Ault Sunday School - No TAG Backs Part 2

Prayer for Worship and Help in Thinking Deep Thoughts About God

Dearly Father, thank you for this day where we get to come together and worship you, and celebrate you, and pray to you, and help us as we think deep thoughts about you.

Amen.

Amen.

Presuppositional Argumentation and the Transcendental Argument for God

Alright, so last week, we started looking at the first half of this. This is a paper about presuppositional argumentation, about the transcendental argument for God. Big, heady words, so if you weren't here last week, I would try as much as possible to fill in all the vocabulary that you're missing out on.

Also, this is something I mentioned last week. It's somewhat controversial, and I don't think it should be. And frankly, you know, we've got visitors from the East Coast here. There's a big difference even in how the East Coast approaches this, versus the West Coast, if you look at reference formats.

Yeah, if this, you're aware. But then again, I believe this is actually says that even if they don't say that they agree, they might deny morality, but even to speak.

So you take something that's agreed on.

And we started covering because of this fast one exists, but rather because of what the Bible says about God, because of what he says about himself. It really is the case that you could not have this universe apart from apart from him in the way he is disclosed himself.

And particularly, we were looking at the Trinity. Now, the Trinity is not the only thing that's unique about Christianity, but it certainly is a fundamental one. Thinking about the nature of God. Yeah.

The Problem of the One and the Many

So one more, one more bit of background. We were talking last week about what's known as the problem of the many and the one, right? That there is both unity and diversity. You know, I am made of many atoms that are constantly changing their position and or, you know, the space they're taking up, et cetera.

And yet there is the one unified concept of commonness, you know, of commonness that remains constant, even though everything that exists in this spacious world is constantly changing. So how does it step in a stream?

No man steps in the same way.

Later, Greek philosophers said that everything is actually like Plato and Aristotle. Everything is fundamentally one. And so from that, you know, you have the substances that are unifying this world. This is abstract stuff.

So I'll give more examples. This also, I mentioned, exists in Eastern religions. Hinduism, the fundamental Hinduism, tenet of Hinduism is that everything is ultimately one. You have this one life essence called Brahman that unifies everything together and establishes a basis for Atman.

Atman being yourself. And so in Hinduism, everything is fundamentally one. And the goal is to embrace that that is consistent across moments. You just have what was at that moment and what was at the next.

So this is a real problem, even if people aren't thinking about it from day to day. This is a fundamental thing that philosophers have wrestled with, both Greek philosophers, Eastern philosophers. How do you account for the fact that there are abstract concepts that remain unified?

There's laws of logic, there's truth that remains true no matter how many moments pass. And yet, everything in this world, otherwise, is constantly changing.

How do you account for that?

And the uniqueness of Christianity with the Trinity is this posit as though we're the ones coming up with this idea. But the Bible declares God, who is not, his unity and his diversity are equally ultimate.

That he is one God in three persons. And so he provides the foundation for a world that has diversity but also unity. So we were on page 5, and beginning with this, if you're confused about anything, just raise your hand.

God as Strictly Eternal and Exhaustively Personal

Alright, so God is strictly eternal and exhaustively personal. The first point indicates that the Trinity is not in any measure dependent on an opposing, ever-incomplete compromise of the finality of his knowledge and being.

The second point indicates that the Triune God is not married to any sort of unconscious and failed to fully express his self-awareness and self-direction. We're going to go through that in this next paragraph here.

To rephrase, we're asking that it doesn't really exist in the world, it only exists in our minds. And we are finite, and we will cease. And then if we cease, the punis of this object ceases. So something that unites the two, that unites unity and diversity, that fundamental principle needs to be eternal.

Because both themselves, to rephrase, is exhaustively personal. God, while being tri-personal, is still, while he's tri-personal, he's a single, he's just you. And so if everything is diverse, and there's no, there's no unity to tie it all together, then knowledge is impossible.

Because these things that we claim are just in our own mind. You're just naming things. It's not actually a real truth, you're just naming it. There's a difference between the two. Neither of us are claiming to know what's going on in the machine.

Just that we have all the ingredients necessary for it. And so, I'm not claiming I know how knowledge is possible exactly. What I'm claiming is that I have a God who can make it possible. Where what the unbeliever prescribes, the non-tri-God, have a basis, provide the solution.

What about a very similar approach? Even barring the requirement of multi-personality, it's clear that there are only two options for a God that would mimic the tri-God of Scripture. In which case, you know, we can already show that he's fallen previously.

He previously deistic, having not given revelation of himself until the present time. So let's say, you know, this being the be-all, end-all. We addressed once the first half of the answer. Now the next half of the answer is probably the more powerful and better half.

Chance, Sovereignty, and the Impossibility of the Contrary

Manuel, could you say that? If you've ever seen a transcendental argument for the existence of God, it shows that God is true by the impossibility of the contrary. When it rejects, and when it demonstrates the person you're arguing with, we now progress to the second.

To make sense of the universe apart from God represents a reliance on the irrationalist notion of open-ended chance. That Bancho has already proven. The polemic against the notion of chance. Because, you know, chance is not a real thing.

Since the lot is cast in the lap of it, every decision is from the Lord. So, yeah, there's no such thing as chance. God is sovereign. We may see that this response contains a repudiation of the idea that autonomous man can make any sense of the universe without God.

But man cannot begin to even discuss the purpose of the previous response, i .e. showing that the relation of the Trinity in solving the problem of the one of many is limited in purpose. The objection that not every possible instance of the non-Christian worldview is handled by Tagg most frequently comes from the misunderstanding of what the Christian worldview is.

That is, there's a lack of perception about just how unique the Christian God is and how every other God is entirely unlike him. We have therefore shown how the Trinity is central to the argument. God's triunity and sovereignty being the source of Christianity's uniqueness.

That is all on its own. It cannot go farther and demonstrate. And as we have come to these prophecies, contrary to the nature of it, it really is reliant. It does not mean that Adam, obviously he already experienced good.

Okay, so it's not talking about experiencing good evil. He had already experienced good. It's not about knowing what evil is. God told him it was wrong to eat of the tree. He already knew that that was evil.

It was instead autonomy. You look at the phrase good and evil in Scripture and you see that it's what the Bible uses to describe judges, ones who know what right and wrong is and are determining that as an authority.

So Solomon is said to know good and evil. He's a judge who makes determinations for people. So the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is basically saying rather than letting God be the judge, I'm going to take matters into my own hands and decide what right and wrong is in good and evil.

This is the original sin. This is the root of all sin. It's that autonomy where I'm not being directed by God, but I'm directed. And the one who imagines that their own knowledge is self-directed rather than revealed is able to hypothesize all these different religions that might exist that might be able to account for that.

Okay, first of all, the Christian has forfeited a notion of God. So these things that God already tells us there is no other God, that only God is the true God. Countless verses in Isaiah say that there is no God like me.

That's the Christian in that. So now he's hypothesizing, well, maybe there's another worldview out there. It's been shown that he doesn't have a foundation. I have a very good question. How do you make a hypothesis and know that hypothesis?

You don't have a foundation from which to make it, right? If your worldview is just this, and there's some common ground that everyone stands on. The reality is if you're a ship on which knowledge stands, it's time you have to make a hypothesis from this other ship right here.

So this really all comes down to just the fact that the reason why people have trouble thinking like this.