Christian Apologetics: A Conversation with Douglas Groothuis

Revealed Apologetics Introduction and Upcoming Interview Announcement

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala, and today I have Dr. Douglas Grothuis with me, who is the author of this apologetic monstrosity, this dictionary-size apologetics textbook.

Now you guys know, those who follow my channel, I'm a presuppositional apologist, but I cannot tell you how much I have benefited from reading folks in different apologetic traditions, and so there's so much great information in this book, so if you you don't have it or you're just getting into apologetics, I'm very much looking forward to inviting Dr. Grothuis on with me in just a moment to kind of unpack a new edition of this book that is going to be coming out, and so I'm very excited to be talking about that with Dr. Grothuis tonight.

Well, just real quick, I do have a quick announcement. Those who have been following various posts that I've been putting out on social media, on Thursday I'll be having Dr. Scott Oliphant of Westminster Theological Seminary on to talk about his new book, Apologetics and Persuasion.

It was originally scheduled for Thursday at 7 p .m. Eastern Time, but it has been rescheduled still on Thursday, but at 3 .30 p .m. Eastern, so much, much earlier. You guys know I usually do my shows at 9 p .m. because my kids are in bed, but we're gonna make an exception for Thursday, so looking forward to having Dr. Oliphant on with me then, and so that's the only announcement I have.

Douglas Groothuis on His Background and Favorite Influences

So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Dr. Douglas Grothuis. How are you doing, Doctor? Doing well. Thanks for having me. It is a pleasure to have you back on. For folks who don't remember, I had Dr. Grothuis on a while back to talk about the spiritual formation of the apologist, and so I put a link to that video in the comments there if you want to check that video out.

Why don't you tell folks a little bit more about yourself, who you are, where you teach, and.

Yeah. Well, you did pronounce my name correctly, which is very significant and important. Douglas is easy, but it's Grothuis. It's a Dutch name. I teach at Denver Seminary. I've been here for, gosh, since 1993, and I'm a professor of philosophy, and I think I'm up to about 14 books now, and my real passion is to make the truth of God known to the world, to build up the church, and reach the.

Unbelieving world with the truth. Excellent. Now, you have written many books on a wide range of topics. I believe you wrote a book a while back on The New Age. I'm not sure how popular The New Age is today.

I haven't been following that movement, but I remember reading portions of that book, and it was excellent. So folks, really, if you've never heard of Dr. Grothuis, look him up on Amazon. He's written a bunch of books, but my first question with respect to books, there are already some comments being made about your bookshelf.

People love seeing the bookshelves in the background in these videos. See how messy it is, right? Yeah, well, you know, it's cool, though. You know, it's kind of like... Can I have a chunk?

What was that? Stacks of papers and journals and magazines and things.

Hey, you have the nerdy vibe. People like that. Yeah. What are your top three favorite books that you've read and top three favorite books that you've written?

Hmm. Well, you know, it kind of depends on how you define favorite. If I would say influential on my ministry, then I would put Francis Schaeffer's book, The God Who Is There, as the first, because I read that as a young Christian in 1976, and it really set the tone for my whole ministry in terms of understanding the world according to a Christian worldview and not being afraid to tackle the great philosophical and cultural issues.

And then another book that was extremely informative for me is a book called The Universe Next Door by James Sire. Jim passed away about three years ago, but the book is out in a sixth edition, came out after he died, edited by a guy named Jim Hoover.

But that's a comparison of the Christian worldview to deism, naturalism, existentialism, nihilism, etc., according to basic categories like what is the ultimate reality, who are human beings, what is the nature of morality, what's the meaning of history, if any, and so on.

And then I think maybe the third one would be a book I may have read more than any others, and that's C .S. Lewis's book, The Abolition of Man. It's less well-known than mere Christianity or Screwtape Letters, but it's an argument for the existence of objective moral value.

And I've taught it at the graduate level, undergraduate level, read it probably, gosh, probably about 11 or 12 times now over the years. So those are the top three. The ones I've written, I'll just put it this way.

I think the most significant book I've written is my Krishna Apologetics textbook, which is out actually now in a second edition in Kindle. It should come out hard copy in about six weeks, supply chain willing, we'll see.

I think the best written of my books is my memoir called Walking Through Twilight, A Wife's Illness, A Philosopher's Lament. And I think my most, I dare say this, entertaining or lively book is Philosophy in Seven Sentences.

Hmm. I reread that and I get a chuckle out of it myself. I asked, I actually asked the Lord to kind of give me the spirit of G .K. Chesterton for that book to be able to make it witty and interesting and give people a laugh.

Writing Process, Research, and the New Book Fire in the Streets

Yeah. Now you're an author. I mean, that takes a lot of time to write and research. I mean, when you take a look at this textbook, I mean, this takes a long time to research and write. What's your process for writing?

How do you gather your material? What does that look like.

From here to the page? I may be the wrong person to ask about that.

By the way, I'm going to stop you right there. Every single person that I've asked about their writing process has told me that. They've had excellent books to be like. I remember I had Dr. Kirk McGregor on.

He's a well-known Molinist philosopher and he wrote a biography on Louis de Molina. I asked Dr. McGregor, what's your studying process? He's like, oh, I'm the worst person to ask. I don't wish my methods of study on anyone.

So no worries. I'm sure.

People will still be interested in knowing your process. Well, I kind of bring it down to the level of passion and consistency. So all of my books have come out of a concern to address an issue. I've never written a book because someone paid me to write a book here, write a book on this.

Every book I've wanted to write has been related to a topic or an issue I think is very important. And then persistence, keep writing. I don't have really a set schedule, but I can hit things very hard.

I just finished a book that will come out in July called Fire in the Streets, which is about the racial upheaval in our culture. And I wrote that book in about three and a half months. And the last weekend finishing up, I think I spent 20 hours on a Friday and a Saturday writing.

And I just sat there and banged it out. It didn't even seem to be a long time. I was kind of in a flow state, you know, everything was on the screen and I wasn't tired or grumpy or anything. Just this is what I need to do.

But if you want to ask somebody about method, you should interview Dr. Craig Blomberg, if you haven't. He's a New Testament scholar, good on the reliability, I think the best on the reliability of the New Testament.

And he is very methodical and very disciplined. He's German, Blomberg. I'm actually half Italian and we Italians just get excited about things and then it happens. I got the Dutch last name, but I'm actually half Italian.

Okay. All right. Excellent. Very good. Okay. So let's kind of zero in on your major work. Now, you said that the hard back of the hardcover of your new edition is coming out when?

Sometime in April. It was supposed to be out, I think February 8th. And then I was told that the printers couldn't get it out because of supply chain problems, but the Kindle came out February 8th and it'll be about another hundred pages long.

It'll be seven chapters and all the chapters are updated, including the chapters by Craig Blomberg and Richard Hess. Craig Blomberg wrote a chapter defending the New Testament and Richard Hess wrote one on apologetic.

Issues in the Old Testament. Excellent. So my next question is kind of layered, this being kind of your longest and master's book, what inspired you to write a book like this and then come out with a second edition to even add more material?

And maybe we can kind of get into what that material is. So folks can get an idea of whether it's worth getting the second edition, right? What new content do you have in there that someone who has the first edition might say, you know what?

I think I need to get that second edition. Well, I taught the book for.

Many years and as I would teach through it, I would think, well, this needs to be updated or I didn't touch on this issue at all. So I kept jotting down ideas for another edition and it sold well enough to warrant another edition, which means it's been picked up as a textbook at a lot of Christian colleges, seminaries, other places.

So my publisher was interested in that and I've added chapters. Actually, the reason why you need to buy it, second edition is that J .P. Moreland tells you to do so on the back cover. J .P. tells you to do it, you have to do it.

But it does have a lot of new material. In fact, I even forget what's in there. There's so much I wrote down. I have two chapters defending the atonement of Christ. In the first edition, I spent more time on the person of Christ and not as much on the work of Christ.

So I really got into atonement theology and some of the attacks on propitiation, especially. There's been a lot of attacks.

Is that coming from the angle of its moral appropriateness? How can a loving God sacrifice his son, kill an innocent person? Yes. Some people have called it divine child abuse.

There are a number of criticisms and I probably worked harder on those two chapters than any chapters I've ever worked on in my whole career. So I got into it in a lot of detail. I went back and read heretics like Sosinus, who was a good heretic.

I mean, that guy was smart. So I read his work and read some critiques of him and Bill Craig's book was very helpful, Atonement and the Death of Christ. Very helpful. And then of course, there's John Stott's book, The Cross of Christ.

So there's one chapter explaining the atonement, the elements of the atonement. There are about five elements of it. Propitiation is one. And then I have a chapter defending the atonement against Sosinus and other folks.

I have a chapter I think is very important. And this was the first one I thought about writing in addition to what was already in the first edition. And that's called In Defense of the Church. Because most Protestant apologetic books just assume if you make a case for Christianity, then people, that's enough.

And people will probably attend the church if they come to Christ. But we can't assume that. A lot of people think that spirituality is private, subjective, is something they can do on their own. So I have a whole chapter defending the institution of the church and basically what the church is.

I give an apologetic for the church and then the church as an apologetic to the world. How we live or how we ought to live. I have a chapter on what's called original monotheism, which is the argument that the first religion in history was monotheism.

Now we know that from scripture, but there's a case to be made from history as well. And it's countering the view, the evolutionary view of religion that people started to think of spooks and spirits in various places.

And then over time, it became more and more sophisticated and you go from polytheism or animism to monotheism. And I argue against that. There's no good evidence for that. Wynne Cordewin's book was very helpful.

In the Beginning God, he's revived this original monotheism argument really well. And then I've got a chapter called The Argument from Beauty, where I argue that there is such a thing as objective beauty in the world in nature and also some objects and events that human beings create.

And the best example or the best explanation for these examples of beauty is there is a divine artist that you can't explain. The beauties in outer space or even remarkably colored fish and birds and things like that by just reducing it all to time, space, chance, plus nothing.

This is a better explanation for that. Sure. Then I guess the last two or however many left here, the chapter called Doubt, Skepticism and the Hiddenness of God. So how do we deal with the claim first that there's great evidence for Christianity?

Everybody should believe, but so many people are unbelievers. It's called the Hiddenness of God problem. So I tackle that. And then I have a chapter on, it's called Lament as Christian Apologetics. So this is like the flip side of the problem of evil.

How can we believe in a God who's all good and all powerful when there's so much evil? Well, we try to deal with that. I've got a long chapter on that, but I flip it around and say, Christianity actually gives us the best resources for suffering well.

And it really centers on Christ that he suffered for us. And in his suffering, we find redemption. And in his suffering, we find a model for how to suffer. And we find someone who understands our suffering better than anyone else.

So as Christians suffer well in faith, turning to God, even in their lament and in their pain, that is evidence that God is with us in our suffering. And that's something I've written about quite a bit before also.

The Argument from Beauty and Objective Aesthetic Value

So you, would you say that the additions.

To your book, it's a couple of hundred pages more than? About 100 extra pages. Okay. Wow. Okay. Very good. Now I'm, I'm interested in, in the section on, of beauty because there's not a lot of, at least on the popular level.

I mean, when you, when you take a look at popular level apologetics works, you have the arguments for the existence of God, the historicity of Jesus, the evidence for the resurrection. I like when books cover, you kind of arguments that aren't really explored.

They kind of give you new and creative avenues to kind of discuss with, with unbelievers. I, I work at a Christian private school and I am a senior advisor. I'm an advisor for a senior thesis and a student is writing a paper on, the issue of beauty and whether it's innate, is the knowledge of beauty innate.

So this idea of beauty is very fascinating. Do you think you could lay down and kind of a thumbnail sketch, what an argument for beauty might look like as you presented in your book and kind of just a thumbnail sketch?

Right. Well, it is.

An argument that's been used in apologetics. I don't find a lot of evangelicals using it as much, but it's a two-stage argument and it's structurally similar to the argument for God from morality. So in that argument, you have to argue against moral relativism for some kind of objective moral truths, objective moral reality.

And then you say the best explanation for that objective moral reality is God. Well, in the beauty argument, it's actually like an argument from design. And you say, first of all, there is such a thing as objective beauty.

It's not all in the eye of the beholder. And if you're talking about elements of beauty, for example, that humans had nothing to do with like sunsets and star clusters and unbelievably beautiful fish coloring and bird coloring and so on, and the beauty and majesty of an eagle and so on, then the naturalist, the atheist has to say, all of that has no aesthetic intention whatsoever.

It's just there. And we happen to enjoy it. You know, that's it. And I think that's a very impoverished, inadequate understanding of beauty. So the first is an argument for objective beauty. Okay. And secondly, that objective beauty is better explained by theism and Christian theism than any other worldview.

Also, I think the Christian worldview itself is very beautiful because the parts fit together so well. Francis Schaeffer mentioned that. And then also the doctrine of the atonement is very beautiful. And Noah Derrickson explains the different aspects of the atonement theory.

And I agree with him. And he says the theory, I mean, the reality, I mean, of the atonement, when you look at it conceptually, or you might say theoretically, is majestic. It's beautiful. Christ is our representative.

He's our substitute. He defeated the powers of evil. He provides union with him through his atonement. All these elements fit together perfectly. And then the whole Christian worldview, creation, fall, redemption, consummation, fits wonderfully together.

So you've got beauty from nature, the beauty from Scripture, the beauty of Christ, all those things indicate the reality of a divine artist.

Defining Beauty, Subjective Taste, and the Apologetic Use of Nature

Now, when we are arguing for objectivity of beauty, and God being kind of the best explanation for that, it's important that we also define our terms. Isn't the definition of beauty something that is under dispute as well?

How would you define beauty? So if you make an argument for God based on beauty, don't you need a definition that the unbeliever would agree on, and then show that God is the best explanation for it? How would you define beauty?

Yeah, I don't think defining beauty is as simple or straightforward as defining other things. Okay. Defining the triangle, pretty easy. But with beauty, I think it's more a matter of being impressed by something, that it's praiseworthy, it's wonderful, it attracts our attention.

And then there are elements of beauty such as harmony and symmetry, fittingness, and things like that. But I think one really good way to show that there is such a thing as beauty is to simply point. It's called ostensive definition.

So you look at some animals or some aspects of outer space, you say, look at how majestic, how remarkable, how awe-inspiring that is, you feel kind of a sense of humility before it. And you may not be able to state it very technically, but you are able to point to it and speak of some qualities that it has.

Now, one of the issues here in our culture is that a lot of people don't believe there is objective beauty. They believe only beauty in the eye of the beholder. In fact, I gave a talk on the objectivity of beauty just a few days ago, about a week ago, and someone just didn't get my first point at all.

And she said, well, wait a minute, people like all kinds of different things. One person will like this type of art, another person will like another type of art. And I said, well, that's irrelevant to what I'm saying, because I'm not talking about what people tend to like.

I'm talking about the objective qualities that something has. And often you have to learn how to appreciate the goodness of something. You don't immediately gravitate towards it. This is true with food and drink.

It's true of appreciating elements of sports. Somebody just watching a game may not be able to tell who the superlative athletes are. They might miss the nuances. I was watching a soccer game with some friends of mine, and I know very little about soccer.

And they're telling you, look at this, look at that. You see how good this player is. And I may not have even noticed it had they not pointed it out.

Beauty, Music, and the Limits of Subjective Taste

Right. Now, okay, so suppose I listen to kind of like a Beethoven symphony, right? And then someone shows me like, hey, man, you got to check out this song. And it's like an 80s rock song. I like the 80s, the overexertion of the snare.

It's very inspirational, you know, put the rocky soundtrack on or something like that. You have people who listen to classical music, which many would say is beautiful. And then other people listen to it and be like, well, that's not beautiful.

I don't like that type of music. How do you differentiate then? If beauty is so difficult to define, you spoke about symmetry, you almost speak about like an order and harmony. What happens when someone disagrees?

How do you differentiate a beautiful song from a not beautiful song? It seems very subjective. And the reason why I'm asking this question is because if we're going to make an argument for God based upon beauty, that's a really contentious, you know, statement that beauty is this and therefore God's the best explanation of it for these reasons.

If you can't agree on a definition or, you know, whether one can differentiate what is beautiful rather than what is ugly, it seems like the argument wouldn't.

Have as much force, if that makes sense. Well, that's true. And there are several things in response to that. First of all, this argument is not necessary for a full-fledged apologetic. Sure. I didn't use it in my first edition, and I think I gave a pretty comprehensive apologetic.

It will appeal to some people a lot more than others. Okay. So just let me follow up on that.

Sure. We have dealing with the problem of disagreement about art, like painting and music and sculpture. You say, okay, let's just forget about that. Let's just be concerned with nature. Let's look at animals and stars and trees and flowers.

Just leave humans out of it. We could say for the sake of argument that, yeah, what people like in culture varies a lot. And it's hard to know what's objectively beautiful and what isn't. But let's look at a field of fireweed in Alaska in early August.

Let's look at the Milky Way. Let's take a look at an eagle descending to the ground. There's something I think many people would say is remarkable. So I give an example in the book. I was a graduate student at early 1990s, University of Oregon, and I was talking to another grad student.

And I believe it was a really beautiful sunset. And he said to me, when I see things like this, I feel very grateful. And I said, who are you grateful to? And it stopped him. I mean, literally, he didn't say anything for a while.

Sure. And that led to some very good conversations about the Lord. And I found out that he had not been really following God or pursuing God, but he had had a spiritual experience as a younger man that helped get him off of drugs.

He was addicted, I think, to cocaine or something. And so that discussion of the beauty of something out there in the natural world that no human being created got him to think about his place in the world.

I feel grateful. You can't feel grateful to a rock. You can't feel grateful to a cloud or to the sun. You have to feel grateful to a person. So it led to some pretty good apologetic interactions with it.

So for the sake of argument, don't worry about cultural beauty. Let's just go.

To nature. Sure, sure. So you would say perhaps maybe an argument from beauty is not attempting to be like a knockdown argument, but it is something to have in your tool belt that might resonate with someone and that it'd be useful to bring it up.

Exactly. Okay. I see what you mean. All right. Interesting. I think that's fascinating. I wanted to kind of pick that apart because I think that that's interesting. So folks who are interested in that type of conversation, you might know someone who might resonate with that.

Definitely an interesting.

Thing to read up on. I'll point about that. Yeah, sure, sure. The tradition that I broadly represent in philosophy is called analytic philosophy. Sure. Although I'm not as fine-tuned and fine-grained as Keith Yandel or Alvin Planting or anybody like that, but typically analytic philosophers don't deal with this kind of thing because it's a little harder to pin down.

Right. However, I do give premise-conclusion format in my chapter about how the argument works.

Okay. And so you don't have to unpack that. If folks want to know what that looks like, they can get the book, but that's excellent. It definitely is an angle that a lot of people don't think about. Okay.

So when I take a look at, say, a really good book, a really good apologetics book that I've enjoyed over the years is J .P. Moreland's Scaling the Secular City. Okay. Now your book is not exactly like his book.

All right. His book, the chapters in that book are isolated and can be read just independently. What is the structure of your book? How did you lay it out? Is there a logical order to what you're trying to do?

Is it the sort of book that someone has to kind of read in couplets, like this chapter is connected to that chapter, or did you follow the similar lines like Dr. Moreland, where the chapters are isolated, people can just approach the book depending on the topic that kind of serves their purpose?

Well, the book is one long argument,.

So the best way to read it is start at the beginning and read it all the way through. In fact, Charles Darwin said that origin of species was one long argument, and my book is one long argument. However, you could just read the chapter on the argument from beauty or the chapter on the resurrection of Jesus and some helpful arguments there, but they fit together.

So I start with the need to find meaning and truth in life, and then I go on to a biblical apologetic for apologetics because their people think apologetics is against faith. You know, there are no good arguments for faith.

We just have to experience God, and then I deal with the category of concept of truth. What is truth? Because we need the objectivity of truth to give arguments for anything. So Christianity is merely private and subjective.

There's really no apologetic for it. So it all is laid out in terms of preliminaries, why we need a worldview that makes sense of the world and gives meaning, the biblical basis for apologetics, the biblical worldview, defending objective truth, the importance of truth, and then I get into natural theology, into arguments from design, cosmological arguments, moral arguments, the ontological arguments, the beauty argument, and then we get into specifics of Christianity.

The biblical account of human nature makes more sense than other worldviews. I trade heavily there in Blaise Pascal, and then we look at the reliability of the New Testament. Dr. Blomberg wrote that, the claims and credentials of Jesus, his deity, his atonement, his resurrection, and then I look at some objections to Christianity, particularly, how can Christianity say it's the one true religion when there are so many other religions that are believed by millions of people?

It's called the religious diversity question. Then I deal specifically with Islam, which claims to be the abrogation of Christianity. It has replaced Christianity, so I deal with that, and then I deal with the problem of evil, which I mentioned earlier, and I have an appendix where I look at the issue of hell, how can we go to the doctrine of hell?

So it proceeds very methodically and very carefully, but it's not a dictionary. I mean, I have somebody, sometimes people say it's so big, it must be like an encyclopedia or a dictionary. It isn't. There are no, you know.

It's a really enjoyable read. It's not even as a textbook. It's not, you don't write in a very dry manner. I mean, you're not trying to do what C .S. Lewis is doing, but it's definitely, I'm tracking with you when I'm reading.

I'm interested. So it's not, it doesn't read like kind of an informational textbook. I think you do a good job in putting it in that mid shelf for the average person to kind of dive deep into this and get enough that's going to be really useful to them.

Good. Yeah. Did you want to follow up on that?

That was the goal of the book. And I don't assume, you know, anything about apologetics when you start reading the book. Sure. So I try to initiate people into it through the quest for meaning. And then we get into everything else we need to address, such as biblical basis for apologetics, the meaning of truth and so on.

And I like to quote authors, I think that say things extremely well. So you find a lot of quotes from C .S. Lewis and Blaise Pascal, a number of other people. Sure. See, I've taught this subject now for almost 30 years.

So actually, after I taught it for 10 years, one of my colleagues said, after you teach a subject for 10 years, you should be able to write a textbook on it. Okay. And I spent another eight years writing.

So I've tested these arguments and ways of presenting them in the classroom for decades, which I think helps my writing and my overall structure of presentation.

Debates, Lectures, and Public Apologetics

Have you ever participated in any public debates? Some. Yeah, not a lot.

There are some debates online that people could look at. I did a debate, it was a panel discussion debate on intelligent design. It's called, I think it's called Battle of the World Views or War of the World Views.

Came out, I think, 2014. And Michael Tooley, who's an atheist philosopher, was on the anti-intelligent design side, along with another gentleman whose name I forgot. And then I was paired with a high school science teacher.

But most of the action was between Tooley and myself, because we were the two academic professors. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, that's out there. And I also did a debate. I think it might have been 2014 also with the president of the Boulder Atheist Group.

Okay. And that's online. So people could see that if they're interested. But I don't do a lot of debates. You know, like William Lane Craig would do or some other folks, partially because I have a full time teaching gig.

And well, yes, it takes, I'm not saying Bill Craig is a slacker by no means, but the way he has structured his life, he definitely dedicates a lot of time to the debates. And he doesn't teach three or four.

Classes every semester. Right, right. I lost track. I just had Dr. James White on my show the last time. And he, I think he's at 170 something moderated debates. And I don't know, I lost count how many Dr. Craig has.

I mean, the amount of work that goes into preparing it, preparing for a debate. And I mean, both of them are really good debaters in their own right. I know they deal with different topics, but it is, it is fun to watch.

And I've had a couple of debates myself. They're, they're great. But it takes a lot of time, especially when you're trying to balance like everyday life. So I'm glad that God has given us people who are doing it more often.

But, you know, I really would like to take, I've never, I didn't know you had had debates out there. I'd really would enjoy watching those. So thank you for giving me a heads up there.

Yeah. And I've done, I've done a few others over the years that have not been recorded. My favorite kind of gig, really, I'm very open to doing more debates if I have the time. And sure. So I, part of the issue with me is for many years, I had to take care of my first wife, Becky, who was very ill.

So that limited some of the work that I could do. I wrote a lot during that time, but if you want to do a debate well, you have to thoroughly research what the other person's position is. You also have to be mentally and spiritually up for it because they are,.

They're pretty intense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, if you're in the future, in the future, if you're interested, I'd love to moderate a debate on my channel. I do that sometimes on this channel. So if you're interested in the future, I can find someone and run them by you.

And if you're interested, we can do it. I, my favorite thing to do is to do lectures in a secular setting. Okay. Or a setting that's both Christian and non-Christian. So a couple of weeks ago, I spoke for ratio Christie group, both in Colorado at school of minds.

And it was just a completely open-ended question answer time. And they had about 30 people there and a number of non-Christians. So we had questions about religion and science about one question was very general.

How can you know whether or not something's true? So it had to do with truth, you know, epistemology. And I don't remember the other questions, but that I really enjoy that is a number of settings where you just say, I'm a Christian.

Here's some reasons why not much, maybe five, 10 minutes. And then what are the questions you have about God, Christianity, spirituality, and I'll do the.

Best I can to answer. Sure. Really enjoy doing that. Excellent. That's awesome. So now getting back to your book, you have a whole host of arguments and evidences for the Christian faith in your, in your opinion, I'm a presuppositionalist.

I love the transcendental argument, but what's your favorite argument that you include in this book and you think has worked well for you? And, and you know, you've heard of other people using those specific arguments and having great success in conversation.

What, what's your opinion on, on, on what you think is the most powerful, most persuasive argument that you have there in your book? Well, I'm, I'm not sure.

Really. I think all the arguments that I give are pretty strong. Okay. The hardest one to understand is the ontological argument. Okay. I think once you understand that it's profound, I think it works.

Now, an argument that I've developed over the years, I think more than other folks is what I call the anthropological argument, which I get from Blaise Pascal. And the argument is that the greatness and wretchedness of humanity is best explained by the Christian worldview, that we are great by virtue of being made in God's image, but we are wretched because of the fall.

So you see this Latin phrase, it's called corruptio optima pessima. There's nothing worse than the corruption of the best. So human beings can do remarkable things in medicine, in heroism, intellectually, and people can use those same gifts to create torture chambers and nerve gas.

And they can use their intelligence to bless people. Let's say as a counselor, they can use their intelligence to curse people, ridicule people. So I think that's a powerful argument because it actually argues to Christianity in one step.

It says, here's the human condition. Here's elements of greatness, elements of wretchedness or misery. And other worldviews really can't explain the greatness in relation to the fallenness the way Christianity can.

Christianity is the best account of that. And also it has the only real solution to that, which is the work of Christ on our behalf. So that's an argument that I've given and defined, redefined over the years, refined, I should say.