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An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics, Part 8, brought to you by RoarNoMore .com.
I don't have a handout this morning, as you may have noticed. Over the last two weeks, you had like five handouts, I think, so I'm giving you a little break this morning. What I want to do are two things.
I have other ideas of things we can talk about, but I want to open it up for questions because I know we've been hitting a lot of material, and inevitably, I'm sure, there's a lot of things that might not be crystal clear in your mind, might be vague, and if you want to ask any question, please feel free to do that, or if you want to share any story about maybe where this class has come in helpful, maybe a time when you've used a presuppositional way of doing apologetics with a neighbor or a coworker or someone out in the world who is not a Christian, this would be a good time, I think, to do that.
I have some stories to share if you don't have any, but I just want to open it up. Any questions about worldviews, about the transcendental argument? We can go back to the circle if people want to go back there, because I know that's one of the most confusing things.
Anything?
Any questions? You have a question? Well, it's sort of a scenario that you can help me with. I was doing my job, and a coworker was up with me, and he's a little older than I am, and he was looking at retirement, and I've known him in the past to just hate people, and he was talking about retirement in the day, and he was conflicted about it, but his comment was, you know, we don't live forever.
After all, we don't live forever, and I was doing my job, and I was like, I shut right up. I left my knowledge of conversations with him in the past, and how it's just pasta for people, and I just spoke to him immediately.
I said, he doesn't want to hear it. And I clammed right up, and how do you just push one through that, and just say what you have to say?
Yeah, well, I can relate to that. I've definitely had my share of occasions where I've done the exact same thing. Someone says something, and you're thinking in your head, like, sometimes you want the best answer to give to them.
Like, what can I say that's not going to make them mad, but it's going to cut to the heart of the issue? And then pretty soon, you've thought about it for about five minutes, and the situation has passed, and they're talking about something else.
Or maybe it's just fear, and I've had that too, where I just don't want to get into a discussion with a particular person about that. It could jeopardize the way people look at me. I think, for me at least, the way that I've gotten past that a bit is by actually just doing it.
I know that sounds like such an easy answer, but it's true. Going out, we went out, what was it, three days ago, Ray? We went to the city of Beacon, and we just walked around, passed out tracks, talked to people.
Last week, Ray and I had the discussion with that atheist, and I try to habitually just go out and force myself into situations where, and it's better when you have other believers to encourage you to do that, but force myself into situations where I'm actually doing it.
Then when the opportunity arises, then a lot of that fear has passed away, and I'm ready to do it. But it's something that you've got to be habitually doing. It doesn't necessarily have to be going out with the purpose of, we're just going to witness today.
I hope everyone would do that, but I realize that a lot of people are busy, their schedules and stuff. But just going around in your daily life, going down to the gas station or whatever, just handing out a track, getting past that fear of man by starting small, saying hi to people, might be the first step you want to take.
Now, this is someone you know, I'm assuming, pretty well, right?
I've worked with him a few times. We've had two or three-minute conversations over the course of the job. Every conversation tends to him be saying really vicious, hateful things about the general public.
You set up filters in your head. I do. Whenever I see anybody, automatically, oh, this one's small, this one hates everybody, this one's not, you know what I mean? Right. I automatically do that. When he said that, I thought, what a waste it would be for me to even bother to say anything.
It's never necessarily a waste. How do I know that it's a waste? Because I don't know his heart.
God knows. But I shut right up. I just, I let my, what I set up about him, I just let that rule. And I shut right up and I just continued to do my job with him when I went.
Well, it doesn't sound like he actually said that. So you don't know what his reaction would have been. You're just going on the path of how he's treated other people. So, I mean, it's good to ask questions when you're in that position.
Because then he can't really get mad at you for asking a question. You just say, well, what do you believe about death? He says, we're all going to die someday. Or you can say, that's true. And do you know where you're going?
Or do you have a religious upbringing? Or just any kind of, you're just asking a question at that point. And depending on his answer, you can then react in a way that would be appropriate. You know, if he just jumps down your throat for simply asking a question, then you can just back off.
Hey, I was just asking a question.
I was curious about you. I have to work from home now. I'm there. Yeah, I relate to that. But I was just like, forget it. It'll be a waste. Don't bother. But I know I'm not, you know, I know that the bottom line was me anyway.
It's just fear. Well, to get over the fear of man, it's good to see the big picture. To look at what Christ said. If you love me, you keep my commandments. If the Holy Spirit's prodding you in a situation to do something.
And, by the way, I had a similar situation like three weeks ago when I was at the gas station that I go to a lot. And I walked in there and I talked to the lady. And I've talked to her so many times before.
She's got little, I guess, Hindu religious things on her wall and stuff. And I walked out. I get in my car. I started it up. And I just realized in my head, I was like, you know what? I've been going here a couple times.
I've been here over the past three years and I've seen this lady. I've never given her a track. And I was like, I felt really bad about it. I was like, I shouldn't. I'm looking around in my truck. And I was like, I don't think I had anything.
And I was just like, you know what? I'll just get it next time. And so I basically did the same thing. I'm definitely not above that. I do plan next time I go down there to be ready and to give her something.
But, for me, it's always been getting over the fear of man is looking at the big picture. Looking at what Christ, how do I look in Christ's eyes? I can't see him right now, but I know he's watching. And I know that my primary allegiance goes to him.
I shouldn't care what man can do to me. Man can't do anything to my soul. Christ can. So I know that's kind of a hard thing. But I think once you take that first step and do it, it's like swimming. It's like you jump in and you just, you might not know how to swim at first, but then you get used to it and you're in the water.
It's kind of like that. That's how I've always viewed it. Yes, did you have something?
Yeah, I was going to say something that can help the attitude. It's that some of the individuals who show the greatest covert hostility are closer. Think about the Apostle Paul. He killed those things, and yet he was very close.
Yeah, good point. And sometimes an input from somebody like that can be more strategic than somebody who has manifest an openness. So hostility is often paradoxical. It's fine that they're under conviction.
That's a good example, Apostle Paul. The Holy Spirit was working there, and the Christians getting stoned to death probably wouldn't have even thought that was possible. You're just a tool. That's what you are, and you have to be patient with them and be wise as serpents, innocent as doves.
Are there any other questions regarding some of the material maybe we've gone over or evangelism apologetic stuff? Anything else? If not, I'm just going to do a quick review, and if a question pops in your mind as I'm just talking about this, then feel free to ask it.
Last week we talked about the transcendental argument. We talked about, and I'm just going to repeat that for you, the proof for God's existence is that without him you can't prove anything. And then we went into a number of different worldviews and the questions that you can ask them.
If it was a Muslim or an atheist or whatever, we went into I think pretty much a big picture, like most of the worldviews that I can think of. And all worldviews actually really do come down to ultimately two things, but there really aren't a whole lot of starting points.
You have monistic theism. You have, with monistic meaning all is one, sort of a pantheistic idea, but monistic is just all is one. You have Christianity, right, which is we have a Trinitarian God, but one God.
We have atheism, there is no God. They really only come down to, and dualism, which is there's two essences. Other than that, there really aren't any other worldviews. Everything else is pretty much stealing from one of those.
And it all has to do with God, coming back to what is the starting point. Is it one, is it two, is it many? Polytheism, I didn't mention that one. That's another one. And we went over some of those. We went over what the problems in those worldviews are and why they cannot make sense of reality.
Now the thing is, between a Christian and a non-Christian, we all do things a certain way, right? We all drive on the right side of the road. We all tie our shoes the same way. We all eat our breakfast.
We cook it the same way. We want to make sure there's no bacteria or nothing that's going to harm us. We act in very similar ways. Sometimes even on morality, I can agree with an atheist on probably 90 of what he wants to see in the world.
Yet the problem is, they don't actually have a leg to stand on. They're borrowing from our worldview every time they do that. So we talked about how we reason with them. We reason with them to show them that they actually do believe in God, ultimately.
So that was the transcendental argument.
Did you have a question, Rod? I find that this is very intellectual, in a sense. It's a subtle argument, but does it really change hearts? Is it your experience that you can win the argument, but do you...
Good question.
Yeah. My experience is that God is faithful to those who abide by His principles and obey His commandments. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to see someone saved. Actually, I never have seen anyone.
There's a couple of times that people have told me that they're saved. You can do the word-of-life approach, which is you go out and you put their hands on them and repeat the words after me, pray the prayer, and, oh, they're saved.
But usually those people don't get saved either. It's a rare thing, and when it does happen, it's also a glorious thing. It's something we rejoice over. But in my personal experience of witnessing, I've never seen someone right in front of me get saved.
I've seen people say they don't have an answer, or I've seen hostile people. I've seen people that are humble say that they have to think about that and pray, and it's possible there could be people saved.
There's actually a story about a man in George Street, Australia, who passed out 10 tracts every day. He never saw any fruit from it. There was some Bible conference where all these pastors were getting together, and they realized a bunch of them had the same exact testimony, and it started with a tract from this man in George Street.
They went over there. He was an old man at that point, and he had stopped passing out the tracts because he was just invalid. They explained to him what his ministry had done, and he had no knowledge of it.
A lot of times when we're in the world planting seeds like that, we don't actually see the harvest. There's other times we get people coming to the church. They just visit the church, and they get saved.
I can think of a couple people that are even here today in our service. That's what happened. They started asking questions, and they came to our church. It started with someone talking to them at some point, but that might not have been us.
The first part of the question, have I ever seen that? I actually haven't seen anyone just repent in front of my eyes. I know that people do get saved through presuppositional apologetics, getting them to really think about their epistemology and how they come to know truth.
People get also saved through evidential apologetics, even though I don't think that's an honoring way. I think it's a wrong way to go about it, but God uses various means and methods. The reason we're doing it this way is because I believe this is the way the Bible teaches us to use it.
This is what Paul did to Marcel. This is what Christ did. This is what Proverbs recommends that we do. We answer the fool according to his folly. I don't know if that answered your question at all. It's just a matter of being obedient to me.
One of the things that we talked about last week was that when Jesus used this presuppositional approach, it was to a Jewish audience. Paul went philosophical with them because he was with the Greek audience.
When Jesus talked to them, he just went to the law and cut straight to their heart. That's also presuppositional apologetics. You know that they have a conscience. They know that they're evil, yet they do evil things.
There's guilt there. You press that. You go and you talk to them and ask them if they're a good person and go through the Ten Commandments. We all hopefully know the way the Master approached on that.
That's also presuppositional. It doesn't have to be intellectual like this high thing. It gets that way. The reason that we're going over some of that stuff is because there are people that will challenge you on that.
You can also explain this to an eight-year-old. You start with just the Gospel. Do you know you're a sinner? That's presuppositional apologetics right there. You know something about them that they have a presupposition that maybe they're not even aware of.
They know they're sinful. Then you bring the law to show them that they're sinful. You take the moral argument. That's the easiest one. You can explain that to an eight-year-old too. Where did morality come from?
Is it wrong because Mommy and Daddy said it or is it wrong because God said it? Most eight-year-olds understand that things are wrong if you explain it properly because God said it. That's a very stripped down way to do presuppositional apologetics.
That's the way we're usually going to do it. Talking about the laws of logic and whether they're material or immaterial. I love getting into those things. There are people that also love getting into those things.
I think we should be prepared for it, but that's not the common person you're going to be talking to. There are two things I wanted to stress before we close today. The first one was, I don't think I emphasized this quite enough.
Presuppositional apologetics is not as complicated as it may seem. A lot of the material is good to know, but the root of it is asking questions. That's the biggest method that you're going to use. Just keep asking questions.
As Greg Bonson said, you give them the rope by which to hang themselves. You don't have to know the in and outs of the Muslim worldview to witness to a Muslim. You just ask questions. They can formulate their own worldview right there.
They could formulate a worldview about the big puka-jum-jum in the sky who feeds spaghetti to everyone at 12 o 'clock. It could be the most ridiculous worldview ever. You can challenge that and get them to be self-aware of that, of their presuppositions.
I want to just encourage you that as you're out in the world, don't think that you have to have all the laws of logic down in your head and to understand the laws of math and everything else we went over in order to reason with someone.
Just ask questions. You don't even have to mount a defense if you don't want to because your defense can just be asking questions. Eventually, they're going to be caught in something. I think the main thing is to have the gospel down and to be as ready as you possibly can.
The Holy Spirit will take care of the rest. That's what I've done. There's been times that I've been stumped and I just keep asking questions. You get into that inquisitive mode. You don't have to feel like you have to be a PhD.
I just wanted to make that announcement because I don't think I emphasized that quite enough. Another thing I wanted to talk about, which we ended with last week, but we were really quick because I only had five minutes and we tried to talk about morality, is the problem of evil.
God is powerful. Number two, evil exists. And number three, God is good. That's right. That is the problem. If God is all-powerful, if he controls everything, if he's sovereign, like we claim he is, because our church is more in the reformed tradition especially, we believe God controls everything and that's what the Bible teaches.
If evil also exists on the world, and not just evil in the sense of the evil in man's heart, but also earthquakes, hurricanes, and natural disasters, and if God is also good, how can he allow this to happen?
Isn't there a contradiction between God's power and God's goodness? Now, does anyone remember the fourth step that resolves all of this? God has a morally justifiable reason for evil to exist. When you add that fourth step in there, this goes away.
Because if God is all-powerful, and he has a reason, a good reason, for this evil to exist, and in the end it's going to glorify him somehow, then he is fully justified in allowing evil to continue, or allowing it to exist in the first place.
And so, we find that that's not the most comforting answer, but that gets rid of the problem. The logical problem disappears when you do that. An important thing to remember is you don't actually have to have a reason in mind when you say that.
They might ask you, well, what is God's reason? You don't have to tell them. You can just say, the scripture, my ultimate authority, assures me that there's a reason. I don't have to actually give you the reason.
Explaining it to them is not a necessary factor here. All there has to be is a potential reason. If there's any way that God can somehow harness evil for a greater cause, then the problem self-destructs, basically.
Biblically, it is going to come down to a paradox. It is going to come down to something we don't fully understand. We have in James, right, evil trials, suffering, causes us to have greater maturity, right?
We have in the book of Job, we have Job's all the troubles that he was going through. In the end, what happened to him? He gets more cattle, more of this and that. We have basically an example of what James was talking about there.
God blessed him even more because of what he went through. Sometimes that blessing is not even temporal, it's eternal. We have little glimpses here and there of why evil is allowed to be permitted to exist.
What we don't have is an overarching reason. What we don't have is, why did God create Adam and Eve with the potential to take of the fruit and disobey him? We don't know the exact answer to that question.
We can speculate and we can also, you know, Scripture, the clearest way that Paul answers it is when he says, who are you to even ask the question? Who are you to point the finger at God? Shall not the potter do what he wants to with the clay?
Now, that's not a problem for the logic of it. That's still, all you have to say is there is a potential reason. They're not going to accept that, but our worldview is still intact. There's still not, there's not a contradiction there.
Now, what was the second thing we talked about? How do you talk to a non-believer and challenge him when he asks the question? Because there's a hidden assumption. Remember, we're doing presuppositional apologetics.
What's his presupposition that he's bringing to this question to challenge you? It's a very important one. He's borrowing from our worldview. Presupposition is that such a thing as good and evil exist.
What reason does he have to believe that good actually exists and evil? Now we're arguing about whether good or evil exist. And that's an argument that we know that we have solid foundation to stand on, and they have nothing.
Because in order to believe that evil exists, you have to believe that good exists. In order to believe that good exists, you have to have a moral law. In order to have a moral law, you have to have a moral law giver.
It all goes back to God. And so, I can bring up the question again, my staple question. Is it wrong to rape children for fun? Is that a wrong thing? Yes, it's wrong. Oh, so you do believe in good and evil.
Now, why is it wrong? Now we're back into that. And they can't form an answer to that question. But they're arbitrarily just saying that somehow good and evil exist, and somehow God's evil. But they're borrowing from God in order to say that.
So that's the second thing that we can point out to them. And that's the way I usually go with that question. Because we get into an argument where he has no justification. It's hard, though, when something like a hurricane comes and kills a bunch of people.
What do you say in that situation? And you have to just believe that there's a greater good there. That you may not know about. You're part of a huge tapestry. And you can only see maybe your little section of it.
But it's huge. And God has an ultimate plan for that. Actually, I'll just quickly say this. I remember, I think it was Franklin Graham. It was on the television after Katrina. And they said, why would God do this?
And he had a great response. Because there was a hidden presupposition in what the interviewer was asking. Why would God allow this many people to die was the question. And he said, well, this hurricane didn't change the death rate any.
I thought that was great. He just pointed out the presupposition that this man had was that, as if these people weren't going to die anyways. Everyone dies, ultimately, when you think about it. And that is also part of the problem of evil.
It's suffering, death. But to single out a natural disaster and to say because this happened, therefore God doesn't exist, is not to think through and think, well, everyone's going to die eventually. We're all going to that same place.
There's another hidden assumption, though, in the problem of evil. And that's because the assumption is that God must be evil because if he's powerful, he would have stopped it. Would you have stopped 9 -11 if you had the chance?
Yeah, so you must be nicer than God. That's one of the ways they're trying to phrase it. What is another hidden assumption? Another hidden assumption is that good and evil exist. Another hidden assumption is what?
That we're good somehow. We're not deserving of suffering and evil. That somehow there's something good within us that is innocent, that is not deserving of God's punishment and wrath. And that's another incorrect assumption.
If you enter the Christian worldview, you find that we're all deserving of eternal damnation. God's justified in sending us all there now if he wanted to. But he's also merciful. And he's merciful because we're here right now in an air-conditioned room, not being tortured or not suffering for our sins.
And many of us, the elect, are going to be with him in paradise forever. So there's also an element of mercy there. That should shock us. That should cause us to be just amazed at his mercy. Usually, though, we think the opposite.
We think, how could he not save some when we should be just amazed at the people he does save? And so those are the two hidden assumptions in the statement that we have to challenge. Now, I want to just quickly, we only have a couple minutes, but I want to quickly go over some of the defenses.
There's about ten of them. I'm not going to go through all of them. Some of the defenses Christians try to use, the most popular one is called the free will defense. That in order for God to create a universe in which there must be free will, he had to create a universe in which evil was possible.
So in other words, we have a choice. We can either choose good or we can choose evil. And in order to truly love God, we have to do it of our own volition, of our own choice. Otherwise, we'd be robots, right?
You can call it the robot defense. A lot of people call it that. Now, my own take on that is that it is not biblical. You're not going to find anywhere in the Bible where this defense is given. In fact, what you find is that we don't have the right to ask the question, that this is part of God's plan.
So I don't actually offer that defense. I have heard that defense many times. I think it's a weak defense because an atheist will go back and just press the point of God's sovereignty to such an extent that you realize, technically, if God knew that we were going to choose wrong, then why did he let us do it?
And the problem of evil still exists, I believe, if you mount that defense. I think, biblically, it's a mystery. The whole free will versus God's sovereignty. Of course, we're more of the reformed perspective that God supersedes our wills in order to save us.
We have a character that is adverse to him, and he's merciful in getting us to do something that is not in our nature. So there is no choice. I'm not born into this world having... The choice is offered to me, but I don't have the capability.
I'm a dead man. I don't have the capability of choosing good. And so this is also a very Arminian defense. This is a defense that comes from people who believe that we are capable of choosing God, which is something that I don't think the Bible teaches.
So that's not a defense that I ever offer. Another very famous defense is called the best possible universe defense, and it's very similar. It just says that God created a world in which the greatest amount of people would be saved.
And basically, they're saying that it was impossible for him to create a world in which everyone was saved. This was the best world he could have created for people to be saved. That's also speculation.
You're not going to find that in the scripture, so I don't offer that defense. There's a couple other ones that are just never used, so I'm not going to go over them, but those are the two biggest ones that we find in the Christian community.
One last thing about the problem of evil, and I think it's important after challenging the atheist that he doesn't have a right to ask the question, is to ask him how he copes with evil, because atheists have death in their families too.
They have tragedies. How does an atheist understand that in his worldview? Is there any comfort in an atheist universe? And the answer is no, there's not. Someone dies, that's just it. They're dead. You can't do anything about it.
Suffering, tough luck. That's just the way nature's rolled the dice, and that's just the way it is. And in the Christian worldview, we actually have a hope, right? At the funeral on Tuesday, we're going to have a hope.
We're going to be rejoicing that Dick Burlingame is in heaven right now. We know that there is an afterlife, and we can take comfort in that. We can take comfort in a merciful God who's going to judge us with equity but with also mercy.
And so there is comfort in the Christian worldview. There is not in the atheist worldview. So that's not necessarily answering the question on a logical framework like we did with the syllogism here, but it is going at it from an emotional perspective and showing all the times in Scripture that people were comforted in lieu of tragedy and trials.
So that's the problem of evil in a nutshell. It's not really a problem for the Christian worldview, but it's the most popular one that's brought up against us, and I think we should be prepared when people bring it up.
So next week, we're going to go over some more things. I'm going to have a handout for everyone. And if there's any more questions, a quick question, I can take one. If not, we're just going to go to the Word Printer.
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