Presup, TAG, & the Apologetic of Jesus: A Conversation with Joel Settacase

And all sorts of topics along those lines. You can definitely check out his website and YouTube channel, The Think Institute. I think that's what it is. He'll correct me in just a few moments. Just a couple of updates.

Upcoming Guests and Ministry Updates

I have some really exciting guests coming up in the, in the far, it's in like in the far future, but I get so excited that I share it on my, on my social media anyway, cause I'm just excited about sharing it.

But I have a couple of cool guests coming up in December, all the way out in December. I have Pastor Jeff Durbin of the Apologia Church and folks who are familiar with presuppositional apologetics and the ministry of Dr. James White.

Of course, you will most definitely be familiar with Pastor Jeff Durbin. So I'll be having Jeff here in December. Also, let's see here. I will also have Mark Farnham. I think it's Farnham or Farnham, something like that.

He's the author of Every Believer Confident. And it is a, it is an awesome introductory book on presuppositional apologetics. So people always ask me, how can I learn presuppositional apologetics in a very simple and straightforward way?

This book, Every Believer Confident is an excellent book for that. And so I'm happy to have Mark on there. That's gonna be on August 25th. Also to be announced, I don't have a specific date, but I'll be having Brian Auten from Apologetics 315 back on the show.

We're gonna be talking about apologetics in movies. That's gonna be a lot of fun. And I was invited along with a bunch of other apologists to hop on Matt Slick's channel at karm .org. Matt Slick is the president of karm .org, Christian Apologetics Research Ministry.

Great website, very large website, lots of articles, a lot of information to sink your teeth in if you're wanting to learn apologetics. But I've been invited to jump on there with a bunch of other apologists.

I'm not sure, I think Anthony Rogers will be there, Dr. Tony Costa, and a few others. I'm not sure exactly which ones, but Matt's a friend of mine. And so when he asked me, I was like, awesome. So I'll be doing that on August 23rd.

And I think, I think that's it for now. Ah, okay, wait a second. Okay, so no date now, okay. But in September, I have locked in, at least he's confirmed that he's gonna come on, we need to lock a date in.

I'm gonna be having Dr. Lane Tipton of Westminster Theological Seminary to come on to talk about his new book on Van Til, Van Til and his Trinitarian theology. So we're gonna be talking about presuppositionalism, Van Til, and Van Til's views on the Trinity and things like that.

So that's gonna be super awesome. Once I get the date locked in there, I will let folks know. Just real quick, I just wanna fill people in on my health. Now, I had a kind of a scare on Friday. Sunday was my wife and I's 12 year anniversary.

And so we went to celebrate on Friday, we went out to dinner and I all of a sudden became very lightheaded and I started shaking. I literally felt like I was gonna die. And they actually had to remove me from the restaurant and put me in my van and my wife was gonna take me home.

But I said, you know what, I wanna be safe. I've never felt this thing before. Please take me to the hospital. And so my wife took me to the hospital. I started shaking and feeling woozy. I felt like I was gonna pass out and they gave me fluids and all sorts of things.

It was a mess, it was terrible. And then the next day, well, they sent me home that same night. The next day, everything started out well. I went to take my son to get a haircut and on our way out of the barber shop, I began to feel lightheaded again and shaky again.

So I had to sit down in a store near the area and they had to call the paramedics. And so thankfully all of my vitals were perfectly fine. The, I guess the symptoms that I was displaying was very much in line with, and this is what the doctor said at the hospital and what the paramedics said the next day, they're very much in line with what looks like an anxiety attack.

Now, that's very odd for me because I don't ever see myself as someone who is anxious. Definitely I have no anxiety when I'm speaking in front of people or doing anything which requires me to be in front of people doing things.

And I'm a teacher, so I'm very busy, but it's not something I typically associate with anxiety. But I hear, I'm not an expert in this area, that it could be any number of things that can bring about an anxiety attack.

I think I had that. So it was really, really scary. I'm just recovering. I didn't even go to work today. I just started feeling much better in the middle of the day today. And so I would very much appreciate your prayers.

I believe that God is sovereign even when scary things happen, right? It's those moments in our lives where we have opportunity to display our trust in Christ. He is sovereign and he has all things under control.

And so I would appreciate prayers and I am very thankful that I'm able to be here tonight and to continue what I'm doing. And hopefully not just this conversation, but all of the things that we do on this channel honors and glorifies God for years to come, God willing.

So just wanted to share that with folks. Well, without further ado, I'd like to introduce my good friend, Joel Sedekes from the Think Institute. How's it going, Joel? Hey, doing great, Eli. How are you, man?

I'm doing good now. I went too hot earlier today and over the weekend, but my wife has been awesome and gave me so much support and encouragement through a scary time.

So I'm doing well now. Praise God. Praise God. Yeah, that's good. Well, don't tell your wife what my dad always reminded me when I was young, which is the Bible says, he who finds a wife finds a good thing, but you're still a thing.

No, don't say that.

Okay. I won't say that, I promise. So why don't you tell folks a little bit about your ministry before we kind of jump into our discussion for today?

The Think Institute and Worldview Legacy

Yeah, sounds great. So I run the Think Institute. I'm the founder and lead teacher. And I'm a former pastor who used to defend my faith the completely wrong way until God changed my attitude and my approach.

And now I defend the faith using a three-step presuppositional method. And I know your listeners will be very familiar with that term presuppositional, or if they're not, they're about to become very familiar with it.

And I also have the distinct privilege of being able to teach that approach to others, both at the high school level, I teach at a local homeschool co-op here in our local area, as well as in churches and conferences, and then weekly on our podcast, which is called Worldview Legacy.

And so I would commend your listeners and invite your listeners to check out Worldview Legacy. We've got kind of a unique spin on what we do because it's the show that helps Christian laymen to become the worldview leaders that their families and churches need.

And so we're all about helping men who, primarily men, women are invited as well, but primarily men and dads, wannabe dads, who want to pass on their faith to the younger generation and are never gonna go to seminary, but want to be able to give clear articulate answers to the questions that the world is asking and to do so in a biblical way.

That's really what we're all about.

Excellent, very good. Well, guys, definitely check out his channel. Joel's actually done a couple of debates too. If you wanna see what presuppositional apologetics looks like in an actual debate context, he's debated a few atheists, one of which was Tom Jump, who is a well-known atheist on the interwebs.

And I thought you did an excellent job in that interaction. And I don't remember the other gentleman's name, but I remember listening to it and thinking, you did a good job, so. Thanks, man.

Yeah, well, I've actually, and man, at this point between debates and sort of like moderated debates and then informal dialogues, I think I've had like seven or eight different encounters. Had a great one with Travis Pangburn on my show and then a gentleman who goes by the moniker of your friendly neighborhood atheist.

He and I went back and forth like five or six times. Okay. And that was a lot of fun, but by the like the five or six time, it's like, all right, I gotta, you know, like I'm not saying anything different.

Right, right.

So you find another Christian. Well, here's the thing, for folks who might think that doing debates is useless, if you know anything about debate, you are primarily not trying to convince your interlocutor, your opponent.

Now, that'd be nice if by God's grace, the person was convinced, these sorts of debates done on a public platform is very much for the audience, people who are on the fence, people who we know God is working on through his spirit.

And of course, obviously we want our debate opponents to be saved as well, but that's not our primary audience. We want to present a clear case for Christian theism because we know many people are watching and people are at different places.

And those sorts of discussions can be used by God in amazing ways. As Joel knows, doing apologetics, we can probably do an entire show telling stories about how people have been impacted by debates and discussions and teachings and things like that.

But without further ado, before we actually start, I do want to define some terms for us. So if you notice on the YouTube thumbnail, it is entitled precept tag and the apologetics of Jesus. I just want to kind of quickly and briefly define those terms for people who are uninitiated in presuppositional apologetics.

Now, one of the main goals of this channel is to popularize this methodology as I do think it is biblical. I think it is powerful. And contrary to our classical and evidential brothers, it is a very effective apologetic.

But of course, we don't simply go for effectiveness. We go for what we think is based upon biblical principles. So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. So presuppositionalism, my favorite definition out of everywhere that I read the definition, more than Bonson, more than Van Til himself, my favorite definition is taken from Stephen D. West's The Resurrection Scripture and Reformed Apologetics, a test for consistency in theology and apologetics.

And he defines presuppositionalism like this, quote, presuppositionalism is a school of thought that attempts to bring all human thinking into subjection to the authority of the word of God. Okay, now methodologically, presuppositional apologetics endeavors to achieve this goal by demonstrating that all human thought that does not submit to the word of God is fallacious and untrustworthy.

So that's presuppositionalism in terms of a definition and it's presuppositionalism in terms of what it is and what it's seeking to accomplish as a methodology. And of course, I would argue that the transcendental argument, which is typically associated with presuppositionalism is a very important part of what that looks like when it is played out in an apologetic interaction.

All right, so Joel shocked the internet with a post that he put out on Facebook. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the context that led you to posting what you posted and perhaps you can clarify what you meant and then we can kind of jump in maybe if there's some disagreement between you and I about the relationship between presuppositionalism and the transcendental argument, we can kind of talk about that and move on from there.

How does that sound?

Yeah, that sounds great. I've also got some notes on an apologetic encounter of Jesus is where I think that he uses the kind of presuppositional approach that I teach and that I advocate for. Would it be all right if we got into that a little bit as well?

Yeah, I also would like to know what do you think is the difference between the method you use, this three-step approach and what presuppositionalism already kind of tries to set out? I don't know if you think there's a difference.

If you do think there's a difference,.

Maybe you can hash that out for us and then we can interact a little bit. Yeah, that sounds great. Okay. So, okay, so where do we begin? Oh, I'll talk about the post that I posted, right.

Why are you making the internet mad, bro? Come on, man, you're so divisive.

I know, I know. The internet was so calm and placid until I posted that. Placid, I haven't heard that word in a while. All right, go for it, man. I'm trying to bring it back. So here's what happened. So my brother, Parker, he's my little brother, but I had to stop calling him that years ago because once he became a state wrestler in college, I had to stop calling him my little brother because he was a beast.

He was bigger than me, but he'll always be my little brother. And he's got his own show, Parker's Pensies. Definitely check that out. Very heavy on the philosophy. Just excellent, excellent stuff. Fascinating.

But he and I don't get to see each other as much anymore as we used to. He lives about an hour and a half away, but we still text back and forth, whether it's a GIF or a meme or some serious apologetics discussion, philosophical discussion.

And I just texted him the other day and I don't have my phone or else I'd look up the exact text, but I basically said, hey man, I don't remember my exact words, Eli, but it was something along the lines of, I think I'm gonna give up on tag.

Now that's typical set of case hyperbole, okay? That's not, you gotta understand how we talk to each other. Okay. And he and I talked a little bit about Romans one, what does Romans one actually say and who does it say it about in terms of who is suppressing the truth and what happens to the mind and to the moral sense, the conscience, if you will, after that truth is suppressed, how far does the suppression go?

Anyway, it's a text conversation. We're not going uber deep, but we're just talking back and forth. And one of the things that I do on a semi-regular basis is I'll get into the different Facebook groups I'm a part of and either comment, participate, engage, or just try to start conversations myself.

And so I made the heinous mistake of getting into the reformed presuppositional apologetics group and just posting that I had been thinking about this. Like, again, using that, the set of case hyperbole, I said something along the lines of, yeah, I'm thinking about giving up on tag.

One, because it's rarely effective with the uninitiated atheist or something along the, the uninitiated skeptic or non-believer, okay? And two, now this set people off, but I stand by it. Two, I said, you don't see it in scripture.

Now, here's what I meant by that. What I meant is, and I appreciate your desire to define our terms. What I meant is that the specific transcendental argument for God's existence, which appeals to the preconditions for intelligibility, or which talks about predication or the transcendentals, as an argument for the existence of God, you don't see that argument in scripture.

What I was getting at, Eli, is that, look, you don't have to use a Vantillian transcendental argument every time you go out there and defend your faith, especially if the person that you're speaking with is uninitiated.

In other words, they don't know. They've never once thought about what their grounding is for logic. They've never once thought, they've been calling Christians irrational for years, and they've never once thought about that.

And quite frankly, you're gonna have to do a lot of legwork and a lot of ground laying to get them to even understand it. And so I posted that, and it was like I pulled the plug out of the dam and all the water started coming out,.

Little by little at first. Well, can I say something in defense of the reformed presuppositional apologetics? Which I love those guys, don't get me wrong. Of course. No, I'm sure. I mean, it's not a crazy point, but when you said something to the effect of the set of case hyperbole, you have to understand that when you post something on Facebook, not everyone who's reading your post will be aware of the set of case hyperbole.

So, you know what I'm saying? So I'm sure there were kind of like knee jerk responses, not really knowing the context and the frame of mind with which you were posting that. So I'm pretty sure that was probably a contributing factor to maybe some of the pushback there, which I haven't been following.

Just heard a few things here and there, but I know how Facebook can be.

Yeah, sure. And, you know, I'm sure you're right, Eli. I will say some of the comments, and I think I cleared that up in the comments. I mean, there was a pretty lengthy comment thread, but some of the comments, now this is where I started to get really perplexed because a lot of the comments were along the lines of, there is no presuppositional apologetics without tag, specifically without the transcendental argument for God.

It's all tag. And I said, well, that's just not true. And what I tried to do is I tried to define my terms, and I know, well, I'm interested to hear your thoughts because we've talked a little bit about this back on the phone.

But my point was that specifically referring to the transcendentals or the preconditions of intelligibility, you don't have to refer to those explicitly every time you make a presuppositional defense.

At least I hope not because Jesus didn't, and Jesus argued presuppositionally, as did Paul. And not once did Jesus mention the words logic, science, morality, or predication. So I sure hope that you can argue presuppositionally without expressly appealing to those things or explaining how they presuppose God.

Yeah, so tag, that term tag, which stands for the transcendental argument for the existence of God, is thrown around very loosely. But I do think that we need to make a distinction between tag as an argument and transcendental reasoning as a principle.

I do not think you can separate a transcendental principle from presuppositionalism. Because everything we do, we reason from the principle that God is the necessary precondition. But that said, that does not require, nor did Van Til believe that to be the case, that did not require that we had to offer, quote, a transcendental argument every time.

But we always argue according to a transcendental principle. And that is consistent with starting where the unbeliever is, having a conversation with them, and always having the background music of the Christian worldview and the need to be consistent with those principles, even when we talk about specific data points.

So there is a difference between giving a formal transcendental argument and talking about data points in a way that is consistent with our overall commitment to the authority of scripture and God himself.

So regardless of what I do, if I give a formal argument or I talk about the nature of history and whether it can be known, I never stop using a transcendental principle, even though when I speak of history, I'm not offering a transcendental argument.

So you never stop reasoning transcendentally, but that's not the same as giving a formal argument. So when someone says Tagg is not in the Bible, no presuppositionalist that I know would say that there is a Bible verse that formally lays out the argument for Tagg.

I think that, and I'll be quiet after this and hear your thoughts, I think that Tagg is derived from biblical principles and theological teaching. So we can take, for instance, the idea of a completely sovereign God and draw implications from a biblical doctrine of God and use this as a premise of an argument or something along those lines.

We can derive the creator-creature distinction from Genesis 1 .1, and there are apologetic applications that can be made based upon the nature of God, the nature of knowledge. We can use the more formal language, ectypal, archetypal knowledge.

You'll never use that in an actual day-to-day conversation, but there are implications there. The biblical conception of authority as God being the ultimate, as we see that God swears by himself because he can swear by none other.

The doctrine of total depravity, the effects of sin upon the mind of man, how man distorts God's revelation, there's no neutrality, these sorts of things. I would argue that the transcendental argument is based upon biblical principles.

And in that sense, I would say it is biblical, but I would not say it's biblical in the sense that no presuppositionalist says it is. Namely, there is a formal argument along those lines. Because basically, and I'll stop here, I promise, we don't see cosmological arguments or teleological arguments or anything like that in the Bible.

You have principles that we can derive premises and use arguments along those lines. So TAG can be complicated, but that's all depending upon the nature of the thing under discussion, right? Someone says, well, that's too complicated.

Why don't you just use the cosmological argument? Well, use the cosmological argument, you're off running talking about potential and actual infinites, quantum physics, and all sorts of things. It can get really difficult.

But as Bonson has shown, you can use the transcendental argument in very amateur ways while still maintaining that overall transcendental thrust that I think is required by the methodology. There, I'm done.

You can share your thoughts there. That's a mouthful. No, I agree with you that TAG, as such, the specific transcendental argument for God is derived from scriptural principles. And that was the one thing that I maintained in that group.

I said, yeah, of course, absolutely. Part of it could be, part of my desire to push back against some of this could be, well, one, it's because I started getting pushback. I started, here's the thing, Eli.

I started getting the kind of pushback that most of it was fine, good natured, good faith. But then there was some pushback that was, let's just say less than optimally Christian. And I won't get into details, because who cares?

But, and when that kind of stuff happens, I mean, that kind of makes me want to fight back. Well, now I'm becoming more entrenched in my position. But part of the reason why I want to push back against some of this thinking is that, one, I'm a former pastor.

I ministered in the city of Chicago and in the town of Plainfield. Yes, I've got a seminary degree, but I've never taught in seminary. I've never taught philosophy at the university level. I'm used to working with blue collar and white collar, mostly dads who are out there trying to make an impact for the gospel in their local area.

And if I tell these guys they need to reason transcendentally, okay, Joel, I'm gonna have to translate that. I might be able to say the same thing. But when I'm thinking about what does it mean to reason transcendentally?

I'm thinking, how can I put that in terms that the guys that I ministered to, they're not dummies. I mean, these are very well accomplished guys, okay? But they're not philosophers. How can they understand it?

Well, I might say something like, look, you can't abandon the Bible to defend the Bible. And I know you would say the exact same thing, Eli. I've heard you say such things countless times. But you start from the basis, the foundational presupposition, I'm fine using that term, I love it, that the Bible and all that it affirms about God, the universe, and the human self are true.

And you just start with that. You figure out what the Bible says, learn how to ask great questions to uncover the underlying presuppositions and contradictions in your neighbor's worldview and position.

And then there's this very simple three-step process that I always advocate for and teach. But it's really just a matter of standing on God's word and just not wavering from the fact that everything that God affirms in scripture is true, unequivocally.

Now you have to figure out what that means. Right. Not every passage is as clear as others. The apostle Peter says that.

But that's how I think of it. If I could ask you a quick, so you have difficulty, and this is a question, you have difficulty laying out a transcendental argument to a blue collar unbeliever? It almost seems to me that if you understand the argument, it's just as simple as asking, hey man, how do you make sense out of your life, man, without a maker?

I wanna hear your story. Right there is a layman's transcendental argument because I don't think he's going to give me a sufficient answer. So at that point, I'm actually laying out in very common blue collar way, like, dude, with all the stuff that you have going on, how do you make sense out of the world you live in?

You know, and hear him. And I think that is a transcendental argument, not formally laid out. So having difficulty seeing like what you're saying, like, I don't see this, it's very difficult to communicate this, but then we change the wording to more simple way, like, how's that different?

So like when you shared your three steps, it seemed like what you're doing is basically just simplifying what the transcendental argument is anyway.

Yeah, but I think we're talking about two different things. So I was just, maybe I can, maybe let me say this and tell me if this helps clear things a little bit. So on the one hand, I'm talking about the guys that I'm teaching the apologetic to.

I wasn't talking about the guys that I might be meeting on the street or something like that. Okay. Now, let's say, you know, let's say I am on the street. Let's say somebody goes, Christians are immoral.

Okay, well, look, we can talk about morality. That's perfectly fine. Like that's one of those transcendentals or that's one of those preconditions for intelligibility. Moral law. Sure, absolutely. We can do that.

And that's a very common one. Logic, it's a little bit more hard to understand, which people can, you know, people can understand that. Sure. Science, I mean, I love the way Jeff Durbin talks about science, you know, talking about uniformity in nature and induction and all that.

And, you know, I will often translate those terms if I'm speaking to a non-believer. But let me give you an example of a way of using, a time that I used presuppositional apologetics, which I don't think is Vantillian tag.

Even if you might wanna say, yeah, but you were doing that in the background. Sure, that's fine. But a couple, let's say a year and a half ago, I was down in New Orleans. I was doing some street preaching with some guys down there.

Zoe White and Declaring Truth Ministries, excellent ministry. Zoe's a good friend. And I'm down there and I wasn't preaching at the time, but I was handing out tracts, starting up conversations with people as they walked by.

Young dude, 25 years old, comes up to me and we get to talking and this guy is great, really personable. You know, smiley, happy, just the kind of guy you wanna talk to, just a nice, cool guy. Like you, like you.

I don't know, we'll see. We'll see how this conversation goes. But he goes, we talk about Jesus. I said, what do you think of Jesus? He goes, I have nothing against Jesus. I just haven't been convinced that he's God or that I need to follow him.

I'm paraphrasing. Sure. And in other words, what he was saying is he's neutral towards Jesus. Well, all my precept alarm bells start going off because there's no neutrality. All right, so what I did was, first I told him, I said, you know, it's interesting.

You say you're neutral towards Jesus. Can I tell you what Jesus said about that? Jesus said that whoever is not with him is against him. Whoever does not gather with him scatters. So Jesus really didn't leave the option to be neutral.

You're either with him or against him. And all of a sudden this young man, his demeanor changed and he started looking more grim. And he looked right at me and he said, I could never believe in someone who said that.

Right then and there, he realized he is not neutral towards Jesus. He had a false view of Jesus and Jesus does not allow him to be neutral towards him in that way. So what I did was I reduced his position to absurdity because he's claiming to be neutral towards Jesus, but the very words of Jesus negate his neutrality.

Okay, so I reduced it to absurdity. We continued talking. I presented the Christian worldview and invited him to believe in Jesus. And he walked away not yet a believer and really with maybe a bit of a more grim outlook towards Christianity.

Only because he realized the demand that Jesus was making on him was much more than he had made. So really quickly, because I haven't laid it out explicitly yet, but the three steps there are one, reduce the, here's how I phrase it.

One, show the problem with the unbelieving position. Okay, reduce it to absurdity, if you will. Perform a reductio ad absurdum. Two, show how the Bible solves that problem. All right, so what you're doing there, so in a sense, you're inviting the unbeliever to walk down into your basement and take a look at your foundation after you've just shown him the crack in his.

And you're doing an internal critique on the Christian position. And then three, pivot to the gospel, or as I say, show how Jesus solves the ultimate problem. So show the problem with his position, show how the Bible solves that problem, and show how Jesus solves the ultimate problem.

And involved in step two is often a step that not all presuppositionalists take, but I like it, which is not only show how you need the Bible in order to make sense of the very categories, but also show how the Bible lays out the rules for those categories and doesn't violate those rules.

So someone says the God of the Bible is immoral. Well, you're gonna show them that you need God for morality, but you're also gonna show him, whatever his objection was, you're gonna show him how God is not actually immoral.

I have a question, I have a question.

I'm sorry, I'm rambling, I'm rambling. No, no, no, you're my guest, you're my guest. So everything you just said is literally Vantillian. Like there's nothing you said, like, so like name, if you could do me a favor, so name the step one, what was the step one?

First of all, I know it's Vantillian, but it's not. It's transcendental as well. Well, okay, well, show me how, because that's one of the reasons I wanted to come on here is so that you could explain that to me.

Okay, so step one, so what was step one again?

Step one, show the problem with his position. Okay, that's an internal critique. Correct, well, yes, yes, it's an internal critique, although the way I typically teach it is I just refer to it as the reductio ad absurdum.

That Bonson uses the same language? Right.

That's an internal critique. Yes, you're doing an internal critique of the non-Christian position first. Which is a reductio.

Yes, you're reducing it to absurdity. Which is the Proverbs 20, I think it's Proverbs 26 principle, right? Proverbs 26. Answer the fool according to his folly. So you're right in line with traditional Vantillian categories, and that's actually part of the transcendental argument.

So there are two steps to the transcendental argument as I see it, but you can cut it up in different ways the way you present it. It's still. No, I add a third one. Yeah, that's fine. But even your third category is perfectly in line with Vantillian categories.

So you have an internal critique.

What was the second point? So yeah, so the reductio, and then the second one is,.

Show how the Bible solves the problem. Okay, so that's your positive case. That's how we actually.

Correct, that's your positive case. Right. And I refer to that as the internal critique of the Christian position. And the reason I don't use the same term for both is because I teach high schoolers this, and I don't want them to get too confused.

So I say, you know, start with the reductio, then do the internal critique of the Christian position, and then step three.

But whatever language you use, you're still using internal critique of the unbeliever. You're welcoming the unbeliever to internally critique ours. And then I think if I remember correctly,.

You said pivot to the gospel. Which is shorthand, the way I actually phrase it is show how Jesus solves the ultimate problem. Right. Which is sin. The ultimate problem is sin. By the way, spoiler alert.

Anyone listening, the ultimate problem is sin and maybe Jesus took it from you.

It is. But that just is Vantillian presuppositionalism. It's exactly what Bonson showed when he had an entire chapter in, I think it's Vantill's Apologetic, where he talks about the relationship between theology apologetics and evangelism.

So those three prongs, I mean, you're right there. There's nothing you said from, at least for me, I've read Bonson, I've read Vantill. There's nothing you said that's different except perhaps the wording and maybe emphasis.

Like you've split it up in three steps instead of like two steps. Answer the fool, don't answer the fool. But you're basically giving a transcendental argument. Number one, your positive case demonstrates the exclusive truth of your own view and your internal critique gives an illustration of the truth of your view.

Namely, that given the unbeliever's perspective, he really doesn't have a foundation for anything. You might not be using the language logic and transcendentals, but that, I mean, you just summed up beautifully the transcendental argument and transcendental principle.

Okay, so yeah, listen, I didn't come up with this on my own. I mean, I've been reading Vantill for years. The thinker who's most influenced me in these terms, and along these lines rather, is John Frame.

And John Frame, as you know, was a student of Vantill, articulated things a little bit differently than Vantill, but I wrote one of my capstone papers for my master's on Frame. And man, I just love the way John Frame thinks.

I mean, everything I read from that guy is like, oh, so good, except he's a Presbyterian, I'm a Baptist, but hey, no one's perfect. And so, and then after him would be, I mean, of course, Vantill, of course, Bonson.

And then, you know, more modern guys, Jeff Durbin, Seitenberg and Cade, who's my friend that I've worked with, and James White. But Francis Schaeffer as well. And Francis Schaeffer had such, I mean, if you read John Frame talk about Francis Schaeffer, he talks about how at his heart, he's really an evangelist.

And so he's a presuppositionalist, but he doesn't formulate things quite as explicitly as Vantill. But okay, the reason why I mention all this is this, is because the way that I present things is I'm trying to give believers a tool to share the gospel.