An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics 6 (The Preconditions of Intelligibility & The ...

The Preconditions of Intelligibility and the Word of God as Final Authority

An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics, Part 6, brought to you by RoarNoMore .com.

The next thing I wanted to go over, and we're going to actually go over this one in depth, the whole thing, is the preconditions of intelligibility handout, which should be being handed out right now.

And I'm going to start, I'm going to read the first paragraph of this one, and then by that time all of you should have it and just follow along. To make any rational sense of the world, human beings must start out as knowers.

We know that certain things are true, and based on these known facts we build our worldview. Scientists understand this. In order to know that a certain reading or measurement is accurate, they must rely on their instruments.

Through careful calibration, the scientist fine-tunes his equipment to ensure proper functioning. In order to know that a measurement is accurate, the scientist must first know that his instrument is accurate.

In the same way, human beings, in order to know that what is being perceived is actually accurate, must first know that their senses are reliable, that nature is, in fact, uniform, the laws of logic and mathematics are sound, and that morality is upheld, etc.

In order to trust the reliability of his mental and sensory faculties, a person must first know that they are valid. These preconditions of intelligibility are only valid if they are upheld by some personal force outside the human being, the same way the scientific instruments can only be trusted if they are first validated by the scientists.

The Word of God is this validator. It makes sense of the preconditions of intelligibility in such a way that humans can accurately make sense of reality. Okay, I know that's kind of a mouthful. The main point, though, I'm trying to make is that when we are born into this world, when we approach life, we have to start out knowing something in order to understand anything, right?

If we fall into complete skepticism that we mistrust everything, including our thinking, then we really can't actually make sense of anything, right? So the person who says we can't know anything, he is making a knowledge claim when he says that.

So he's saying he actually does know something. There is not one worldview in this entire gamut of history that has ever successfully tried to make a claim that we can't know anything. All of them start out knowing something.

So that's the point. And the things that we all start out knowing are all common. We all start out knowing that our thinking is reliable, right? If we don't understand that our thinking is reliable, we can't actually make sense of anything, right?

If we don't understand that our senses are reliable, then we can't understand anything about the sensory world. Even optical illusions, right? They rely on our senses to ensure that they're optical illusions.

So I know a lot of times people say, well, your senses can be fooled. Here's an optical illusion. So how do you know that your senses are being fooled? Because you're actually examining it with your senses to find out that your senses have been fooled.

So even there, you're relying on your senses. Morality is one of them. All these different categories are called the preconditions of intelligibility. And we've talked about this. I've mentioned it a couple times.

But I just wanted you to see how our final authority accounts for these things. Why we know that these things are accurate. Why we know that we can trust ourselves, our minds. Why we have a reference point that can make sense of these things.

No other worldview makes sense of reality except the Christian worldview. And that's the gist of it. So I want to go through a couple Bible verses here. First category on the preconditions of intelligibility handout says, the word of God makes sense of reality by giving us the preconditions of intelligibility.

And here's a couple verses that show that it makes sense of all preconditions. In other words, anything that is required for understanding the world is made sense of through the light of scripture. So Colossians 1, 2 through 3 is the first one.

We've gone over this before. Christ himself in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Everything that can be known is hidden in Christ. We only know it because Christ is Lord and he's maintaining it.

Genesis 127, God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. Now that's actually very important. The only reason that we can know things for certain is because we've been programmed by God to know them.

We're relying on him whenever we make any knowledge claim at all, no matter what it is. So being made in the image of God is really a very important concept in this. If we were not made in the image of God, there would be no reason to think that our senses are reliable.

And that's the problem with evolution. There's a lot of chaos going on, but they don't have any image of God to actually root their foundation for their thinking in. They can't actually trust their minds because it's all this process of random chaos.

There's nothing upholding it. So being made in the image of God, very important. Romans 11, 36, for from him and through him and to him are all things. Saying the same thing as Colossians. Romans 1, 19 through 20, since what may be known about God is plain to them because God made it plain to them.

For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse. Very important.

I don't know where presuppositional apologetics would be without Romans 1. Romans 1 really gives us our inside look, our full understanding of what the situation is with the believer and non-believer.

So even the non-believer knows something about God and it specifically mentions attributes here. It says his eternal power and divine nature. These are attributes of God. It's the Christian God, not a generic God we're talking about.

And so whether it's the most hard atheist you can think of or a Hindu or a Muslim or someone of any other worldview, they know the invisible attributes and qualities that make up the God of Christianity, but they suppress that truth.

So they're relying on him every moment of the day to function. They have to rely on their senses. They have to rely on that the future is going to be like the past, that nature is uniform. But the only reason they can rely on these things is because God exists and they know he exists.

But they're deceived. They deceive themselves. Hebrews 1 .3, and he is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature and upholds all things, that include knowledge, by the word of his power.

The Laws of Logic, Morality, Sense Perception, Uniformity, and Mathematics

Let's get into some of the specifics here. In order to know anything, first we have to accept the laws of logic. We have to understand that we are capable of knowing things. And there's three basic laws of logic.

First one is called the law of non-contradiction. And that basically says that there cannot be contradictory things in the same sense and in the same way. For instance, I cannot both be here and not be here in the same sense and in the same way, right?

That's impossible. Either I'm here or I'm not here. And we rely on that to reason about anything. And so that may sound very self-evident, and it is self-evident, but there's actually philosophies that have really struggled.

In fact, every philosophy struggles with trying to actually prove that this is the case. I mentioned the first week of this that in my first class at college, there was my professor didn't believe in the law of non-contradiction.

She thought that a desk in the room could be there and not be there, depending on your point of view. There are people, especially in post-modernism, that try to suppress this. Now, it seems obvious to us, right?

But that's because we come at it with a Christian framework. That's something that's in the Western world. In the Eastern world, that's not necessarily the case. They will go back to, well, it depends on your point of view.

And so, even though it's obvious to us, that's because we're products of Christianity and Western culture. 2 Timothy 2 .13 says, if we are faithless, he remains faithful. He cannot deny himself. In other words, he can't have a contradiction.

Numbers 23 .19, God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good? This is talking about the honesty of God, which is really what this relies on.

God is honest. He can't lie. A lie amounts to a contradiction. So the very reason we can accept that the law of non-contradiction is because of the nature of our God. Let's go to another one here. Oh, Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoid worldly and empty chatter, and the opposing arguments.

Now, in the King James, I believe it says contradictory arguments, or I don't remember what translation, but that's what opposing means, of what is falsely called knowledge. He's saying avoid contradictions.

So God accepts that there are contradictions, we are to avoid them, and it's part of our character. It's part of being honest. The second law here of logic, the law of identity, whenever God identifies a thing as possessing a distinct identity from other things, he is upholding that identity does exist.

Another thing that we accept as just a basic premise. When I refer to Mr. Halpin in the back, I know that I'm referring to Mr. Halpin. I'm not referring to anyone else. And he knows that he's distinct from everything else.

That's the law of identity, that when we're talking about something, we're actually talking about that thing. And it has characteristics and attributes that make it separate from other things. And so, that's actually another problem for post-modernism and Eastern philosophies.

And we see in the scriptures it says, in Exodus 3 .14, God said to Moses, I am who I am. That's actually pretty much a direct statement of the law of identity. I am who I am. I am distinct. I am separate.

I am myself. I have personhood. Let's go to the law of excluded middle. That's the last one. The Bible constantly affirms that there cannot exist a situation in which something both is the case and is not the case.

It's actually very similar to the law of non-contradiction. There cannot be a situation in which one thing is true and is also not true at the same time. And we see in the Bible, we have two verses here.

God also accepts this. He says, even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed. So there's the gospel, right? And then there's a false gospel.

There is the negation of that gospel, right? Can't have the gospel and not have the gospel at the same time. Romans 11 .6. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.

You can't have it both ways. That's what God's saying here. It's either one or the other. So very briefly, the laws of logic, and you don't, most of these are so obvious, right? We don't even have to get into it really.

But just to accept that we're talking about things that have characteristics and that can be understood on the basis of our senses and our rational faculties requires that we understand that we're programmed for us to be able to understand those things.

And God is what gives us the precondition for that. Notice I'm not proving, I'm not saying that because these things are true, they're for the Bible is true. I'm saying that in the light of the understanding of God's revelation to us is how we make sense of these things, of the laws of logic.

Laws of morality. That's the second category. Though humans have a sin-filled nature, they also have an innate sense of right and wrong. There is no alternative for the sense than God himself. Psalm 25 .8.

Good and upright is the Lord. Therefore he instructs sinners in the way. Romans 2 .15. In that, they show the work of the law written in their hearts and their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternatively accusing or else defending them.

So sinners know what the law of God is. That's not a problem. And God can actually, he's capable of teaching them his way so that they can, what, follow them. They already know what those ways are, but they don't follow them.

Here's another one that we, in order to know anything about reality, we have to rely on our sense perception. The Bible repeatedly assumes the reliability of our senses whenever it validates an individual or a group of individuals for seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, or hearing.

And I have three verses here. First John 1 .1. We have seen with our eyes. We have looked at. We have touched with our hands. There's three of those right there concerning the word of life. Deuteronomy 4 .9.

Give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently so that you do not forget. And by the way, that's the mental right there. So we're capable of memory. That's accurate. So that you do not forget the things which your eyes, sense perception, have seen.

That you do not depart from your heart all the days of your life. Deuteronomy 4 .12. Then the Lord spoke to you from the midst of the fire and you heard, you're capable of hearing, the sound of his words, but you saw no form, only a voice.

So the scripture validates that our senses are accurate and reliable. The next category is the uniformity of nature. And that simply means that the laws of nature, and actually I don't like calling them the laws of nature because they're God's laws, but God's laws in which he rules the natural world are constant.

We can rely on gravity that it's going to be the same all the time. There are miracles which are occurrences that are rare and usually for a specific purpose that God has foreordained. But in general, the laws are consistent, right?

We can do science based on that fact. If that wasn't true, there would be no way to do any scientific experiment of any kind. And not only that, they're true throughout time. So a hundred years ago, gravity was still in effect and now gravity is still in effect.

And a hundred years from now, gravity will still be in effect unless the mass of our planet changes somehow and that's also part of the laws that God has set up in nature. So Genesis 8 .22. It says, while the earth remains, sea time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Jeremiah 33 .20 -21. If you can break my covenant for the day and my covenant for the night so that day and night will not be at their appointed time, then my covenant may also be broken with David my servant so that he will not have a son to reign on his throne and with biblical priests my ministers.

This verse is important because even though it's not talking about natural phenomenon, what it's talking about is the covenant God has made with David and he's saying that I'm going to keep that. And that's the only way we can rely on anything in the external world is by realizing that God is going to keep it constant.

That's part of his character. Matthew 5 .45. So that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven for he causes his son to rise out on, arise on the evil and the good and sends his reign on the righteous and the unrighteous.

One more. The laws of mathematics. Another thing that we rely on. Counting, right? Multiplication, division, addition. Is there an accountant in the room? There is an accountant in the room. Yes. And you work with numbers.

Okay. Most of us do in some capacity. There are at least 150 references to arithmetic and geometry in the Old and New Testaments. Over and over again, the Bible shows the laws of mathematics to be valid.

And I'm not going to read you that verse, but all the genealogies, all the measurements for the temple, the measurements in Revelation, when Christ talks about paying taxes and you go on and on and on with all the references to math in the Bible and the use of math.

So the laws of mathematics themselves are also validated by God. And I'm just going to read you the last paragraph here at the end of the handout. It says, in addition, the preconditions of intelligibility must be invariable, absolute, and unchanging.

Three obvious characteristics of the biblical God. If they are not, we have reason to doubt them. For instance, the laws of logic must always be the same in every situation for us to make use of them.

Science depends on this. All right. Now we're done with the meta-apologetics part. Now we're going to get into how to actually talk to an unbeliever. And we're going to go to the tip of the iceberg today, and we're going to do a lot more, but hopefully this is going to be actually pretty fun.

All previous handouts on meta-apologetics, and by the way, this is the Transcendental Argument handout, all previous handouts on meta-apologetics have built up to this point in which we will learn how to apply what we have come to understand.

The Transcendental Argument goes like this. The proof for God's existence is that without him, you couldn't prove anything. What this argument is trying to convey is actually rather simple. Though discussing its implications can require some knowledge.

Any fact, facet, point of view, evidence, truth, claim, piece of knowledge, et cetera, all must presuppose the God of the Bible. Without him, life is essentially meaningless. Either there is no foundation for intelligibility, or the foundation is a faulty one.

In order to utilize this argument in an effective way, we must learn the don't answer, answer method. Proverbs 26, 4 through 5, do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will also be like him.

Answer a fool as his folly deserves, that he not be wise in his own eyes. That's NAS. I'm not sure what your translations say. Usually it's that he will not be wise in his own eyes. Is that a contradiction?

No, it's not, but it does look like one, doesn't it? A little bit? Let's get into this. The next point says don't answer a fool. Someone who doesn't fear God according to his presuppositions, i .e. that truth can only be found through science, or that truth is relative, et cetera, what we ought to do with that person is point out his folly.

So if an evolutionist will take, I love picking on evolutionists, I guess it's the easiest one for us. If he walks in the room right now and says what I'm saying is false, and the Bible's not true in this because of what science has said, we want to give him an answer.

We're commanded to, right? He's challenging our faith. We have to give him an answer, a response. So at what point should we make the response? Should we contest his scientific facts, where he got them, what the data actually says about carbon -14, or should we answer him according to his folly?

What's his real folly here? Is it misinterpreting the facts, or is it interpreting him according to the wrong worldview or starting point? In other words, when he looks at a rock and says this is this age, because of what layer it's in or whatever, what's the problem?

What's he doing wrong? Essentially what he's doing wrong is he's starting with the wrong foundation. He's starting with utilitarianism, that the past is the key to the present. So that's one of his presuppositions.

He also starts with a presupposition that the Bible cannot be true because it was written by men and there's contradictions and this and that. And so he's going to be very skewed in his understanding when he looks at that rock.

And so where do we challenge him? We should challenge him according to his folly. We don't join in with him and be the fool with him and say, well, you can rationally understand things, I can rationally understand things, let's talk about this rock and evaluate it scientifically, because it's really not a scientific question.

In the long run, nothing actually is. It's a philosophical question. It's going back to his starting point. And his starting point can't make sense of the reason he's relying on. So we're going to point that out.

We're going to say, you're relying on your mental capabilities and your reason, and I'd like to know why you can rely on those things given your worldview, given that you came about by chance and there's no God.

How come you can make sense of this? That's his weak point. That's his folly. So that's what it means to answer a fool according to his folly. It means you go to where he actually went wrong and try to correct it.

So we have some examples of this actually in the Bible. We're not going to go through all of them, but if you want to, read Acts 17. This is where Paul is on Mars Hill. Really nothing is new, but there were slight differences in the worldviews back then.

The majority of the people were either Jews, the apostles were ministering to, or they were Greeks in their thinking. They were either dualistic, philosophical, the heirs of Plato and Aristotle and that school, Socrates, or they were Jews that had the Old Testament as their authority and their rabbinical writings.

And so when the gospel went forth, the Jews accepted the Old Testament, right? Christ said, if you would know Moses, you would know me. And so when the apostles preached to Jews, what do they do? The Bible is a stumbling block to them, but they still use the Bible.

It's a stumbling block, but that's what they're using. When they preach to Greeks on Mars Hill, what does Paul do? He uses biblical principles, right? But he points out that they have an unknown God and that they don't understand who they're worshiping.

He points out that they do actually know God, but they're worshiping him in, the word is ignorance. And so we see that he treats the two groups a little bit differently because what he's doing is he's correcting their folly.

He starts out with, of course, the God of the Bible, and then he shows how, where they went wrong, where their presuppositions were off. Presuppositions of the Jews are off because they don't understand the Old Testament.

Presuppositions of the Greeks are off because, essentially, they're worshiping in ignorance, something that they don't actually understand and comprehend. And so he's pointing out the attributes that they know through their conscience.

Even their Greek poets even said, you know, through him we have our life and our meaning. And the Greek poets understood this, that we had to rely on God. Paul points that out and says, you guys know this, but you're not being consistent with it.

So he's pointing out their error. So when dealing with different worldviews, we're going to approach them a little differently depending on their presuppositions. We're going to point out their error.

And that's what Paul does on Mars Hill in Acts 17. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10 .5, we are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. We are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

And notice the order here. Speculations are first destroyed, and then the thoughts are taken captive. And that's a strong word, right? We're destroying speculations, these things that they can't prove.

They're speculative. We destroy those by pointing out the inconsistencies. Answering a fool according to his folly means locating the folly, where he went wrong, and shining a light on it. This is nothing short of exposing an individual's sin.

Christians are the light of the world, and it is our duty to expose a nonbeliever's error for both his sake and the sake of our testimony, rather than joining with him in his foolishness. This means that when confronting nonbelievers, we hit them at their weakest point, the point in which reality is misinterpreted because of their worldview.

We attack their faulty presuppositions. First Corinthians 1 .23 says, but we preach Christ crucified to Jews a stumbling block in a Gentile's foolishness. There was the reference I was looking for earlier.

Self-Refuting Statements in Relativism, Postmodernism, and Other Worldviews

All right, so this is going to be kind of fun, because I like these things. We're going to talk about self-refuting statements, and this is just the beginning. We're going to have more next week. But I want to sort of start out this way, because it's kind of a mode you get in.

You develop your thinking in such a way that you can spot these really quickly. The presidential debates are coming up, right? Actually, I think we've already had two of them in the Republican Party, at least.

If you understand self-refuting statements, just that alone, left and right, you're going to be seeing things. For me, at least, it's a little fun, because I can kind of observe and see where they're going wrong or whatever, but anyone can do this.

I'm going to go through some of the most common self-refuting statements that I've heard and that we hear in our culture, and then I have the answer here to show why it's wrong. Every worldview essentially breaks down into a self-refutation when it does not start with Christ.

Here are some examples that show the inconsistency in the nonbeliever's worldview, and I have them in different categories. So these are, these are, it's not extensive. I don't have Islam on here, I don't have Mormonism, I don't have some of the more ones that actually really borrow from our worldview that need to be discussed further, but I do have the major ones that our society advocates, people that aren't religious, at least.

The first one is relativism and deconstructionism, or you might know this by postmodernism, right? And here are some of the statements that they'll make, and you've probably heard a lot of these. The first one is, there are no absolutes.

And when someone says that, you should ask them, are you absolutely sure? They're absolutely sure there is an absolute, right, and that's that there are no absolutes. So if they're right, they're wrong, and if they're wrong, they're wrong.

So either way, they're wrong. Here's another one. It's impossible to know anything for sure. Question, are you sure you know that? If you know that, you can't know anything, then you're wrong. If you're right, you're wrong.

Again, that's why it's self-refuting. So essentially, they're basically sawing off the branch they're sitting on. No one should be judged for their lifestyle. Question, is that your judgment regarding those whose lifestyle requires judging?

Now, that may take a little bit of thinking at first, but what if my lifestyle is in such a way that, like I'm a Christian, and it requires me to make determinations about things, to judge certain things?

Now, if that's true, then my lifestyle is to judge certain things, and to judge certain.