Ault Sunday School - No TAG Backs Part 2

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

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Dearly Father, thank you for this day where we get to come together and worship you and celebrate you and pray to you.

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Let's just be thinking thoughts about you.

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Alright, so last week, we started looking at the first half of this. I'll put a tag back.

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A paper about presuppositional argumentation, about transcendental argument for God.

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Big, heady words. If you weren't here last week, I would try as much as possible to fill in all the other words you're missing out on.

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Also, this is something I mentioned last week. It's somewhat controversial. I don't think it should be.

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And frankly, we've got visitors from the East Coast here.

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There's a big difference even in how the East Coast approaches this versus the West Coast if you look at reformed Baptist service. But then again,

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I believe this is all true. So we were talking about the transcendental argument that says that God is true because of the impossibility of the contrary.

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If you take some truth that everyone agrees on, or even if they don't say that they agree on it, they act as though they do.

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Speaking things, they might deny morality, but even to speak and to assert things is to say that you should believe this, which is in itself a moral thing.

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So you take something that's agreed on and you're able to listen to your ex, but it's a thing that's not existent.

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So you disprove the others, and we started covering the first one last week.

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The first is that Christianity is truly unique. We're not just claiming that because of this philosophical fast one

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I'm able to pull on you, God really exists. But rather, because of what the

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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 Him and the way

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He has disclosed Himself. And particularly, we were looking at the Trinity. Now, the Trinity is not the only thing that's unique.

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It certainly is a fundamental one. So one more bit of background.

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We were talking last week about what's known as the problem of the many and the one. That there is both unity and diversity in the world.

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I am made of many atoms that are constantly changing their position and the space they're taking up, etc.

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And yet, there is the one unified concept of commonliness that remains constant, even though everything that exists in this spacious world is constantly changing.

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So how is it that there is not many? And it really does, if it doesn't,

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Congress wrestled with this in the earliest ones, said, well, everything is ultimately many.

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The fundamental property in the universe is change, and everything is just constantly changing. So if you step in a stream, no man steps in the same river twice, because it's not the same river the next time.

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All the water has changed. And later, Greek philosophers said that everything is actually like Plato and Aristotle.

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Everything is fundamentally one. And so from that, you have the Greek notions and substances that are unifying this world that is otherwise different.

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I know this is abstract stuff, so I'll give more examples. This also, I mentioned, exists in Eastern religions.

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Hinduism, the fundamental tenet of Hinduism is that everything is ultimately one.

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You have this one life essence called Brahman that unifies everything together and establishes a basis for Atman.

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Atman being yourself. And so in Hinduism, everything is fundamentally one, and the goal is to embrace that fully and just become one.

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So they would say that the fundamental goal is to realize that you don't even exist. This lectern doesn't exist.

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This pew doesn't exist. Because it's constantly changing, and there is no unity. There's no identity that is consistent across moments.

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You just have what was at that moment and what was at the next moment, etc. So this is a real problem, even if people aren't thinking about it from day to day.

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This is a fundamental thing that philosophers have wrestled with, both Greek philosophers, Eastern philosophers, all kinds of people.

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How do you account for the fact that there are abstract concepts that remain unified?

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There's laws of logic, there's truth, no matter how many moments pass.

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And yet, everything is. And the uniqueness of Christianity with the

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Trinity is that we are the ones coming up with this idea.

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But the Bible declares a God who is not only fundamentally one, not only fundamentally diverse, but he's unity and diversity.

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He is one God. And so he himself provides the foundation for a world that has diversity, but also unity.

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So we were on page 5, and beginning with this is where we stopped.

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And please, if you're confused about anything, just raise your hand and I'll ask a question.

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Alright, so God is strictly eternal and exhaustively personal.

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The first point indicates that the Trinity is not in any measure. The second point indicates that the

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Triune God is not married to any sort of unconscious being that would resist and fail to fully express his own eternal self -awareness and self -direction.

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Okay, so we're going to go through that in this next paragraph here. To rephrase, the

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Trinity is the principle that establishes the harmony between you and me.

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So, in other words, if that's the case, then it doesn't really exist in the world.

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It only exists in our minds, and we are finite, and we will cease. And then, if we cease, the punishment of this object ceases.

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So, something that unites the two, that unites unity and diversity, that fundamental principle needs to be eternal.

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And our God is strictly eternal. Because such harmony is found in relating a member of the many in order for God.

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Man does not know everything, so his mind cannot be the harmonizing principle. God does know all things, both himself and his creation, so that he may provide.

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To rephrase, this is being.

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When it says he exists, he is exhaustively personal. God, while being tripersonal, is still, while he is tripersonal, he is a single person.

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He is without body or part. Okay, so he is simple, and he is personal, which means he is exhaustively personal because there wouldn't be any part of him that could not be personal, since he's not made of parts.

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Thus, he, in his entirety, may communicate to man whatever of his knowledge, i .e.,

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of himself, that he wills. So, because of this personality of his, and personality of his being the basis of communication, he is able to communicate to us these truths.

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Okay, so, it's all pretty complicated hardware. It is just unity.

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Second, plurality is ultimate, not unity, right?

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So, if everything is diverse, and there's no unity to tie it all together, then knowledge is impossible, because these things that we claim are just in our own wisdom.

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You know, you're just naming things. It's not actually a real truth. You're just naming it.

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If you have a dialogue partner who claims that you can't know something, they're claiming that they know that they can't know something.

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So, they've got a problem there. So, knowledge of the universe is not impossible.

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It isn't even possible. Therefore, the ontology of the universe, the being of the universe, must be something such that unity and plurality are co -ultimate.

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Therefore, Christian theism is the case, since only Christian theism posits an ontology with the necessity of a solution.

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A lot of people, when they hear all this, because it's so hard to understand, they're immediately responsible to the other basis for it.

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Even the non -Christian, excuse me, both appeal to mystery. In other words, things that are just unknown.

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However, the Christian appeals to a mystery which lies on God, one who is capable of providing an answer, and the non -Christian appeals to an uncertain reality which will not necessarily provide any answer.

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Furthermore, it is not as though the non -Christian's worldview merely might not provide an answer.

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It cannot provide an answer. Any answer that appears, or that we might discover in the future, would necessarily contradict.

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He possesses various pigments that are then mixed in the cans. No one knows what it does, and indeed mix it.

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Let us say that purple...

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He does not know how purple is produced, but he has a basis on which it may be produced. Okay, so there's a difference between the two.

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Neither of us are claimed to know what's going on in the machine, just that we have all the ingredients necessary for purple paint to come out.

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And so, I'm not claiming I know how knowledge is possible exactly.

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What I'm claiming is that I have a God who can make it possible, where He does not have a basis on which knowledge is possible.

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He has a basis for rational synthesis.

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There's a position that in a book, for example, it exists just in our minds, or it does exist in the universe, but from an impersonal

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God who can't communicate it. So our God is exactly impersonal. He's capable of what we talked about with weather and heat.

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Thus, a solution is necessary, and only the triune God can provide the solution.

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So at this point, you might say, all right, well, what about if somebody else takes a very similar approach?

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Even barring the requirement of multi -personality, it is clear that very few religions meet the conditions of heretical variance, which changes such a discovery from improbable.

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First, it should be clear that no such religion, other than Christianity, has been posited until this time.

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Some have suggested that the Trinity is mirrored in pagan religions. Sorry. Yeah, but this needs to get fixed here.

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Say something, though. Some have suggested the

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Trinity is mirrored in pagan religions. These religions have repeatedly been shown to be tritheistic at best.

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Have you ever heard someone claim that? Oh, yeah, Christianity and your Trinity, that comes from, you know, some

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Greek myth where there's this three -headed person or all kinds of things like that.

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Usually, this is just a tritheism that they're claiming is where Christians got the

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Trinity. Further, there are only two options for a god that would mimic the ontology.

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It would either be based on the perversion of biblical revelation. Basically, you have a triagonal scripture, but then you're modified.

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Or, in which case, you know, we can already show that he's false, because, like I said, if you deny him, it's not the same god.

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Or he would be previously theistic, having not given revelation of himself until the present time.

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This would make the Christian god an idol that would have surpassed the true god in even revealing that.

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So let's say, you know, there's some new religion. This is a big blur with the

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Old Testament revelation. Our argument thus far may suggest that those saints living prior to the New Testament revelation did not have sufficient justification for their knowledge.

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Right? So if you don't have the revelation, so this is not the case.

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While the Trinity is most certain, the saints may not have been aware, additionally, until the

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Second Coming. Instead, it is right to understand that the completion of our knowledge

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Yeah, there's a reason that we have fuller revelation of what's needed, or of God, and are able to make these arguments.

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It's because this is the final stage. We're at the end. Or that the problem of the

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One Amendment is the sole problem that is needed.

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So yeah, I'm not saying that this is the only unique thing that Christianity is offering. This is the only way that the argument can be made.

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For example, John's frame speaks of ethics. Person here includes interpersonal attributes such as love.

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This is known by ethics. So, you know, selves.

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And if you ruin that relationship, then in what sense can God even be personal?

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If there's no potential for relationship, right? If there's no relationship. So anyway, ethics, epistemology, meaning knowing all those things, require the fact that, yeah, it's not just this one philosophical problem.

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I suppose that ethics is not a necessary category to acknowledge in the universe, but it is not so easily disposed of.

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When one reasons, he argues for a position as true. When arguing a position as true, he implies that it ought to be believed.

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Thought is a moral or ethical category. Thus, we see once again that Christianity is wildly—

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Yeah, if someone—I mentioned this earlier, but if someone is stating things as true, then they are stating them.

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So instead of the problem of the one and the many being the— If there's just one example, the answer is probably the more powerful and better issue, or I can grab it if you're trying.

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So yeah, 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.

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When it rejects, and when it demonstrates that the person you're arguing with is— their religion is not true, whatever it may be.

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Now, we anonymous man might be able to make sense of the universe apart from God, represents a reliance against the notion of chance, because, you know, from the most past and the last, every decision is from the

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Lord. So yeah, there's no such thing as chance.

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We may see that this response contains a repudiation of the idea that autonomous man can make any sense of the universe apart from God.

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In other words, without God, man's purpose of the previous response— i .e.,

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showing that their relation is limited in purpose— the objection that not every possible— there's a lack of perception about just how unique the

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Christian God is. We have therefore shown how the

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Trinity is central to the argument. God's trinity and sovereignty being the source of Christianity's uniqueness among the world religions.

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However, that is all the response can offer. On its own, it cannot go farther and demonstrate or assess the long -worldly grounds.

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This is entirely contrary to the nature of TAG, epistemic comprehension.

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Instead of discovering the preconditions of intelligence, satisfying them by revelation— so we're not saying, all right, we'll discover this problem in the middle and the one, and then we look at the

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Bible, and we should find this other problem, what guarantee do you have that really is relying on you?

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Therefore, the unbeliever is able to take some set of preconditions and hypothesize— not so much that the—

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I'm going to come back— that such a

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God exists. In accordance with biblical revelation, there could not be— a non -Christian cannot suppose that such a

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God exists because he has no foundation from which— let me explain that, because I— and especially if we're talking about making an argument with an unbeliever, and you've shown his worldview to be false, and it's probably not

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Christianity. Okay, so, the idea of us imagining that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what does good and evil mean?

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It does not mean that Adam— obviously, he already experienced good. Okay, so it's not talking about experiencing good and evil.

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He had already experienced good. It's not about knowing what evil is.

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God told him it was wrong to eat of the tree. He already knew that that was evil. It was instead autonomy from the other.

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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, right?

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So Solomon is said to know good and evil. He's a judge who, you know, makes determinations for people.

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Right, so the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is basically saying, rather than letting God be the judge, and the one who imagines it is able to hypothesize all these different, you know, okay, first of all, the

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Christian has forfeited any notion of autonomy that satisfies— that's the

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Christian in that discussion, right?

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So now he's hypothesizing, well, maybe there's another worldview out there. Well, on what basis is he making that hypothesis?

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He's just been shown that he doesn't have a foundation for explaining how knowledge is even possible.

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How do you make a hypothesis unless you have a very good— that suddenly got very loud. How do you make a hypothesis and know that that hypothesis is meaningful if you don't have a false?

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It's only if you think that you truly are autonomous and there's some common ground that everyone's standing on that gives you free access to these sorts of ideas.

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If anything that you suppose should be just rejected as depending on whatever worldview it is that the

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Christian has demonstrated to be false is failing. The only ground you have to make a hypothesis from—

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So this really all comes down to just the fact that the reason why people have trouble thinking about this is because sin is so serious and it has so deeply affected the way we think that we think of ourselves as autonomized.

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These other religions, is your ability to think there?

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And additionally, we've seen that the objection may not be exclusively of Christianity.

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In other words, Christianity claims to be exclusive so we can't call ourselves Christian. And the non -believer, so, maybe my understanding from a failed understanding about non -Christian life is he is not at liberty.

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Thus, every man should be called a submission owed to the tribe by virtue of a man's creaturely status.

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In summary, it is not the Christian who is a theist. Theism is the idea that—theism is the idea—maybe you've talked to another

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Christian and you know that Christianity is true and they'll say things like, well, you can't actually make a slew of faith and then you remain consistent in there and you can show that it's not necessarily false and that's the best you can do.

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I don't think that's right. That's what a lot of people claim because they don't realize that there is proof.

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Gosh, if there wasn't, how could God hold us because we know it because it is asserted?

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The Christian who advances the gospel by means of the transcendental argument when used rightly begins from a sound epistemology and reaches a sound conclusion.

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Instead, the label theist may accurately be looking at all of it.

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So, for example, this would be a classical apologist who is arguing for the existence of Mary.

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Let's say you're talking with an unbeliever and you've shown that their worldview is false.

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Doing some other religion that's not

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Christianity, from a Christian perspective, that's because Christianity, the

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Bible, declares that God is exclusively God. There is no other religion out there that is true.

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And then from their perspective, they can't, they don't have the grounds to argue for that because you just showed their worldview to be false.

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If you showed your Hinduism is false, or your Buddhism is false, or your Atheism is false, if you showed them that their worldview is false, and that their understanding of where knowledge comes from is false, how could they make a knowledge claim that there could be something out there?

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How do you argue that there could be another religion out there if your understanding of how to even make knowledge claims, or the basis on which knowledge is true, has been proven.

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Back to that sinking ship analogy, the ship is underwater, you can't really do anything.

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The only ship around that you can climb to is the Christian ship.

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Yeah, I guess part of the ship analogy, you hear that one often, is because a lot of people imagine, because they think of themselves as autonomous, there's just lots of options out there, even if we haven't discovered them.

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But that's not really how it works because we're not honest beings, we're able to hypothesize, we're standing on presuppositions that answer for you.

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Once you get it, and you've heard it before, I feel like you say, well, maybe there's some other religion out there.

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I don't know. I feel like it's important to be able to explain that in a way that they should have to acknowledge it too.

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And I know that they are also aware of God because Romans 1 says that God has demonstrated His power and glory, etc.

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But if it's not, if that's not something that can be articulated, it seems there's something off.

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And it is something that actually can be articulated, why they can't just hypothesize these things. Dale?

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So, honestly, a lot of this is for the believer. Like, when we're talking about to persuade someone or whomever, the fact of the matter is only the

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Holy Spirit does that. Presenting the gospel is wrong. However, yeah, this is useful.

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It's useful in part to have those kinds of discussions, but a lot of its utility is just in having a deepening understanding of the majesty of your

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God. So, what do you do for someone like that? I think this argument can be re -explained in some way.

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If you're at that point, they say it's universal.

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So what makes something true? And if they say the courts are for reality, and you point out to them that they don't even know what reality is, they're not in a position.

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So there's ways of, I think, casually, even at that discussion, to explain, you're not in a position to make those kinds of claims.

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It's arrogant of you to make that kind of claim given that you just admitted that you don't know. And that's called sin.

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I hope this is helpful. Like I said, this is yeah, the main utility of this from my perspective is just to have the deepening of the

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Spirit. It's going to change someone's mind and, you know, maybe wrestle with some of these things to help them.

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It's not the Spirit. So really, why

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I'm presenting this is Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word.

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We thank you for how you have revealed yourself to us and disclosed so much that was not known to us.

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Revelation. We pray that you would assist us this day as we worship you.