The Trinity | w/ Dr. Brant Bosserman

Romans 1 and the Problem of Suppressing God’s Revelation

Jeremiah, you just, you got to drive home with this guy. If there is an absolute personal creator God at the end of it, and your whole religion doesn't even acknowledge him whatsoever, how are you not in the position of Romans 1,.

Where it says,.

Since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen. We're talking about the big God here, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse.

For even though they knew God, you just betrayed it despite your own theology, Mormon. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give him thanks. My goodness, friend, have you ever given thanks to this God for sustaining your entire being?

Why do you have some God before him who you call Elohim from planet Kolob and his son? Why do you put another God in front of him and deprive the one who's really responsible for everything?

The Apologetic Dog, 1 Timothy 6:20, and the Upcoming Free Will Debate

Well, hello, and welcome back to the apologetic dog, where it's our heart's desire to do apologetics, to talk about knowledge that God has revealed himself to be and who we are in his world and to talk about the truth.

And so if you're acquainted with the apologetic dog ministry, then you've seen the logo, the dog, the bearded dog. I hope y 'all get a kick out of that, but there's also a verse embedded in the logos ministry, and that is 1 Timothy 6, 20.

I just wanna remind you of how important this verse is to me. Or Paul tells Timothy, oh, Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. And so the apologetic dog is a guard dog, guarding the gospel of grace.

And then Paul tells Timothy, do this in a very particular way, avoid irreverent babble, avoid pagan philosophies that try to rival the knowledge of God and twist truth. And he says, also avoid those traditions that have contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.

And so the apologetic dog, we wanna stand on God's truth, the way that he has revealed himself to be. And so thank you again for joining. I just wanna give one quick announcement where in about a month or two coming up, I will be engaging in a public debate with A .K. Richardson, and we are going to be debating free will.

And so this is a hotly debated topic that will probably not be solved with our debate, but that's okay. A .K. and I have really enjoyed interacting with one another and talking about what does free will look like in light of God's word.

So mark down your calendars. That'll be on June 24th at 12 .5 church, where I serve as pastor and elder here. We're gonna have a great time. And if you would love to come in person, we can hold up to 130 seats.

So message me, message Pastor Nathan. You can reach out to him on Facebook Messenger and things through the church website if you would like a seat. But if you can't make it in person, then we will also live stream the debate on the Apologetic Dog YouTube channel.

So mark that down on your calendars. You don't wanna miss the free will debate between me and A .K. Richardson. So with my ministry being in apologetics, it's no surprise I'm reformed. And so everything that I approach doctrine and scripture and everything is through that worldview.

And so another part of my ministry that I'm looking forward to embarking more and more on is the fact that I'm Trinitarian. I believe that God is a triune, God the Father, the Son and Spirit are the one true God.

And so the doctrine of Trinity for me is foundational for everything else. God has revealed himself in his word to be a very particular way. And I believe when we look in creation, it gives us so many details pointing back to God's triunity.

But at the end of the day, God has to reveal himself to us in truth. And so as I've studied the Trinity, I came across a book called The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox, an Interpretation and Refinement of the Theological Apologetic of Cornelius Van Til, written by Dr. B .A. Bosserman.

And so without further ado, Dr. Bosserman's in the building. Can you hear me okay, Dr. Bosserman?

I can hear you well, Jeremiah. And I just wanna say, I really appreciate you explaining the meaning of the apologetic dog because I was worried it might be a reference to Psalm 2220 that seizes upon the power of the dog.

And I just, I was gonna have to confront you that that's not a positive biblical reference. And so I just, I'm glad to hear that there's a better reference.

Yes, well, I've also, people have said that, don't cast what is holy before the dogs. I'm like, oh, people are already coming at me pretty hard. So I have to constantly remind people kind of the vision behind the logo and the ministry name.

Yes, but in all seriousness, yeah, go right ahead.

I appreciate you coming on the show. Like I have waited a long time for this. I read your book a while back. I actually learned about you from a mutual friend of ours, Eli Ayala from Revealed Apologetics.

That's the first time I found out about you. And it was also during a similar time where I was starting to really grasp concepts of the Trinity. God is one being and he's three in his personhood. And those are different distinct categories that are necessary when we're evangelizing.

I remember I was sharing the gospel with a Jehovah's witness and they said, Jeremiah, can you show me anywhere in the Bible where we see Trinity? And you talk about just not being equipped to be able to go to the scripture and show that.

And then they're saying, how are you not serving three gods? I just felt it all in a moment. And this was years back early on in the faith. I really wanted to just be obedient to share the gospel. So by God's grace, I've been equipped over the years.

My heart has really rejoiced with presuppositional apologetics. That's why Eli Ayala has been so invaluable in my life. And then learning from guys like Cornelius Vantill and just the rest. And so when you came on the scene, I was like, what is this book about?

And the way that I approached it was thinking, is he really gonna take Cornelius Vantill's apologetic one step further? I just wanna tell you, your book was fantastic. By far the hardest book that I've ever read.

Wow, wow.

Well, I mean, don't pick up the critique of pure reason, my friend, or the phenomenology of spirit because they will crush you. Yes. No, I appreciate that. You know, I mean, there's some honesty there, I think about the nature of the work.

But I think, I say we just jump into it. I think one of the goals today is to try to draw out some of the argument that I make in that book and to maybe put it in terms that are more accessible, of course, as you know, to people.

And I'll tell you what, before we dive right in, do you mind to tell people where they can maybe see some more of your work? If you have a website, if they can listen to some of your preaching, where you serve at and things like that?

Yeah.

You know, all my sermons are on Sermonatium. So anybody wants to listen into a sermon, it'd be there. You know, I just barely have a hand in academic things these days. I'd say in the last probably couple of years, I've been able to be a bit more involved.

But man, I've had kids under the age of, you know, six for a long, long time. And survival should be everyone's chief goal at that point. But my kids are getting older. And so that's opening me up a bit.

I've got an article that is slated to get published in the Westminster Journal this coming fall. It's actually more of an exegetical article. And so, you know, but it has, you know, an apologetic, you know, flavor to it, directed specifically to Seventh-day Sabbatarians and it's an argument for, you know, first day observance.

But yeah, other than that, really, it's stuff like this. There are various, you know, interviews and things like that floating around on the internet. I have a debate from about a decade ago. Someday, maybe I'll do some more of that stuff.

But I've got a church and a family and that's quite a lot, so.

Oh, your hands are full. And because I would love it for the day for you to get back into the debate arena. I know some Unitarians that would love to have a crack at B .A. Bosterman.

Oh my goodness.

I want people to see your book here, The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox. And so I love it because you talk about things that are paradoxical, but necessarily require, like if you're starting at one point, then you have to carry that all the way to the other pole.

And a lot of things are necessary for one another when we're talking about God and who man is. And something that you talk about in your book a lot is the absolute moral bankruptcy of any worldview that opposes the Trinity.

Doesn't start with a sovereign triune God. So I just wanna tee you up. We can start wherever you want to in that.

Context, Metaphysics, and the Problem of Induction

Well, let's do it. You know, I think a great place to start is with the concept of context. How important context is for understanding anything. Now you can think about this on a very practical level.

If you heard someone scream, I'm going to kill you. If that is in the context of people playing Fortnite online, the meaning of that phrase is radically different than if two people are in a street fight.

And the context in which that phrase is uttered is going to color its meaning utterly. Those two contexts are gonna change that same phrase into a playful assertion to something very dangerous. And so we start with the concept of context, but we're gonna take that into the realm of metaphysics.

What is the ultimate context that surrounds everything? You could say that this is kind of the heart of any apologetic debate with an atheist, someone of another faith. And to be really honest, this isn't a difficult part of what we call presuppositional apologetics, really driving home the problem of context.

And here's what I mean. When you talk with an unbeliever, it doesn't take any grand skill or ingenuity to explain, listen, how do you know that the ground that you're standing on is going to be stable?

At first, they could appeal to the integrity of the structure that they're standing in, the house or the building. Beyond that though, you'd have to say, yeah, but how do you know the ground underneath that is stable?

Then they might have some conception of planetary motion, gravity, things like that. But obviously, as you keep pressing this question further, the unbeliever must arrive at a point where they frankly say, I don't know what's beyond that.

You take it to the Big Bang, for example, where it's hypothesized that space and time themselves came into being through some sort of initial explosion. The physical laws we know, the rational laws by which our minds are governed came into being at this point.

And it's actually a big problem to come to terms with the fact that you don't know where the Big Bang itself came from and what's beyond that. And fundamentally, if you don't know, for lack of a better phrase, the ocean on which our universe is floating, everything you think you know about this universe is undermined.

That's to say some other dimension that birthed our dimension. How do you know that that other dimension will not intervene or is not intervening right now such that what you think is a valid conception of the external world is an illusion?

And most unbelievers have to admit they don't know.

Yeah, so I just wanna chime in because you gotta think, I'm coming at this from the lay perspective, but I've loved the stepping into the world of apologetics, thinking presuppositionally, standing on God's truth at every point and turn.

And so what helped me beginning this endeavor was understanding what a worldview is, right? So we got kind of the category of ontology slash metaphysics. You know, what is actually real, you know, past the physical realm that we can see what goes after that or beyond.

But you have ontology, you have epistemology. How do we know what we know? And that's the kind of the question that you're pressing, you know, the skeptic essentially. And then the value theory of ethics and morality, how ought we live in this particular universe?

And what I've loved about presuppositional apologetics, it says all three of those pillars are necessary to kind of explain one another. You can't just have an epistemology devoid of an ontology, it's begging the question.

It's gonna be arbitrary. And the Christian apologists were saying, you're standing on our ground. We're not saying that we don't know. And we're going to press the epistemological question on your worldview to the point where you have to say, well, it just seems to be the case.

And at that point, you've given up a rational foundation for meaning and intelligibility and so forth. Am I on point or am I close to where you're laying the foundation for?

Absolutely.

If you do not know the fundamental nature of ultimate reality, you could say the context of everything it undermines your capacity to know anything. This is really a fairly elementary insight. And in fact, you know, it will be propounded as epistemic humility to admit these sorts of things that we really can't totally know.

We can't be absolutely certain. And of course, that's the opposite of the virtue of humility taken in the ethical realm. To be humble in the ethical realm, you have to actually know that you lack certain capacities, that you've done certain things wrong.

And therefore, in light of that objective standard, you're humbled by your inadequacy. But in the realm of epistemology or knowledge, people will have to admit fundamentally, I don't ultimately know anything.

And they'll try to go with, you know, it's probable. We'd probably push forward, you know, that your knowledge isn't even probable. You have to have an objective standard to even begin to calculate probability.

And this is the beginning of our claim to just demonstrate the importance of context. And of course, the unbeliever is gonna come right back at us and say, one of two things, you're in just as bad of a position as I am.

That's the first thing they're gonna say. Or other people or other religious worldviews can do just as well as you. And that's what we'll kind of, we'll be responding to.

Could we say what we're dealing with is the problem of induction, right? Absolutely. Humanity, we exist in a context, we're gonna keep using this word, in a world that's impersonal. And so in many ways, this impersonal context subjects us to the problem of induction, to where we don't have an absolute knowledge and all sufficient omniscient mind to know things with absolute certainty.

And it kind of goes back to the context in which we live, this impersonal universe, right? And then the way I've processed it in your book is, and that's kind of why we have the problem of induction. And if induction is the foundational worldview, well, that's sinking sand, right?

That's probability. And like you're bringing out the hypotheticals of, well, if you don't know with absolute certainty, then everything's kind of up for chance, but it's also self-defeating because you have to make knowledge claims that you're certain about something not being certain at the end of the day.

So it's just a broken epistemology when you get down to it.

That's right, it is deeply broken. And the problem of induction is, it's even worse than just, that people only have probabilistic knowledge. It's worse than that because as Hume showed, before you can even rely on the concept that I've watched something occur, say five times, and I'm anticipating it's gonna happen the sixth, you have to already know that reality is such a place that uniformity pervades it.

How do you know that in the first place? Why do five occurrences imply a sixth at all? What authority could tell you that? And when you're dealing with the universe that seemingly came into being out of nothing, that right there is so anomalous and so foundationally problematic when you start talking about what you should or should not expect to occur.

How do you know that the universe as we know it will not be zapped out of reality, out of nowhere? You don't know the concept, excuse me, that the properties of this other dimension from which our dimension came, and that undermines knowledge.

And so, of course, the Christian claim is gonna go something like this. And so we're gonna power into the Christian view of reality. And we're really answering the question, where are we? The unbeliever's answer is, we do not know where we are.

I can talk about certain local answers to that question, but even those are subject to some vast void of unknown in the darkest sense. And we're gonna say to the unbeliever, if that were true, you would have no knowledge at all.

You wouldn't be justified in any of your beliefs. You wouldn't even know that any belief were true. We're gonna say, you don't really live in that context. You live in this context, and we're gonna expound this for a moment.

Where we all are in the Christian worldview is we are in God's providence. And when we speak of God, we're not talking about a being who is gradationally greater than we are, has significantly more power than we do, occupy some space in the universe.

We're talking about an absolutely personal God who spoke reality into existence such that all of it, without exception, is subject to his design and decrees, and that he has absolute comprehension of himself and the universe.

And in fact, we were made to live out our existence with this understanding at all times that this is our ultimate context. And in fact, the natural, and when we speak of natural, we mean before man fell into sin, the natural way to look at the world when we encounter any object, any animal form, any plant life, a mountain, the sky, all of it is to immediately see that as a created creature, created animal form, a created tree, a created mountain that was made for us to access it, to study it, to search out the mysteries in it.

And in that context where our biggest authority, our biggest principle is a personal God who fit us and fashioned us for the world and the world for us, we know everything in light of his revelation and his testimony that we can know in a manner that images his absolute perfect and comprehensive knowledge.

And I just wanna point out some biblical scriptures that people will get, I think agnostics and believers will get frustrated with Genesis 1 .1. It simply begins in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

It doesn't provide a proof, a theistic proof that this God exists. And there's a reason for that. God is saying, I am the absolute context of everything. Heaven, earth, time itself with its beginning, I am the one who precedes that.

My voice, my song pervades all of it. And in fact, one has to begin with me, not arrive at me from an apologetic argument, climbing up a ladder, if you will, to God to discover him and then reason in light of what he tells you.

Rather, you were designed to begin with me as your ultimate presupposition and starting point. And what that involves is acknowledging him as the ultimate context of everything.

Dr. Bossman.

Go ahead, Jeremiah.

So like another verse that presuppositional apologists really try to memorize is Proverbs 1, verse seven, that talks about the fear of Yahweh, giving reverence and honor to him as the supreme being, right?

That's the beginning of knowledge. Proverbs goes on to say, that's the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. And it's fools that despise him and ultimately want nothing to do with him. So is that a good scripture?

Because I've actually had some people say, well, beginning could just mean the best of many options. And my response is, that's true because it's the only foundation that secures everything else. And so I've had some people kind of scoff a little bit about Proverbs being just kind of wisdom literature.

I'm like, where else would you wanna go for wisdom? Lover of knowledge, right? From the book of Proverbs itself. And then I believe it's later in Proverbs chapter nine, where it tethers it, this concept to the Holy One.

And so that sounds a lot like Colossians chapter two, that in Jesus Christ is the treasures of knowledge. And that's how we ultimately have full assurance. And so the presuppositional argument is, you must start with the Christian worldview and the triune God for everything else to even make a lick of sense.

To remove that foundation, everything is going to be absurd. It's gonna be rendered into kind of nonsense. And so this actually reminds me, one of my favorite chapters in your book, you talk about the transcendental argument from the Trinity and for the Trinity.

And when I first read through that, it didn't hit me, but it's like, oh, because I've even talked with skeptics and atheists about this and they're just like, well, did you know about God when you were little?

And I'm like, no, but that's approximate starting point. I was borrowing from the triune God who I made in his image and I didn't realize it. And so I'm standing on that metaphysical grounding all along and I didn't know it, right?

But I discovered that that's where I've always been. Van Til talked about a little child slapping the father in the face, but it was the father that was holding him up the whole time. I believe that's Paul in Areopagus, right?

We live and move and have our being, quoting these Greek prophets that knew better, right? For our being, that's contingent on a greater eternal being. So that's kind of the thrust of the propositional framework.

That's right, sir. And I would put it this way, to the friend who said Proverbs 1 .7 is just setting God out as the best of multiple options to be your starting point, think about what a contradiction it is to even say that.

If you consider yourself as a person at the ice cream shop looking for a starting point, in fact, your appetites are the starting point. None of the ice cream flavor, none of the 31 flavors are the starting point.

You, your autonomous self, are the beginning of things with, as we'll discuss in the course of time, an active suppression of the knowledge of God. And when you know the difference, to the friend who said, well, did you know God when you were a baby or something like that?

You distinguish the proximate starting point from kind of the foundational logical starting point. And I would just say to the unbeliever, as a logic professor, I always talk to people about the wonder of that.

What we're studying in this class is something you've been using all of your life. From the moment you began reasoning, we're just putting names to these argument forms, which are the way that the mind thinks and operates.

I will note, there's no logical proof that logic itself applies to reality. It's actually kind of a big problem philosophically.

I mean, for Kant,.

Well, for Kant, the transcendental subject is imposing various categories onto creation. That's why you can be sure they're going to show up every time you evaluate something is you're literally projecting them.

Obviously other philosophers will say that reality is embedded, these laws are embedded in reality. But again, that's just a hypothesis. And so I would actually say, in fact, not only are we, from the moment we are conscious, relying on reason and logic, but we're actually relying on the God who is above all rational forms, all rational inferences and material reality, whose voice is assuring us at all times to apply the one to the other and count them as fit for one another.

And I would just note, reality can't tell you that before you evaluate it, nor can reason tell you that before you're using it. In fact, no, that's the voice of God at all times. Speaking, that is your big context.

And they'll hate that. But I should also note, the verse that you just mentioned, Proverbs 1 .7, it's just, it's multiplied all over the wisdom literature. It's the exact same thing in Job 28 .28. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom.

It's Ecclesiastes 12 .13. It is in the wisdom Psalms, Psalm 111, verse 10. This is a mantra of scripture.

I have another one I want your thought on. So John 17 .17, "'Father, sanctify them the truth, your word is truth.'". And he's talking to some advocates of Greek orthodoxy. And they're just like, Jeremiah, that's not the word graphe.

Logos there. How do you know it's not referring to Jesus? I'm like, the word of God is necessarily both, right? How God has revealed himself as the second person of the triune God and his revealed word.

And so I read a book called The Canon of Scripture, a Presuppositional Study by Philip Kaiser. And he made such an astute point. I think you will like this. He said, Jesus did not say your word is true as though you're judging God's word from a different standard altogether, but your word is truth.

It's the precipium that everything else is judged in light of. And so when I get asked about Sola Scriptura, because Jonathan Frame said that presuppositional apologetics is Sola Scriptura applied. I love that.

But I just said, John 17 .17, that's my go-to to say, look, God's word is truth. Jesus is the revealed word. He is the way, the truth, and the life. And so I just love it. You got to start with Christ.

Christ is the justification.

Yes, and to that Eastern Orthodox fellow, I would just note, contextually, John 14 through 17, there are numerous statements to the effect that the spirit of God will recall to you all that I've spoken to you.

There, he who remains in my word. The good news is not just that God has a word, it's that the word speaks to us with our words, and it would be deeply problematic and no salvation at all if that contact were not made.

But to jump back onto the Christian view of reality, before the fall, we exist in the context of an absolute, all-knowing, sovereign creator, God. And this is just pounded home all over the word. Solomon, after he completes the temple and he leads the people in prayer, he says this, he says, but will God indeed dwell on earth?

Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house, which I have built. It is the concept that God bursts the categories that we might make from, not in the sense that they are totally rendered, entirely useless, but in the sense that we can know God truly, but never exhaustively.

And the temple is a really excellent portrait of this. It's the concept that we can access our living God. He is present here with us. So this building isn't useless, but it's also there to remind us where we need to be reminded at all times that that building, and especially as it's holy of holies, actually represents the context and the transcendent thing that surrounds us, God himself.

And, you know, John Frame, you just mentioned a moment ago, he does well expounding, you know, Van Til's concept of a Christian concept of transcendence and eminence. The non-Christian concepts of both are deeply problematic.

That which is transcendent is totally unknowable and unknown. It's their void, their empty, the realm that surrounds this realm that just calls everything into question. Their concept of eminence is the idea that we can know God or divine things exhaustively, or maybe even anything about God exhaustively, or exactly, or perfectly.

And it kind of bounced back and forth between those two things. Whereas for us as Trinitarians, who we know our context is this absolutely personal God. We know that in everything and at all points, we know God truly, but we never know him exhaustively.

The transcendence piece is what keeps us from knowing him exhaustively and his eminence. The fact that the word of God can speak with human words and well represent himself. It means we can know him truly.

And those two things together are of utter significance.

And maybe a key word that you mentioned a lot in your book, it comes out in Van Til, but we know God analogically. And that's awesome, right? God is able to speak to us in ways that we can understand.

I remember you giving an example of, you have a child seeing that their dad uses a credit card and all he knows is every time he swipes the magic card, you get food, you get groceries. And that is a adequate understanding from that child's perspective, but doesn't understand the greater context that their dad goes to work and puts money in the bank and all this transaction.

Well, in a similar way, analogically, God comes down to us and speak to us in ways that we can actually understand. And that's only possible if we are made in his image and reflect many attributes of who he is.

Yes, that's absolutely right. And so with that understanding in mind, we're gonna confront the unbeliever with this concept that as a creature, their context is the creator. We're actually gonna confront the unbeliever and we're gonna say, the reason you carry about with such a self-assured sense that you can trust your senses, the world around you, expect normalcy, honestly, even expect a whole lot more than that in a world full of expectations.

The reason for that is because you live and move and you even have your being in the context of this God with this sort of character that the scriptures revealed. And the non-Christian response is actually gonna be interesting at this point.

If all I told the unbeliever were that much as a presuppositionalist, that you're a creature and your context is the creator, some unbelievers will actually think that we have some sort of common ground here in that we kind of believe the same thing.

I'm thinking of a recent interview between Russell Brand and I think Tucker Carlson, where he gave testimony to how much he needs God to feel sane in the world. And we can appreciate that on some level, but Russell Brand's coming at this from what I can tell, sort of mysticism and pantheism, where you're not actually saying the same thing we are at all.

You don't fundamentally, if you're a pantheist, believe in a creator-creature distinction. In fact, what you're saying is that we are one metaphysically with this context in which we live. In fact, the context is the wrong way to even think about it.

Perhaps the biggest problem from which we all suffer is believing in our distinct individuality when we're really drips from an ocean. And that actually might be the great error from which we suffer. We'll just note, even right here, you're actually in the same terrible position as the out-and-out atheist.

Ultimate reality itself is afflicted with error, illusion, falsehood in you, because you are, as Van Til will frequently say, a charter member of ultimate reality, which means that error is inherent in that thing that you're calling God itself.

The moment you do that, you say that God himself is in some degree in error, or even the illusion of error. You're in the same place where you'd have to admit every proposition of knowledge that you claim to know is questionable.

There's no ultimate authority or standard to which you can go that is flawless, whose knowledge is perfect, never hampered down with error and confusion, because those things enter into the divine himself.

So this is how a presuppositionalist is going to go at someone who tries to mimic a theistic sort of position and go, yes, I believe in a divine context as well. We're gonna say, in fact, what you're describing is totally different from what we're describing, because you lack a creator-creature distinction where that creator context is absolutely holy, never fraught with error, sin, confusion, or the like.

That makes sense. Yeah, because you're bringing out, once again, the problem of induction. And one objection I've heard against presuppositionalists from the same gentleman that doesn't want us to interpret Proverbs 1 -7 in the way that we do is, well, Jeremiah, you don't know everything, do you?

Well, then how can you? And my immediate thought is, I'm not claiming to be the one that has all knowledge, but I'm putting forth a worldview. The worldview that I have has the one who has all knowledge.

So we're kind of going back and forth between the creator-creation distinction. I do have a fallible knowledge, but it's within a worldview that rests on the one who is infallible. So it's making that distinction between what I possess in the metaphysical context in which I exist.

I can know that with certainty, even though I've not crossed over into the creator realm itself. So we're talking about metaphysics. We're talking about the whole worldview in which we're even having the conversation.

Well, that's right. And I think even just laying forth the simple proposition that I think we can agree that if there is a God who knows absolutely everything, then believing what he says would be the absolutely most certain sort of belief that you could ever have.

Whereas what you're saying, Unbeliever, is that maybe such a God exists. If he does, I'm gonna have to find him and he's gonna have to prove himself to me. And what you're really saying is that there's something, self-assurance that you have, which we're gonna press forward is baseless.

It's entirely baseless. It doesn't matter how much money that's made you, how well that's gotten you around the world and helped you reach your goals. It's baseless in terms of epistemic justification or even a claim to truth.

And Jeremiah, I'll just say one thing. It's more than just the problem of induction, because that's a problem of how we can make probabilistic conclusions about the world, the external world. It's the problem of intuition.

How can you trust your intuition when you say you're a member of ultimate reality, which itself just emits error from time to time, emanates error and illusion from time to time? It calls into question all of your thought as potentially being error and illusion.

And so we could go down the line. It calls into question your sense of, mathematical truths. I understand it's really compelling and it's painful to imagine trying to disbelieve those things. But again, once you put yourself into the context of the unknown, what the unknown is compelling you to think or to believe is itself unknown.