back. All right, I wanna suggest to you, this is what's going on in apologetics today. This is what Christians do. The non-believer takes our tools. So they take reason, and they try to use reason against us.
They take evidence, and they try to use evidence against us. They take morality, and they say, the God of the Old Testament did horrible, cruel things. And they take that away from us. I know I'm a little late, I'm sorry.
I just wanted to get this story out there. And then we say, why don't you come over to our church and see how great it is, and you're a little misinformed. I know you had some bad experiences in the past, but you know what, it's actually a really good place.
Now, what's God gonna say? Where are my tools? You let the unbeliever keep those things? You just let him have reason, and you let him have morality, and all these things that belong to me? That's actually false worship in a way, right?
They don't belong to him. They have God's name printed on them. And so what we endeavoring to do, and this is what we're gonna learn over the next two weeks, is showing, not going about it that way, but showing the unbeliever that his tools actually aren't his, that they're the God of Scripture, the God he knows exists, and the God he knows is gonna judge him, all right?
So I know some of you probably need to go. If you need to go, why don't we close in a word of prayer, and then if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask, and I'll see what I can do, all right? Lord, thank you so much for this time.
Thank you so much that the sound ended up working, and that we were able to go through some of these truths of your word. Lord, we wanna serve you. That's why we're here, Lord. We could be doing a lot of other things on a Saturday night, and then coming to a church and learning about philosophy and apologetics, but Lord, I know the heart of the people in this room is they want to be able to communicate the truth of your gospel in a very clear, effective way, and they wanna be able to answer those who would contradict it.
And so I do pray, Lord, that you would just bless them, Lord, that you would bring up opportunities even this week for them to share their faith, and that when we meet next week, Lord, we would just be ready to get into it, and we'd understand everything that you have for us, in Jesus' name, amen.
So for those who don't need to leave yet, are there any questions for anyone? Is there real, you have a question?
Oh, okay. For the people of God, is that, so I know that Psy, I think he has like four things that he usually goes to, like morality, reasoning.
The preconditions of intelligibility, you mean? So you could go to laws of logic. You could go to knowledge. You could go to morality. You could even go to the laws of mathematics, or induction, which is what science is based on.
That's the uniformity of nature. So there's a bunch of ways you can go about it. But he likes to go to knowledge. Usually what he does, he's got the simplest way of going about it. He usually says, how do you know?
And then someone, or he'll say something like, can you be wrong about everything you claim to know? And then someone will say, usually, surprisingly, most people will say, I could be. And then he says, well, how do you know anything?
If I said, if someone asked me, did the mail come today? And I said, it could have, but I don't know. It means you don't know if the mail came. So if you say, I could be wrong about anything I claim to know, you've just given up knowledge.
And so he points it out, and then he says, I can have knowledge, though, because God's given me revelation. So that's one of the ways he goes about it. And then atheists get mad, and they say, well, you can't know either.
And he says, if you can't know anything, how do you know what I know? And so that's, I think, the most common one he does. But you could go to any of those, yeah.
Is that usually the sequence of how it works? With Psy, or? No, just in general.
You gotta presuppose God in order to prove. Whatever argument you're using against God, you have to presuppose God for it. Because if you're invoking logic to disprove God, all right, let's start with.
How do you get logic?
You have to assume God, right? So you do have to pick a topic and show how God is assumed in all of it.
Whatever topic they bring up, yeah. You can let them bring up the topic, yeah. They wanna talk about morality? Okay, how do you get morality? How can you brush your teeth with God? Because you're assuming a lot of things just to make that simple.
You're assuming that the future is gonna be like the past in order to brush your teeth, that the tooth decay happens, right? And so, I mean, you could go anywhere with it, really. Yeah, that's the beauty of it.
It's very versatile.
