ALL religions can't be right | You can't escape God's world (Greg Koukl)

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What was the first apologetic argument that you remember really interacting with and really stuck out to you?

You know, only one comes to mind, but I don't know if it's the first, and it's something I've incorporated into my own material.

And I actually used this last week when I was in Fargo, North Dakota with a bunch of high school students.

And that was, it was a piece of paper that had responses to challenges to Christianity.

It was notes. And with regards to the challenge, um, let's see, what was it?

Um, uh, about Jesus being the only way I think it was, you know, and about what about other religions?

And the point that was being made is all religions can't be true because some religions say to go to heaven or hell.

Others say that you get reincarnated and you can't do them both at the same time.

Right. Pretty straightforward. Somebody's about something really important. Right. And that just hit me like, wow, it's so obvious that some religions are going to be wrong on their foundational claims.

So therefore all religions can't be equally true. I have developed different aspects of that argument over the years, but that is the one that I think is more primal in my experience as a

Christian. It goes farthest back. It was on that sheet of paper when I was there in that Christian community and it has just stuck with me.

Now, maybe I heard some things before that, but that was real handy. That was one of those light goes on moments that I had.

Right. It sounds like you were already back then thinking along the lines philosophically, because I hear a little bit of the law of non -contradiction in there.

Did you have training? I had no training in that. Father, in fact, I did not even hear of the law of non -contradiction for years later.

It was the late eighties, this is 1973 that I became a Christian and it wasn't until the late eighties and I was taking,

I was getting my first master's in apologetics and I was taking a class where some of these philosophic points came up and the law of non -contradiction was bandied about there in the conversation like everybody knew it, but I'd never heard of that before.

I had no training in philosophy at all. But of course the law of non -contradiction isn't something you learn in philosophy class, you learn the name in philosophy class, but the notion that A cannot be non -A at the same time and in the same way, that's the classic definition of it.

Well, we already know this to be the case and that's why we point out, well, wait a minute, what you're saying is contradictory with what you said before.

Right. So they both can't be right. So which one is it when we say this stuff in conversation? Right. So I guess

I was just, I just noticed in this particular case, how good that object, that point was that was being made in the paper that pointed out the contradiction between worldviews, religious views.

So therefore one was right or the other, or maybe they were both wrong, but they both couldn't be right.

Yeah. You mentioned mentors. Was there somebody that stuck out to you in the very formative years?

Yeah, there was actually one person who stuck out for two years with me, actually a little longer than that.

His name was Craig Englert and I had moved into this Christian community on the outskirts of UCLA campus there in Westwood Village.

It was an old fraternity house converted into this Christian community. This is the mid seventies, the Jesus movement was happening.

So it seems a little weird, but that's okay. Everything was kind of a little strange during that time.

So I was a Jesus freak during the Jesus movement, had long hair. I was a tennis player, so my hair was blonde and those were the days.

Let me think about that just for a second. Okay, I got it. Try to get the picture. Wait a minute.

But that was almost 50 years ago. But in that community,

I made friends with a guy named Craig who was about maybe two years older than I was in chronological age, but spiritually, obviously much more advanced.

And I asked him if he would disciple me right at the same time he'd been thinking about doing that, entering into a relationship with me.

And since I was living at the, what we call the Light and Power House, the Jesus Christ Light and Power House full -time,

I was living there, taking classes. I quit going to UCLA there and focused on my spiritual life entirely.

And Craig was one of the teachers there, part of that community. And he was also a tennis player. So we had,

I mean, 24 seven is what it seemed like. We'd take vacations together. We'd play tennis together.

We'd go to events together. And I was right there at his side when he was doing the things that he would do spiritually so I could watch what he did and how he comported himself with other people.

You know, a lot of being a Christian is caught, not taught.

And that's the value of having a personal discipleship relationship, mentoring relationship of some sort, because you hang out with that person long enough, things start rubbing off on you.

And I actually needed a lot of work. He was very gentle and gracious, but he did direct me a lot.

And I was very, very wild and crazy, very aggressive, very obnoxious, very loud.

And it was Craig's steady hand in my life, along with his wife, Kathy, that made all the difference, all the difference.

And this is why I'm deeply committed to the concept of mentoring and discipleship. And when I think about Stand to Reason, we are not an evangelistic organization.

We're a mentoring organization. Our first words of our mission statement is we train

Christians, okay? And then it goes on, but that's our focus. And I realized that's the

DNA that I have as a result of Craig Englert, my mentor for almost three years.

Actually, that relationship continued for quite a bit longer, even though we got distant and then we got together again.

There were lots of ways. We ended up being staff pastors at the same church for a number of years. So there was this long -term ongoing relationship with Craig that really made the difference for me.

I don't know where I'd be without Craig, to be honest. And I've had other mentors since then. J .P.

Moreland, for example, has a huge influence on my life. And I've been close to J .P. for probably 30 years now, the philosopher who

I took an M .A. in philosophy under. And others more distant, like C .S.

Lewis or Francis Schaeffer, those were really the three biggest intellectual influences in my life as a

Christian, a thoughtful Christian. But Craig was at the foundation, and that foundation needed to be laid, and he did such a great job.

You said it was 1973. J .P. September 28th. So that's when I trusted Christ at first.

J .P. Yeah. So tell us about the worldview of the culture back in 1973.

J .P. Well, this was coming in the heels of the massive shift in the culture in the 60s.

So I was born in 1950. So in the 60s, I was a teenager. I graduated in 1968. I'm 18 years old, and the

Beatles have arrived already. And then you've got all of the British invasion, so to speak, but you also have these transcendental meditation and other

Eastern religions kind of coming in. And in my view, I had already tried Christianity and found it wanting.

It did nothing for my life. And so I was embracing all of these ideas.

So the things that are mainstream now were just being introduced then.

So moral relativism, for example, and I don't even know how to describe it in those terms.

We called it free love back then. That means at least you didn't have sex with somebody that you weren't in love with.

You didn't have to be married, but as long as you loved them, okay? So that was kind of the first break away from the classical view.

But the classical view was still very much had a hold on the culture, which was good. It had a hold on me, too.

It restrained me from being worse off than I would have been. The drug scene was opening up during that time, and acid and marijuana and all of that was a big deal, was part of the psychedelic experience.

And so that was when things were breaking free. And if you're on the vanguard, you are embracing some of these new ideas, which is what

I was doing. But there was a lot of the old guard around, right?

The same people that had believed conservative things forever, and that had been a foundation of our whole culture that still had formed behaviors.

But there was a new thing happening. Now, the new thing happening, leftism, has taken over.

And that is mainstream. And conservatism, whether it's political conservatism or where you're trying to conserve the good things of the past, you're not progressives, you're not reinventing it every generation, but you're sticking with the tried and true.

And the conservative values of this country were grounded in a Judeo -Christian ethic.

So those things were just being challenged at that time.

But many of the same things were there, but they didn't have the footing that they have now, and they were not as aggressive.

So this was a kind of a live and let live mentality. We're going to do the new thing, leave us alone, whether it's the new religious thing or the new sexual thing, or just leave us alone.

We'll leave you alone, you leave us alone. That has changed radically now, because the left is very aggressive, and the left demands that you toe the line with its views or else they'll punish you.

And that's a huge difference from almost 50 years ago, counterculture.

I mean, I was going to ask you to sort of contrast how things were in 1973 to perhaps today.

It began as you were becoming a Christian. We were a bunch of foolish people like me, spouting our new ideas, but it was foolishness.

It was just foolishness. It brought nothing but destruction. When you say,

I'm the master of my own fate, I'm captain of my own soul. All right. Well, that feels very liberating because all the constraints that were on you morally in the past, now you've got rid of.

And that feels initially like freedom until you start paying the price. And there are all kinds of prices that are paid for, say, sexual foolishness.

Pregnancies, venereal disease, broken relationships, broken hearts, broken homes, all kinds of stuff.

And I came to realize that the old ways were the right ways. Those sound moral ideas that were biblical were the right ways.

Now there were some old ways that weren't so good, but those are the old ways that were contrary to the biblical ethic.

And so nowadays though, what has happened, it's just so bizarre.

Even 10 years ago, Nate, I would never have imagined where we're at right now.

And even in the last 12 months, things have escalated so aggressively that it's got my head spitting.

But now what you have, as Sean McDowell has said, not a post -Christian culture, but an anti -Christian culture.

And in fact, something new has happened in the last few years. And that is that if God exists and he's your

God, that God is evil. Because he doesn't allow people to do whatever they want.

Now, here's the flip side of that though. Nobody wants to live in a culture where people get to do whatever they want.

That's like, people want to be relativists for themselves, but they don't want other people to be relativists towards them.

And so this has a cannibalizing effect. You start living this out and then it starts turning inward and destroying itself in a certain way.

The leftists begin eating each other with the worldview that they have.

It can't be lived out. And when you have all these individuals living out their own ethics, there is no foundation for community anymore.

Because you have to have shared values to have community. So you begin to see the destructiveness of this.

And I don't know how long this is going to last, but it is like a tidal wave crashing over us right now.

And the challenges to Christianity are bigger than they ever have been before. When I say challenges to Christianity, I don't mean that there is something new coming up that really shakes the roots or the foundation of the

Christian worldview. The more that happens, the more I'm convinced that Jesus got it right. And the biblical worldview is sound.

It's the best explanation for the way things are. But what I've seen happen though is that the culture is now, it's a full court press on every particular piece of the

Christian worldview about Jesus and about God and about the reliability of the

Bible and about the nature of what it means to be human and what it means to be a male or what it means to be a female or what a marriage is all about, what sex is all about.

Every single thing is now being attacked and taken exception with, which means, and it's being done so in an aggressive, vicious way thoughtlessly.

People aren't making arguments. They're screaming and yelling and calling names and mischaracterizing

Christians and the Bible. And this happens over and over and over again. And now you have the powerful medium of the internet and all the visual images.

And now you have very aggressive censorship going on in the internet with people like Google and Facebook and Twitter and whatever.

So only certain ideas get showcased. And if you don't have the right idea, then they're going to censor you.

And so there is this wellspring of foolishness that is aggressively being advanced with very sophisticated rhetorical appeal, call it propaganda.

And a whole new generation is hearing just this. And there's a price to pay for not towing the line in terms of social acceptance and even greater things.

You could lose your job, for example, nowadays. But notice who's being influenced. It's a whole bunch of young people that are trying to figure out what the world's about, just like I was back in the sixties.

And my mind's open, but I'm being overwhelmed with the wrong ideas, but overwhelmed in a way that the ideas look good and they feel good.

And they're all about me and all about my pleasures and my desires and my freedoms and whatever I want. It's called expressive individualism, a phrase

I coined, but it's been going around to describe the narcissism of this age.

And this, taken as a whole, represents a whole new set of challenges to the Christian. I mean, so you said a moment ago that these kinds of ideals will eventually cannibalize itself.

But a lot of people that I interact with just don't seem to be bothered. The people who agree with those ideals, they don't seem to be bothered by that.

Is that a way to address these particular things that you see, is to just point out that the standards by which the left and the secular culture is trying to live by, they're corrupt because they don't apply to them.

It just applies to everyone around them. Yeah. Well, you can point that out. I think it's a fair critique. This is basically the suicide tactic that we're thinking, like the book tactics, talking about how we engage, that there are ideas that are self -refuting.

I was a moral relativist in the 60s, early 70s, but I was against the war in Vietnam because it was an immoral war.

Now, for me, I was aware that there was a contradiction and it got my attention for a moment, but I dismissed it because what

I was really interested in was doing what I wanted to do, not doing the right thing, the morally sound thing.

I think we have the same dynamic nowadays where narcissism trumps everything.

What I want, and again, back to expressive individualism, EI, it's all about me expressing whatever

I want. For a while, there's going to be a personal payoff for that.

It's like, really cool. All right. That's called tolerance. Everybody gets to do their own thing.

Except if you're a Christian, your ideas don't count. There's the contradiction again.

I think people are blinded or it's not so much that they're blind. Some are blinded to the contradiction.

Others don't care. That's right. This is what you're getting at. They don't care because there's this payoff, just like there was for me back in the 60s and early 70s.

This is very difficult to overcome. I think because it isn't like people are trying to figure out what the truth is.

Then you can approach them on that basis. What they want is what they want. That's it.

That's the end of it. There's no more discussion. If you don't give it to them, you're evil. That's the relativism.

They're not assessing by some transcendent standard. They're assessing by a personalized relativistic standard.

You're not giving me what I want in this moment, so you're bad. Your God is not giving me what

I want in this moment, so he's bad too. I'm still working through this,

Nate, because this represents a challenge that I've never faced before. I'm not well -suited to deal with it.

The organization is called Stand to Reason, after all. I'm kind of in a modernist way of looking at the world, which, since I mean, is that it acknowledges the role of reason in figuring out what's true about the world.

There is a reality out there that we can discover something about, and that's an important enterprise to figure this out.

That's not the sentiment nowadays, generally speaking. Here's another piece, though, that to me is really significant.

I wrote about it in the 10th anniversary edition of Tactics. It's a new tactic for that book.

It's called Inside Out. The principle there is that all, and I got this from Francis Schaeffer, all human beings actually are made in the image of God, and they actually do live in his world.

Even if they deny both of them, they can't escape them. As I put it in the book, they could run from God, but they can't run from themselves.

So what's going to happen is the image of God in man and the reality of the external world that God has made is going to express itself in their conversations because they can't help it.

It's like the relativist who says, lookit, there's no object of morality, man. Therefore, you shouldn't be pushing your morality on me.

There it is. Yeah, there it is. There's the contradiction. Right. There are no moral rules.

Here's one. That's right. Wait a minute. But they say these things, and they don't realize it's a problem.

But see, that's the inside thing that God has placed in there that is coming out.

All right. That's the inside, the truth on the inside that's coming out. And we can use that.

We can observe it. If we're watching for it, listening for it, we can observe it and ask questions about it, the tactical approach.

And see what God does with that. Get people thinking. Try to put a stone in their shoe. There are those in the next generation that just want to eschew all the things that we've been discussing from the secular culture, which means that they are ready to go out there and spread the kingdom of God.

What would be your advice for just young up -and -comers just getting started? Well, uh...