A Biblical Defense of Presuppositional Apologetics

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I am your host Elias Ayala and today

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I have a very special guest on with us to discuss another application of presuppositional apologetics.

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Today we're going to be looking at the biblical foundation for presuppositional apologetics. If you're wondering why

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I'm out of breath, my kids are upstairs and at the last second, right before we were gonna get started, my son needed water and so I had to run up the stairs, run back down, so I'm out of shape.

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So hopefully I will survive and not pass out in the midst of this interview.

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Just real quick, by way of some quick announcements, I have some really exciting interviews coming up as well to discuss other aspects of presuppositional thought.

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Today of course we have Pastor Doug Wilson. On the 29th we have Jeff Durbin coming on to discuss how to apply presuppositional apologetics to competing religious perspectives.

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We also have Dr. James Anderson coming on on May 9th to talk about the nature of transcendental arguments and the different ways you can apply those sorts of argumentation within a presuppositional framework.

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We also have Dr. Gary Habermas coming on on May 12th and Douglas Gruthius on May 15th.

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So we have a really great lineup. As you probably recognize, some of those guys

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I just mentioned are not presuppositionalists, but as I have expressed before in past episodes,

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I really want to build bridges and show that we can very, very much appreciate the work that's being done within the whole scope of the

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Christian Church with regards to defending the faith. And so we can appreciate people who are coming from other apologetic methodologies, even though we disagree maybe with the foundation from where they're coming from.

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But again, this is an in -house discussion and I think we can engage in those internal discussions and debates with gentleness and respect, as 1st

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Peter chapter 3 verse 15 tells us with regards to giving an answer for the hope that's in us. So without further ado,

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I'd like to introduce our guest for today. We have today Pastor Doug Wilson.

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Welcome. Can I call you Doug? Wilson? Hey, hey you.

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Doug is fine. The bearded man. Well, I'll just call you the bearded man.

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That'll be how I'll address you. That'd be really awkward for this interview if I did that. But I'm very excited that you're on.

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I greatly appreciate the work that you've done in apologetics. I know you're a pastor and so your job goes way beyond just what a lot of people see on the internet and what you've done with regards to debates and things like that.

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Why don't you tell a little bit about yourself for people who might not know who you are and maybe you can share with us a little bit of your experience and background in apologetics and then we'll start with our discussion.

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All right. Well, my name is Douglas Wilson. I'm a pastor in Moscow, Idaho. If you don't know where that is, it's in Idaho and we're in the...

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Idaho has a panhandle and we're up in the chimney, up in the panhandle of Idaho.

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We're about as far away from the potatoes as we are from Seattle. So this is logging and mining country.

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Very beautiful, very beautiful part of the country. It's called the Palouse. So I've been here pastor for over 40 years.

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I came here to go to school. My folks had moved here. I helped them move here and then

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I went in the Navy and after a stint in the submarine service, I came to the University of Idaho here in Moscow and got my bachelor's and master's in philosophy.

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And I did that because my father ran an evangelistic

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Christian bookstore. That's why he came to Moscow to open one of those. He did that in Pullman, Washington, which is just eight miles away and Moscow here.

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There's a university in each one. The plan was to study philosophy and do what my dad was doing.

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I was going to go to another small town with a major university in it, open an evangelistic apologetic bookstore and run it as a ministry to college students.

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That was the plan. That got derailed. So I would always been interested in apologetics and engaging with non -believers and I did a lot of that when

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I was in the Navy. And I was studying philosophy after I read a little bit of Francis Schaeffer in the

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Navy and I got interested in a thinking Christian response to the challenges of unbelief.

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So that's why I studied philosophy. And I sort of got pulled through the hedge backwards into the ministry.

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While I was doing my undergraduate work, I played the guitar.

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I was the song leader for a little Jesus people type of fellowship that was planned here.

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Did you have a mullet? I didn't have a mullet, but I was more of a hair farmer than I am now.

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I had a longer beard and I fit into the 70s. Let's just say I fit it in.

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The church plant, this little Jesus people fellowship, was about a year and a half into it when the man who was doing the preaching announced one

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Sunday that he had gotten a job in another town, another city, and he was going to be moving and he was going to be gone the next

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Sunday. And so that's how I wound up. I preached the next

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Sunday and I've been preaching to these long suffering saints ever since. So the ministry side of it, the pastoral side of it, started up.

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But this is a university town, so very early on we would schedule debates with various forms and various kinds of unbelievers, some atheists.

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I've debated Gordon Stein, who shortly after his famous, infamous debate with Greg Bonson, that was a surreal experience,

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I can tell you, because, you know, I debated Gordon Stein.

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In my opening statement I laid out a basic classic presuppositional argument and Stein, who had just been through the mill with Greg Bonson, acted like he'd never heard of, you know, never heard any of this stuff before, and said, well,

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I'm glad that Wilson isn't going to appeal to the classical arguments for God's existence, and this is what

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I would have said if he had. So he just debated an imaginary, you know, and I've debated

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Dan Barker a few times and other, Edward Tobosh, and so I've had a number of debate and encounters with mostly atheists, and the most significant apologetic encounter

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I had was with the late Christopher Hitchens, when he and I debated online at Christianity Today, and then that was released as a book, and then that book release tour that we did together was turned into a documentary collision.

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So if people associate me with apologetics, it's probably because of collision.

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Yeah, the first time I ever heard of you was in your debate with Dan Barker, and I think that might have been one of the first times

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I heard about Dr. Bonson, because the person introducing you mentioned that Dan Barker was scheduled to debate

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Dr. Bonson, who passed away, I think it was a year before, is that correct? Yeah, so it was right around that,

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I don't remember the exact chronology, but yes. Did you ever get to meet Dr.

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Bonson at all? Yes, I met him one time. He and I spoke at a

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Christian worldview conference, well it wasn't for the young people, but we did a conference together in Delaware or Maryland, somewhere in there, and was privileged to meet him and enjoyed that.

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All right, very good. Well, I never knew that you debated Dr. Gordon Steiner.

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Is that audio available anywhere? No, part of his deal was no recordings, and he didn't want anything documented.

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Okay, well that's no fun. No. All right, well let's jump right into things here.

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The main thing I wanted to talk about with you is the Biblical foundation for apologetics. Last episode we had

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Dr. Michael Kruger on, and we talked a little bit about presuppositionalism applied to historical studies and issues in canon, and so we had a very interesting discussion with regards to how to understand evidence and history within a presuppositional framework.

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But I figured I'd have you on as a pastor. You're very much connected with kind of that Biblical foundation, so perhaps you can lay out for us, as you see it, the

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Biblical foundation for doing apologetics presuppositionally, and then perhaps we can dive into some of the more controversial passages that classicalists and presuppositionals go back and forth on.

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Sure. I would say that there are two ways to approach this question, and I'm persuaded of both ways, but let me just lay them out.

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One would be the intellectual slash theological question. How do we stack these statements with truth value claims attached to them?

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How do we arrange them? What's the most foundational claim that's being made?

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It's the intellectual or philosophical or theological problem.

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How do you want to parse it? That's one way to approach it, and I figure

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I could do that also. But if someone were to ask me what my central

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Biblical case for the presuppositional approach would be, it would be tone, and that has to do with certainty.

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When I say certainty, I don't mean epistemic certainty, as though a creature could have the kind of certainty that God has.

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That was the aboriginal temptation, you shall be as God.

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I always must know as a creature, but when you look at scriptural declarations, the prophet comes out of the wilderness saying things like, thus saith the

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Lord. He doesn't come out of the wilderness saying, it seems to me, or I've been giving this a lot of consideration, or the people in my seminar group agree with me that this is a valuable question.

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The Biblical faith is declarative. I'm a preacher, I'm a herald,

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I announce things, and Peter says that the one who preaches should preach as declaring the very oracles of God.

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The thing that strikes me is that in much modern apologetic debate, discussion, the thing that puts people off on presuppositional, the presuppositional approach, is that it sounds just way too cocky, just way too confident.

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There's no room for discussion here, fellows. Here it is in this bag.

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It's really interesting because I just finished today, as a matter of fact, listening through, again,

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Francis Schaeffer's book, He is There and He's Not Silent. This issue of tone came out, struck me.

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Schaeffer's basic statement is, it's Christ or nothing. This is the only possible conceivable route.

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You've got to go this way. Instead of saying this is the best available explanation out of 17, this is the one

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I prefer, and I think this one is prettier than the others, I think this is nicer than the others.

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The reason I think this is important, and this is probably the basic theological foundation of what

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I'm saying here, if you were to ask me what is it to prove something, what constitutes a proof?

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I would say the thing that constitutes a proof is when you have obligated belief.

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If the person turns away and refuses to believe, that person is sinning.

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They're not making a mistake. They're rebelling. They're sinning. They've got something on their conscience.

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When someone has something on their conscience, after I've laid out a declaration or preached a sermon or shown them evidences for Christ, if they turn away, and this takes us to the first kind of argument, if they go into the posture of the unbeliever in Romans 1, where they're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness, that means they've got something on their conscience.

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That means that this is a moral issue. Because if it were not possible to bring the apologetic endeavor into the realm of conscience, morality, and obligation to believe, then it will not be possible for God to judge the world.

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How can God judge the world if belief is not obligatory? And it's only obligatory if the person knows.

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If someone knows, if they know what the truth is, and they suppress it, then that is a moral failing.

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It's not like I'm... So apologetics ought not to be trying to explain calculus to a second grader where they just don't have the framework to comprehend any of it.

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I'm explaining something to the unbeliever that Romans 1 tells me is the soul of his being.

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He already knows. He knows already. Okay, right there. If you don't mind me interrupting there.

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Okay, so this is usually a point of contention between the different perspectives out there, and it's the nature of the knowledge of God.

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What sort of knowledge of God does the unbeliever have? Is it an innate knowledge, or is it an immediate knowledge?

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Is it a little bit of both? And if so, if man has innate knowledge, what is the nature of that?

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Does he have innate knowledge of the tri -unity of God? Does he have an innate knowledge of just a vague notion of divinity?

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What's the nature of that innate knowledge? I think you've touched the thing with a needle.

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This is a $64 ,000 question, and the way

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I would answer it is this. He's suppressing knowledge of the true

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God. He's suppressing knowledge of the living God. He's suppressing knowledge of the

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God he doesn't want in his life because that God is going to mess everything up. Now, I don't believe that the non -believer has and this is where I think

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Van Til maybe trips some people up where Van Til would say, you can't form a coherent sentence without presupposing the triune

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God. That does not mean that the non -believer has the

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Nicene Creed tattooed on the back of his brain and he knows that that Nicene Creed, he knows what it means and he knows everything it's saying and he knows all the implications and he's suppressing that.

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I would prefer to say that he's suppressing the knowledge of the living God who is triune and in order to have that suppression be a moral failing the person doing the suppressing has to know that this is the living

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God. It's not a phantom not a fairy, not a construct, it's not a placeholder

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God it's the God who lives the God who's there.

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So, in Romans 1 I see a non -believer, if you imagine knowledge of the living

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God as an over -inflated beach ball and the non -believer is to hold the beach ball underwater and he's trying to keep it there and his arms are quivering because it's hard to keep that beach ball under there.

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The job of the apologist is to come up and poke his arms. Stop it!

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And the reason he wants you to stop it is because there's going to be a reckoning and if there isn't a reckoning that he is suppressing then he has a defense at the last day.

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It all boils down to this. Can the non -believer honestly say, I didn't know it was you?

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I would say Romans 1 says he can't say that. So, man was without excuse.

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Someone who I think has a good knowledge in audio asked

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Dr. Wilson to put on his headphones my output is going through his input.

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That might be the reason why there's echoing. I don't know if you have headphones or whatever.

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That might be helpful. I hope you guys are enjoying this discussion.

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I'm trying really really hard with the audio issues going on.

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I'm not a really techy kind of guy. I'm not in my office as you can see. I kind of have a family issue that requires me to be home at this moment.

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I don't have everything all set up and stuff. What did your viewer say? He asked

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Dr. Wilson to put his headphones on because my output is going through your input. Let's see if that works at all.

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If we fix this I might stop making sense. I hear a little bit of my own echo but we'll see what happens.

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Maybe if I put my headphones on. That sounds better to me already. I don't think

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I even have my headphones on. Did you say I sound much better? How do I sound better to you?

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Look at this. Reformed people shop alike with regards to their headgear.

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Let's see here. I'm going to turn my AirPods on. Let's see if this works a little bit.

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The echo is gone. Can you hear me? I can hear you.

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They're saying the echo is gone. Let's hope it's in fact gone. What I was going to ask was with regards to the knowledge of God, you said that he knows the true

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God. This is an epistemological issue. You most likely understand that the nature of the

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Triune God is necessarily connected to the epistemological issue.

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In other words, man naturally thinks in one and many categories. Do you understand? If he doesn't presuppose the

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Trinity, he has no knowledge of the Trinity, can he justify any of his claims given that oneness and manyness that he's functioning in necessarily must be grounded in the

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Triune God? Does he know that God is Triune? If not, in what sense does he know

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God? Does he have justification for the things that he knows? The way

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I would answer that is that he must presuppose the Triune God in order to deal with the one and many.

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He must presuppose it. The question has to do with how conscious is that presupposing?

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What I'm maintaining is that it's conscious enough to be culpable.

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It's conscious enough that he has no excuse. It's not so conscious that he could recite the

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Nicene Creed and say this is Trinitarian Christianity. Most Christians can't do that.

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The fact that I'm presupposing the Triune God before I know the word

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Trinity Let's say I'm a three -week -old Christian and I'm praying to the

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Father in the name of Jesus and I believe there's a Holy Spirit, but nobody sorted it out for me.

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I'm supposing all of that. I can't function without presupposing that.

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Astute and refined thinkers, if you take Heraclitus and Parmenides and they're pursuing the one and the many, sophisticated analytical thinkers cannot solve those problems without appealing to the

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Trinity. The same sort of thing with Aristotle's unmoved mover and Plato's God that knows us and Aristotle's God that doesn't know us there can be no peace there can be no reconciliation between those positions apart from a direct recognition of the

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Trinity. But you've got all sorts of rank -and -file non -Christians who presuppose the

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Trinity without consciously being able to pass even the most fundamental quiz on what the doctrine of the

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Trinity claims. So where are you supposing at?

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Say that last part again? How much self -conscious knowledge does it take to call it a presupposition?

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I'm created in the image of God and if I were a non -Christian I would still be an image -bearer.

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Well that image that I'm bearing is the image of a Triune God. I can't run from the

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Trinity because it's woven into the very fabric of my being Of course

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I have to presuppose the Trinity in order to think. Because I have to presuppose me in order to be able to think.

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And I can't presuppose me without presupposing someone made in the image of the Triune God. Now this tends to also be connected to the whole issue of what a lot of classicalists will criticize presuppositionalism for and it's this confusion of ontology and epistemology.

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The Triune God is the ontological grounding for knowledge. But is the assumption of the

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Triune God a necessary precondition for knowledge? And so the classicalists will often say that they agree with the presuppositionalist

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God is the ontological grounding. But that doesn't mean man has to presuppose

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God in his thinking to acquire knowledge or have a justification for the things that he knows. How would you address that issue?

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Do you think it's one or the other? Or is it both? Do you think that the ontological grounding is

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God and that one must assume because he has innate knowledge of God in order to have a justification for the things that he knows?

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No, I would say because we're finite thinkers. In our theology departments or in our systematic theologies, we have one section called ontology and another section called epistemology.

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But in the actual world where people live, ontology and epistemology are all descriptions of the same world.

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The fact that I can make different philosophy departments or I can say he studies epistemology and he studies ontology, well maybe they ought to get together and visit more.

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Maybe they ought to communicate more because these questions have something directly to do with one another.

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So the classical evidentialists will say, yeah, ontologically speaking there's no world but the triune

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God because the triune God made it. But when we're speaking of epistemology it's a different ballgame.

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Well, I would parse it further. Are we talking about the knower? The person who's knowing stuff or are we talking about the student of ontology who is looking at the knower knowing stuff?

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Which one are we talking about? So the man who knows that that's a tree over there or knows that that's a park bench or knows that this is his wife and these are his kids.

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He can't know that at all unless he's a knower.

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He can't be a knower unless he's created the image of God but that doesn't mean that he is a student of epistemology.

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That just means that he's assuming things he's never proven in order to know that that's his wife.

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Now I would say a sophisticated student of epistemology who has pursued this with the refinement of Greek philosophy and has pursued it for 300 years is going to get to the point where he says, you know, that guy can't know that that's his wife without presupposing the triune

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God. I think that would be true. So everything has to do with how self -conscious a presupposition is.

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How self -conscious is it? That's it. How self -conscious is it?

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How self -aware is it? Right. And so we would say that the knowledge that everyone has the natural man, for example, someone who doesn't have a

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Bible or anything like that, is a general knowledge is a general revelation. So would you say that general revelation, the general knowledge the general revelation of God and the knowledge that man has innately of God what is that?

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As presuppositionalists who affirm innate knowledge, would we back off from trying to gain specificity with regards to what that knowledge entails since perhaps we can't know biblically, we just know that he has enough of it that he's without excuse?

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How would you describe the nature of that knowledge in detail if it could be done? So the way

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I would illustrate it is because knowledge is a very strange thing when you think about it.

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So let's say let's say I walk out of my office and I look down Main Street here in Moscow, and two blocks away

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I see a little tiny figure, you know, a little tiny person, and I know instantly it's my wife.

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Now, how did I know that? And let's say I walk down there and sure enough it's, I didn't recognize the clothing it's far away.

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But my ability to apprehend that that's my wife is something that is built in.

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God has wired us this way. Now, I believe that non -believers when they're running from God, are not running from the

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God of the Jehovah's Witnesses. They're not running from Allah.

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They're not running from Baal or Dagon. They're not running from any false constructs or any false gods.

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They're running from the true God. The fact that they're running from the true God doesn't mean that they're close enough to see all the features.

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They just know enough to know that that's the God they don't want to deal with because that's the

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God who will deal with them. It's sort of like Edmund in The Lion, the

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Witch, and the Wardrobe As soon as he hears Aslan's name, he knows he doesn't like it. That's the kind of knowledge

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I'm talking about. It's instantaneous love or hatred attraction or revulsion.

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And for fallen man, it's always revulsion unless God is in the process of drawing that person.

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That's what brings the culpability in. And that's why I think the apologist or the evangelist needs to be dogmatic, declarative, pronouncing.

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Because he's saying to the people, I'm telling you something the Word of God says, and in your heart, what

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I'm saying resonates with what you know already. It's like a tuning fork.

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You hit the tuning fork and it's resonating with what that person's heart knows. And for them to reject at that moment introduces culpability.

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They're now at that moment without excuse. On the other hand,

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I want to cooperate fully with your desire to have evidentialists and presuppositionalists learn to play nice and learn to have fruitful interactions.

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But one of the things I've seen in many popular evidential approaches is it seems to me to want to give the sinner too much wiggle room.

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Too much room to maneuver. And I believe that our responsibility is to give them no room to maneuver.

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And then call them repentance. Right. And I would fully agree with that.

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And I think another thing I'd like to emphasize is that when we appreciate what other people are doing within different apologetic traditions, that's not to say that we compromise on our own convictions as reformed

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Christians as presuppositionalists. Because I do believe that there is far too much wiggle room, even just the wording, as to many of these classic listen debates, the wording that they use when presenting their case.

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I'm thinking, I can't imagine the Apostle Paul phrasing the argument in that way. So yeah,

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I definitely agree with you there. Now, with regards to Romans 1, a lot of classical apologists use this to support a sort of natural theology.

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Why don't you tell folks what natural theology is and what you think, with regards to Romans 1, is it in fact supporting a natural theology?

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Yeah, as I identify myself, I actually hesitate to say any more than I identify as a thing, but I identify as a

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Vantillian. So that means I'm nervous about certain expressions of natural law.

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And the expression of natural law that I'm nervous about is the kind that wants to carve out autonomy, where people talk about, they can get around the idea of whether or not natural law would remain obligatory even if there were no god.

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Can you have natural law in an atheistic universe? Well, that to me is like trying to draw round squares.

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Natural law means there's a lawgiver. Natural revelation, which is a phrase I'm much more comfortable with, means that there's a revealer, someone who gives that information.

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The heavens declare the glory of God. I don't have any problem affirming that there is a declaration that God is making in the created order.

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I have a problem with the created order serving as this nebulous quarry from which the stone masons of human thought can go out and carve their ideas.

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I don't think we go discover things all by ourselves.

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I think God reveals. I think God tells. So you would hold to a form of revelational epistemology?

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Yes, very much so. So I believe that someone who's not yet encountered a

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Bible knows from the sun, moon, and stars that he is a creature.

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He knows that he is not the one who made all these things.

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A fallen finite man can know that he is not God. He must know that he is not

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God. Now the way I illustrate it is two school boys come home to one of the boys' houses, and the mother of one of the boys took some brownies out of the oven and left them on the counter and left a note for the boys on the brownies.

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And she said boys, I'd like you to help yourself. There's some milk in the fridge.

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But before you do that, I'd like you to carry this desk upstairs. And the two boys walk in to the house, and the house is beautifully kept, and there's beautiful pictures on the walls.

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She's a wonderful housekeeper. The whole place is like brownies. And then there's a note on the brownies.

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The house and the brownies are general revelation. The note is special revelation.

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I like that. That's really good. But there's only one mom.

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So the problem that... this goes back to our... That's really good. I never thought of it that way.

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So you're saying the brownies, the cookies, the hospitality, the people who go to the house know this is...

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we can know something about the woman who lives here because she looks after all the wonderful things she leaves out.

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We can even see family portraits. They're like, oh look, maybe she has three kids. And then the special revelation would be more specific, a letter, or even the woman coming out and saying, hey, how's it going, guys?

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The thing I want to lean against is because when we're talking about this, when we're talking about ontology and epistemology, just because we can give a name to two different disciplines doesn't mean that those disciplines are separated in the world.

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So in the real world, the god who spoke Andromeda into existence and the god who inspired

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Paul to write Galatians is the same god. So he's communicating to me one way in this setting, and he's communicating to me in another way in this setting.

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Now the problem with natural ontology is that people want to separate the disciplines of let's study the book all by itself and let's study nature all by itself and then they come up with all kinds of fossil records and what the scientists said and they misread the book because they've detached it.

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They go off into the garage and eat all the brownies because they refuse to read the note. That's really good.

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I like the way you did that there. And I know the difference between these things, but the way you just put it there,

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I was like that actually is really good. It kind of makes the point very clearly there.

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Let's take some questions from people who are listening in. Some may be related to what we're talking about. Some may not be related.

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If you want to answer a question, go for it. If there's a question that you think, man, I don't know if I'm going to address that, you can just hand wave it away.

39:14

No big deal. The answer is 42. Anthony asks,

39:19

I know it's off topic, but ask him, that's you, what his favorite memory of Hitchens was.

39:25

I assume you guys were somewhat friends. I don't know if you guys were close at all. I would say you can get a good glimpse of it in Collision.

39:39

There's a part in the film where we're at King's College in New York and we got to, we're both great lovers of P .G.

39:48

Woodhouse, and we got to quoting favorite lines from back and forth to one another.

39:56

Christopher Hitchens, what it boils down to is this, was just really gracious to me in all of our interactions, except when we were on stage.

40:09

When we were on stage, he would move into his bad boy shtick.

40:18

He would insult me and do different things on stage. One time we had breakfast together in New York, just the two of us visiting, and it was just a very amiable and good conversation.

40:37

My favorite memories would revolve around being able to share meals with him.

40:49

The camaraderie or fellowship is way too strong, but there was an affinity there.

40:56

We really did get along famously. We got along really well.

41:02

One time, another we were sharing, we were in a little place,

41:09

I think this was in Dallas. We spoke at the Christian Sellers thing.

41:16

We were on a panel there. Christopher and a few other of my Christian friends and I were in a coffee joint or someplace and we were talking.

41:26

I told him that he was still a Christian because he'd been baptized in the

41:33

Church of England and he'd never been excommunicated. He really ought to have been excommunicated, but that wasn't up to him.

41:42

He couldn't just admit that he wasn't a Christian. The church had to come out and he really needed to do something about that.

41:50

That kind of took him back a couple of steps.

41:57

Okay, that's interesting. That's funny how he's super nice and then you're on stage. Christopher Hitchens was a funny guy.

42:04

Out of all the atheists that I've watched, he was the most enjoyable to watch. Obviously, apart from his blasphemous...

42:11

of course, many of the blasphemous things he would say. He was very quick and very witty, which is why he got away with murder.

42:21

You pin him If this was a wrestling match, he'd run the mat both shoulder blades down and he would say something uproariously funny and everybody would laugh as though he had thrown off the argument.

42:35

He hadn't done anything of the kind. You had to keep an eye on him all the time.

42:43

I thought you handled him very well. Those were great discussions. I had the pleasure of listening to those a while back. Here's another question here by MJ Jackson that is not

42:51

Michael Jackson, just in case. Grace and Peace Brothers, what books would you recommend on biblical epistemology?

43:00

Oh, man. I would start

43:11

Part of the problem that I have in this whole field is I got what's going on in my head is an assemblage of many snippets from many different places.

43:26

There's no one book that I would say this is the go -to book on epistemology.

43:35

I'm afraid I'm going to come up short on that. Some of the books that I learned the most from I would have significant disagreements with in different places.

43:47

This is slightly off topic from the question, but it illustrates the point nicely, I think. One of the first books

43:55

I read was in the early 90s. It was called Persuasions. It was a dream of reasons and meeting unbelief.

44:02

It was a basic intro kind of thing to apologetics and evangelism and whatnot.

44:08

This was pre -internet, pre -everything like that. Book junkies like me used to get monthly newsprint catalogs of book distributors with 6 .8

44:21

point font describing all the different books. There was one of them on the

44:26

East Coast called Great Christian Books. The fellow there agreed to pick up my book as an offering in his catalog.

44:37

Which at the time was a big deal for me and I was really whizzed up about it. When that catalog came,

44:44

I got the catalog and I flipped open and I found my book. He, the man running the catalog company, had written an ad copy for my book.

44:55

He said this little book is a very fine basic introduction to Venteen apologetics.

45:03

I looked at that and I said it is? I think I've read Persuasions. It was really good.

45:10

I had not read Vantill at the point.

45:18

I thought, good beef. Are you trying to say you developed presuppositional apologetics simultaneously but apart from Dr.

45:28

Vantill? Kind of like Leibniz and Newton. The point is if I didn't learn

45:34

Vantill, where did I learn it? What I did was

45:41

I ordered Vantill's Sense of the Faith and read it and was greatly relieved.

45:48

I don't mind being tagged with where I was tagged. That was a close call.

45:59

After I said okay, I agree. I'm basically in sync with Vantill.

46:05

Where had I learned this basic prepositional move?

46:13

Why did he identify my book as presuppositionalism when I hadn't read

46:18

Vantill at all? I had learned that method of argumentation from C .S.

46:23

Lewis. Particularly his book on miracles. In the first two or three chapters, he does a demolition job.

46:32

This is weird because Lewis was not a presuppositionalist. I would say that Lewis was a mixed bag.

46:41

If he was talking to non -believers behaving themselves and asking questions, he was an evidentialist.

46:50

He would use evidences. He would just function like an evidentialist. John Warwick Montgomery corresponded with him and showed him an article and Lewis wrote back approvingly.

46:59

Lewis was happy to sign off on evidential arguments. But then when he encountered materialistic atheism he just ran the most devastating reductio imaginable.

47:13

You can't think if you're just a mindless concatenation of atoms. You can't even say

47:19

I'm a mindless concatenation of atoms. That makes too much sense. That reductio demolition job is something

47:27

I learned from Lewis. Going back to this question I would say probably the best place to start on all of these questions and a good intro would be

47:43

Greg Bonson's Always Ready. Bonson's Always Ready sort of covers the waterfront and the question of Christian apologetics is boiled down the question of Christian epistemology.

48:00

You can't get to whether Jesus rose from the dead without addressing how do we know what we know.

48:10

Always Ready is a great one because the chapters are super short but it's filled with scripture. I think

48:15

Dr. Bonson's main goal was to provide that biblical basis which apparently was missing in Van Til's work in the sense that Van Til didn't really engage a lot of the text of scripture in his work.

48:27

He kind of just assumed it and it was weaved into a lot of his philosophical jargon which made many accuse him of not being biblical yet he was suggesting that this was kind of the way to go for the

48:39

Christian. If anyone's interested in Christian epistemology biblical epistemology there is a book called

48:45

Debating Christian Religious Epistemology and Dr. Scott Oliphant has an excellent chapter there on Covenantal Epistemology which is basically epistemology from a presuppositional perspective.

48:56

I just recently read that a couple of weeks ago. It was really really good and very much related to some of the things we were talking about just a moment ago with regards to innate knowledge and things like that general revelation special revelation.

49:07

You want to check out that book Debating Christian Religious Epistemology and check out Scott Oliphant's book there.

49:13

Alright thank you very much MJ. We have another question here. I guess this one's for me. Eli will you have William Lane Craig on the show?

49:20

Actually if you guys remember a couple of episodes back I had Kevin Harris who was the guy who interviews

49:25

Dr. Craig on his Reasonable Faith podcast and he was telling me that he was going to try and hook me up to get

49:31

Dr. Craig on here so hopefully we will get him on sooner rather than later but I know he's a very busy guy so I'll keep you guys informed with regards to that.

49:41

Okay let's see we have a couple more questions here. That one was a tech question. Okay we don't want to ask you that one because you already have your headphones in.

49:48

Let's see here what are your recommendations that's another same question.

49:55

Okay here's a point here someone's asking classical apologists sometimes accuse preceptors of confusing ontology with epistemology.

50:04

Have you heard this before and how do you respond? Yeah we've touched on it already but I would say basically

50:13

I would say confusing them is not the same thing.

50:19

Basically you can distinguish things without separating them and my problem with the modern world is that once we've distinguished something we think that we've separated them.

50:29

We think that this belongs in a box and this belongs in this box. I can distinguish easily a child can distinguish height from breadth from depth.

50:40

But you can't separate them. If I take this microphone here and remove the height from it

50:49

I don't have a very very flat microphone. I have no microphone. All I have to do is remove one attribute and I've removed the other two.

51:00

That's because these things can be distinguished but not separated. So I would say that ontology and epistemology can be distinguished but not separated.

51:15

If a knower can't know unless God created him so that he can know.

51:21

Ontology. Unless God created him unless God is there and created the world no knower can know anything.

51:31

Now that is an ontological claim but it's also relevant to epistemology.

51:40

I can't know anything unless I'm created. So that's what the presuppositionalist is doing.

51:53

What are the presuppositions of me being here at all? That's ontology.

52:01

And what are the presuppositions for me being here at all and being able to know something? What kind of universe does it have to be in order for me to know anything at all?

52:14

And that's epistemology all the way down. But it bleeds into ontology.

52:22

I can't pursue epistemology without at some point coming to the creator

52:29

God. As soon as I get to the creator God, that's ontology. Which means that these subjects can be distinguished but never separated.

52:40

I hope that answers the question. I addressed this more specifically in my response to Dr.

52:46

Richard Howe's interview on capturing Christianity. You can check that out on the Revealed Apologetics YouTube page.

52:53

And I addressed that and the application of presuppositionalism to other religious perspectives. I think the point came up that when we argue transcendentally by the impossibility of the contrary, who's to stop someone from assuming the

53:06

Muslim God? You can just remove the Christian God and replace the argument with any other God and it works the same.

53:13

So the critic says. And I demonstrate that that's not the case as well. So both of those questions are answered in more depth in another video.

53:20

So hopefully what Pastor Wilson has just expressed here is helpful as well. We have another question here.

53:26

When witnessing, do you have to present the fact that the person you are speaking to knows God? Or can you assume that for yourself and not speak about it when either witnessing or when debating?

53:40

I assume it for myself. So when I'm talking to someone I don't say, hey buddy, you know that everything

53:50

I'm saying is true. Why don't you just come along quietly? That's not going to persuade anybody.

54:00

It may well be true, but it's just an obnoxious way of proceeding.

54:06

It's like licking your finger and going up to touch his eyeball. The fact that he knows

54:12

God and he knows God at a foundational level of his being is something that he is not going to bring out or allow to be brought out until he trusts you.

54:26

And he's not going to trust you unless it's clear to him that you love him. So basically, when

54:34

I'm speaking to someone, I assume that he knows God without telling him in a taunting way that he knows

54:42

God. Now when I say that he knows God, I've got to qualify this also because a non -believer can know the more a non -believer knows the true attributes of God, the more he hates

54:57

God. So the one thing a non -believer cannot do is know

55:02

God and love God. A non -believer can love

55:07

God and not know anything about him. You know, let's say a sweet bourbon

55:14

Mormon housewife who just loves Jesus. But then if you were to ask her what her definition of Jesus was, it would be quickly apparent that she's loving a construct of imagination, which is what makes the love possible.

55:29

She can love and not know, or the non -believer can know and not love. So you're going to get in a conversation with the non -believer you're witnessing to they're going to get to a tipping point where they're going to have to open up with what they're really afraid of, or what they're really running from.

55:53

When that starts to happen, you're at the point where you're not far from praying with them or leading them to Christ.

56:02

And you've got to be, you know, the fisherman doesn't yank on the line at that point.

56:08

You just have to be living and tender and thoughtful, but you assume, you know the whole time that when they say

56:16

I have no idea whether God exists, you know that that's a lie.

56:24

You don't say you don't tell them that's a lie, but you might, depending on how well you knew them and how far along you were all of those things.

56:35

But I would not ever do that right out of the starting blocks. Right. And not doing that is not working against the presuppositional method, because at a popular understanding, people think like, well presuppositionalists just go out there and say, you know

56:48

God, stop lying to yourself and that's it. How arrogant. And that's why a lot of people call presuppositionalists arrogant, it's for that very point, is that we're just telling the unbeliever you know

56:56

God and you're just suppressing it. And that's true, like you said, but you don't have to go out and say it. It's not because we're not honoring

57:02

God's word. It's just you want to use strategy when you're talking to someone. You want to reach someone.

57:07

So there's certain ways you go about that that you want to consider before you start making various applications. Alright, someone wanted to give a shout out to their favorite book, their favorite

57:15

Doug Wilson book. Brett says, my favorite Doug Wilson book is Persuasions. There's a character trying to get to the city based on his own righteous works.

57:23

The evangelist commends him and tells him good luck, because no one has done it on their own. The character asks if the city is full and how.

57:31

Evangelist confirms and says, what a man can't do for himself may still be done for him.

57:36

Nice. Persuasions is an excellent book and I believe can be downloaded on Kindle as well. It's probably going for a pretty nice price at this point.

57:43

Here's an interesting question here by Lagos Ministries. Hello brother, can you ask Pastor Wilson? Okay, Pastor Wilson, this is for you.

57:50

How can you deal with doctrine matters or doctrinal matters in a country where there is no room for Reformed theology as Middle Eastern countries?

57:58

A follower from Jordan. One of the things

58:03

I would do in that situation is I would avail yourself, as you have just now done, of theological blessings where you can get nourishment and encouragement and blessing from outside your community environment.

58:21

I would encourage you to start with eschatology. If you're in Jordan right now, you need to know that a day is coming when

58:32

Jordan will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. I would start with if you're isolated and lonesome that way,

58:44

I would use technological means, electronic communication, chat groups, books, that sort of thing to refurbish or strengthen your doctrinal understanding.

58:58

But I would start with the doctrines that are the most refreshing and encouraging.

59:05

The doctrines of grace and eschatology is where I would start.

59:11

All right, thank you. This one's pertaining more to our main topic, the biblical foundations for presuppositionalism.

59:18

I don't know how to pronounce his name, so I do apologize. He or she,

59:23

I'm not sure. Many use Psalm 19 to aid their classical evidential approach. The heavens declare the glory of God.

59:30

How would you answer them according to the text? According to that text, I have it here. The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims

59:37

His handiwork. Day to day pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor are there words whose voice is not heard.

59:43

Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. And then, of course, it goes on to various other aspects of creation.

59:50

How do classicalists use this passage, and how would you understand it from a presuppositional perspective? Classical evidentialists would say, see, you've got natural revelation in the first part of that Psalm.

01:00:05

And say, amen. The heavens do declare the glory of God. The heavens don't declare

01:00:12

God's indignity. They don't declare anything shameful about God. They declare God's glory. This goes back to mom and her brownies.

01:00:22

It's when you get to the second half of Psalm 19 that you get to the note. The law of the

01:00:27

Lord is perfect, converting the soul. That's a wonderful poem because not only do you have two halves of the poem, where you've got natural revelation and you have special revelation, the law of the

01:00:40

Lord being perfect, converting the soul, but the poetic device is the sun comes like a bridegroom out of his chamber, ready to run the race.

01:00:51

The sun illuminates absolutely everything. And then it moves seamlessly into this hymn of praise to the law of God.

01:00:59

So what they're saying is that these two things are not unlike. They come from the same

01:01:06

God. The one who reveals in the first part communicates by means of propositions.

01:01:16

In the second part, the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. So these two things are

01:01:24

God wrote two books, one author, two books, and I distinguish them, but I absolutely refuse to separate them.

01:01:32

I want natural revelation and special revelation to be as conjoined in our thinking as they are conjoined in Psalm 19.

01:01:42

Psalm 19 doesn't end with the sun coming out of his chamber. Psalm 19 moves on into the glories of special revelation.

01:01:51

Alright, I'm going to keep going with the questions if that's okay, because some of them are based on understanding of biblical text, so that just covers our topic.

01:01:58

And we are running to our closing time, so I'm just going to run with the questions so that the listeners can get their questions answered, and I'm glad they're asking a lot of these

01:02:07

Bible -based questions here. Here's a question from Dylan. Does Acts 17 .31 suggest that God has provided the same type of evidence in the resurrection as he has in creation, in that both leave men without excuse for unbelief?

01:02:22

And Psalm, I'm sorry, Acts 17 .31 says, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

01:02:35

How would you address that? I think that's a very good question, because you'll notice in classical apologetics, you have a tendency to want to prove the resurrection.

01:02:52

Let's prove that the resurrection happened. In biblical apologetics, the resurrection is proof.

01:03:02

You just have that in Acts 17 .31. The fact that Jesus came down from the dead is the proof of a number of things.

01:03:11

So Jesus is declared in Romans 1 .4, Jesus is declared with power to be the

01:03:18

Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. His resurrection declares who he is. His resurrection declares in Acts 17 .31

01:03:25

that he's going to be the judge of the whole world. And God has given the whole world assurance of this by raising

01:03:34

Jesus from the dead. So the resurrection is not the thing that needs to be proven.

01:03:40

The resurrection is the thing that proves things. So I go out as a preacher of the gospel,

01:03:48

I go out to declare and preach the resurrection of the dead as a proof of what

01:03:54

God's going to do. It's not the topic for discussion.

01:04:00

Now I don't say that if someone were to have a debate with someone over whether Jesus rose from the dead,

01:04:07

I'm not saying it's sinful to participate in a debate with that as a topic.

01:04:12

But I do think it's a problem when we forget the resurrection is God's mighty proof.

01:04:20

Okay. Here's a more pastoral sort of question. This person asks,

01:04:26

I'm convinced that God has called me to be a pastor. What's the first thing I should do? The next thing they're going to do is going to be based on your answer here.

01:04:34

So no pressure. You should go lie down until the feeling goes away. So basically

01:04:45

I would say that if you want to be a pastor, there's an old joke down south that says that a hot sun and a slow mule has been the cause of many a call to mystery.

01:05:03

You weren't being so interesting. So there are a lot of people who are interested in big fat books and an indoor job with no heavy lifting and that sort of thing.

01:05:18

So the first thing I would do is check your motives. Why do you want to be a pastor?

01:05:27

If you want to be a pastor because you're a theology nerd and you love talking theology with other theology nerds, that's not what you're going to wind up doing.

01:05:40

When you're a pastor, you're going to be helping people put their lives back together, people who didn't give a rip about the theology and they should have, and that's why their life is a mess.

01:05:52

So you're going to be doing a lot of things that require sacrifice, giving yourself away.

01:06:01

So I would test yourself by giving yourself away. PGA said that everybody wants to save the world but nobody wants to help mom with the dishes.

01:06:18

You're like a walking fortune cookie. So what

01:06:24

I would say is that if you want to be a pastor, start looking for places to serve your local church.

01:06:32

Look for jobs that other people want to do. Look for people that other people don't want to spend time with.

01:06:42

Because when you become a pastor, you'll be spending time with people that other people don't want to spend time with. That's what you're actually aspiring to.

01:06:52

And Jesus says that if you want to become great in the kingdom, he who wants to become great has to be a servant of all.

01:07:01

So I would encourage you in your local church, practice giving yourself away in that way.

01:07:09

And I would say, depending on where you are, get a really good liberal education, undergraduate education.

01:07:19

Build a seminary education on top of that. Very good.

01:07:29

Are you okay with these questions here? I'm still good.

01:07:37

So Jared has a question here. How or what advice could you give me to getting into apologetics ministry?

01:07:47

So, I would say this is going to seem, again, pretty simplistic. If you said, how do

01:07:54

I get into fishing? Well, you get a fishing boat and you go where the fish are.

01:08:01

And you don't take the boat out on the lake and then wait for the fish to jump into the lake.

01:08:08

They sometimes do that, but it's pretty rare. What you want to do is go where, if you want to interact with non -believers, go where non -believers are.

01:08:21

And be content with not being very good at it. If you want to learn what

01:08:30

I would call street level apologetics, how to feel questions, how to answer questions,

01:08:36

I would do things like go to a nearby college campus and do some open air preaching.

01:08:45

Do you want to learn how to field hot questions? Well, that's how you're going to get hot questions thrown at you is if you go do open air preaching.

01:08:57

Or if you hand out literature, let's say you hand out literature on the

01:09:02

LDS church outside an LDS church. Somebody's going to come out and talk to you.

01:09:10

Or if you live in a city where there's some JWs standing on the sidewalk handing out their literature, you go give them some literature.

01:09:22

You're going to find yourself in conversations. And when you're in this conversation, interact with them, and then go home and watch the game.

01:09:35

Just go over in your mind and say how did I get painted into a mirror? That seemed fruitless.

01:09:42

You're going to find yourself doing a trial and error thing.

01:09:48

If you've got a friend that you can take with you so someone can help you view a game film,

01:09:53

I thought you got stalled out on this point here, or I thought the argument became fruitless at this point.

01:10:03

And I think this is how I learned just by doing it. And you're doing it, you're going to be doing a bunch of it wrong.

01:10:13

When I was in the Navy, I was on the first submarine I was on for about a year and a half.

01:10:21

And for the first nine months I was on there, I grew up in a family that loved debate and back and forth.

01:10:28

For me, it was almost like entertainment. It wasn't a sad bedtime.

01:10:36

For some people, arguments remind them of quarrels, which make them sad because of a dysfunctional home.

01:10:43

But for me, I had a very godly, happy home. I just loved to argue.

01:10:50

And so I would go at it with these sales, one at a time or a bunch at a time. And I would just go back and forth.

01:10:58

And I was talking about nine months of that. I was talking to my dad on the phone, and I said, you know, no one's coming to Christ here.

01:11:07

I don't know, what's the deal? And my dad quoted a verse to me out of the pastorals in the

01:11:12

King's Version of the Bible. It says, avoid foolish and unlearned arguments, for they do gender strife, and the servant of the

01:11:18

Lord does not strive. So you've got to go where the people are there who will talk with you, who will argue with you.

01:11:27

You have to engage, and you have to debate with them. But you have to do it without getting sucked into foolish and unlearned arguments or endless genialities.

01:11:37

And that's why it's good to have a friend along who can say, that's fruitful. That line of discussion was fruitful.

01:11:43

This other line of discussion, I don't think that's fruitful at all. And I like what you said there.

01:11:49

You have to be okay with messing up too. I mean, it's easy to kind of catch the YouTube videos of like the cool one -liners that some famous apologist did.

01:11:58

But there was a lot of practice and a lot of messing up and then getting things right later that came before all of that nice stuff that gets slapped onto YouTube.

01:12:08

Same thing with the whole issue of preaching. People are like, I want to be a pastor because maybe they listen to your sermons and they've been inspired by the work that you're doing or someone else.

01:12:17

And being a pastor is not all glitz and glam and just preaching all day long. I mean, there's a lot of things that you are doing besides a video, an interview like this, that's just really just being involved with your congregation that people don't really see.

01:12:30

They just hear about. This question comes from Julio on a scale from 1 to 10.

01:12:37

I love these kind of questions. How post -mill are you, Doug? I mean, really.

01:12:43

We know you're post -mill, but how post -mill are you? I would say 12. Very good.

01:12:52

All right. I'm going to ask one more question here. And I do apologize if I missed anyone's question. I do want to respect

01:12:58

Pastor Doug's time. And I'm not sure how the audio is still sounding to a lot of people out there.

01:13:03

I did hear that people were finding that it was okay. But I don't want to push the limits here.

01:13:09

So Dylan has a question here. If God has provided, one, the assurance of his existence in creation, two, the assurance of the gospel through the resurrection, what exactly do we seek to prove slash expose in our apologetic methods?

01:13:29

That's an outstanding question. I would say the thing that we're trying to accomplish in our apologetic method is dismantle the denials of that assurance.

01:13:40

So men are assured of God's existence through the creation. They're assured of the gospel through the resurrection.

01:13:47

But because they're sinners and because they're still unregenerate, they want to deny in the teeth of the evidence these things.

01:13:55

And it's our task to dismantle that denial. Our job is take that denial or that ability to deny away.

01:14:06

And just leave them naked before the question. That's the task of apologetics.

01:14:15

Very good. All right. Oh, this one's a good one. I said last one, but this one's a good one.

01:14:20

You mind one more? I think it's a good one. It's an important one. Do you have any advice for keeping your cool during apologetic encounters?

01:14:29

That's really difficult. Asking a person who did not grow up in an environment like you did, i .e. a family who enjoyed happy debate around the dinner table.

01:14:37

So how does someone keep their cool in the context of apologetic encounters? Yeah. I think the fundamental thing is this, is recognizing that if you lose your cool or if you have enough self -awareness to know that you're about five minutes away from losing your cool.

01:15:02

That means that you are entering into disqualified territory. You can't grab the football and run down the spines behind the benches.

01:15:12

You're out of bounds. That's not how this thing goes. Those aren't the rules of the game.

01:15:19

So when we deal with the non -believer, Paul says again in Timothy that we should be prepared to answer them gently if peradventure

01:15:33

God would grant them repentance and turn them from the course they're on.

01:15:40

My keeping it together is an essential part of my qualification to be doing what

01:15:49

I'm doing. So if I'm convinced that I'm about to lose my cool, what

01:15:54

I should do is say, look, sorry, this conversation has been great, but I have to come back next week.

01:16:02

I have to go. You don't have to tell anybody why you're going to go. But if you're going to lose your cool... I really have to go.

01:16:13

If that happens every time, then maybe you're not cut out to be an apologist.

01:16:18

Because the qualification, this is brother to brother, but in Galatians 6 .1,

01:16:27

if it was overtaken in a trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in the spirit of gentleness, considering yourself, lest you also be tempted.

01:16:36

If that's true brother to brother, how much more would it be true of talking to a non -believer? So I think it's absolutely rock bottom, fundamentally necessary to learn how to keep your cool.

01:16:50

And part of that is cultivating a sense of humor. Learning some deflection, things that you can say that would defuse a situation.

01:17:03

Sometimes you lose your cool because the other guy is in the process of starting to lose his. And so you want to be able to ramp down.

01:17:12

Okay. Very good. Well, thank you so much, Pastor Doug and Pastor Wilson.

01:17:18

Doug Wilson. I'm just going to call you Doug Wilson. Thank you so much for your time. People call

01:17:23

Pastor Doug out here all the time. Thank you so much for your time. And I know you're really busy, so this is really a blessing for those who are listening.

01:17:33

I am getting some comments in a different stream than the chat area here. People are really enjoying it.

01:17:39

So thank you so much for coming on. For those of you guys who are following the channel, on the 29th

01:17:45

I'm having Jeff Durbin, and then I'll be reeling out some interviews in close proximity, not because I do them on purpose.

01:17:52

I just do these interviews based on those that I'm interviewing their own schedule. So I wanted to be respectful for that.

01:17:58

But I know you guys are enjoying the content. If you have not subscribed to the Revealed Apologetics YouTube channel, then you are living evidence of total depravity.

01:18:05

You need to go to YouTube and you need to click subscribe and be aware of what is going on at Revealed Apologetics so that you can get your hands or your eyes or your view on the helpful information that's on that channel.

01:18:19

Well, once again, this has been another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala. If you have any questions, you can email me at revealedapologetics at gmail .com.

01:18:30

Once again, thank you so much, Pastor Doug Wilson, and we are done. Thank you so much.