The Presuppositions of History w/ Eli Ayala & the “Other Paul” #presup #apologetics #otherpaul

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today

I have a two or three time returning guest. I forgot how many times you've been on the show, man.

Do you remember how many times you've been? I think it's like three times now. This is the third time? I think so. I had you on when we had that epic

Protestant live stream. Mm, no, I think I'll make it the fourth time, actually.

I think - Okay, where I made your dreams come true. I remember you said what would be epic is if we had a live stream with, and you named everyone, and I was like,

Lord, let's do it. Come on, open up those doors, and it worked. That was the

Pentecostal. I was praying as a Reformed Baptist myself. I was praying like a Pentecostal, hoping that God would respond, and it worked out okay.

So I'm glad we were able to make that happen. But today, I am happy to have

Paul. I've been following his stuff for a while now, and so as I said before last time I had him on, I highly recommend you go check out his

YouTube channel called The Other Paul, and subscribe. And I am hoping that folks subscribe to my

YouTube channel if you haven't already, because we are right now, as we speak,

I'm at 6 ,992 YouTube subscribers, and that would be a bummer if I finish this live stream and we're not at 7 ,000.

Come on, I just need a couple more. So I greatly appreciate it. Create a fake account and then just subscribe, and you don't ever have to use it again.

Maybe you have a kid who has a YouTube account that he doesn't use anymore. You could hop on his account and subscribe.

It would definitely be super helpful. So yeah, so there we go. All right, well, we're gonna be talking about an interesting topic.

We're gonna be addressing the presuppositions of history. So folks who typically follow my channel, you guys know that I place a great emphasis on presuppositional apologetics and the theology and philosophy of Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bonson.

The Other Paul has read a little bit of Van Til and read a little Bonson, correct?

Yes, I have. Well, not Bonson, I've read, I've been reading more and more of Van Til who

I actually have right here. So I've been reading a bit of that right now, including in prep for this.

I wanted to say specifically what he says about like history. So maybe I can reference that once or twice here.

But yeah, otherwise not a huge amount, but enough where I'm like, hmm, this is interesting.

And other bits where I'm like, not sure about that, but it's interesting nonetheless. Hey, this is important to know for folks who really love

Van Til, hey, Van Til isn't Jesus and Van Til isn't the word of God. We always want to test even

Van Til, right? And so not everyone's gonna agree with everything that comes out of his mouth, but at least from my perspective, and I'm sure from what

Paul has read, there are some interesting insights there that I think are very useful for people. And so we can call

Paul a dabbler in the Van Tilian arts. That sounds - Sure, sure, why not?

A professional dabbler. I dabble in the Van Tilian arts, you know? Yes, I do dabble in the pre -propositional novels every now and then.

We can call him a dabbler. I chew on the meat and spit out the bones, so to speak. That's right. Hey, look at this one.

Toto Bermundo says, I'll take my wife's phone and subscribe her YouTube account. Nice! Impressive, impressive.

I actually just said to, I actually just told my Discord server to subscribe to you, so I reckon you'll hit seven million next time.

I appreciate it, appreciate it. So I wanna kind of share the screen here. I wanna open up with some

Van Tilian and Bonsonian nuggets before we get into the issue of history here, okay?

Every discipline that we can study, whether it's philosophy, science, mathematics, whatever, all of these disciplines are paradigm dependent, right?

They are dependent upon a worldview context. When I teach my students about worldviews and how they relate to how we understand individual facts of our experience,

I always liken it to like a word in a sentence, like the dog chases the ball. What is a dog?

What is a ball? The meaning of the individual words will be provided by either the context of the words around it or the intellectual context of human language, but there is a context that gives meaning to the individual words and how they relate to the other words so as to form meaningful sentences and things like that.

So presuppositions are super important as they are a foundation of our worldview, our paradigm system.

So I'm gonna start by kind of opening up with some quotes here and kind of discussing them a little bit, and then

I'm gonna jump into, or shift rather into asking brother Paul here about his take on the role of presuppositions within the context of history.

So let's begin here. So I have a quote here by Cornelius Van Til from his introduction to systematic theology, page 242.

He says, quote, and I love quoting this because a lot of people, when I quote this, they don't know it's

Van Til unless you tell them because it doesn't sound very Van Tilian. But here we go.

Van Til says, historical apologetics is absolutely necessary and indispensable to point out that Christ arose from the grave.

But as long as historical apologetics works on a supposedly neutral basis, it defeats its own purpose.

For in that case, it virtually grants the validity of the metaphysical assumptions of the unbeliever.

Okay, so there's a lot to unpack there, but I think the point here is that as presuppositionalists, we are not allergic to historical analysis, historical data and evidence, as long as we understand that the specific things with which we are speaking about are not to be understood detached from broader worldview commitments in general.

And it's detached from our broader worldview commitments to Christ, right? They are connected. If we speak of history in a way that grants the unbelievers outlook on the world and interpretation of history, then of course we, in essence,

Van Til says, we're granting him his metaphysical assumption. So we wanna acknowledge those assumptions. We wanna acknowledge our own assumptions and we wanna be what

Van Til often said, we wanna be epistemologically self -conscious. We wanna be aware of those undergirding worldview commitments when we're doing history and the like.

He goes on to say in introduction to systematic theology, page 16, indirectly, even science and philosophy should be theological.

And so I added here, this is not what Van Til says, but I would imagine he would 100 % agree. I put there and history.

So we can, in essence, put words in Van Til's mouth and say indirectly, even science, philosophy and history should be theological.

And that's to say that our understanding of science, philosophy, history, mathematics flow from our theological commitments to God as he has revealed himself in his word.

And that revelation includes the nature of the world and how we are to understand it.

So in essence, history, this is the topic we're talking about today, is not detached from our theological commitments.

To detach them is to think, as Van Til would say, in block house fashion. We separate individual disciplines and fields of study from our broader worldview commitments.

And that from a presuppositional perspective, at least is a no -no. And from a point of view of reality is impossible.

You can't actually meaningfully detach these things from our broader worldview commitments.

And here, Greg Monson says in Van Til's apologetic, page 38, facts and interpretation of facts cannot be separated.

Facts and interpretation of facts cannot be separated. A fact separated from the interpretation of the facts, you get a brute fact.

It's just a self -explanatory fact. It's just, that's it. But of course, if you're familiar with Van Til, Van Til famously said, brute facts are mute facts.

Facts don't speak, they have to be interpreted. So facts in themselves can't settle anything because they need a worldview to provide their interpretation, right?

We need paradigms to give meaning to the specific things that we are discussing. Now, the study of history itself is paradigm dependent and Paul's gonna kind of unpack that for us.

And I have a bunch of questions to ask him here after I kind of go over my introductory spiel here. But to show history is to be understood within a context.

I kind of just gave these kind of quick little examples here when we speak of time, different conceptions of time,

I just picked randomly here. So we have an Eastern view of time that's expressed more specifically in say like Buddhism and Hinduism.

They tend to think of time in terms of cycles, you know, reincarnation.

So there's a cyclical views of time and there is what I would call the biblical view of time, which is a linear view of time.

There is an absolute point of creation, God creates and time moves towards a destination, a fulfillment and unfolding of God's plans and purposes, such that in a linear view of time, events within history have objective meaning, purpose and direction as they are being moved along by a personal

God who has created the world in such a way that all things accomplish what he has intended from the very beginning.

So this just shows that even the idea of time itself is worldview dependent.

All disciplines of study are worldview dependent and such. We cannot detach these from our worldview commitment.

So that's my brief little introduction to give some context here. Is there anything you'd like to add to that, share to that, an observation, something to, you know, an insight, and then

I'll kind of jump into some of the specific questions I wanna ask you today, Paul. Sure, yeah, I'd say this does well encapsulate the necessary, the unavoidable nature of historical study.

Whatever presuppositions you end up landing on, you simply cannot avoid, as was just shown, you cannot avoid the simple fact that you, history is not done in a vacuum, it's not a neutral exercise, there's no list of historical methods and criterion written into the molecules of the universe that we can observe and follow, regardless of what we think or do or say.

It is most certainly worldview dependent, even to such basic levels that even most people wouldn't even realize that there are such, even many people who are aware of the issue of presuppositions, there are some such deep presuppositions or layers of presuppositions that even they may not be aware of.

And so it does, that is fundamentally how we function. Our views don't come out of a neutral vacuum, our methods don't come out of a neutral vacuum, it is, as all those quotes said, it is paradigm and worldview dependent, and then those must branch off into any number of specific criteria and methods and so on and so forth.

So yeah, total agreement with what was said there. Right. Facts speak for themselves.

You can speak of that in like a very generic sense. Yes. When you assume, when you're assuming a common worldview, like I think you can speak meaningfully of such a thing in many context of like common sense, you know?

Right. Even across cultures. And so in that sense, you can say facts speak for themselves.

But when you actually wanna get into the serious discipline itself, as you just read, it's not that simple.

I remember when William Lane Craig debated Christopher Hitchens, and I'm a presuppositionalist, but man,

I enjoyed that debate. I was like, if he's using classical apologetics, he's still spanking him really bad.

Right. There was something that Dr. Craig said at the beginning that didn't sit well with me because of my sensitivity to presuppositions.

And again, I love Dr. Craig. I think he does excellent job in his debates, and I've learned so much from him. But he says, if I know

Biola students, I know that they've left their bias outside the door, and they're willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Now, there's some truth to that, but in reality, it is not possible, I think, to leave your bias outside.

And we are bringing our bias, right? And there's nothing wrong with acknowledging our bias.

We can say, hey, I have bias, you have bias. Let's move on from there. Let's be honest that we are coming to this question at least in that context, the existence of God, with some presuppositions that are gonna really impact how we hear the debaters and these sorts of discussions.

So we just wanna be sensitive to that and be realistic that no one is objective in that perfect sense.

But that doesn't mean we can't talk about these issues and come to conclusions. So that said, let me ask kind of a basic question here.

What is history? We're talking about presuppositions of history. What is history itself in your understanding?

Sure, you can define it a number of ways, but one such way

I have in this beautiful book on historical method that I have right here. It's an older one and it's a very nice volume.

And it actually gives three distinct definitions of history.

And I didn't have that opened right now, but I believe it should be right here, three times it.

Okay, I'm gonna have to wing it. But basically you can speak of history as the sum of past events.

You can speak of history as a method, as a discipline. And you can speak of history as like a literal piece of history, like a record.

Cause classically historical writing was called a history. So that's why you'd have Eusebius's ecclesiastical history or you'd have

Herodotus's histories. Like countless ancient authors, even though we give more elaborate titles in modern translations.

They actually, a lot of them just called their historical works histories or histories of this, history of that.

So there's three different ways you can think of that. But I think with this thing, we can consider the most relevant ones would be the second and first definition, especially the one with history as a method.

That's the most relevant one. So we can consider a historical method as those sums of, as the sum of criteria, paradigms, tools, what have you, that allow us to reconstruct past events accurately today.

A very crude, very basic definition. But that's - Yeah, no, that's helpful. The summation of past events.

And then of course - Yeah, well, that's the first definition. Like as in the objective sense, the summation of past events with respect to time.

But then the more relevant one for here would be history as a discipline. So that's what

I think - Well, you said discipline now, but you originally said method. What do you mean by a historical method?

I use that interchangeably. Okay. So history as a discipline in the same sense that like natural sciences or certain kinds of philosophy and what have you.

It's a discipline slash method. Although I guess discipline is probably better because it's more broad for discerning past events and reconstructing them.

Okay. Now, when we talk about the discipline of history, of course, there are many subdivisions within that, right?

You can talk about medieval history. You can talk about philosophical history. You can talk about the philosophy of history.

That's right, yeah. What are the different disciplines within historical study and analysis that would be important for people to know in terms of just more specifics?

Oh man, there's a lot. So just having a, I didn't prepare a list, but just going off the top of my head, you're gonna have to do,

I don't know if it's a specific discipline, but you can think of the term heuristics, which has to do with the finding of historical sources.

But then more properly, you'll have the broad field of criticism, which has to do with the analysis of sources.

And with that, you can have various kinds of higher and lower criticism, which are varying qualities of good and less reliable methods, if you will, especially in the modern era.

You can have textual criticism. You can have narrative criticism, all sorts of tons of methods.

You mentioned certain subdivisions of history, like medieval history and all that, which would be more with respect to like certain time periods.

But then with the discipline itself, as I mentioned, various kinds of criticism, form criticism, source criticism, textual criticism

I mentioned, which has to do with the ascertaining of manuscript data for a specific source and being able to ideally reconstruct its original autograph, or even in certain more niche cases, just trying to say like a specific tradition and see how that's gone by.

Lots and lots and lots of presuppositions involved in that single subfield alone. And you can even get into very, very particular, very fine grained fields, such as something called numismatics, which has to do with the study of coins.

So there's tons and tons of fields across different areas for history, and it's almost inexhaustible.

That's interesting. So the way we do history now, I would imagine is not exactly the way history has been done in the past.

Can you make a differentiation for us between how history has been traditionally done in say the ancient world and how it's changed within our modern context?

And I suppose, is the modern way we do history better?

Is it superior to how history was done, say in the ancient times or the medieval times or the

Renaissance period? Yeah, that's actually a really good topic. It's the one I've looked a little bit into myself.

With modern days of history, with exceptions, but it's generally with like proper academic coin history, it tends to be very cold and just to the facts, to the data, all the footnotes and all that stuff, but otherwise a very bland read.

You can find decently written histories, but they tend to be quite a popular level and sometimes not as great.

Whereas in the ancient world, the greater emphasis of doing history was not, broadly speaking, was not for doing history for history's sake.

Very often it was actually done for things like moral instruction, for example. So someone would make a history of a certain character, like Alexander the

Great, or of a certain war, like Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars. And they would do so not simply for the sake of, oh, look, here's some history that's kind of cool or cool reading.

It's for the sake of moral instruction, whether it's personal or like what things to emulate in past people, what things to avoid, things for wisdom, basically.

So that was actually a large emphasis of ancient history. And interestingly enough, there was actually quite an emphasis on good, a large emphasis, actually, in professional history on good rhetoric and good writing.

So the kinds of stuff in modern academia and how they do history, how it's like, obviously you have to write clearly, but there doesn't really have to be any style or whatever to it.

That would be criticized. That would be criticized quite a bit in the ancient world. Although, of course, there was also criticism in the ancient world of people who focused too much on style and not enough on substance.

So there has been a change. And to answer that bit on whether it's been for the better or not, in some sense, some changes have been for the better, though not necessarily because we've just come up with new methods, whatever.

Like there were historians in ancient times that were doing proper historical and critical work when interacting with sources.

One thing that probably has improved, I guess, is how like we have in modern history, modern historical writing, we have a great emphasis on like very carefully citing everything, which

I like. I'm very much a fan of that. Whereas ancient historians, even the best of ancient historians, there wasn't really a big deal with precisely noting every one of your sources.

Often they would, but not always. Whereas most of the real advantages for modern, for our history today is not so much in that area of method.

That's probably like the main difference for me, I guess, but has come with, in our modern time, with our greater technology, we have a much wider access to sources than any ancient historian could dream of.

And so that's more of a circumstantial thing than a methodological thing. But one thing that's definitely changed for the worse is how they're, in academic history, the emphasis on like appealing and good writing is just out the window.

Good writing in the sense of writing today. Okay. Good writing in the sense of writing clearly and precisely and all that, that's obviously held up.

That's like basic research method 101 if you go to university. But otherwise in terms of writing something that's genuinely good, like appealing and captivating writing, that's kind of just, they don't really care about that.

Would you say then that within the classical era, like in the ancient world, there was a greater emphasis placed upon, say like logos, ethos, and pathos and the way that they communicated history among other disciplines in a way that today maybe that's not the case.

That there's so much focus on the logos and perhaps some ethos that there's no pathos.

There's no passion and emotional hook. I'd say so, yeah. No, no, I would agree with that, yeah. Okay. Interesting.

That's fascinating. So we mentioned at the beginning here that history is paradigm dependent.

It's worldview dependent, right? So when I've defined worldview within various contexts on this channel,

I've defined worldviews as a network of presuppositions in terms of which all of reality is interpreted. And that every worldview has at least these three pillars that make them up.

Metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Those are fancy words for people who might not be familiar with them, but they simply ask three basic questions.

Metaphysics asks the question, what is real? What is reality? Epistemology asks the question, how do we know?

What we know? And ethics asks the question, how should we live our lives? Now, when we think of history,

I'm not really concerned so much with the ethics aspect, but how does the discipline of historical studies relate to our metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions?

So could you say that one more time? Yep. How does the discipline of historical studies relate to our metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions?

In every possible way. Where do you even start with that, honestly?

You can even look at ancient historians who will speak of divine intervention.

There were also ancient historians who were critical of actually going that way. But one good example would actually be my boy

Eusebius of Caesarea with his church history. And now he very nonchalantly in his preface and throughout the book speaks of how, he was talking about his historical event and how

God did this. So a very, very key presupposition that he and Christian authors writ large and even certain pagan authors at certain times would have is that they'll see an event and they have this paradigm, this divine paradigm of some kind, whether it's

Christian or what have you, but for our sake, let's say Christian. And they'll say, oh, this interpreting our paradigm, this must be

God doing this for this reason. So he'll point to like, for example, how they won't just point to the destruction of the temple in the second temple in a modern historians, in a cold modern historian sense of like, oh, well, the ancient, the

Judeans were, they were causing a rebel against Rome. And then they were, then the

Romans decided to come and crush them after a revolt and the temple happened to get destroyed by a fire or whatever. Very mechanistic, not really concerned with any greater supernatural thing behind it, because unfortunately even

Christian scholarship has inculcated a methodological naturalism, which we can talk about a bit more as well.

But you read someone like Eusebius and he'll immediately point out how the destruction of the second temple was actually

God's judgment on the, on the Judeans and their rejection of Christ and persecution of the

Christians. And so you have, you have right there a core presupposition in Eusebius' own writing, which fundamentally changes the interpretation of an event, not necessarily like the specific facts of the event, what precisely happened, but its significance, what it actually means in a wider sense.

And so, yeah, go on. No, go ahead. If you, I was gonna interrupt you, I apologize. God, you can finish.

Oh yeah, sure. I was gonna cap it off with like, so in just that one little thing alone, like even just the basic thing of, is there a

God who interacts with the world? That thing can totally change how you, how you view history.

Right, so within our modern context, we tend to have a dry recording of events, whereas in a time where the existence of God bore very strongly upon how we saw history, you had the recording of events and the interpretation of the events.

Whether those interpretations were correct or not, there was a strong feeling of these events that I'm recording mean something and fit within these overarching purposes of God, which is valuable, but can also be dangerous, right?

We, the earthquake happened, oh, that earthquake happened because there were a bunch of gay people living there. That must be

God's judgment, right? Well, you wanna be careful, don't be too hasty.

I mean, okay. Let's be a little careful, because even then our Lord himself says, the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

So there's still that thing to account for. And yet there is nonetheless still a sense of meaning and divine action in certain things.

So normatively, God can allow good and bad things to happen to just answer anyone.

But then at other times, he may particularly allow for a certain dispensation, no dispensationalism, don't confuse me.

He may allow for a certain dispensation of judgment in a particular time for a certain people in order to make a point.

So yeah, it's a big both and thing. It's a difficult thing to discern, but I don't think it's impossible. I myself am more or less deliberately trying to orient myself to that more ancient way of doing history, where I take for granted the reality of divine intention.

And so I actually will, if I write something historically, I'll actually say like, oh, well, this is

God doing this for this reason, for example. Because it's something based in reality.

If that is, if our faith is true, we cannot afford to avoid that at all. And that's just one of a billion areas where metaphysics completely changes our history.

Well, you see this in scripture too. And you see like, for example, I don't know, first and second Samuel and first and second

Kings, you have the history recorded and then you kind of have like the theological commentary on what God's doing.

On the one hand, Saul dies, but then in other passages say the

Lord took his life. You have kind of this dual recording of the same events, but from a human perspective versus a

God's perspective. You see this kind of ooze through the pages of scripture. David gets up in the morning and trains his hands for battle.

That's why he's a great warrior. But in another place in scripture says, the Lord trains my hands for battle.

So you kind of have this. Exactly. Activities happening historically, but there's an acknowledgement that there is this invisible hand moving things along to accomplish his purposes.

So you kind of see that in scripture as well. So I think that's important. Yeah, 100 % true.

And I was slightly vague before with like outlining basic areas of historical discipline.

They can be divvied up in any number of ways, but just to give some basic stuff, like you can think of kind of the basic, one of the basic overarching things would be like source criticism, which

I didn't define that, but that's basically analyzing the various qualities of a source for various purposes.

You can think of things like, who is it authored by? When was it written? Where was it written?

Was it assembled by preexisting sources? What were those sources? How were they done? Is there an original form and subsequent evolution of these sources?

And particularly the latter questions, unfortunately, modern scholars are kind of gone a bit not so crazy with it, especially with respect to like the

Torah, for example. But otherwise these are perfectly valid questions. There's many, many different areas and all of them involve layers upon layers of presuppositions that would put even the most grandiose wedding cake to shame, to speak lightly of it.

Yeah, so yeah, that's basically that. So depending on our metaphysical assumptions, let me turn my mic down a little bit.

Depending upon our metaphysical assumptions, if we presuppose the metaphysical reality of God, not generically, but the

Christian God who reveals, then the metaphysical assumption of a revealing

God is gonna have bearing on our epistemology. So that because we believe metaphysically that there is a

God who reveals, epistemologically we can know that which he reveals and a lot of what he reveals is history, is events in history, right?

So metaphysics and epistemology have direct bearing on how we understand history. Now let's talk more generically,

Paul, about, give me one second, I'm sorry. It's like I'm loud in my own head here.

Let's talk more generically, when we study history, maybe as a professor, as like a researcher, what are some key presuppositions that are brought to the historical enterprise, just generally speaking?

So whether you're a Christian or not, you could ask this to a professor and a professor will, well, here are some presuppositions.

What are some of the general presuppositions that scholars bring to the historical study? Yeah, I'd say one of the massive ones would be methodological naturalism, as I mentioned before, where Christians and non -Christians alike will do it.

And it is knowingly distinguished from naturalism as a worldview, but I do nonetheless think, and maybe you'd agree that it does, unfortunately, somewhat rely on naturalism as a worldview, even if a

Christian or generally supernaturalist scholar wants to say otherwise. And to summarize, methodological naturalism would basically say that history cannot, it's not that history denies the existence of miracle claims or supernatural events, but that history just does not have the tools to do that because history specifically pertains to things that are of natural origin, natural events, so on and so forth.

And so whether they exist, whether miracles can or can't happen, they otherwise, they just can't be assessed by proper historical method.

That's a huge presupposition brought to the table very often. And I think it's more than worthy of challenge. Like you can see this excellent volume

I bought some years ago, for example, Jesus, Skepticism and the Problem of History, tons of different contributors, and even a foreword by N .T.

Wright himself, but basically commenting on the whole issue of Jesus' historiography, the gospels and all that, what are the challenges involved?

And there's even at least one chapter, one chapter done by Michael Acona. He actually does challenge that very common paradigm of methodological naturalism.

And I would too, but yeah, go on. Yeah, so, okay, so this is a big deal. So when someone says, we need to start with methodological naturalism because if you don't, here's a slippery slope argument, right?

Then we can't, we could just insert God everywhere and we can just say God did it and we wouldn't really be able to do history.

Why do you disagree with the assumption or presupposition of metaphysical naturalism?

How would you respond to the metaphysical, I'm sorry, methodological naturalist who says, yeah, we have to, even if God exists, we have to assume he doesn't when we're doing these kind of historical things, these historical, how would you interact with that position?

Yeah, I'd say that, well, a couple of things. So it's not even a metaphysical naturalist.

So it could be a fellow Christian or believe in supernatural. I said metaphysical, I meant to say - Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, so that's right. So that's a good thing we can distinguish. But I'd say that, look, if you are already such a person who grants that the supernatural can, and if you're a

Christian has happened, these are things that have happened in material reality, things that have been observed by people.

And they could tell, especially if you're a Christian, you have to acknowledge that people were able to tell when things were of supernatural origin.

And that as Christians, we were thus able to accept their testimony of such as reliable. So if you're a

Christian, you have to get rid of that completely. But even just outside of Christianity, if you grant any way that the supernatural could be real, even if you're agnostic on the issue, you grant that it could be real, or if you are straight up supernaturalist and that supernatural things can and do happen by the mere fact that they happen in reality and they can be discerned as such, that alone rules out methodological naturalism.

It can make things harder. I can grant that discerning supernatural sources for things can be hard.

Well, it can be difficult to discern whether this miraculous event came from Jesus or Molech or something,

I don't know. But it is a much easier enterprise, relatively speaking, to discern that a supernatural thing occurred, something that goes against normal, tangible, material reality, that there was something above that, something still real.

And so in that very basic sense, still natural because it's part of the world, but beyond material planes.

And so that'd be my issue for methodological naturalism. If you're a supernaturalist, you simply can't hold that. It just doesn't make any sense.

If you wanna say that, well, it's too hard to discern supernatural things, whether something was a supernatural origin or not, well, that's an assertion that should be proven.

So, and it doesn't matter how many examples of alleged supernatural events you can show that nonetheless could be interpreted naturalistically, you'd have to categorically rule them all out.

So there's really actually no grounding for that method, unless you're already a naturalist.

And it would only be incumbent on one person to cite one example of something that has, of a supernatural event that has been verified according to the normal canons of historical method.

That's the key thing, because when you go to the more hardcore of naturalist historians, especially like those inspired by Hume, for example, they will consciously suspend normal canons of historical method when it comes to a supernatural event and basically raise the bar like that.

You'll have David Hume himself, for example, speaking of how no human testimony alone, no raw human testimony is capable of demonstrating a supernatural event unless the falsity of that testimony is more miraculous than the event itself.

At least from the little I've read of him, that's more or less what he says. Very presuppositional and very reliant on his own deductivist worldview.

And the only issue of course is like, look, something of consistency, like where do you actually ground this?

Whether you're a metaphysical naturalist, where do you ground that supernatural events can't be discerned like normal historical events?

If you're willing to accept two or three reliable witnesses who say that they saw a guy do a backflip in the park one day, but you're not willing to accept the exact same witnesses of the exact same or even greater reliability who attest that someone, like,

I don't know, someone levitated in the air. If you're not able to rely on those guys, then where's your consistency?

What's your actual principles here? And then likewise, I'd say the same for the naturalist. Like for the full -on hardcore metaphysical naturalist in their history, they start off with a closed worldview.

And I think that's a massive problem for like Humean type naturalist historical method where they assume that their natural view of the world is all there is.

They actually do not allow human experience beyond their own basically, or beyond their own apprehension of human experience to actually make them consider that there's other things out there.

Which is just simply, I mean, it's definitionally ignorant to do that.

And I try to be consistent with that. I'm not like one of those, because you'll sometimes see skeptic polemicists try to say, oh, you

Christians, you accept the resurrection accounts, but then when someone talks of supernatural miracle in another religion, you deny it.

Some Christian apologists may do that. And that would be inconsistent. That's why I don't do that. I actually do try to apply the same standards.

And so I'll actually see or read accounts and study accounts of supernatural events.

I don't know, like a poltergeist, for example, or some other thing from other religions or cultic stuff, whatever.

And I can totally grant, and I have on multiple occasions, just by regular historical method, not being uncritical, being properly critical, but not to an unreasonable extent, as I would apply those criteria to other events.

And I come out and thinking and saying, wow, okay, there was some spiritual activity in here. And then of course, the deeper presuppositions come in of my

Christian worldview and say, and that was demonic. Yes, I remember someone telling me, well, how do you know

Christianity is true? Because I know someone who witnessed an Imam cast a djinn out of someone.

And I remember asking like, well, how do you know it was a djinn? You just interpreted the experience, right?

Those deeper commitments are gonna come in when we try to make sense out of the specific things that we experienced.

So I think that's super important. I did have a question before I forget. We talked about natural and supernatural.

What do you think about the presupposition that there is a distinction to be made between natural and supernatural?

It's my understanding that in the ancient world, there was no such distinction. It was just, we live in a supernatural world.

It's not that there's one category over here, one category over there. They're so intermingled together that that distinction isn't even assumed in the way that they see the world.

What do you think of that? Yeah, I do actually challenge that a lot myself. I simply just use, for convenience sake, natural versus supernatural, because like everyone gets it.

But yes, otherwise I highly, highly question the distinction at least when it's applied in a very hard sense.

I think it may be valid to think of it in just a very basic kind of distinction. Things that are fundamentally rested in our material world versus things from like a higher plane of reality.

But to speak, I guess to speak or to use that terminology of natural versus supernatural, does kind of imply, even if not deliberately, that things that are supernatural are somehow less natural or like other in a sense that they can be taken, that such events can be taken -

We're told that we're adding things on. Yeah, exactly. As if there's a self -contained natural order and then there's something added to it.

That's a presupposition. That is a massive presupposition and one that is very little defended apart from just, oh,

I can't see God out there. Or some other very like elaborate - I like your impression of unbelievers.

Every time he's about to do an unbeliever because the voice goes down. I always make him sound so much like a

Lebanese wog from my area. Like, oh, bro, I can't see God out there, bro. Where is he? And all that, it's very ungranted.

And yes, they can give out some more like very sophisticated argumentation out there. But from my reading of much of that stuff, it does fundamentally, like the origin of their belief basically does come down to like,

I haven't experienced this stuff myself. Which is why when you do get unbelievers who at some time have like a spiritual experience of some kind, whether it's a

Christian one or not, they suddenly change their tune. Quite, quite hardcore.

I was even, I even watched an interview recently of like a guy who went to, Australian guy went to jail on that.

He was a hardcore like fan of like Dawkins type arguments and like smashing Christians and that. But then at one point he said he had this crazy like experience of what he thought was

God. And he's totally flipped around because of that. And so, yeah, the distinction, supernatural and natural, that is a presupposition and it's one that can be and should be challenged.

We should actually ask why does that distinction, why should we maintain that distinction? That's something you should especially ask of other believers and other supernaturalists more generally.

Because obviously naturalists straight up will say, well, there isn't even a supernatural period. It's all just natural. And those things we call supernatural don't exist.

But it does need to be challenged because if you are a supernaturalist, then by necessity, you actually do believe that the supernatural is actually part of the natural.

It's all intertwined. And yes, as you said, the ancient world, they did not have this hard distinction.

You can find the distinction in a softer sense when you speak of like things on earth and things in heaven, for example.

You can find that in the Bible, you can find that in other authors. They have that distinction, but that's simply in the level of like basically locality, earth versus heaven.

Whereas for us in terminology of natural or supernatural, it tends to be something of like fundamental planes of existence and category, which is erroneous.

Because as you did mention, the ancients, including believing ancients, assume that the two realities are totally intertwined.

Like with the pagans, for example, it was to the point where they are gods for almost every mundane little thing out there.

And they didn't, you didn't even have to be a, there are even people who otherwise non -pious, they didn't care about any special devotion to the gods.

Some of them could even disdain them and yet they still believe they existed. And that they are these beings who can be appeased and you can get rewarded or they can be ticked off and you can get punished from them.

And so it was so ingrained in their ancient worldview. And that's almost kind of one thing. One of those tiny few things that the ancient pagan world has a one up on us is that their supernaturalism was so ingrained that even the non -pious took it for granted.

So that's - That's a great point. I think it's opposite today, right? Isn't it opposite today? Exactly, yeah. Although I think the tides are changing now, better and for worse.

One, for conversion of people to the faith, but also, whereas in like, if you spoke about the early 2000s and 2010s and all that, that was like the age of the

Reddit fedora tipping atheist. But now that, in my opinion, that's changing.

That's changing completely now. Who created God? Knowledge, knowledge is my artillery.

I am quite the opponent. Milady, please love me. Someone, anyone?

Fedora -wearing atheist. When you said that, like a flood of images popped in my head, because I remember when that was the thing.

Like they had, you had the fedora with the anime characters in the back and a large collection of cartoon characters.

Who created God? Where did God come from? Ah, yes, another theist owned.

I'm going to put that on my wall. Another victim. But no, that era is basically gone and dead now.

It's not even dying. I think it's dead now. And you can see with a lot of people, whether they become Christian or some other, like non -Christian, but spiritualist or new agey, or even just indifferent, but they nonetheless grant these things are real.

I think that is changing quite a bit. A lot more people now are granting the reality of a non -corporeal dimension to our natural world.

And so, yeah, I do think, I hope it is, I hope it happens to be totally honest, but I do genuinely think that over time, the kind of atheist polemics, apologetics world will start to die down.

And I think we are seeing that a little bit now. But yeah, yeah, that's my take.

I think the rise of apologetics has helped quite a bit. Oh yeah. It's so funny when people are like, apologetics doesn't work.

I beg to differ. I mean, you have some good apologists, bad apologists, but the conversations are becoming, at least in some quarters, a better quality.

And I think in some areas there's progress, and I think it's moving towards a positive direction in the midst of other negative directions, but these things happen slowly.

All right, so we want to avoid metaphysical, naturalistic assumptions, and methodological naturalistic assumptions when doing history.

Those are presuppositions, and they are quite challengeable. We are to challenge the assumptions that people just take for granted and think are the default, the default position.

Now, I do have a question. I want to shift from kind of the unbeliever, like atheistic, skeptical presuppositions of history, and let's move towards kind of the religious worldview perspectives and the presuppositions they bring to history.

So what are, I know your area, you're really are very, you're very knowledgeable in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy and kind of church history and these sorts of things.

What are the presuppositions of history that Catholics or Eastern Orthodox bring to the table?

Because obviously they're different. They're different than the atheist and the skeptic.

They're more similar to a Protestant, but there's even differences there. So how would we identify and explain and unpack the presuppositions of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy with respect to how they confront the question of history?

Yeah, so with many, in the grand scheme of things, we take a step back in many, many areas with Easterners and Romanists.

We do have plenty of commonalities in the sense of granting the supernatural, the heaven.

Honestly, I want to come up with a term that's alternate to supernatural and natural. So I'm thinking everything's a natural world,

God and material or everything between is all natural, but we can think of what we call supernatural as like the heavenly dimension.

I'm going to call it that, the heavenly dimension to nature. It's all natural. It's all natural. It's like the ultra mundane or something.

There's like a way of saying it. I heard William Lane Craig say it. It was like weird, but it sounded better than. That's sick.

But yeah, we do otherwise grant commonly a heavenly dimension to a heavenly and intelligent dimension to reality wider, including in the specifics of God and coming to man, interacting with man, interacting with history, guiding things, incarnating in man, a lot of those things.

But then of course, once we get into the specific interdenominational dialogue, that's where other more particular and yet still with huge implications, presuppositions, that's where they come out to play.

And so to speak of, and again, if you've seen some of my recent stuff,

I've grown to hate the term Protestant and Protestantism because there is no single tradition called Protestantism.

There's no single church called Protestantism. You don't have a church, bro. You don't have a church, bro. Oh yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Oh, you don't? Where's your church? Where's your church? What Protestant church? You don't have a church.

This is your private interpretation. You're a sectarian, bro. You're a sectarian.

You guys just rely on interpretation. But meanwhile, my private interpretation of history is objective and true.

Anyway, nonetheless, nonetheless. Oh, wait one second. I have to interrupt you.

I have to interrupt you. Braxton Hunter of Trinity Radio. Sorry, I didn't call you back. It's all right, bro.

I'm feeling a little shafted, but it's okay. I'm just kidding. I love you, bro. We'll talk soon,

I'm sure. Trinity Radio. Go ahead, I'm sorry, Paul. We got some interchannel drama happening live, boys and girls.

Interchannel drama. Hey, I'm feeling a little anxious right now, Paul. Right now,

I am at 6 ,997 subscribers. I just need three more subscribers.

Boys, anyone who's subbed to me, sub to the man right now. Get in the chat. We're almost there, come on.

And do it because then he'll owe me a massive favor. That's right, that's right. All right,

I apologize. I interrupted you when you were about to say something cool. Yeah, yeah. So the other presuppositions they'll bring that distinguish them from, and I'm just gonna, because again,

I hate the term Protestant. So I'll just, either I'll think, either I'll use a term like the Reformation traditions, which would be more specific.

That'd be like continental reform, Lutheran and Anglican, evangelicalism, less so. So I'll just think in terms of the foil of Anglicanism, right?

But it's otherwise, in this specific area, there's a lot of commonalities with other denominations.

And so you can more or less hot swap them in. But just to give something more concrete, the distinctions they may have with Anglican views, for example, is a higher view of, much, much higher view of concilial authority.

So in particular with Rome, for example, they'll have the view of the church, functionally speaking, even though officially they may deny it, but functionally it acts like another, it acts like another scripture in a certain way.

Like when a council publishes a certain document, it will functionally be taken the same way as scripture.

Now, granted, metaphysically, they don't believe that, that there is a prior, there is a priorness to scripture, and there is something unique where scripture itself is revelation, whereas conciliar documents and certain papal decrees are not new revelation, but the explication of revelation.

But they have that same kind of divine protection when in the right context, such that they functionally operate the same, in my opinion.

But yeah, nonetheless, much higher view of ecclesial authority, where a council can get together, ecumenical council of the whole church, and that which they decree on faith and morals, that is binding on all the faithful, ipso facto.

Not simply because, as the reformers would say, we agree with the councils, and that they are binding because they comport with what scripture says.

Romanists would agree with that, but they'd add the extra thing, and because ipso facto, these councils having been received are divinely protected by the

Holy Spirit to not preach error. And so there is actually another element inherent to the councils themselves that makes them, that gives them an extra quality of necessity of assent to them.

And how that ends up affecting their history is you'll see in many of their apologetics, where fundamentally

Romanists and Easterners, lesser Romanists, because there's a much larger popularity of like the

Newman type hypothesis of the development of doctrine, and I can get to that later. But otherwise, with more traditionally minded

Romanists, and more today with Easterners, because they tend to categorically reject an idea of doctrinal development as per Newman.

Because of what their councils say, they don't subject their councils, they don't think their councils can be subject to a critique in the same way that a single church father, for example, or some other scholar, or some other local council can be subjected to.

Because of the presupposition that these things are protected by God, these councils do fundamentally shape how they view history.

And so that's why, for example, with Eastern Orthodox apologists, they'll have a much, they have a, in their realm, in their circles, they have a much, much, much stronger game of defending the painting and veneration of icons all the way back to the apostles.

Something that you would think, if you read the regular sources and mainstream scholarship, and people know me,

I'm not like, oh, my scholars say it's true. But if you read all that stuff, you'd think that that's a very hard sell. And having read the stuff,

I do think it's a very hard sell. But nonetheless, because of their presupposition that what their councils say, particularly the

Second Council of Nicaea, which according to the Orthodox, treats it as an apostolic practice.

This is something that fundamentally undergirds their worldview of history. And so they have to interpret history in light of the

Second Council of Nicaea. And so they'll do apologetics in accordance with that. The church has spoken, now we just have to find where history brings it up for us.

And that's why they're very, very, very, what's the term? Like very zealous in defending the apostolic practice of iconagilia.

Whereas Romanist epistemology today is quite a bit more flexible.

You'll have many Romanist apologists and theologians nonchalantly say, yeah, icon veneration, it wasn't always a thing.

Yeah, they didn't even have icons the whole time, but it eventually developed and this is where their presuppositions still kick in because nonetheless they accept the

Second Council of Nicaea as divinely protected. And so they'll say that nonetheless, icon veneration in their interpretation of history was a necessary natural development of proper

Christological teaching, for example. And so the development of icon veneration due to the presupposition that this council was inspired, that this teaching was inspired, well, not inspired, but divinely protected, gotta be careful with the terminology.

Then because of that, they'll then read that, they'll read history with that presupposition and say, okay, this was a necessary and natural development of our

Christological teaching. As the church's Christology became more and more refined properly, icon veneration came out of that necessarily.

And that's why we can say that it is an apostolic and binding belief and practice, even though it did only develop later on.

And so those are some very key presuppositions in Romanist and Eastern history.

Whereas with an Anglican or a Baptist or whoever, anyone from the Reformation traditions and afterwards, whereas our presuppositions would more or less be limited to that which is revealed in Holy Scripture, and otherwise other things can be subject to greater degrees of scrutiny, the

Romanist and Easterner will extend that presuppositional layer of authority to other things such as councils and with Romanist teachings of the

Pope with his extraordinary magisterium. And so those are some very central presupposition, historical presuppositions with Rome in the

East, which in practice, when you actually get into debates with them on historical topic, it almost always ends up devolving down to the issue of authority because, and I know this from experience, you can even get to a point where by seemingly regular common historical method and argumentation, you can decisively demonstrate that a

Romanist teaching on like, I don't know, the papacy or an Eastern teaching of icon veneration being apostolic, that these things are historically refutable, debunked, absolutely destroyed.

But ultimately there's the stop gap of the fact that in the Romanist worldview, technically speaking, even if data seemingly seems to go against the view, there's still the higher authority of what their council or Pope or whatever has decreed.

And that's something that actually really does trump the data, the regular common data, so to speak, as in a greater sense.

The council is the ultimate kind of data, if you will. And thus everything needs to be read through that. That's why you even have

Romanist apologists, very, very well -read guy, Eric Ibarra. He made a big essay response to Dr.

Gavin Altman's big video on the assumption of Mary and how it's historically untenable. And he was straight up with the presuppositional issue where he said that Altman was kind of assuming a skeptical paradigm, which

I don't, I think that was kind of silly, he's not. But either way, he said that in a Roman paradigm, he straight up said, even if there is, even if the first ever documentation of the assumption of Mary came from the 11th century.

So after over a thousand years after the event allegedly happened, even if the first documentation of that event came up a thousand years after the fact, if the church decreed that it happened, then it still must be maintained as truth, like historically true.

And so that, I'm not saying that to say, look how ridiculous that thing, I mean, I would say that that is ridiculous, but I don't say that because, oh, look at me,

I'm more neutral and balanced. I say that because I have different presuppositions. That's right. And my presuppositions,

I believe are more defendable. And on that basis of presuppositions, I say that he's wrong. And so that circles back to everything.

People can't just go out and say, oh, Eric and Bara, what you said there is ridiculous. All this Roman, you guys are ridiculous in how you like twist and contort historical data.

I think they do that. And I think that can be demonstrated, even at points with their own standards of historical methodology, because they will still by and large accept regular methods of history.

But I don't pretend to come from that because I'm somehow like a better, more neutral interlocutor.

So that's how this all interconnects. Everything interconnects to presuppositions. There's no room for hubris in that respect.

Well, Paul, we're at 6 ,900. And 99 subscribers.

Ooh, boy. We're right there, man. I refreshed my page. I refreshed my page.

It says 7 ,000 now. It does it, does it really? It does for me. I'm refreshing. Yeah. Let's go, boys.

Yes, 7 ,000. Oh man, that's so cool. Well, thank you so much.

Whoever did that last second bombardment of subscriptions, I appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Oh, I gotta do it. You know what? My next live stream has to be a celebratory live.

I'm supposed to have Dr. James White back on to talk about Mormonism. Maybe we'll, I'll try to do something special with that one to celebrate 7 ,000.

That's super cool. So, all right. Chill stream with all the boys, open invite. What was that?

Chill stream with all the boys, an open invite. Chill stream with all the boys. Hey, that'd be awesome.

I don't mind doing a chill stream, that'd be dope, man. I wanna do another one where we have like the epic round table discussion on some topic.

I wanted to do one on Islam called epic takedown of Islam and just have, you know, a bunch of guys who are really good in that area.

So, but we'll see. Islam destroyed with interpreted facts and presuppositions. That's right, that's right.

Well, I have a question for you. And I think this is a, not that everything else we've discussed is not practical.

I actually, I've enjoyed all our discussions, Paul. This discussion I think is hugely important because a lot of people don't think about these.

I mean, we could argue about the facts of the resurrection and these sorts of things and people don't ever, or not to say ever, they rarely bring up the issue of like the presuppositions.

We kind of just grant what the other person's saying and try to roll with what they're going with without addressing some of those deeper issues.

So, I think this is such an important topic. So, my next question for you, and then we'll kind of take a few questions from the comments here.

There's just a few, but that's okay. So, okay. Oh, of course,

I just hit 7 ,000. Of course we got the Catholic. He says, he says.

His channel hasn't hit 7 ,000. I think he's saying he's the 7 ,000th sub,

I think. No, that's what I'm saying. So, he comes in, Unashamed Roman is checking in. I'm a hardcore

Protestant presuppositionalist who has a predominantly Protestant audience and it's the

Catholic who gets me to 7 ,000. Let's go. Thank you,

Kyle. I appreciate it. Getting the enemy to do the work for us, that's great. All right, okay. Well, I'll shut up, my man.

All right, so here's my question for you, Paul, okay? How do we address, or how, let me rephrase that.

What kind of questions can we ask a Roman Catholic, an

Eastern Orthodox, or an atheist? What kind of questions can we ask in apologetic encounters to help expose the presuppositions that they have concerning history?

So, suppose we're in a conversation with, you know, informal, not like a formal debate or something like that, but you're informally having a discussion on, let's say the resurrection of Jesus.

What kind of questions, how can we navigate a conversation in such a way so as to expose some of those presuppositions that they have concerning kind of historical investigation and things like that?

Sure. Oh man, you could ask 1 ,000 different questions to 1 ,000 different kinds of them, because even different, speaking in respect specifically to Romanists, they can have varying degrees of different kinds of presuppositions.

One of the really, really key ones may be, for example, the nature of interpreting

Holy Scripture itself. Many will reasonably grant, and there'll be a common ground for us, that Scripture is something that can be appropriately interpreted for what it says, like for what it actually says and means and its significance by the ordinary means of study and interpretation.

And so, with those ones, the kinds of questions you can ask with, well, okay, you believe that Christ and his apostles actually established this specific kind of church authority that's able to, in itself, in a council or through a

Pope, bind the conscience of the faithful. Where do we find that in Scripture? They may raise certain passages to you, and then in that respect, you can go into, basically into the deep dive to demonstrate how, well, no, those passages don't actually say that.

And then you can even extend it, like where in the first or second or third generation of Christians, do they actually even assert this kind of authority?

And you can do more or less the same thing. You can even find events that seem to show the contrary, like the Easter controversy, for example, which, in my opinion, is a very decisive demonstration against the idea of the

Pope having universal, not just like universal authority, unilateral authority in general, but also even on matters of liturgy, which is actually something that's core to the papacy today, because you can see the

Pope now, for example, enforcing global liturgical norms across the Roman Catholic world, and particularly with the

Roman worldwide. And he can do that, and he can enforce those norms and such, but in the

Easter controversy, he was decried for doing that. And a whole section of the church in Asia Minor totally rejected the idea that he could do that.

They were saying, no, we were following the tradition of our fathers and these apostles and all that. We'd rather serve

God, we're gonna serve God rather than men. And that's literally what the Bishop of Ephesus said to Pope Victor.

He quoted Acts 5 .29, we must serve God rather than men, which if you're saying that to, if you're a

Roman Catholic saying that to a Pope, if they had the Inquisition today, you'd be dead, okay?

Simple as that. You're calling him a mere man who isn't the vicar of Christ. So point being, with a

Roman Catholic who grants normative things of interpretation of scripture and history, you can, there's a wide breadth of things you can do, a wide breadth of strategies.

Now, there is a certain section of more presuppositionally oriented Roman Catholics where you're not gonna be able to do this anywhere near as easily.

So I'm thinking of certain Roman apologists and thinkers like Brian Cross, for example, who will, in some, who will argue that for a

Protestant to read Holy Scripture in such a way as to refute the

Roman Catholic paradigm actually begs the question for a Protestant worldview and against the

Roman Catholic worldview, precisely because in the Roman paradigm, scripture can only be authentically interpreted by the church.

Not that, and he's careful to stress it, although in my opinion, like the distinction is like, how do you even make it?

But whatever. In his own words, he doesn't say that scripture is unintelligible, that you can't read it and reliably discern certain things from it.

But when it comes to more particular issues of interpretation and application in that, to do so against the

Roman church, against the magisterium is to actually beg the question. Precisely because in his worldview, only the magisterium has the power to authentically, normatively, authoritatively interpret scripture for its truest sense and significance.

And so with those ones, you're gonna have to do some much more deeper work, much, much more deeper. And one way

I personally like to think of is that, look, you're basically making, we grant scripture as unique, okay?

Scripture is unique in that it is ultimately divinely authored, with human authors, but with an ultimately divine source as well.

We can grant that. However, the issue is these Romanists will nonetheless universally assume that we can reliably interpret pretty much any other text and not just that, but in such a way where we can impose certain expectations of their significance, such as, like, let's say, for example, what would be an example?

Like with church history, for example, he will actually bring up the example where, look, the person studies church history and they find that the

Roman church is the true church and all that jazz, which assumes that a regular people with the normal tools of interpretation can reliably interpret, and not just interpret, because he grants that to a limited extent, but interpret in such a way as to rule out other systems.

So that process necessarily involves, if it's to get to the Roman Catholic worldview, it necessarily involves ruling out the

East, for example, or ruling out the Orientals. And yet one could easily see an

Eastern Orthodox or an Oriental. And in fact, I might even recall one or two times where that happens, where if you were to try and interpret the fathers to critique the

Eastern Orthodox or the Orientals, they could, by the same standards, say, you're begging the question against us, because in our worldview, the fathers are ours and they expose our faith.

So you're actually presupposing against us. And so that gets into a really big problem.

And so it gets really, really, really tricky, but nonetheless, people who would forward this kind of argument where you can't interpret scripture in order to critique us because you're begging the question against us, you can nonetheless say, look, okay, granted, you guys do accept that texts can be normally, and they can be normatively interpreted by normative tools.

And with that, people can make valid decisions of which way to go in any number of issues.

You even grant that this is the case for finding the true church, that people can validly interpret historical texts and evidence in order to judge, if you will, that this church is the true church and not this one.

They have to grant that, because that's exactly what they described. And then I can simply say, well, okay, you grant that, but now here's the problem.

Why does the same thing not apply with holy scripture? If you presuppose that scripture can act that way, well, okay, but I'm simply just gonna say, look, your presupposition is extremely ad hoc, because even in your case, you grant that texts universally, texts can be normatively interpreted in such a way where individuals can validly judge against others.

They presuppose that language is a meaningful and sufficient mechanism to convey truth.

Precisely, precisely. That's right. So they presuppose that with other things, but then

I would say that their system is ad hoc in trying to say that if someone by those same standards finds the same kind of problem against the

Roman or the Eastern church in holy scripture, and then you ought to say, oh, well, you're presupposing against us. I'd simply say, look, the worldview is fundamentally incoherent.

It's you're giving one set of standards for quite literally everything else, and then a totally separate set of standards for this specific thing.

And I'd simply ask them, where do you base this presupposition? Why should I grant it? And ultimately that presupposition being that the magisterium is the sole authentic interpreter of scripture, they'd have to do that on the basis of historical study of many other sources, which actually ends up assuming the validity of critically interacting with sources so as to rule out certain authorities, even if those authorities claim or authoritative interpretive rights over those sources.

And so I know Brian's fear in the comments, that he's kind of losing track. Yeah, I was gonna, let me just kind of catch them up here, and then we'll take some questions here because we're over the hour.

But Brian, we are talking about the presuppositions of history.

When you study history, what must you presuppose? We spoke about at the beginning, the importance of how our worldview informs how we understand everything in general and how we understand history in particular.

And so what Paul was doing for a while now, because we were talking about different subtopics within that broader category, he's sharing with us, what are some of the presuppositions that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox bring to history?

And he's kind of exploring the difficulties and challenges of bringing out those presuppositions, depending on who you're speaking with, you could have a

Roman Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox that is more sensitive to the presuppositional issue. And so that could make exposing those presuppositions and interacting with them a little bit more challenging.

So that's kind of what we were going into and Paul was kind of going into some details there. So if you came in the middle, it can be a little difficult to understand.

And no, you are not rude, I'm a teacher. And so by nature, if someone doesn't understand,

I feel obligated to explain. So it's not a problem at all. I will -

Why are you illegitimately presupposing your concept of rudeness on us? That's right, that's right. All right, well,

Paul, let's kind of grab a couple of questions here and then we'll wrap things up, right? This is - If I may just like,

I'll wrap up what I was saying. Yeah, go for it. I know I've gone on for a while. You can share what you wanted to say. And I can understand if people may need to rewatch that because even

I was interacting with this particular kind of very presupp - Roman Catholic Orthodox argument.

Even I sometimes still need to think about, okay, like the very precise things of what they say. And so sometimes even that can make it a little bit difficult to respond at times.

But hopefully I was clear on that. Ultimately, with those more presuppositionally oriented

Romanists and Easterners who try to say, you can't authentically interpret these sources outside of us.

So that's just begging the question against us. You just simply point out, no, you grant the intelligibility of texts such that they can actually rule out other authorities even if those authorities claim interpretive rights over them.

And so for you to be consistent, if you're gonna be consistent, you have to allow us to actually do the same.

Now, your system could ultimately end up being correct. And by the normal means, we couldn't find a falsification of your church and perhaps even find support for it.

That could happen, but that's gonna have to be how you're gonna support your own system if you accept the normative human ability of interpretation and personal criticism of things.

And so, yeah, that's one way I'd address it. Even then I'm still developing on addressing these particular kinds of arguments, but that's more or less how

I'd go about it. All right, thank you for that. All right, we're just gonna take this one here.

Actually, I gotta wake up super early in the morning. Tomorrow it's late over here. Paul, this has been a lot of fun, man.

I think you're doing an excellent job and I'm gonna go back and listen to this. So I appreciate your comments and your thoughts here, but here's a question.

We'll wrap things up after this one, but Toto Bermundo says, shouldn't all believers presuppose or believers presupp of history, shouldn't all believers presupposition of history be that God, according to his purpose, who works all things after the counsel of his will, declaring the end from the beginning?

So should that biblical truth be the presupposition that we should have when looking at history, that God declares all things from the beginning to the end?

And then he quotes something here, just like in Dr. White's debate with an open theist, he said, it's one thing to know the facts of history, it's another thing to know why they happened because of God's purpose.

Is that a presupposition that we should be bringing to the table when we're doing history? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Open theism is cringe. It's very incontrovertible as those passages and others show that God has decreed the beginning from the end, he knows what's gonna happen.

And it's not even in like a Arminian sense, just a passive foreknowledge of the material accidents of history, things unfolding and God just like tweaking these things here and there or whatever.

No, there's actually a deliberate momentum to all of history, biblically speaking. And so that is a presupposition we should have.

All right, excellent. Well, thank you for that question. And guys, thank you so much for listening in. I hope you guys found this discussion useful.

We started basic and Paul dove right in and it was excellent. So there's so much information for folks to glean from.

So if you enjoyed this conversation, check out the other

Paul's YouTube channel and subscribe, please. I watch his stuff all the time, whether he's talking about a specific topic or he's just chilling out, wearing cool sunglasses and just talking about general things.

I enjoy it. I don't know. It actually makes me, it's entertaining. There we go. There they are.

That's right. I enjoy my 45 minute drive to work. So I get to hear you expound on various things.

I do wanna listen to more of your debates. I haven't listened to the one, there's one that debate you did with a red guy.

He had a red beard. Oh, Jimmy Akin. Yeah, that wasn't my finest hour. It wasn't your finest hour.

Okay, well, did you do bad or did you just not do as good as you thought? Not bad.

I think in summary, I think, look, he's a guy who's been debating longer than I've been alive.

He maintained a rhetorical grip on the debate that unfortunately kept on forcing me on the defensive and I couldn't get to the substantive points that I really wanted to get to.

I had a whole page of notes that, like multiple pages of notes that I didn't end up using because of what he did.

He kept on forcing into this one very silly question. So, yeah. So what, in your opinion, what is your best debate that you've done that if someone's like, man, point me in a direction of a cool debate that you did that you thought you did well and your points came across really clearly?

I think my debate with Craig Trulia on tradition, on like oral tradition.

That was one. I think we did that on the gospel truth, if I'm not mistaken. Okay. So find that one.

That was a genuinely good one. I liked it. I think I did well. But most importantly, I think like, I like to define a good debate in a non -egotistical sense.

Not like, oh, I've destroyed the opponent with facts and logic. They're good in the sense of entertainment, I guess. And like boosting up the confidence.

But a good debate in a genuine sense where people learn from it. That was a genuinely good debate. We both brought our heavy hitting stuff and I think we both did well.

I think I came out on top, honestly. But it wasn't that Craig fell on his face or anything.

No, you did a good job. Excellent. I'll definitely check that out. Well, Paul, thanks again, man. And I definitely will have you back on as often as you're willing to come back on.

James Bain, man. Throw me what you want to talk about and I'll consider it. Absolutely. And I'd like to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart.

7 ,000 subscribers. To be perfectly honest, when I first started this stuff, I had no idea that I would even remotely get where it is now.

So I'm so grateful for folks just supporting in various ways, whether it's through subscribing or writing a good review on iTunes or something like that.

I really do appreciate it. So maybe I'll do kind of a Q and A, like an ask me anything sort of thing or plan something cool to celebrate 7 ,000.

But I love you guys. I appreciate you guys. And Paul, thanks again. Until next time, folks, that is all.