March 4, 2025 Show with Eli Ayala on “The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (TAG)”

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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

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Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this fourth day of March 2025.

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Before I introduce my guest and our topic of the day, I want to remind my listeners, if you are a man in ministry leadership, you are invited to either or both of the next upcoming 2025 free

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God willing, soon. But there is a providential connection here with those two men that I mentioned, who are my pastor's luncheon speakers,

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Dr. Jason Lyle and Dr. James R. White. They are both going to be speaking this

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September in Franklin, Tennessee, alongside my guest today.

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It's great to have him coming back to the program. His name is Eli Ayala. He is a presuppositionalist apologist, an old friend of mine from Long Island, New York, now ministering in North Carolina.

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And Eli, as James White has put it, is one of the brightest young minds in apologetics today.

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I am very glad that I introduced these two men together because it has obviously provided Eli with a larger platform where more people are discovering his gifts.

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Today, we're going to be discussing the transcendental argument for the existence of God, also known as Tag.

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It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharp on Zion Radio, Eli Ayala.

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Thank you so much for having me back on. It's always a pleasure to reconnect with you, and I'm super excited to be able to have this conversation with you.

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Tell us about Revealed Apologetics. Revealed Apologetics is an apologetics ministry that I started.

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I have a website, but it's primarily through my

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YouTube channel, where I talk about issues relating to apologetic methodology. Of course, the topic that we're going to be talking about today, the transcendental argument, is an area of focus of mine.

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And I do cover a wide range of topics as well, reform theology, philosophy. And I've had the pleasure of interviewing kind of like what you've done in the past.

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I've had the pleasure of interviewing some pretty bright minds in the apologetics world, presuppositionalists and non -presuppositionalists included.

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So, there's a wide variety of content there. The ministry Revealed Apologetics is called

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Revealed Apologetics, and that's just my way of referring to biblical apologetics or presuppositional apologetics.

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As you know, Chris, the Bible commands us to do apologetics to defend the faith, but I'm convinced that the

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Bible actually reveals to us how we ought to do that. And so, I call the biblical approach to apologetics or presuppositional apologetics.

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I refer to it as Revealed Apologetics. So, that's the explanation behind the name there.

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And what is your website? My website is revealedapologetics .com.

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And the YouTube channel, of course, is Revealed Apologetics, and people can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, all the social media outlets.

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Great. And, God willing, we'll be repeating that website later on in the program. Before we go into the heart of the matter with the transcendental argument for the existence of God, please, in layman's terms, as simply as possible, define presuppositional apologetics.

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So, even a knuckle -dragging moron like myself can understand what you're saying.

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Well, I don't know about that. I think you're a pretty bright guy, but if I could define presuppositional apologetics in very simple terms,

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I would say that it is the attempt to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, even the thoughts of the unbeliever.

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When applied to apologetics, we ought to do apologetics in a way in which our reasoning and our thinking is under the lordship and authority of Christ.

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And when we interact with the unbeliever, we try to argue along biblical lines that unless the unbeliever submits his thinking to the lordship of Christ, he doesn't have a foundation or grounding for anything that he does, whether it's science, history, philosophy, mathematics, the use of logic, and so forth.

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So, that's how I would define it. To differentiate it from other apologetic methodologies, without doing a full survey of apologetic methodologies, the two prominent and probably the most popular apologetic methodologies would be that of evidentialism and classical methodology.

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And so, I would call those approaches a bottom -up approach, a bottom -up approach, because they work their way up to the conclusion that God very likely exists or it's the most reasonable position to believe that God exists.

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The presuppositional approach is not a bottom -up approach. It is what I like to call a top -down approach.

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We're not reasoning our way up to God, but rather we are starting with the authority of God and reasoning down from there.

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We're saying that unless you start with the triune God who's revealed himself both in general revelation and special revelation, then you lack any foundation for intelligible experience, knowledge, history, all of the categories of learning.

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And so, pretty much we try to apply biblical truth to the area of unbelief and how we interact with the unbeliever and how we reason in a way that is, as I said before, under the lordship of Christ and consistent with the

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Scriptures. Now, what is being presupposed, hence the name presuppositionalism?

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Yeah, well, the two basic things that are presupposed are the existence of the triune

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God and his revelation. So, in philosophy, when we talk about worldviews, every worldview is comprised of at least three foundations, and these three foundations are metaphysics.

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Everyone has a metaphysic, and I'll define that in just a moment. Everyone has an epistemology, and everyone has an ethic.

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No matter what worldview you hold, whether you're a Muslim, a Mormon, a Jehovah's Witness, an atheist, or whatever, everyone presupposes and has those three categories functioning in the background.

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So, metaphysics, simply put, asks the question, what is real? What is the nature of, what is one's theory of reality?

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And depending on your worldview, you're going to answer that question differently. So, if you're talking to, you know, a metaphysical naturalist, an atheist who is a materialist, they don't believe in any supernatural entities, the universe is all that exists, all that exists is matter in motion, but that's going to be their theory of reality or their metaphysics.

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Epistemology is one's theory of knowledge, and that asks the question, how do we know what we know?

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And based upon someone's metaphysics, that's going to impact their theory of knowledge.

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And you have different theories of knowledge. You have something like empiricism, which is a look -and -see theory of knowledge, right?

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I can only know the things that I observe through the senses and things that I experience. You could have theories of knowledge that are based upon mystical experience, divine revelation, rational reflection.

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Everyone has a theory of knowledge, whether they know what their particular flavor of theory of knowledge is called, right?

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You know, there are many people who are empiricists, but they don't know that their view is called empiricism. And everyone has an ethic, and ethics asks the question, how should we live our lives, right?

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Everyone has a theory of what they believe to be right or wrong or whether right or wrong exists at all. Every single worldview has those categories.

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From the Christian perspective, our theory of reality is not real. We don't take it to be a theory, like a hypothetical, like, you know, perhaps you can envision the world in which a

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God exists. No, our presupposition, metaphysically speaking, the thing we presuppose that is real and the most fundamental foundation of reality itself is the triune

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God who has revealed himself. So our presupposition is one involving a theory of knowledge or a view of knowledge and a theory and view of reality.

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God is the foundation of reality. His revelation is the foundation for our theory of knowledge. So that's pretty much what we are presupposing.

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I use shorthand, I'll say, when I talk to people, I presuppose the truth of the Christian worldview, which would entail the triune

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God and his revelation. So I typically, you know, hash things out in terms of worldview, if that makes sense.

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And one of the things that I have noticed when different Christians coming from different ideologies, apologetics, methods, they will sometimes, it seems to me, waste a lot of time trying to prove to someone, an unbeliever, the existence of things that they really, in reality, according to Romans 1, already know.

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Very often you will have evidentialist apologetics or apologists taking most of the time indefinitely trying to convince somebody that God exists.

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But God really, the existence of God is something that is already etched in their minds and hearts, even if they are rebels and they suppress this truth, right?

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That is correct, yes. The Bible teaches that all men have a knowledge of God. The go -to passage there is

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Romans 1, verses 18. I suppose you can go down to verse 21.

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I think it'd be appropriate to read it here because a lot of people will use Romans 1, verses 18 -21 as evidence of what theologians call natural theology.

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Natural theology, which is typically associated with the utilization of what we call the traditional theistic roots for the existence of God.

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You know, arguments like the cosmological argument, right? Trying to show that God is the transcendent cause of the universe.

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Or the teleological argument, trying to demonstrate that the fine -tuning, for example, of the universe for intelligent life or design in the body and in nature and so forth.

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These things point to a designer. These are the theistic proofs that are typically associated with what we call natural theology.

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Now, I don't think Romans 1, verses 18 -21 is teaching natural theology. I actually think it's teaching natural revelation, which is actually a very important distinction to keep in mind.

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There is a difference between what we call in theology natural revelation and what we call in the philosophy of religion natural theology.

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If I can kind of dumb it down for knuckle -dragging individuals like this, what

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I would say is that natural theology is what we do.

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We theologize and grapple with the data of creation to draw a conclusion.

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Natural revelation is what God does. He reveals himself in the created order.

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So let's take a look at Romans 1. I'll read it and kind of walk through the text here. The Apostle Paul says,

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For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

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Now, I'm going to continue to read, but that is a very significant phrase there, the suppression of truth. Right. Yep. Did you want to say something there?

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No, I just said right. Yes. So, and this is key because to suppress the truth assumes that you are in possession of the truth.

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So that's very, that's very important there. So they suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them.

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Why is it plain to them? Is it because they reflected on the data of creation and created deductive arguments leading to the conclusion that very likely a

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God exists? No. It says for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.

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Okay. So they know because God has shown it. All right. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made so that they are, and the interesting phrase here, unapologetus, where it's kind of the negation of the word apologetics.

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They are literally without an apologetic. Why? For although they knew God, the

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Greek there is interesting. It is, it's not that they knew God in a generic sense. It is notis tomtheon, knowing the

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God. So their specificity with respect to the God that they know, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

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We continue in verse 22, claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal

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God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and, and so forth. Um, so the

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Bible clearly teaches that God has made himself known. Okay. Um, and that knowledge of God is not simply something that is derived from looking and seeing, rationally reflecting, formulating an argument and drawing a conclusion.

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The knowledge of God that, that all men have is what we might call in theological and philosophical jargon.

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It is immediate, immediate. We know God innately in light of the fact that we are made in his image.

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We do not know God simply by looking, seeing, and then trying the conclusion.

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And that's actually very important to the whole issue of apologetics because as you said, um, before that there are many evidentialists and classical apologists who will waste lots of time trying to convince an otherwise ignorant person.

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But the problem with that approach is that it doesn't take seriously the biblical data with respect to the nature of the unbelieving man or woman.

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When we're doing apologetics, we are not giving information to an otherwise ignorant person, but rather we are trying to expose the suppression of truth inherent in the unbeliever.

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And how do we do that? Well, it might involve giving various lines of argumentation, but the argumentation we offer in apologetics is not to supplement an otherwise ignorant individual.

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And I think that's very, um, very important. I think Dr. Scott Oliphant, um, I don't know if this is original to him, but Dr.

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Scott Oliphant over there at Westminster Theological Seminary said that apologetics is the application of Christian theology to unbelief.

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And I like that. Looking at the unbeliever from the perspective of the biblical truth that he has a knowledge of God, that he's without excuse, and that our job in apologetics is to apply that, those truths to him so that we could expose the suppression and obviously call this person to repentance.

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And we pray that, of course, God, in his sovereignty and through the working of his spirit, opens blinded eyes.

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So there you go. That's my summary there, piggybacking off of what you said before. And one last thing before we move on to our actual subject.

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I have heard presuppositionalists, or at least some say, in response to those who are defending evidentialism, or perhaps they just don't know what the unique differences are, and they may assume that evidentialism, since it's a separate category of apologetics, that that means that we should conclude that presuppositionalists do not use evidence.

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And I have heard, on occasion, presuppositionalists say, no, we believe there's nothing but evidence.

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Would you also agree with that statement? Yes. And the nomenclature is actually very confusing when we talk about presuppositionalism versus evidentialism.

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Right. A while back, I had Dr. J. Warner Wallace on my channel.

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He's a very popular evidentialist apologist. He wrote the book

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Cold Case Christianity. And I had him on my show and we were talking about the evidence and so forth.

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And he brought up the issue of Mormonism. He's like, well, you know, presuppositionalism is useful to expose, you know, faulty assumptions, so on and so forth.

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But what happens when along comes the Mormon and he has his holy book and you have your holy book?

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Like, well, you both hold those holy books as your ultimate authority. So at that point, then the only thing we have left to do is become evidentialists, because now we have to give evidence to support why our holy book is, you know, better than their holy book.

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And of course, I took objection to that and I pointed out that there is a there is a vast difference between the use of evidences and the utilization of evidentialism as a methodology so that when the presuppositional apologist uses evidence to support what he's arguing for, he does not cease to be a presuppositionalist.

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And for our for our purposes as a presuppositionalist who's desiring to be consistent with the categories of Scripture, we seek to use evidences within the context of biblical categories.

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That is to say that we do not offer evidence in a way that assumes the neutrality and autonomy or the attempted neutrality and autonomy of the unbelievers reasoning.

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But we do offer evidence. You know, Chris, if someone were to say, you know, there's no evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, I have no problem going through the historical evidence for the resurrection.

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But once the conversation continues to move, we begin to see that the issue is not just the data, but it is the presuppositions that are impacting how the unbelievers interpreting the data.

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Cornelius Mantel, the father of presuppositionalism, often referred to the idea that he would often use historical apologetics.

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He says, I would speak about the facts with the unbeliever, but I would not speak endlessly about the facts without addressing the unbelievers philosophy of fact, without addressing those foundational issues, those presuppositions.

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So, correct. I think you're correct that we do not we are not afraid to use evidences, but we believe that evidences ought to be used in a way that is consistent that is consistent with biblical categories.

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Now, one other thing before we move on to the central theme, which will actually begin after the first commercial break, since I brought it up at the very outset of the program, tell us about War of the

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Worldviews, a Christian apologetics conference featuring you and Dr.

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James R. White and Dr. Jason Lyle. Yeah, well, it's still in its early early stages.

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But what I the way it was introduced to me was that the the organizer wanted to have a conference in which the speakers can kind of tackle the main proof for Christianity.

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And so I'm tasked to talk about the objective proof of Christianity by walking through what we call the transcendental argument, which is an argument that I think actually proves the

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Christian worldview. And of course, I believe Dr. White, if I'm not mistaken, is going to be dealing with textual issues, which is an area of his focus.

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And I would imagine that Dr. Lyle will be speaking on a topic that is particular to his expertise, perhaps, you know, science, something relating to science along those lines.

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So it's still in the early stages. But once once the guy who was organizing it told me that it's like, yeah,

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I wanted to get you, Dr. Lyle and Dr. White. I'm like, well, sign me up. That'd be a blessing to join those gentlemen.

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I have met Dr. White in person and had the pleasure of, you know, sharing a meal with him there while I was recording at Apologia Studios in Arizona.

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But I've never met Jason in person before. I've only had him on my channel. So I'm very much looking forward to getting to know him and spend some time with him there.

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And that's going to be held, God willing, September 5th and the 6th in Franklin, Tennessee.

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The the the advertisement in social media says Nashville, but that's on the borderline of Franklin.

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I was told by Denise Toth that it's going to be held in Franklin, at least

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God willing. And there is no specific venue yet selected.

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And I'm even helping to find a venue. I already have a couple in mind if what they are looking at does not follow through.

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But Pastor Bill Sasser of Grace Church at Franklin, if you're listening or if you are listening,

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Lynn, his wife, or anybody else from that congregation who sponsors this program, perhaps you might want to open up your building to host this event.

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And I will try to speak with you about that in the very near future.

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Well, we are going to our first commercial break. And then when we come back, we will dive into the main theme before us, which is a defense of the transcendental theory of the existence of God.

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And if you would like to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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Earth may now order your books from cvbbs .com. We are now back with Eli Ayala, founder of Revealed Apologetics.

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We are talking about the transcendental argument for the existence of God, also nicknamed

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Tag. And if you have questions of your own, our email address is chrisarendsen at gmail .com.

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chrisarendsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

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Now, why don't you put our listeners at ease, their minds at ease, who may be having just nothing but weird and bad connections with the word transcendental.

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They might be saying, you know something, I had a brother -in -law who was into that transcendental meditation.

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And that guy was a heretic and a freak. And I don't want nothing to do with anything that has that word in it.

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So why don't you explain transcendental? Yeah, well, a transcendental argument is just a particular argument form.

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Anyone who studies logic might be familiar with like a deductive argument where you have like steps or a premise that lead to a conclusion.

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You know, a basic one that is typically taught in logic classes would be something like, you know, all men, premise one, all men are mortal.

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Premise two, Socrates is a man. Conclusion, therefore, Socrates is mortal.

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So that's a deductive argument. You have deductive arguments, inductive arguments, adductive arguments.

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You don't really need to know what all those are now. But a transcendental argument is just a particular kind of logical argumentation.

36:52

And a transcendental argument throughout the history of philosophy has typically been used as what we might call anti -skeptical arguments.

37:03

They are arguments that are addressed towards the skeptic who doesn't want to affirm anything.

37:09

So a transcendental argument is meant to demonstrate something with such conclusiveness that the skeptic must affirm it in order to even be rational.

37:20

So a transcendental argument seeks to prove something by the impossibility of the contrary.

37:27

And so that's all it is in logical form. In biblical categories, I mean, a great way to illustrate this,

37:34

I think, is that passage in the Book of Psalms where it says, In his light we see light.

37:40

And that's basically what we're arguing. We say that unless you see the world in light of God's revelation, then you don't see the world truly.

37:48

The Bible says that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. That's true. Unless you're standing on the firm foundation of Christ and his word, as he's revealed himself, you don't have genuine knowledge and wisdom.

38:02

The beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord. All of these biblical passages, when we apply them to argumentation,

38:11

I would say that they give us something akin to a transcendental line of reasoning that unless the unbeliever is standing on the foundation of God's revelation, we say with Paul, Where is the debater of this age?

38:26

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? So that's basically what we're doing. We're applying those biblical categories to, in philosophy, a more rigorous line of argumentation.

38:38

Well, why is this such an important topic to you, the transcendental argument for the existence of God?

38:47

You must think it is superior to other arguments for the existence of God. And so tell us why you even wanted to highlight this in the discussion today.

38:58

Yeah, well, first, I think that our apologetic, and Dr. White, as James White has said this many times, that our apologetic flows out of our theology, right?

39:09

You cannot separate theology and apologetics. And when we consider what the

39:15

Bible has to say with respect to God, his existence, his requirements that he has towards man, like what we are required of as creatures and so forth, when we take what the

39:26

Bible has to say in terms of how the Christian ought to interact with the unbeliever, I am not at all convinced that the

39:33

Bible teaches us that we should be going around trying to prove the high probability or likelihood that a

39:40

God somewhere might exist, and that God who might exist might happen to be the one who raised

39:46

Jesus from the dead. That's not the picture of apologetics. Yeah, that seems to dominate a lot of evangelical apologetics, where people, apologists in the public sphere, in debates and so on, are seeking, either verbally or in writing, to prove to atheists that God exists, and then when they are finished with their presentations, they clap the dust off their hands, sit down, and think that that's fine, that we need not continue much after that.

40:29

And there's some kind of enormous victory when an atheist or an agnostic says, you know,

40:35

I think there is a big man upstairs. But that seems to be, in my opinion, from what

40:44

I've seen, a lot of what goes on in apologetics. Right, and there are a number of reasons for that.

40:51

Again, as I said before, your apologetic is going to flow from your theology, and if you have a weak theology, one that does not hold the

41:00

Scriptures in its proper place in terms of its authority over our reasoning and our thinking, then you're going to have some other authority.

41:07

Let's say the human intellect. And if the human intellect takes primacy over the Word of God, then you can only get probability.

41:15

The human mind, independent of the resources of divine revelation, can only get you to probability.

41:21

There's no way to transcend yourself to have a big picture of the world unless you're going to appeal to revelation, but the unbeliever doesn't accept revelation, so many of these apologists are convinced that we can't use the

41:33

Bible because they reject the Bible. So we have to work our way incrementally to the idea that a

41:39

God exists, and so, you know, if we can demonstrate the high probability of the most reasonableness of believing in a

41:45

God, then maybe that'll open the skeptic up to believing in something like miracles, and we can take the New Testament, and we could show that it's historically reliable, and that it has an early testimony to it, and the disciples died for, you know, their faith, and no one dies for a lie.

41:59

You see how all these arguments kind of work, right? The problem is, the

42:05

Bible speaks— when you take the Bible on its own terms, it speaks with a greater authority and certainty that I don't think is reflected accurately in a lot of the apologetics that we see today.

42:17

And so the reason why I think the transcendental argument is important and the presuppositional method is important is because it is a methodology that really seeks to ground itself in the certainty and authority of God and His Word.

42:31

And so if the God of the Scripture is a certain God, then an apologetic—I think the only appropriate apologetic— is going to be a certain apologetic, an argument that brings the full force of the

42:48

God that we're defending upon the unbeliever, such that he is without excuse. So that's the reason why

42:54

I take the approach that I do. I'm convinced that while we can talk about transcendental arguments and philosophy and logical categories,

43:01

I just think it is an argumentative manifestation of categories that are themselves found in the

43:06

Scriptures. Okay, well, tell us about some of the main elements within the transcendental argument for the existence of God, especially—perhaps you could do it chronologically— when we are either on a plane, train, or in a waiting room, sitting near someone who denies the existence of God or is an agnostic, just isn't sure, or might even be, if you want to risk your life having a conversation like this over your

43:45

Thanksgiving dinner table or wherever else. Tell us about—I mean, of course, there's no cookie -cutter methodology, but explain what might be chronologically a way that you break the ice with this kind of a theory.

44:05

Yeah, so I'm glad that you said that there is not one cookie -cutter approach, because if you think about it, someone says, well, you're on a plane, you've got 10 minutes, and you're sitting next to a person, and the person says, you know, how do

44:15

I know the Bible's true? How would you respond? Well, I mean, if the person sitting next to you is a philosophy professor, that's going to be—you have 10 minutes to explain to a philosophy professor, you know, how

44:28

God exists and that he's suppressing the truth and so forth. It depends on who you're talking about, who you're talking with and the topics that you're addressing, because I do think it is perfectly appropriate that when someone asks a question, you address their question directly.

44:44

Presuppositional apologetics and transcendental argumentation is not something that always has to be at the forefront of every conversation.

44:52

I don't—when a person asks me a question, I don't ignore their question and say, well, your question doesn't make sense because, you know, deep down we all have presuppositions and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

45:01

It's really going to depend on the nature of the question being posed. My favorite simple response for the layperson, okay, that if you want to get a—not for any, you know, nefarious purposes.

45:12

If you want to get a—you're the person asking the question, the skeptic to really kind of like, oh, well, what does he mean by that?

45:19

My good friend Seitan Bruggenkate says that when someone says they don't believe in God, he simply responds with, well, that's not what the

45:25

Bible says. Right. Now— As the old saying goes, there's no such thing as atheists.

45:32

That's right. So when a person says they're an atheist, our job is to remain faithful to Scripture and not believe them.

45:40

Now, that is not to say that they are blatantly lying. The Bible also speaks of the idea that men are self -deceived.

45:48

So there is a certain level of self -deception going on. And so we're going to have to navigate that conversation.

45:54

But in a very interesting way, when someone says, well, I'm an atheist or I don't believe in God, we respond, well, that's not what the

46:01

Bible says. Someone might say, well, what does the Bible say? And there you're off running, kind of sharing him what the

46:08

Word of God says and then addressing his points as he responds. Now, the person says, well,

46:13

I don't believe that the Bible is the Word of God. Well, we could take any approach there.

46:21

I mean, you can appeal to the image of God in him by asking him questions to show that he actually, deep down, does believe things that only make sense if the

46:29

Bible's true. And there are a number of things that you can do to expose that. For example,

46:35

I had a conversation with a young man who used to be in my youth group.

46:41

I was a youth leader at the time, and he was one of the youth, one of the young people, and he was a very philosophically minded young man.

46:48

And when he left the youth group, he had become an atheist, but he wanted to talk with me because we used to have some really good conversations when he was in youth group.

46:57

And so he invited me over to his house and we're sitting down. Very interesting situation. He had the lights off, there were candles lit, he was pouring tea out.

47:06

It was very weird. I was like, what are we doing here? You want a candle lit debate with this former youth leader?

47:13

But he's like, well, I don't believe in God, so on and so forth. And I said, well, I told him straight forward. I was like, well, you know, the

47:19

Bible says that all men have a knowledge of God. And I'm actually convinced that even if you say that, you're actually assuming things that only make sense if God exists.

47:31

He's like, well, what do you mean? He's like, well, you know, I started sharing certain scriptures with him and so forth.

47:37

And he says, you know, I just believe that all that exists is the physical universe. I was like, well, let's let's test that then.

47:43

Let's see if that's what you really believe. And he's like, well, what do you mean? I was like, well, you know, consider this.

47:49

If all that exists is the material world, then men do not have souls.

47:55

They do not have immaterial aspects to their identity. And he's like,

48:01

OK, yeah, that's right. I don't believe in the soul. I was like, OK, well, if man is purely physical.

48:07

The physical is constantly undergoing change. He was like, yeah, that's true.

48:13

You know, the universe is constantly undergoing change. And I suppose our bodies are constantly undergoing change.

48:18

And I was like, OK, and if your body is undergoing change, then you do not have, on that view, personal identity through time.

48:28

You're literally not the same person that opened the door and let me in. Now, an atheist who is knowledgeable about philosophy will even grant that.

48:39

As a matter of fact, if you go back to the ancient pre -Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus said, philosopher by the name of Heraclitus, he says, a man never steps into the same river twice.

48:48

You stick your feet in the river, the water flows and passes by. You jump out of the river and you go back in. Your feet is not touching the same water because the water is in constant motion and flux.

48:59

And so anything that is constantly undergoing change has no identity. Now we have this conversation on the table, right?

49:05

Right there at the table drinking tea. And he's like, OK, I think I'm tracking with you. And he's like, so if all that you are is a physical material being.

49:14

Then you have no identity. And he's like, OK, I guess

49:19

I guess that's true. And he's like, OK, so if you have no identity, you don't exist. And he goes, that's right. I don't exist.

49:25

And I'm like, OK, so I guess I win the debate. He was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, if you don't exist,

49:30

I'm not talking to anyone. And he goes, no, no, no, no. That's not what I meant. I thought you said I don't exist.

49:36

You see, you have to deny your own existence in order to run away from the God you know exists.

49:43

And that left him in deep thought. He actually emailed me a few months later saying, OK, OK, based on our conversation,

49:50

I do believe that I exist. He had to revamp his objections.

49:56

Now, the point here is not to prove Christianity with one fell stroke. Right. I mean, if I was in a debate,

50:03

I'd give a formal argument and hash this out in more detail and show why Christianity specifically is true.

50:09

But what I was doing there, because he was a learned young man and he kind of was familiar with some of these issues.

50:15

I tried to meet him where he was and show him that when he says with his mouth, he does not believe in part.

50:22

He does not believe in God or the soul or whatever he's asserting. My goal in the discussion was to actually illustrate that while he says that with his mouth, he doesn't actually believe that in his heart.

50:34

I was honestly going to go around saying, yeah, I don't exist. You're going to live consistently like that. No, you know, you exist because you're made in the image of God.

50:42

And so what I tried to do was expose that suppression. And he began to get a little uncomfortable because he recognized really the irrationality of that.

50:50

And I told him that the fool says in his heart, there is no God. You're going to have to say foolish things like I don't exist in order to avoid the

50:57

God that, you know, exists. And that is one of the ways that I tried this approach. Right. By showing that when you reject

51:04

God and his revelation and what he said about you as a human being, then your position is pretty much reduced to absurdity.

51:13

And so that gave him something to think about. And we left the discussion on good terms. He knew that, you know, he was asking these questions and he was going to get a straightforward answer from me.

51:21

But that's kind of one of the ways that I illustrate the fact that the unbeliever doesn't always believe what the words that come out of their mouth, so to speak.

51:31

Oh, yeah. I can remember years ago. I wasn't even a believer at the time.

51:39

I wasn't a Christian. And I was at a party in Queens, New York.

51:45

And a friend of mine, he was a sort of pseudo intellectual.

51:54

And he liked to pontificate. And I overheard him having a disagreement with somebody where he was trying to press forward his belief that there was no right or wrong.

52:12

Because basically, right and wrong is determined upon the different individuals who believe something is right or wrong.

52:25

There is no universal definition or standard for right and wrong.

52:31

And so I said to him, I intruded into the discussion.

52:37

I said, OK, so Hitler, the classic example, he wasn't wrong.

52:42

Well, in Hitler's mind, he was right. And as his followers in their minds, he was right.

52:50

So if I take this beer bottle and smash it over your head, I would not be wrong.

52:57

Well, I would be upset with you, but I couldn't say you were wrong because in your mind, you were right.

53:03

And if I put this cigarette out in your eye, I wouldn't be wrong. No, because in your mind, you were right doing it, even though I would hate the fact that you did that.

53:12

And we were going on and on and on. And he finally said, you're absolutely wrong,

53:18

Chris. I said, I'm wrong. And I started to dance around the room. I'm wrong.

53:24

I'm wrong. But anyway. Well, it's funny. It's funny that you bring that up.

53:29

In fact, in fact, pick up on that when we come back because we have to go to our midway break. So don't forget what you were going to say.

53:37

I'll try my best. OK. All righty. Don't go away, folks. We're going into the midway break.

53:42

And as always, give us, if you're submitting a question via email, give us your first name, at least, city and state and country of residence.

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We'll be right back. I'm Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbrook Baptist Church, a

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnson. Before I return to my discussion with my guest,

01:06:29

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Christ -honoring, biblically faithful, theologically sound, doctrinally solid church, no matter where you live in the world,

01:09:06

I have helped many people in the Ironsharpensiron Radio audience on all parts of the planet Earth find churches that are biblically faithful, sometimes even within just a couple of minutes from where they live, and I may be able to help you, too.

01:09:19

So, if you are in that predicament, send me an email to chrisorenson at gmail .com and put,

01:09:24

I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address to send in a question to Eli Ayala of revealedapologetics .com

01:09:33

on the theme, The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God. chrisorenson at gmail .com

01:09:39

Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Before we go to any listener questions,

01:09:44

Eli, continue what you were going to say. After I was recounting a story of being at a party as a young man, an unbeliever, where I got a person who was babbling on with his pseudo -intellectual rhetoric about how there is no truth, there is no right or wrong.

01:10:08

I got him to prove that that was false because he, in frustration, eventually yelled out to me,

01:10:14

You're wrong, Chris. But anyway, pick up where you left off, where you were about to say something.

01:10:22

You honestly expect me to remember what I said after those commercials? No, I'm just kidding.

01:10:27

I actually remember what I was going to say. And incidentally, I haven't given The Transcendental Argument yet, so perhaps

01:10:32

I should probably do that at some point. Otherwise, the title of this episode would be a misnomer.

01:10:39

But I thought I was going to add an interesting point that if you reject objective morality or objective oughts, that actually undermines the possibility of knowledge and intelligible experience.

01:10:54

Because if you say, OK, there are no oughts, OK, your ethic, remember those three foundations that I've identified in every worldview, your ethic runs roughshod into your metaphysic.

01:11:07

For if there are no oughts, then we could ask the question, ought we believe what is true?

01:11:13

Now, to say that there are no oughts is to say that, no, we ought not believe what's true.

01:11:20

We can believe whatever we like. And of course, that would actually undermine our ability to have accurate conclusions to lines of reasoning and so forth, because people are not obligated to report honest findings and so forth.

01:11:36

And so your ethic actually has entailments with respect to your theory of reality and the other parts of your worldview.

01:11:44

So that's what I was going to add after you said that story. OK, we have

01:11:52

Tracy, and I know I'm going to mispronounce this city,

01:11:59

Rantoul, that's R -A -N -T -O -U -L, Illinois. And Tracy said or asks, how do we confront the person that specifically says,

01:12:13

I do not believe in God? Obviously, we're not going to call them a liar. Yes, correct, because it is not the case that they're simply lying, as the

01:12:24

Bible teaches, that there is a certain level of self -deception. What your job is to do in interacting with someone is to expose the truth that they are suppressing.

01:12:35

And that can be done in any number of ways. I mean, Chris just shared the issue with morality, right?

01:12:40

And someone says there are no objective moral truths and duties and so forth.

01:12:46

But when you actually press them on that, you'll find that they're actually very inconsistent, showing that they do hold to objective moral truths.

01:12:53

Right. When someone says, well, I don't believe in God and I don't believe in an absolute moral law giver, an absolute moral law.

01:13:00

You know, and ask them if someone stole your wallet, what would you do? You see, it's one thing to talk big, like I don't believe this,

01:13:08

I don't believe that. But do they actually live that way? And so our job, when someone says, I don't believe fill in the blank, is to kind of ask strategic questions to expose that actually they're not very consistent with that.

01:13:19

I'll give you an example. I spoke to a student once who said that I don't believe in God.

01:13:24

I believe we're kind of just basically meat machines, right? We're just the product of evolution. All that exists is the material universe.

01:13:32

And so I asked the questions like, well, do you believe that we should interact with one another in a rational way? They're like, well, yeah,

01:13:38

I believe in rationality and science. OK, do you believe in the laws of logic which are needed to do science?

01:13:44

Because, of course, I believe in thinking logically and so forth. And so, OK, so if you believe in logic, how do you square that with the view that you hold that all that exists is the material world?

01:13:56

Is logic material? Well, no. OK, so you just contradicted yourself.

01:14:02

You see, on the one hand, you said all that exists is the material world. But you're going around trying to be reasonable and logical categories that don't make sense if all that exists is the material world.

01:14:13

And so pointing out these inconsistencies can be a foundation for saying, you know, it might be the case that what you say with your mouth is very much in conflict with what you believe in your heart.

01:14:24

And we can pivot from that to what the scripture has to say, sharing a scripture and engaging the conversation that way, depending on how they respond.

01:14:31

So there are any number of ways that that can be done. I hope that answers the question.

01:14:37

And, of course, you could always test the theory of there are no atheists and foxholes by putting a gun to their head and asking them if they believe in God.

01:14:45

But we don't want to—we don't recommend that. If she does it, if we hear about it on the news,

01:14:52

I'm pointing to you. Well, I think now you should go on, and I'm going to allow you to speak uninterrupted for as long as you need to, to thoroughly give an adequate explanation of the transcendental argument for God.

01:15:11

Yeah, thank you. So the transcendental argument for the existence of God seeks to demonstrate the existence of God, specifically the

01:15:17

Christian God, by the impossibility of the contrary. As we've alluded to briefly, that there are many things that the unbeliever says they don't believe in, but when you press them, they actually do hold to things like objective moral values and duties and the laws of logic and so forth.

01:15:34

But what does it look like to kind of lay out a logical demonstration of the fact that the

01:15:40

Christian worldview is actually true? So the route that I take is the transcendental argument, and I formulated it in a deductive argument.

01:15:50

So it's got three basic steps. You've got a step one, step two, and conclusion. Okay? So the first premise of the argument is that if knowledge is possible, the

01:16:02

Christian worldview is true. Premise two, knowledge is possible. Conclusion, therefore, the

01:16:08

Christian worldview is true. Now, what am I saying here in my first step? If knowledge is even possible, the

01:16:15

Christian worldview is true. What I'm about to try and argue for is that for knowledge to even be a thing, in order to have knowledge, the world must be the way that God has revealed it.

01:16:28

In other words, the Christian picture of reality must be the case. Okay? Now, how might we go about doing that?

01:16:33

Well, what is knowledge? Let's define what knowledge is. Knowledge is defined typically in three categories.

01:16:41

Knowledge is typically defined as a justified, true belief. So in order to have knowledge, you need to have those three things in place.

01:16:49

If I have a belief and the belief happens to be true, that's not necessarily knowledge.

01:16:55

Take, for example, someone who plays the lottery. Right? You guess the lucky numbers, and, of course, the beautiful model walks by those little machines that spit out the little ball, and they say, oh, the number four.

01:17:08

And then they walk over to the other one, and the number is seven. And then all of a sudden, by the time she gets to the end, you're like, you know, that's the lucky numbers.

01:17:15

I won the lottery. I knew it. Well, you didn't know it. You believed that that was the number.

01:17:21

It happened to be true. But you lacked what we call a justification, a sufficient and justified reason for believing that that was true.

01:17:30

OK, you just happened to guess. So knowledge requires a justified, true belief.

01:17:36

Now, real quick, before I jump into the defense of the main premise of the argument, it should be noted that those who are familiar with the history of philosophy, the issue of how knowledge is gained has been a very central discussion in the area of epistemology.

01:17:51

And non -Christian, non -religious, non -theistic philosophies have very much grappled with knowledge, because when there is no

01:18:02

God, knowledge will have to be acquired through some kind of rational process.

01:18:09

But then the question is, are we using the proper rational processes to gain genuine knowledge about the world around us?

01:18:16

And so at the beginning of the program this afternoon, we talked a little bit about epistemology, one's theory of knowledge.

01:18:24

And there have been very much attempts to provide a theory of knowledge that can ground the idea that we could actually know things.

01:18:32

So let's take, for example, the empirical view, the epistemology, which says that all knowledge comes through sensation, right?

01:18:41

It's a look and see approach. And, of course, this is very much associated with the scientific enterprise, right?

01:18:46

We look, we observe, we test, and so forth, okay? And that's kind of a very straightforward way.

01:18:51

A lot of people tend to think in those categories almost as a default. But when we actually press that theory of knowledge to its end, we find that it actually runs into some serious problems.

01:19:05

For example, if someone were to say that knowledge comes through sensation, we simply can show the inadequacy of that perspective by asking a simple question.

01:19:16

Which sense did you use to draw that conclusion? That is to say, how do you know that all knowledge is derived through senses?

01:19:25

Do you know it through sensation? Did you observe that to be true? And the answer, of course, is no. You cannot observe the limits of knowledge, okay?

01:19:33

So if this statement is true, all knowledge comes through sensation, if that's true, and you didn't come to know it through sensation, then if it's true, it's false.

01:19:42

In logic, this is called a self -referentially false statement. Namely, it is a statement that if it's true, it actually falsifies itself.

01:19:51

I'll give you kind of a down -to -earth example. If I were to say, Chris, I only know two words in English, if that statement is true, then it's false because I used more than two words to tell you, okay?

01:20:03

So that theory of knowledge is insufficient. Now, I grant knowledge can be derived through our sensation, but when you say all knowledge is derived through sensation, you run into a self -refuting position.

01:20:16

So kind of a strict empirical view of knowledge as to how knowledge is gained doesn't work. And you could do this, and we don't have time to go through a reconnaissance of Western philosophy and different theories of knowledge.

01:20:26

But you can do this with all non -Christian theories of knowledge and show that if those epistemologies, those theories are true, then one is reduced to skepticism, okay?

01:20:38

And this is where the importance of divine revelation comes in, right? I can't know the objective nature of reality unless there is someone who knows reality and reveals it.

01:20:48

So that's going to be part of how we might defend our first premise. So let's revisit the argument again.

01:20:54

If knowledge is possible, the Christian worldview is true. Knowledge is possible, therefore the

01:21:00

Christian worldview is true. Now let's go through what must be true in order for knowledge to be possible, okay?

01:21:08

Remember, we're trying to argue that the Christian worldview must be true in order for knowledge to be possible. What must be true for knowledge to be possible?

01:21:15

Number one, you need truth. You can't have knowledge without truth. So there has to be an objective truth about reality, okay?

01:21:24

Another thing we need for the very possibility of knowledge is reliable cognitive faculties.

01:21:30

We must have the cognitive faculties sufficient to apprehend truth, okay?

01:21:36

We also need an enduring self through time. I must be the same person

01:21:42

I was when I was asking the question to try to gain knowledge about some fact, okay?

01:21:48

Space and time must exist. We exist in the space -time continuum, okay?

01:21:54

Space and change and events imply time, so we exist in time, okay?

01:21:59

All of these categories must be in place for knowledge to even be possible. Interestingly enough, what knowledge also requires is a bringing together of what we call unity and diversity.

01:22:11

In the history of philosophy, this is typically associated with what is called— and people can kind of look this up if they're interested— it's called the problem of the one and the many.

01:22:20

In the ancient world, more specifically during the period of the pre -Socratics, those philosophers who were flourishing before Socrates, they tried to answer the big question, how do we make sense out of all of the particular things that we observe in the world around us and all of the things that we use to unify and make sense out of the particular things?

01:22:46

Usually the common example would be, suppose we're walking in a park and we see two ducks in a pond, okay?

01:22:54

How do we know that both those animals are ducks? You see, we look at the similarities between the organisms, but there must be some unifying principle that allows us to identify two separate ducks as being in the category of duck.

01:23:13

And so in Plato's philosophy, he would appeal to what's called duckness, this non -physical idea that allows us to meaningfully understand that there are two ducks in a pond.

01:23:24

So this was a problem. How do we make sense out of diversity, many things, and the unity required to make sense out of the diversity, okay?

01:23:34

This is another thing that needs to be answered in order for knowledge to be possible because every time we make a statement about something, it assumes categories of unity and plurality, okay?

01:23:46

So you need an explanation for unity and diversity, and there are a whole list of these things that must be in place in order for knowledge to be possible.

01:23:55

Now, the question then arises when we're disputing between the unbeliever and the believer. We both have worldviews.

01:24:02

We both have glasses, so to speak, through which we filter and interpret everything around us.

01:24:07

The question is, which worldview is correct? Who is viewing the world in the correct way?

01:24:15

Who's viewing the world in a way that they are gaining an accurate picture of what the world is like, okay?

01:24:21

And so we take, for example, the atheistic worldview. If atheism is true, and more specifically, materialism is true, that all that exists is the physical world, does that picture of reality account and provide a justification for those lists of things that we just went through that are necessary and required for knowledge?

01:24:42

And the answer is no. You see, if logic is needed for knowledge, then you can't make sense of logic if you affirm a worldview in which all that exists is the physical world.

01:24:54

See how that works? You cannot account for truth. You could acknowledge there is a truth, but on atheism, for example, how do we know we have reliable cognitive faculties?

01:25:06

Let's take the person who affirms the theory of evolution. You see, on evolution, our brains have just evolved through a blind process to be the way that they are.

01:25:16

And so our minds, or we don't even have minds, see, we can't speak of minds on atheism, our brains have evolved, right, for the purposes of survival.

01:25:28

And so our brains function because they have survival benefits. But on atheistic evolutionary perspective, our minds are not geared towards truth, it's geared towards survival.

01:25:41

And so that we ask the question on that picture of reality, why trust the conclusions we draw through our thinking process?

01:25:48

And this is not something that, you know, a weird wonky Christian is talking about. I mean, even Charles Darwin said, why can't we trust, you know, the conclusions and the reasoning of a monkey, right?

01:25:59

And of course, I understand what evolution is. Evolution does not state that we come from monkeys, that man and ape have evolved via a common ancestor.

01:26:09

I'm kind of just using shorthand popular parlance here. But if the world is the way that the atheist says it is, then the things needed for knowledge don't fit in such a worldview, okay?

01:26:20

Now, you can do this with a whole bunch of things. Say, for example, someone's like, maybe I'm not an atheist. Maybe the Muslim can account for, in his worldview, immaterial logical laws.

01:26:30

He can say it's grounded in Allah, okay? Now, remember, I said that every worldview has these three categories, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, okay?

01:26:39

Now, here's what I like to do to demonstrate the insufficiency of a non -Christian worldview.

01:26:45

If every worldview and belief is, or every belief that someone holds is based upon their fundamental worldview assumption, their theory of knowledge, their theory of reality, and their theory of ethics, if we can demonstrate an inconsistency in their worldview at that fundamental level, then everything else that they believe crumbles because their beliefs are based upon those three foundations.

01:27:07

That is to say, that if I can show that what the person says about the nature of reality is in conflict with what they say about how we gain knowledge, then you've destroyed their worldview.

01:27:19

Since every belief that they hold that's built upon, it's built upon those foundations. So let's take, for example,

01:27:25

Islam. Islam has a metaphysical theory. It says that there is a

01:27:31

God, Allah. He is transcendent. He created all things, so on and so forth. And epistemology, yes,

01:27:37

Allah has revealed himself. He's revealed himself in the Quran. He sent the prophet Muhammad, and you get the whole story of Islam.

01:27:45

Now, when we critique the Muslim conception of God, it runs into problems in the area of the theory of knowledge.

01:27:53

Because in Islam, guess what Allah is able to do? Allah is able to lie.

01:28:00

He's actually called the greatest of schemers or the greatest of deceivers. Now, this is a problem.

01:28:06

If you ground your knowledge and your worldview on a deity that can deceive, how do you know you're not being deceived at the present moment?

01:28:16

That will actually undercut the very foundation or one of the pillars of your worldview, epistemology.

01:28:21

You see? Now, when we take a look at the Christian conception, does the

01:28:26

Christian worldview provide what we call the necessary preconditions for the very possibility of knowledge?

01:28:34

And I would argue it does. Objective truth is grounded in the nature and being of God. We are made in God's image, and so we are created for the purpose of apprehending the world around us such that we could know it.

01:28:46

So there is a justification within the Christian worldview for believing that we have generally reliable cognitive faculties.

01:28:53

God being immaterial, an immaterial deity, he can ground universal, immaterial, and unchanging universal laws of logic.

01:29:04

Unity and diversity is grounded in God in the Christian conception of God, given the doctrine of the

01:29:10

Trinity. God is both one and many, hence grounding and providing a context for the meaningfulness of the one and the many that we observe in human experience.

01:29:21

And so you can go down the list of all the things that are needed for the very possibility of knowledge, and the

01:29:27

Christian worldview actually supplies a justification for each of those categories. Now, if I can wrap this up, because I know we're probably running out of time, someone might say, but then how does that show that the

01:29:38

Christian worldview is true? Well, remember, we are asking which worldview can provide the necessary preconditions for knowledge.

01:29:49

If we're dealing with preconditions that are necessary, then by definition, you could only have one thing that can provide those necessary preconditions.

01:30:00

You can't have two necessary worldviews that provide the foundation in that way, okay?

01:30:06

So if Christianity can provide the necessary preconditions for knowledge, then it follows it is the only worldview that can, since we're dealing with necessary preconditions, you can only have one.

01:30:17

And so the unbeliever's option there is to show that the Christian worldview does not in fact provide those preconditions, and then you're off running in the context of debating some of the details of the sufficiency of someone's worldview to account for what must be true in order for knowledge to be possible.

01:30:35

So if knowledge is possible, the Christian worldview is true, okay? Knowledge is possible, therefore the

01:30:40

Christian worldview is true. You can't deny the second premise because it's self -refuting. Someone says, well, I don't believe knowledge is possible.

01:30:46

We're just gonna turn around and say, well, how do you know that? If you know that knowledge isn't possible, then you've refuted yourself.

01:30:53

If you believe knowledge is possible, then we're gonna ask, does your worldview provide the foundations required for the possibility of knowledge?

01:31:00

And of course, you can survey and critique competing worldview systems and then show that the Christian worldview actually provides a foundation for knowing anything at all.

01:31:09

That's just a thumbnail sketch, but that's how the transcendental argument goes. Now, if I can finish it off with this, someone might be saying, oh boy,

01:31:17

I can never say those things that Eli just said. I don't know anything about philosophy. I don't know anything about, you know, theology and like, you know, one in the many and unity and diversity and so on.

01:31:27

So we can dumb it down for our knucklejackers, right? Okay, I'm being sarcastic now. I don't think anyone listening here is a knucklejacker, but let's water it down.

01:31:36

What does this look like in conversation? You're out to lunch with a friend and your friend's like, well, you know,

01:31:43

I don't know. I don't know if I believe in God or if I believe in the Bible, you know. Why do you believe the Bible?

01:31:49

We turn around, very simple. Hey, the Bible really just explains things in a way that it just makes sense out of the world.

01:31:56

And then I could turn around and say, how do you make sense out of the world? How do you make sense out of like value? How do you make sense out of science and like an orderly universe?

01:32:05

When you ask those general questions, what you're doing, if I were to use the technical term, you're asking them, does your non -believing worldview explain the things that we take for granted?

01:32:18

You can couch the discussion very simply. A child can do it, right?

01:32:24

There's no God. Oh yeah, well, where did the universe come from? That's a very simplistic argument showing that God is the necessary precondition for the origin of the universe, right?

01:32:35

So there are different ways that you can do it. You can do it more sophisticatedly if you're talking to someone at that level, or you can talk about this in a very basic way, you know, at the dinner table.

01:32:45

And I've had conversations with people in both contexts. So it is quite possible. But that's in a thumbnail sketch how the argument goes there,

01:32:52

Chris. Okay, let's take a question from, let's see,

01:33:00

Tilly in Hobart, Wisconsin. And Tilly asks, as Reformed Christians, do we not believe that much of this, if not every single word of this that you have been discussing, is rooted in whether or not

01:33:22

God performs a supernatural act within the heart and mind of the hearer to even embrace these things like the existence of God and the reliability of his word?

01:33:37

That's a good question. Just like with Lydia, when the Bible says that the

01:33:43

Lord opened up her heart to receive the things spoken by Paul. Yes, correct.

01:33:49

Now, if we go back to the father of presuppositional apologetics, Cornelius Van Til, one of the main goals that he had in developing his apologetic was that it would be an apologetic that flows naturally out of his

01:34:01

Reformed convictions. Okay. I mean, Van Til was a Calvinist. Greg Bonson was a

01:34:06

Calvinist. Now we do need to make a distinction between proving the existence of God and persuading the unbeliever.

01:34:13

That's a very key distinction. Proving something is not the same as persuading someone. And so while we are commanded in scripture to argue for God, defending

01:34:25

God by exposing the suppression of truth, whether that person embraces the truth is going to be through the work of the

01:34:33

Holy Spirit. But the work of the Holy Spirit, it is never alone. God, as we know, as Reformed Christians, we know that God ordains the ends and he ordains the means, right?

01:34:43

It's kind of like the question, I bet you've heard this a billion times, Chris, if Calvinism is true, then what's the purpose of evangelism?

01:34:52

You ever hear that? Oh, of course. Right. Well, we can pivot and ask the question, well, if Calvinism is true, what's the purpose of apologetics?

01:35:00

And it's going to be the same answer, right? God ordains the ends, but one of the means that he ordains is the proclamation of the gospel.

01:35:08

And one of the means that he ordains is the defense of the gospel. So it is always word coupled with spirit, right?

01:35:16

We are speaking the word, but the word is moving along with the working of the spirit.

01:35:22

And apologetics, while it sounds, what I'm saying sounds very philosophical, it doesn't have to, but that's just typically how

01:35:27

I present it. While it sounds philosophical, it's very much gospel centered, because what am

01:35:32

I arguing? That for knowledge to be possible, the Christian worldview must be true.

01:35:38

That means that the triune God exists, that he's revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, that he has entered into time and space and history and has dwelt among his people and tabernacled amongst us and lived a human life and died a death and was buried and was raised from the dead.

01:35:54

All of those things are part of the gospel. They can be couched in biblical language or they can be couched within a more philosophical discussion, depending on who you're talking with.

01:36:05

But that goes along with the work of the spirit, which we, in the background of our minds, when we're interacting with people, we know that the spirit is moving and we pray that God uses the words that we speak to be the means whereby, you know, eyes, you know, blinded eyes are open.

01:36:21

So I think that's a great question. And we have Weston in Gutenberg, New Jersey, who says,

01:36:27

I know that there is currently a war going on amongst Reformed people, perhaps especially

01:36:33

Reformed Baptists, over presuppositionalism versus Thomist theology.

01:36:41

And I know that the Thomists despise presuppositionalist approach to apologetics.

01:36:47

Do they also reject the transcendental argument for the existence of God? This question is very much, requires a knowledge in the, kind of the nuance of these sorts of debates.

01:36:59

There is debate over whether the transcendental argument is uniquely, at least as Van Til formulated, is uniquely the purview of a

01:37:08

Reformed apologetic. You know, I have a good friend, Braxton Hunter. He's a classical apologist and a president of a seminary.

01:37:16

He says, I love the transcendental argument. The problem is you Calvinists are greedy and don't share your toys.

01:37:23

That's what he says. He says, you know, I like the argument, but you guys think it's, oh, it's the argument only you guys can use.

01:37:30

So there is a debate over, you know, whether the presuppositional method or the transcendental argument is consistent with other theologies.

01:37:42

And I would hold to the view that Van Til held to and Bonson that the transcendental argument and the transcendental challenge that is offered by this argument is best suited within the context of Reformed theology.

01:37:58

Because when we say that our apologetic flows from our theology, that's not just a generic theology.

01:38:04

That is a theology that takes into account the complete and utter sovereignty of God, the ultimacy of God as being the definer of all the facts, a

01:38:14

God who's revealed himself with certainty, innately to man, right? That God, as Calvin said, right?

01:38:21

That we can't know ourselves without also simultaneously being in contact with our maker, right? We exist within the context of revelation.

01:38:29

We ourselves as image bearers of God are revelation. I'm revelation because I'm part of the created order, right?

01:38:36

So on Thomism, Thomism has embedded within it a particular conceptions of knowledge, okay?

01:38:44

Thomism will often be associated with an empirical approach, a looking and seeing, then concluding, which is not consistent with the view that the knowledge of God is innate in all men, right?

01:38:57

And that's why Thomists tend to use Romans 1 as evidence for natural theology as opposed to natural revelation.

01:39:06

So I hold to the view that a consistently Reformed apologetic and a consistently

01:39:13

Reformed use of the transcendental argument requires a non -Thomistic approach, but rather a foundation grounded in Scripture, and it's probably more in line with an

01:39:24

Augustinian tradition in terms of, you know, faith -seeking understanding, not I have to understand some things first and then

01:39:31

I have the truth. I would say that we believe in order to understand.

01:39:38

And so that's how I'd answer that question. I hope that clarifies things a bit. Okay, we're going to our final break, and if you have a question, fire it off right away, because we're rapidly running out of time.

01:39:49

Chris Orensen at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back. It's such a blessing to hear from Iron Sharpens Iron radio listeners from all over the world.

01:40:08

Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland who wants you to know about a guest on the show he really loves hearing interviewed,

01:40:17

Dr. Joe Moorcraft. Hi, I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland.

01:40:25

Going back to 2005, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is

01:40:30

Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio, Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.

01:40:43

Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

01:40:49

Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards. And Dr.

01:40:55

Joe Moorcraft is the author of an eight -volume commentary on the larger catechism. Heritage is a member of the

01:41:00

Hanover Presbyterian Church built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, and tracing its roots and heritage back to the great

01:41:10

Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Heritage maintains and follows the biblical truth and principles proclaimed by the

01:41:17

Reformers. Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, and God's glory alone.

01:41:23

Their primary goal is the worship of the Triune God that continues in eternity. For more details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit

01:41:31

HeritagePresbyterianChurch .com. That's HeritagePresbyterianChurch .com.

01:41:36

Or call 678 -954 -7831. That's 678 -954 -7831.

01:41:44

If you visit, tell them Joe Roydigan, Iron Sharpens Iron Radio listener from Ottawa in County Kildare, Ireland, sent you.

01:42:04

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005. The publishers of the

01:42:09

New American Standard Bible were among my very first sponsors. It gives me joy knowing that many scholars and pastors in the

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NASB. I'm Dr. Joseph Piper, president and professor of systematic and homiletical theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylors, South Carolina.

01:42:34

And the NASB is my Bible of choice. I'm Pastor Chuck White at the

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First Trinity Lutheran Church in Tonawanda, New York. And the NASB is my Bible of choice.

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01:44:03

This is Pastor Bill Sousa of Grace Church at Franklin here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.

01:44:10

Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpens Iron Radio financially.

01:44:19

Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our

01:44:31

Lord Jesus Christ. And of course the end for which we strive is the glory of God.

01:44:38

If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some

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Lord's Day in worshiping our God and Savior. Please feel free to contact me if you have more questions about Grace Church at Franklin.

01:45:01

Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org That's gracechurchatfranklin .org

01:45:09

This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our

01:45:14

Sovereign Lord God, Savior and King Jesus Christ today and always.

01:45:33

I'm Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,

01:45:45

Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, Long Island, New York, pastored by Rich Jensen and Christopher McDowell.

01:45:52

It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear saints at Hope Reformed Baptist Church in Corham, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in His Holy Word, and to enthusiastically proclaim

01:46:09

Christ Jesus the King and His doctrines of sovereign grace in Suffolk County, Long Island, and beyond.

01:46:16

I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love as I have.

01:46:25

For more information on Hope Reformed Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net.

01:46:32

That's hopereformedli .net or call 631 -696 -5711.

01:46:41

That's 631 -696 -5711. Tell the folks at Hope Reformed Baptist Church of Corham, Long Island, New York, that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.

01:47:01

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01:48:07

I'm Pastor Bill Shishko of the Haven, an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Comac, Long Island.

01:48:13

I hold the Iron Sharpens Iron radio program hosted by my long time friend and brother

01:48:20

Chris Arnzen in the highest esteem and I'm thrilled that you're listening today.

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01:50:00

This is Brian McLaughlin, President of the SecureComm Group and supporter of Chris Arnzen's Iron Sharpens Iron radio program.

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01:50:30

But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters, of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

01:50:44

Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur.

01:50:51

In the film, Chariots of Fire, Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt

01:50:57

God's pleasure when he ran. He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God.

01:51:03

I sense that same God -given pleasure when ministering the Word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God.

01:51:11

That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a Savior who died for sinners and that God forgives all who come to Him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.

01:51:23

I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the

01:51:30

Bronx in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.

01:51:39

That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672.

01:51:49

That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's Word and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.

01:52:07

God bless you. Welcome back. Folks, I want you to also always remember that this program is paid for in part by the law firm of Buttafuoco &

01:52:17

Associates. If you're the victim of a very serious personal injury or medical malpractice anywhere in the

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01:52:30

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01:52:40

We are now back, and we have Nino in Calverton, Long Island, New York, who says, this is a lot of very highbrow stuff.

01:52:51

How do you respond to someone who might think that this very intellectual approach to understanding

01:52:58

God and Christianity may be an affront to the simplicity and perspicuity of Scripture?

01:53:08

Yeah, so the highbrow nature of it is just an issue of context, right?

01:53:14

If you read, for example, Christian philosophers interacting with other philosophers, it sounds very technical because the

01:53:20

Christian has to speak the language of those he's interacting with. You're not going to use the language

01:53:26

I'm going to use if you're just talking to someone on the street or a family member across the table or something like that at dinner, okay?

01:53:34

So it's not an issue of being an affront to the gospel. It's an issue of contextualizing your language to your audience.

01:53:40

And that's all that's going on there. When I talk to young people, I mean, I teach middle school.

01:53:46

I teach 7th and 8th graders, and I interact with young people from all over the place.

01:53:51

I don't typically present things the way that I presented it here. The reason why I presented myself the way that I have is my main audience are usually philosophically, you know, educated individuals who

01:54:04

I have to be more rigorous with my wording and so forth. But it can really be pretty basic.

01:54:10

I say that, you know, preach Jesus, and when the opportunity comes, you know, you challenge unbelief. What is that going to look like?

01:54:17

Well, we're going to follow biblical patterns, but the language might differ from context to context. So that's all that's going on here.

01:54:24

And we have Muriel in Washington, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, are these lessons broken down into different sessions where we can stop, where we can pause, we can rewind and write down notes on DVD or some other format?

01:54:46

Well, obviously, DVD, I guess, is a dinosaur by now, but what other, do you have this available?

01:54:55

I know that you did an apologetics course at Apologia Church. Yes, I have it broken down with notes and all that kind of stuff on Apologia.

01:55:04

If you go to Apologia Studios and subscribe to their academy, which

01:55:09

I think is like nine bucks a month, where you support Apologia Studios, then you have a whole host of educational materials and presentations of which

01:55:17

I teach two of them. One, I teach a presuppositional approach in more detail, much more slowly, and there's some graphics up there on the screen that helps the listener to follow along.

01:55:29

And then I do a course called Presupplied, where I apply this specifically to atheism,

01:55:37

Roman Catholicism. This might be interesting to you, Chris. Presuppositional Eastern Orthodoxy.

01:55:44

There are Eastern Orthodox folks who try to use presuppositionalism, and so I offer a lecture there on how to respond to that and how to apply it to the cults.

01:55:55

And of course, the responses and how we apply this in different contexts don't all require technical jargon.

01:56:03

As a matter of fact, if I were engaging in apologetics with an atheist or a member of a cult and you happen to walk in on me in the room while we're doing this, a lot of the things

01:56:13

I'll say that you'll hear me say is not that much different than the kinds of conversations people will have.

01:56:19

They'll just be a little bit more of an emphasis on, you know, the presuppositions of the person and so forth, right?

01:56:24

I don't walk around, you know, using terms like preconditions of intelligibility and transcendental.

01:56:31

I just use that terminology because when I'm teaching it, I like to teach the big ideas and how they're rooted in the history of thought and so forth.

01:56:37

But it definitely doesn't have to sound this way. There's much easier ways to explain it.

01:56:42

By the way, since you mentioned Eastern Orthodoxy, I just want to give a plug to my guest on Wednesday of next week, not tomorrow, but next week,

01:56:52

Samuel Farag, who is a Reformed Baptist pastor in upstate New York.

01:56:58

He's going to be giving his testimony on why and how he left the

01:57:03

Oriental Orthodox Church. So I just thought I'd plug that since you brought up Eastern Orthodoxy.

01:57:09

Well, if you could, in two minutes, conclude with a summary of what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.

01:57:15

Eli? Yeah. So all fancy terminology aside,

01:57:21

OK, the Word of God commands us to defend the faith. OK, we are to do that biblically.

01:57:27

We are to do it under the Lordship of Christ, whether we're interacting with super intellectual folks or just, you know, a person, you know, your neighbor or something along those lines.

01:57:37

The Bible commands us to get out there and to share and defend the faith. And so I want to encourage folks that on the one hand, while this might sound complicated, it doesn't have to be.

01:57:47

Context is going to dictate the level and depth and vocabulary that we're going to use. But I want to encourage people to just go out there and be faithful and defend

01:57:55

God's truth. So that's kind of basically my goal. Independent of all of this, you know, fancy philosophical categories, we need to be out there sharing and defending the gospel.

01:58:06

And I can assure you, my listeners, that I have been a witness to Eli Ayala speaking to an audience where he breaks things down as if he was teaching a sixth grade class.

01:58:26

And if he uses a 22 -syllable word, he'll explain it very thoroughly. And so—

01:58:32

Real quick, if I can interrupt you, I do apologize. And I thank you for those kind words. But before I taught what

01:58:38

I'm teaching now, I taught sixth grade Bible. Oh, I just happened to pick sixth grade out of thin air.

01:58:44

I didn't even know that that was— Oh, no. I taught sixth grade Bible. And the first thing we did, first thing, was we talked about worldview, metaphysics, and epistemology and ethics.

01:58:54

And my little sixth graders were walking around and they were stopped by the principal of the school. Do you know what those words mean?

01:59:00

And they were able to define it. I have different tricks as a teacher to teach these complicated things.

01:59:06

But obviously, I'm not aware of, Chris, the nature of your audience and the circles that I run in.

01:59:11

They typically have some background of these issues, so I tend to teach it more technically.

01:59:17

But it definitely doesn't have to be. I can teach it to sixth graders and they know it just fine. And did you have to reprimand the students who were smoking cigars in the bathroom?

01:59:28

I didn't know. We have to go. And I just want to remind our listeners of your website,

01:59:36

RevealedApologetics .com. Thank you so much for being such a wonderful guest. I want to thank everybody who listened. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater