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Good evening, everyone. Well time has come for class to begin. We were given a nice gift tonight. We have someone who brought refreshments and there's always coffee back there, but we have a little snack to go with that.
So feel free during the lecture to get a snack if you would like. I do have a few announcements that I need to make prior to the class. Last week I said that I had sort of a special announcement that I didn't want to say last week because I had not affirmed what was going to happen.
Well, I think I can confirm now what we're going to do. On your syllabus it says that week six is video night. That is actually going to change. We're actually going to take week seven and do it in week six because week seven is going to be a guest speaker.
And our guest speaker is going to be a man named Rich Suplita. Rich Suplita is the, he runs a website called AskAFormerAtheist .com. He is a former professor with the University of Georgia who was himself an atheist.
Now he goes on campus and shares the gospel with students directly. So he has a lot of practical evangelistic experience that he's going to share with us and take questions. He's also, if everything goes right, he's also going to speak here at the church on Wednesday night.
So for those of you who are members of the church, we'll have him Wednesday night and Thursday night. So have him two times. And we're thinking about trying to work on maybe going to a campus and doing some outreach together.
So yes. Does he live in Georgia? He does.
Athens.
Up near the University of Georgia. That's why I'm saying bringing him down was a big deal. And he and I have a, he's already affirmed that he will come, but huh?
I was saying Athens, that's a pretty good distance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to be a bit of a drive for him, but we have a church member who's going to put him up and it's going to be nice for him to come down. And so I'm looking forward to having a guest speaker here.
It's the first time we've ever done that and it should be a good day. And tomorrow he and I are meeting via Zoom to discuss all the particulars. So hopefully it'll be, it'll all work out. But just look on your syllabus where it said video night, week six, move that, you know, scratch it out.
That's actually going to be guest speaker night and it's going to be week seven. And what was on week seven, which was the issue of evil, I think was week seven. We're going to move to week six. So dealing with the odyssey or the justification of evil is that particular class.
All right, two other announcements before we get started. I realize that the book that we are reading this semester is pretty heavy. Last semester we read Dr. R .C. Sproul and R .C. Sproul writes for a much more popular audience.
Dr. Frame writes for a more academic audience. So I want to give you a few things to consider. The first thing is there is a website called Books at a Glance. Books at a Glance dot com. It is not free.
Books at a Glance is a pay service. So if you can't afford it, I'm sorry. I'm just giving you the option. I think they have a 30-day free trial, though, if you want to go there. They do summaries of theological textbooks.
So honestly, if you can afford the $9 .99 a month, it is worth it. And they have the summary of our textbook and it is very good. So if you would like help reading it, maybe giving you a... I consider this sort of like, you know, in school they had cliff notes.
Cliff notes were never intended to replace the reading of a book, but rather to give you sort of the on-ramp to understanding the book before you try to dive into a book this.
Thick.
You read a book this thick, it sort of gives you the on-ramp to get into understanding.
It.
So Books at a Glance is one option for you. The other one is called Scribed, S-C-R-I-B-D dot com, Scribed dot com. Now, I have already signed up for Scribed myself and I am super, super excited about it because I have already used it a ton just this week in my sermon preparation and preparation for this class.
By the way, I wrote my notes for this class three different times because I wanted to make sure I'm being clear. I felt like I was maybe a little unclear in our last session. I want to make sure I clarify some things.
But Scribed is sort of like Netflix for books. It's got a ton of books on it. It's $9 .99 a month. You've got a 30-day free trial. And again, this is not a commercial for them. I'm just telling you this is something I personally pay for and it would benefit you.
Now, our textbook isn't on Scribed, but what is is a book called Five Views of Apologetics. Book entitled Five Views of Apologetics, which one of the views is Dr. Frame explaining his view for a popular audience.
So if you are looking for a little easier way to understand what we're talking about, even if you just do the 30-day free trial, go and download Dr. Frame's book. I'm sorry, the book, it's called Five Views of Apologetics.
And you can look at it on scribed .com and you can go to Dr. Frame's position. And if you're interested, there are also the other, there's somebody who argues for the classical view. We talked about the last week, remember the three views that we talked about were classical, evidential, presuppositional.
Well, they also have two other views on there as well. And it has each of the persons who ascribe to those views putting their positions out and then they interact with one another. They ask or they challenge one another.
Yes.
Is it?
Okay.
So if you don't want to, if you don't want to do scribed, go to Hoopla, which is a, it's put out by the library, right?
Yeah.
So again, I'm not telling you to do this in lieu of your current reading. I'm saying to help you with your current reading. I know that it's a lot to digest. And so if you can find better ways to get the information, I'm all for that.
I just want, it's not about getting through with the book. It's about getting the book through to your brain. And so sometimes tools help us do that.
And without, without a doubt, for sure, again, it is, it is certainly that. So last week I also began sending out emails. This is the first class that I have really focused on sending out a lot of emails.
How many of you received my, how many of you got my emails this week? Did anybody not get my emails?
I got one.
I sent an email that had the overview of the last class, including classical presuppositional and evidential definitions. Did you not get that one?
No. Okay.
That, that was the first email I sent out. It was a welcome to class. Here's what we talked about in the first class. Here's the definition of that. And then I sent another one that had a article about the transcendental argument from Dr.
Frame.
That was an article that I was encouraging you guys to look at. So just the reason why I'm bringing up the email is if you're, if I know some of you may not have access to a computer all the time, but for this class, it's going to be more important because I am going to be sending out things.
I'm going to have less handouts and more digital sending it, send outs. This time handouts take paper, they take time, you know, all that, but it's easier if I just send you something, you can have it on your computer, you can put it in a file, you can keep it or you can print it if you want a hard copy of it.
All right.
So.
Who did the email come from?
Email would have come from MK Foskey at Yahoo. No, it would, it comes from my own, I use MK Foskey general or Foskey Jacks at Gmail. I have an email server. I forget sometimes where I'm sending it from.
MK Foskey. MK Foskey is me. Medford Keith Foskey. Yeah, that's, that's, that's me.
So we're ready to begin tonight.
Well, I need it. I need help tonight. My clock is broken. So I need a timekeeper. I need some, I need somebody to tell me when we hit about, what time is it now?
Wow.
We're way into where we need to be. Tell me when we get to around 715 and then do you mind? I mean, just that tells me where I'm at.
Thank you.
Tonight we are going to be talking about the subject, the myth of neutrality. If you have your notes, take out a piece of paper, write at the top, the myth of neutrality. That is the subject of tonight's lesson.
And we are going to begin with the biggest question in human history. And I don't, that is not, and that is not hyperbole. We are going to begin with the biggest question in human history.
I'm going to write it on the board.
I'll wait for the oohs and the ahs and then we will begin to address the question. Biggest question in human history is, what is truth? What is truth? In John chapter 18, the Lord Jesus Christ is facing Pontius Pilate.
Pontius Pilate is questioning Jesus and at one point Jesus says, I came to bear witness to the truth and Pontius Pilate scoffs at Jesus and says, what is truth? What is truth? That is John 1835, or I'm sorry, John 1838.
And so tonight we are going to begin by trying to understand the answer to that question because while I think a lot of people may have some idea of what it is, I think that oftentimes we really don't think about how we define truth but rather we take truth for.
Granted.
We say, well, I know what the truth is, but how do you know and what is it? That's the whole, that's the whole, really the whole heart of this. Apologetics is really a defense of truth. You know, what does Peter tell us?
You know, be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within you. Well, you don't hope for something that's not true. You hope for something that is true and therefore it's a defense of truth as much as it is a defense of the faith.
And so we ask, what is truth? The other day I was riding with my wife and my wife is my favorite student as you probably can imagine. She and I have many good conversations about the Bible and other things and we're riding in the car and I just said, I was telling her about this class.
Oftentimes she gets to classes before you guys do. You know, I'll go through my material with her as we're going about our daily lives. And I said to her, I said, I said, I'll ask you a question and tell me how you would answer.
I said, what is truth? And the great presuppositionalist, my wife, she said the Bible. That was her answer. And I, and I said, no, that's not the question I'm asking. That really wasn't, really wasn't the answer I wanted, even though it's probably the best answer she could have given.
I said, that's, that's not what I'm asking. I said, what is truth? And she said, the Bible, it's like she was, she, she wasn't going to budge. And she, you know, and then she quoted scripture, sanctify them with their truth.
Thy word is truth.
Boom.
And I was like, okay, you got me twice. One, you gave me the best answer you could and two, your second answer was with scripture.
References.
So I was proud, but still not satisfied because that wasn't the answer I was asking. Ed, you wanted to say something?
I mean, on a, on a strictly human level, you could say there's subjective and object truth.
But that's not the question.
Oh, okay.
The question is, what is truth?
I wasn't trying to split hairs.
I know, but the question is, if I said, what is red? You'd have to give a definition, right? It's a color. It's in the hue of this. It's this. You would, you'd have to, you'd have to define it somehow.
So when I say, what is truth, I'm asking for a definition of truth. That's, that's, I'm not saying what is true. The Bible is true. So yes, but I'm saying, what is the definition of truth? And if we're asking the definition of truth, we're also asking the definition of how do we arrive at truth.
And so this is the, this really is the heart of apologetics. Because when someone says to you, well, I don't know if I believe in God. What they're saying is, I don't know if belief in God is true or if God's existence is true or what you believe about God is true.
Maybe what he believes about God, which is different than yours, maybe it's true. Maybe yours is false, right? That's the, the concept is, is true. There has definition. And so I want to, I want to propose to you a, and don't hate on it, because I'm going to use a philosophical term, and Jackie and I talked about philosophy last night.
There are theories of defining truth. And the one that I am most moved by is called the correspondence theory of truth. So let me write this down. The correspondence theory of truth. Now that is not the only theory.
There are other theories such as the coherence theory, the consensus theory, the pragmatic theory, the relative theory of truth, and that's the one you were talking about, Ed. Truth is subjective, therefore truth is relative.
That's a different theory. The correspondence theory of truth is this. That truth is what corresponds to reality. Truth is what corresponds to reality. Therefore, if I say it is true that God exists, what I am saying is that corresponds to reality.
Does that make sense? God really exists. If I say it is true that God exists, I'm saying it corresponds to what is real. Truth is what corresponds to what is real. That's called the correspondence theory of truth.
Correspondence. Truth is what corresponds with what is real. So here's where it becomes circular, though. You remember in your book when you read about circular arguments? Because now we're going to see truth is what corresponds to what is true.
Because what is what is real is what is true. So it's still circular in that regard, but we haven't gotten there yet. That's actually a little further down. My point is the correspondence theory says truth is what corresponds to what is real, or what is, what exists, what actually is.
So if I said you're here tonight, right, Rebecca, is that true or corresponds to reality? Therefore, it's true. If you weren't there and I were talking to the air and I said it's true that you're here, it would be untrue or it would be false, right?
So truth is first and foremost that which corresponds to what is real. But now I want to ask a question. If the correspondence theory is correct, and I think that's how most of us think of what is true.
True is what is real. I think that's how our mind is built to work. That truth is what corresponds to what is real. If somebody said it's true that you went out last night to Burger King and got a Big Mac at midnight because you had a sweet or a hunger pain.
Mike, is that true? No, I don't know. Maybe it is. But is it? No, it's not true. So it's so it doesn't correspond to reality. So when we talk about truth, truth is what is real. Truth is what corresponds to reality.
This is this is foundational because of the next statement I'm going to make. The next statement is this. There's a presupposition in that statement. And I'll give you 100 cool points if you can tell me what the presupposition is.
By the way, cool points are worth nothing. Not that not that not that statement. When I say truth is what corresponds to what is real. What am I presuming? No, because we're not talking about God yet.
We're just saying truth. Truth is what corresponds to what is real. What is it? You're right on the edge that I can know what's real. The presupposition of the correspondence theory is that I can know what is real.
Because if I say truth is what corresponds with reality, then I have to be able to assume that I can know what is real and what isn't. I can know what's real.
And what is it?
Because I say truth is what corresponds with reality. And then I have to say I have to be able to know what's real for that to work. Oh, it can go a lot deeper. But what are you thinking? Okay, because actually there is a deeper line.
I didn't really want to go here, but since you asked. Truth is what corresponds to reality from any perspective. And so it becomes God's perspective that determines reality. For instance, if I look at a flower and to me it's red because I may be colorblind.
And to you it's green because you may have a different color sense. Then our perspective is different. This is where we get to relative truth, right? Because at that point the truth is relative to our eye's ability to understand color,.
Right?
Our eye's ability to translate color to our brain. And therefore there is a perspective that comes into the correspondence theory. Because determining what's real, there still has to be a subject to make the determination of what is real.
And so when we say the correspondence theory of reality, or excuse me, the correspondence theory of truth is that truth is what corresponds to reality from God's perspective. God is the one who determines what is true.
So yeah, there is a deeper... I didn't really want to go there. But there is a further... Yes, there's more to it.
I'm just...
Here's my point in all this. When we start to discuss concepts such as truth, we have to understand that even in our own conversation, even in the very language that we use, we're presuming certain things.
When I say truth corresponds to reality, I'm presuming that I can know what reality is. And so there's a presupposition even in my definition of what it means to know that something is true. That's why I'm a presuppositionalist.
That's why I am... While I appreciate classical apologetics and evidential apologetics, I can't get away from the very foundational presuppositions that allow me to even have a conversation about these things.
We've all been talking about the transcendental argument. We're going to get to this later. But really, the transcendental argument is basically this. There are things that rise above or transcend our thinking that make our thinking work.
The laws of logic allow us to think properly. And those laws of logic are what allow us to be able to have coherent thought. And so those logical presuppositions are necessary to even understand anything.
We're going to talk later about the laws of logic. I'm actually going to bring in a chart to show you some of these things. But the point of it is, we all have presuppositions. I'll tell you two stories.
Two stories that maybe help clarify some things. The first one you've probably heard, but if you've heard it before, don't ruin it for anybody. It's a good story. There was a man who believed that he was dead.
You've heard this story?
Okay. All right.
Well, there was a man who believed that he was dead. And he was so convinced that he was dead that he told his wife and his children, I have died. And yet he was very much alive, able to say, I've died.
He was able to walk around and breathe. And yet he was convinced that he was dead. So his wife, thinking he has maybe something wrong in his brain, says, you need to go to the doctor. The doctor will prove to you that you are still alive.
You're not dead. And so he goes to the doctor. And the doctor begins to explain to him all of the things that separate living people from dead people. You're breathing. Your heart's beating. Everything is working.
Your eyes are open. You're able to communicate. You are still alive. You're not dead. And the guy says, no, I'm dead. I know I'm dead. I'm fully convinced in my own deadness. And the doctor had a brilliant idea.
He said, I'm going to prove it to him beyond a shadow of a doubt, because dead people do not bleed. I don't know if you know that, but Bobby and I worked in the funeral home. We knew that, because when you cut a cadaver, it doesn't bleed like a living human does.
And he took him to the textbooks. He opened his textbook. And he had him read the portion where it says dead people do not bleed. He proved to him beyond a shadow of a doubt dead people don't bleed. And the guy finally admitted.
He says, you're right. Dead people don't bleed. To which time the doctor pulled out a needle from his desk and poked him in the arm. And as he poked him in the arm, blood began to profusely run out of the hole in his arm.
And he looked down. He says, well, look at that. Dead people bleed after all. You see, the heart of the story is presupposition. He has already determined what it is he is going to believe. And no amount of evidence is going to change his mind.
Now, this is why tonight is called the myth of neutrality. Because we think often that when we're talking to the unbeliever, that we're talking to a person who is neutral. But we're not. We're talking to a person who already has a worldview that has been formed by all kinds of different things in opposition to the biblical worldview.
And so that's the first story. I told you that was the first story. Now, did you have your hand up, Janice?
OK.
Now, I want to tell you a second story. This one happened to me. So the first one was a... That story has been around forever, the man who thought he was dead. But there's an even better story because it happened here.
Happened in what used to be my counseling room down the hallway there. I was asked to counsel with a man who was having some issues. And he came to my office. He was not a believer. But I was still asked to counsel with him, and I did.
And when he sat down, I began to talk to him about faith in Christ and about the gospel. And he told me, he said, I cannot have faith because faith is an emotion and I do not have emotions. That was the statement he made to me.
He said, I cannot have faith because faith is an emotion and I don't have emotions. And so I want to make a long story very short. I started to probe. What do you mean you don't have emotions? Well, I was born without that part of my brain.
And I just don't emote. I am everything is logical. Everything is rational. I don't I never have emotions. Everything to me is logical and rational. This is a true story. This is absolutely how it happened.
It was not Mr. Spock, but that's funny. So we continue through the conversation. And my first approach was to prove that faith is not an emotion. I said you had faith when you sat in that chair. Well, I checked it before I sat down.
You had faith when you drove here. You trusted your brakes would stop your car. Well, I put those brakes on the car. I said, dude, you I said I can press this as far as you want to go. But eventually we're going to go to somewhere where you had to have faith.
Faith is not an emotion. Faith is trust. And that's not the same thing as an emotive response. I said, but let me just try something else. And I made him mad. I didn't punch him, but I did make him very angry.
And I said, you are having an emotion. No, I'm not. I said, you are angry. No, I'm not. I said, you want to punch my lights out right now. I can see it in your eyes. You are angry with me. Well, anybody would with the way you're talking to him because I was being ugly.
I was purposefully trying to make him mad, which was dangerous because he was not exactly a sane dude. But I'm at this point, I was, you know, I was prepared for whatever would come. But I began to really push him to his emotional point to show him that he was lying to himself.
And he never did agree that he had emotions because he was convinced that he didn't, even though I made him angry and to the point where he really did want to hit me. So what does that story tell us? Presuppositions are powerful.
And everybody has them. Everybody has them. You see, evidentialists, and I'm not saying they're terrible, no good people. I love my evidentialists. You know, I love guys like Josh McDowell. He wrote the book Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
If you've never read it, I commend it to your reading. It's a good book. Yeah, that's Josh McDowell as well. You know, these are evidentialists. I don't necessarily agree with their methodology, but some of their writing is very helpful and very good.
And the rationalists, you know, I've been really looking into the apologists of the past, you know, Anselm and Blaise Pascal and people like that, and seeing some of these classical arguments that were made.
And I can really be appreciative of the groundwork that these guys laid. But at the end of the day, they all believe that they can know what is real based upon the preponderance of the evidence. Remember what we said?
Truth is what corresponds to what is real. How do we know what's real? By the evidence. That's what evidentialism is. That's what rationalism ultimately is, is that we arrive at what is real based on the.
Evidence.
But here's the problem with evidence. Evidence is always subject to interpretation. Write that down. Write that in your notes. Evidence is always subject to interpretation. No one looks at a piece of evidence completely neutral.
Remember tonight's what's the title of tonight? Myth of Neutrality. No one looks at evidence completely neutral. Two men can look at the same piece of evidence and come away with vastly different conclusions.
Why?
Because they arrive at the evidence with their preconceived opinion. How many of you? I don't know his name. Bobby mentioned him to me the other day. Who's the science guy who comes to set free? Dr. John, right?
Is he a doctor? He's a professor.
But he teaches on science in the Bible. And he talks about, you told me about the thing where you have two guys, you have one piece of evidence, two guys, and you have two conclusions. Because what's different is not the evidence.
What's different is the presupposition going into the evidence, right? When a man looks at a rock, this rock has to be 700 ,000 years old because the other rocks are 700 ,000 years old. How do you know the other rocks are 700 ,000 years old?
Because that one is. Again, the whole idea of circular argument, right? We know this one is, so we're going to say those are. How do we know those are? Because this one is. And I know it doesn't seem that simple, but when you really begin to listen to what they're saying, I'll give you one of the best examples.
Dr. Richard Dawkins, atheist, famous atheist. In the film Expelled, which was put out, Ben Stein, he went around and talked to different people who had been put out of the Academy for teaching intelligent design.
And he talked to them about their stories. If you've never seen Expelled, it's probably free. You can probably find it online. And it's worth the two hours that it takes to watch it. At the end of the movie, he interviews Richard Dawkins.
And he asked Richard Dawkins how he believes life came about on this planet. Richard Dawkins says, of course, I believe it evolved. He's an evolutionary biologist. Certainly believes it evolved. He says, yes, but what was the primer?
What was the cause of the starting point? Evolution has changed. Therefore, it has to have something to change. What was the starting point? And Richard Dawkins' answer was, we don't know. It could have been aliens.
Could have been aliens that seeded the planet. However, what we do know is that if those aliens did exist, they came about through Darwinian evolution. I'm not exaggerating. If you go back and listen to it, that's exactly what he said.
He said, we don't know how it happened. But even if it were aliens, those aliens came about through evolution. He is so committed to his presupposition that even in the farthest reaches of his example, he's going to maintain his presupposition.
And they'll tell you you're a fool if you maintain your belief in the Bible. You see the point? They are going to maintain their presupposition even when it's ridiculous.
That's...
See, the key to presuppositionalism is not just that we presuppose the Bible, but that we point out what the other person is presupposing. No one is neutral. Everyone is coming to the conversation with a preconceived idea.
Therefore, you find it. What is your presupposition? And you look for it and you, for lack of a better term, you exploit it. This is what you're presuming is true. You're presuming you can know what's real.
Again, that's a correspondence theory of truth, right? Is that it corresponds to what's real? You presume you know what's real. Remember what we said last week? What was C .S. Lewis? Why would I trust my brain if I didn't think it was made to think?
If I didn't think my brain was created for thinking, why would I trust my thoughts? I have to presume my brain was created to do what it's doing to trust that it's doing it right. This is such a small sentence, but with such a world-changing thought.
So when we think about evidential... As we move on now, I want to propose three things. I want to discuss the distinction between three concepts. The first concept is rationality. The second concept is probability.
And the third concept is certainty. Rationality, probability, certainty. Now, I'm not going to write this on the board, but if you want to put this in your notes, I'll give you a quick definition. Rational or rationality is that which obeys the laws of logic and reason.
That which obeys the laws of logic and reason. Probability is that which is most likely to be the case. That which is most likely to be the case. Certainty is something which is objectively true. That which is objectively true.
So rationality is that which obeys the laws of logic and reason. Probability, something which is most likely to be the case. That which is most likely to be the case. And certainty is that which is objectively true.
So now let's talk about it. When we say something is rational, it doesn't mean it's true. It just means it obeys the laws of reason. So for instance, if I said that it is rational that last night while I was asleep, thieves came to my house and took my truck for a joyride.
And they drove it around Callahan, committed some crimes, knocked over some mailboxes, that's what I was trying to say. They really had a little crazy time in my truck.
What?
Well, and then they went and they put the gas back in it that they had used on their joyride and they put it right back where it was. So that when I got up this morning, I knew not whether it had gone or not.
Is it rational? Meaning, does it comport with logic and reason that that could be? Could that have happened?
Logically, there's nothing that says it doesn't violate the law of non-contradiction, doesn't violate any sense of what could be, right? So it could have happened. Now my question, the next question, is it probable?
No, it probably didn't happen. And it, huh? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. If I came out and my truck was all messed up, that would increase probability. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the, but the rational doesn't make it probable.
And I hope you see in a moment where I'm going with this, because we've been talking about three different ways to do apologetics. The first one is the classical way. What does the classical do?
Rational.
It's the rational view. Rational doesn't make it true. Just because it could be doesn't mean it is. Just because it comports with the laws of logic and reason doesn't mean it actually is, right? So rational simply means it obeys the laws of logic and reason.
Probable is different. I'll give you an example. And I tested these on Bobby, so he already knows. Bobby and I talked earlier today, and I was giving him these examples to see if he would agree with me that these are decent enough examples.
Because I didn't get these out of a book. These just came out of my endless array of nonsense in my brain. But I imagine, I said, well, imagine every week, Miss Chrissy, who is our church cleaning person, every week she dumps my trash can.
Every week she comes into my office and she dumps my trash can, usually on Friday, sometimes on Saturday. But by Sunday morning, I have an empty bin, right? And that's how I start my week, with an empty bin.
That's very satisfying, to have an empty bin. And so if I come in on Sunday morning and I see an empty bin, I can, the laws of reason dictate that it could have been Chrissy. And the law of probability dictate that it probably was Chrissy.
But it could have been Miss Kelly. Because there have been times where the lady who helps with our finances here at the church, sometimes she'll help clean up the office a little bit. And it could have been her.
So probability doesn't equal certainty. So how do I move from the rational, it could, it obeys the laws of reason, and it's probable it was probably Chrissy. How do I know? Well, I can ask Chrissy, hey, did you throw away my trash?
Yes, I did. Now I know for certain. Unless I assume in some way that she's a liar. Unless I assume that she's, and I have no reason to believe that. So I can exercise what I would say a degree of absolute certainty.
If she tells me it's true, I have no reason to disbelieve her. Somebody might say, that's not real certainty. I think it is, at least in the sense that she would have no reason to lie. There's no benefit for her to tell me something untrue in that case.
And in that sense, I think I could exercise a certain degree of certainty. Certain degree. I can be certain. So when we talk about certainty, we are saying that this is something that we know is true.
Rather than something that is probable or something that is merely rational. And a rational argument for God says that belief in God is supported by logic and reason. Of course it is. A probable argument for God says that the evidences support the existence of God.
But neither of them reaches the level of certainty. Dr. William Lane Craig, one of the most famous apologists in the world right now. He's in that Five Views book, if you look at it. He was asked, I've heard him say this, and it was on video.
He was asked, are you certain that God exists?
He said, no.
I will tell you this. That's the difference between evidentialist and presuppositionalist. The presuppositionalist begins with the certainty that God exists. You say, how can we be certain? Because God has made it so.
Cornelius Van Til actually said this. And again, Cornelius Van Til, you'll read about him in Dr. Frame's book. He said, we cannot deal in the probable when it comes to God. Because God has so given us a revelation of himself that we are not in the realm of probability, but in the realm of certainty.
And this is where you're going to open your Bibles. Open your Bibles with me to Romans chapter 1.
715.
Hey, I am actually where I want to be. So thank you so much. I'm cooking with gas. Thank you. I'm looking forward to one of them donuts on the break, just so you know, if there's any left. I didn't get one before class, so I'm holding off.
So in Romans chapter 1, we read something very important. And I believe this section of Romans 1 is the great apologetic section. I think this should, I think this passage should inform our apologetic to a great deal, if not to the greatest extent, because of what it says about the natural person.
It says in verse 18, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature.
Have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. Now we're going to go on to the rest of it in a moment, but just stop right there.
What do we learn from this passage? We learn that all men are suppressing a truth that they know. Instinctively, that all men are suppressing a truth that they know inherently. When we speak to a person who claims to be an atheist, how much evidence does he need to know that God exists?
None. He already has enough. According to this text, if this text is true, and I'm presuming that it is, I've already said that. This text tells me that he already has enough evidence to know that God.
In fact, it tells me more than that. It says not only does he know that God exists, he knows the true God because he knows of his eternal power and divine nature. For these things are perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.
And so much so, and this is where I say it's certain because no one is judged only on what is rational and probable. People are judged on what is certain. For instance, if you go before a judge and he says, Daisy, it's rational that you stole Keith's truck last night and went for a joyride and filled the gas tank up and brought it back to his house and left it.
It's certainly rational that you could have done that. And you know what, Daisy, knowing you the way I do is probable. OK, that's not true. But you understand the point. We can make an argument for rationality and probability, and it's still not true.
So you can't be judged on something that's not without a shadow of a doubt.
Right.
And then we say in the courtroom, they have to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. That's why you have 12 people in a jury box. And even if one has an issue that it can cause an issue, you have to prove it.
Everybody right beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yes, sir.
B .J.
Well, OK, well, I'm sorry. I'm unaware of the current. That's why I asked Janice. She knows she's she's been around it. She's going to school for it. But the point I'm making is we don't judge on probability or mere rationality.
We judge on certainty, at least as certain as we can be. And God says he is going to judge us not on what is rational or what is probable, but on what we know for certain. Therefore, when we speak to the unbeliever, he is not merely a neutral bystander who just happens to not believe in God.
But he is a person who is currently and actively sitting in rebellion against the knowledge that God has made clear to him or her. I have a T-shirt I made that I made it for an apologist and he uses it in his stuff.
But I made it. I made the design. It says, I know. How do I know God exists? Same way you do. That's what the shirt says. How do I know God exists? Same way you do. So may ask me, how do you know God exists?
The same way you do. His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived in the things that have.
Been made.
Therefore, thou art without excuse, old man. That's not what it says. I'm going to King James. But you understand, that's the starting point. Presuppositionalism does not deny evidences. But what it says is that men already have enough evidence.
We can point them to it. We can we can say you're closing your eyes to what you see, just like I think I told the story last week about the man that I visited in the hospital. Did I tell that story last week?
Maybe I told it in church. The man I visited in the hospital, he said it was an atheist. And I remember sitting in the room with him and talking to him. And I ended up that I usually tell the whole story.
The whole story is he didn't like my preaching because I talk about hell. That was when I told the stories when I was preaching on hell. Jackie heard it. She hears everything I say more than once. But in that same conversation, I remember saying to the man, I said, look at that building.
Out there.
I said, you see the building across the way? And he said, yes. I said, do you know that building had a builder? And he said, well, sure. I said, how do you know? He says, because the building is there.
I said, so you're telling me the builder had a the building had a builder, but creation didn't have a creator. Now, again, am I appealing to an evidence? Yes, I am. But I'm appealing to an evidence based on a presupposition that I already know is true.
And that is he knows and can see that evidence for himself and is suppressing it. So what I'm doing is he's it's like a spring that he's pushing down and I'm reaching up and I'm tickling his hand to get him to kind of to get him to where he's not pushing so.
Hard.
You are suppressing that truth. And I'm just simply moving your hand. You already know it's true. And I'm just pointing out what you already know is true.
Yeah, but I don't remember how I said it. I want to remind me, you know, everybody, everybody battles with doubt and things like.
That.
But even that is our is, yeah, it's suppression of the truth. We know God exists. So even in our doubts, that is a that is part of our sinful nature. See, next week, we're going to talk about the noetic effect of the fall that we didn't.
We're not going to get to it tonight. But the noetic effect of the fall is the Greek word new us, which is the word for the mind. The fall affected our thinking. Our very ability to think properly has been affected by sin.
And so that's that's next week, though. But yes, so our doubts and all of these things, these are it's part of that. It's part of our suppression of the truth. And so let's just I want to finish this paragraph.
Notice what it says in verse 21. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened, claiming to be wise, they became fools.
Boy, if that doesn't explain so much of academia today, claiming to be wise, they became fools. They're wise enough to split the atom, but not wise enough to tell the difference between a boy and a girl claiming to be wise.
They became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So what what does man do naturally in his suppression? He replaces God with idols.
This is why most people you talk to in your apologetic endeavors, most people you talk to are not atheists. I can tell you that from hundreds of conversations I've had over the years, especially going out on evangelism activity.
When I go to the fishing hole and I do those things, and when I go out and talk to people at the beach or wherever we go, when I go with Mike Collier and he's preaching, I'm handing out tracts of conversations I have.
Very rarely does someone say, I don't believe God exists. It's almost always something, you know, well, I'm a Muslim or I'm a Buddhist or whatever. It's very rarely because people and remember this presuppositionalism is not just the presumption that God exists.
It's a presumption that the Christian God exists. It's a presumption that the Bible is true. So presuppositionalism doesn't just arrive us at the evidence for God. By the way, evidentialism tends to only get you to the existence of God.
The greater preponderance of the evidence points to the belief that God might exist. That's where evidence gets you.
He might.
The probability is higher that he might. Presuppositionalism, no. We start with scripture. We start with the God of the Bible. And we work our way out from there. And so when we deal with anybody from a different faith, it's still presuming the truth of scripture.
And so an understanding that a person who's believing in a false God is not neutral. They are suppressing the truth and unrighteousness. You say, how can you say that two billion Muslims are suppressing the truth?
That's a harsh statement. Well, let's just from a biblical perspective. Let me finish my thought and I'll answer your question. Go just to the Bible. When Paul would go into Athens and speak to the philosophers on the Areopagus, he spoke to them and he says, you know God.
You even got a statue to the unknown God. You know God exists in the God that you know I'm going to proclaim to you. The God that you say you don't know is the one that I'm proclaiming to you. He didn't go in and say, okay, guys, I realize you're all neutral philosophers here.
And we're going to start from a point of neutrality. And we're all going to reason our way to the belief in Jesus. No, he came in and proclaimed Jesus as his starting point. Okay, Mike, go ahead.
Would you say that the reason they suppress the truth about God is the result of God's judgment on them, the wrath of God? Because this whole thing for me, this is for the wrath of God revealed from heaven.
This whole chapter or paragraph is about the revelation of God's wrath from heaven.
Yes, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness have been who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. The judgment of God in the fall is certainly part of that.
But it's also somewhat reciprocal. We fall and we're sinners and then through sin incur judgment. And so it's somewhat cause and effect.
Their foolish hearts were darkened.
Yeah, and that's why I say later in verse 26, therefore, God gave them up. And then in verse 20 later, it says the same thing. I have to look. It's in verse 26 and verse 24. God gave them up. And so there's a sense in which that's an act of judgment, too.
So there's so that's it's almost like it compounds. We're judged. We were fallen. We're sinners. And we we suppress the truth in that sin by suppressing the truth. We become idolaters. And through that, idolatry incur more judgment.
And I think the revelation of God's wrath is the giving them up and giving them over to more debased minds.
I know the hardening of the heart is suppressing of the truth is a hardening of the heart. And God hardens the heart. The gospel of the Holy Spirit hardens the heart. And so in that case, wouldn't it like when these foolish hearts were darkened?
God does the darkening.
Yes, I would agree. I would agree with that and hardening. We could discuss the difference between a person who is willingly blind. I've talked about this on my podcast, a person who literally holds a hand over their eyes, you know, which is what the natural man does.
He will not see. It's not just that he cannot see, but he will. He's willingly unwilling. Like the kid who runs down the road with his fingers in his ear going, la, la, la, la, la, because he doesn't want to hear.
Isn't that kind of like suppression of the truth?
It is.
It's suppression of the truth. But then you have something called judicial hardening, which is where there are certain passages of scripture where God actually acts on a person and takes away their ability.
So at this point, it's no longer holding hands. It's like plucking out the eyes. And so there are different levels of that, as we see in scripture. And I think we have to be careful to categorize things rightly.
We can say all men are by nature suppressing the truth because of their relationship to.
Adam.
They're in sin. Therefore, they're suppressing the truth. And it takes the work of the Holy Spirit to overcome that. But some men in that suppression continue into idolatry and through that idolatry can become judicially hardened, such as with Pharaoh.
Pharaoh had think of how much revelation Pharaoh had. If anybody should have been convinced by evidence, it was Pharaoh, right? Pharaoh had had one piece of evidence after the other, after the other, after the other.
I mean, river turns to blood, frogs everywhere, you know, all these things. And yet he wasn't convinced. And what does it say in the text? It says God hardened him. So so there so there is an act of that.
BJ, you had a.
How are we on time, Janice?
730.
Um, has tonight been helpful in clarifying some of what I was saying?
Good.
Every week I hope to make it a little a little more understandable. But but I want to finish with this and then we'll take our break. And then afterwards, we're going to talk about the reading presupposition.
Presuppositionalism does not deny the existence of evidence. We simply say that that all evidence is interpreted through our presupposition. So I'm going to read a quote from Greg Bonson and then we're going to close for a break.
This is kind of a it's a paragraph. So kind of stay with me. In popular misconception today, the choice of an apologetical method facing a Bible believing Christian is between arguing presuppositionally or appealing to evidences from history and nature to support Christianity.
But that is entirely wrong. Sounds like he's disagreeing with me, but he's not. He'll agree with me. Just stay presuppositional apologetics endorses and indeed encourages the use of evidences, but not evidences offered in the traditional manner as an appeal to the authority of the unbelievers.
Autonomous reasoning. You see what the evidentialist does is says you're neutral. Therefore, we'll make you the judge. And he's not neutral. He's suppressing the truth. Therefore, he has no right to judge.
God judges him. He doesn't get to judge God. You see, evidentialists make man the judge. And that's part of the problem. Continuing on, unbelievers who are self-conscious in their autonomy will fight against the force of the facts to which we can appeal in favor of the Bible's veracity.
When unbelievers resist the factual arguments which apologists can and should readily set before them to confirm or defend the Christian position. Van Til said we must then realize and take seriously.
Listen to this. This is the primary. The battle is not one primarily of this factor of that fact. The battle is basically with respect to a philosophy of facts. No one can be a scientist in any intelligible way without at the same time having a philosophy of reality as a whole.
You see what he's saying is you have to first come to the conversation with a presupposition about reality. What is real? Well, truth is what is real. But what is truth? Truth is what is real. Who gets to determine what's real?
Who knows what's real? And how do we know? Goes back to the first question. We start with the presupposition that God has revealed himself and that's how we know what is real.
We're going to take our break now and we'll come back and we'll discuss the book.