Intro to Presuppositionalism

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A basic primer on the presuppositional method of apologetics

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So, this morning I'm going to talk to you guys about presuppositional apologetics. I know if you've hung around this church for any length of time, you've probably heard those two words together, and maybe you don't quite understand what they mean.
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So, today it's going to be very basic. I'm just going to try to show you in real easy layman terms what presuppositional apologetics is about.
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So, this morning I'm going to go over what it is, where it is, and why does it matter.
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Obviously, what it is is going to describe it. Where is it in the scriptures? If I teach you something that's not in the scriptures, what good is that to you?
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You know, we need to hear what God has to say about these things. And then why does it matter? How is this going to affect how we evangelize and share the faith with unbelievers?
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So, real quick, what is apologetics? What does the word apologetic mean, or apologetics mean?
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This is the interactive portion of the talk. Please feel free to... What does the word apologetics mean?
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A defense, right? Apologetics equals a defense. And where is the go -to verse for all apologists?
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Where do they get that from? 1 Peter 3 .15, right?
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Always be prepared to give an answer for the hope that lies within you with gentleness and respect. And that given answer is the word defense.
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We're here to defend the Christian faith when someone asks us.
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So, now, we understand what the word apologetics means. But what does this word presuppositional mean?
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Oh, and I just showed you. What does the word presuppositional mean? Anybody want to take a guess?
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Anybody want to presuppose an answer? Trying to help? Alright.
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Presupposition is a basic assumption about reality.
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A fact taken for granted at the beginning of an argument. And basically what it comes down to, a presupposition is your foundation.
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It's really your worldview, your ultimate authority. What do you start with in order to establish your argument?
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What are the things that you take for granted in talking to somebody that you hold true to?
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That you don't necessarily give an answer for up front. Everyone has a presupposition.
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Whether you're a believer or an unbeliever, no one is neutral. Everyone is coming to the facts that we see in this world from a point of view.
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And we need to remember that because everyone has a worldview, a point of view, and is pushing it on you.
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Whether you realize it or not. How you live your life is a commercial for your worldview.
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The way you act is the basic assumptions that you're living by and trying to put them forth in the world.
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Did you have a question? There's no such thing as brute facts. And I heard it said this way.
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Brute facts are mute facts. Facts don't speak. Science doesn't tell us anything.
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Scientists do. So it all depends on the worldview or the point of view of the person looking at the facts that are going to give you what they think about them.
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And we're actually going to get into some of that. So when we talk about your presupposition, it's your basic assumption about reality.
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What are you standing on? What is your foundation? Apologetics is much like building a house.
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Everybody wants to build a house. You get the plans to draw the house. Nobody ever asks about the foundation. What are we putting this house on?
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Are we putting it on quicksand? Are we putting it in the middle of the ocean? Or are we putting it on a concrete foundation that's not going to move?
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Your foundation is what you're ultimately building your house on. And your foundation is ultimately going to tell us whether your worldview fails or succeeds.
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It has to have a good foundation. Everyone, every house needs a foundation.
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So presuppositional apologetics is defending your basic assumption, your ultimate authority, by using your ultimate authority as your foundation.
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So we're defending our foundation from our foundation. And I know what the first question everybody's going to say is, that sounds circular.
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You're arguing in a circle, Anthony. You're saying, this is my foundation, and that's what you're going to defend.
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And what are you going to use to defend it? Your foundation. That's circular. And you're right. But there's two types of circular.
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There's virtuous circularity and vicious circularity. So if I was to tell you, prove to me that your eye works, but don't use your eye.
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How am I going to do that? How am I going to prove to you that my eye works without using my eye to prove it to you?
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See, that's a circular. That's a circle. Right? But that's a virtuous circle, because you can't tell if somebody's eye works unless they use it.
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Read the eye chart. Read the eye chart. If you can read the eye chart, your eye works. If you can't read the eye chart, your eye doesn't work.
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But also understand that there's a standard. We'll use an eye chart. We're going to get to that, too. Right? Think about this.
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What's the goal in baseball? You guys all know what baseball is. Where do you start off in baseball?
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In the back. What? What'd you say? Home plate. Exactly. Everybody starts off at home plate.
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And what's the goal? To get back to home plate. Circular. Right? Apologetics, presuppositional apologetics, is starting at home plate, going around, looking at all the evidence, and ending up on home plate again.
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That's what presuppositional apologetics is. Now, all ultimate authority is circular.
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Think about it. If you need something outside of or above your ultimate authority to verify it, then that would become your ultimate authority.
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So, when the atheists use logic and reason, we ask them, well, what's your basis for logic and reason?
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Well, that's it. That's my ultimate authority. Well, is there anything above logic and reason that you derive logic and reason from?
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The answer is yes. From our point of view, it's God. But if it's an ultimate authority, there can't be anything above it to judge it by, because then that would be its ultimate authority.
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And then it would end up in what's called an infinite regress. Well, if that's your ultimate authority, and this is what you use to judge it, what do you use to judge this?
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Oh, we have another authority on top of that. Well, what do you use to judge this? And then another authority on top of that. At some point, you have to get to the bottom line.
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What is the ultimate authority that nothing else is above? Again, for us, that's going to be
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God, and we can defend that position. We're going to test their foundation. We're going to examine it and prove it futile.
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Okay, so now, what is our ultimate foundation as Christians?
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What's our ultimate presupposition? What is our ultimate presupposition?
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Thank you. The Christian presupposition is that God exists, and the Bible is his word.
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That is our ultimate authority. God is our ultimate authority, and what he tells us in the Scriptures is final.
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God is all -knowing, and whatever he reveals to us in his Scripture is his word.
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It's God -breathed. That's what the Scriptures say. And it's inerrant. If it's
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God's word, it has to be inerrant, if God breathed it out. So, our ultimate authority comes from an omniscient being, a
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God who knows everything, and therefore cannot be wrong, and he becomes the foundation that we build our house on.
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It's very simple. If we use our own reason and our own understanding, there's certainly a possibility that we could be wrong about that.
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And, we have standards by which we can evaluate our reason. So, as human beings, we can be wrong, but God, who's omniscient, knows everything, can't be wrong.
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So, how does that verse read, 1 Peter 3 .15? How does it start off? Set apart reason as Lord of your heart.
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No. Set apart science as the Lord of your heart. Then, you're ready to know.
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Set apart logic as the Lord of your heart. No. Set apart experience.
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You know, I experience this, this is true. No. Scripture says, set apart Christ as the
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Lord of your heart. He is the one we base everything on, because he's God in the flesh.
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He's revealed to us who he is in his word, and he tells us how he defined and how he designed reality.
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The best book. Anybody know the best book you can read on apologetics? The Bible.
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The Bible is the best book you can buy and read about apologetics, because it's God's word.
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It cannot be wrong, and in it, he defines and describes the nature of reality.
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Not only who he is, but who we are, and that's very important. We're going to get to that in a second. I like the way
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John Frame says it. Christian apologetics is the application of biblical truth to unbelief.
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The application of biblical truth to unbelief. So, we take what the scripture says, we talk to the unbeliever, and we just take the scriptures and apply it to his situation.
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And let the Holy Spirit do the work. We don't change hearts, the Holy Spirit does. Our job is to proclaim the truth to him, close his mouth, and let the
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Holy Spirit open his heart. So, we're all good. We're all starting on the foundation of God's word.
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So, that's what it is. I like the way Paul Nelson puts it. He says it like this. Presuppositional apologetics defends the
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Christian's worldview, the entire system of truth, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures.
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Christian theism is to be defended as a unit, as a belief system. The defense of our faith must never compromise the content of our faith.
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It is not a defense against details, but of principle and exposition and vindication of the
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Christian's worldview. And what he's saying is, in here, it's to be defended as a unit.
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In other words, everything that we see in the world, and I said this last night, my daughter had the moving up ceremony, and I explained to her that every fact in this world, like you said, is not a brute fact.
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Every fact is related to something else and points us back to God. There are no arbitrary facts just floating out there, you know, waiting to be defined.
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Everything that God created, he created with a purpose and for a reason. So, there's no fact independent of anything else.
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All these facts are particulars in the universe, and all these particulars are coherent together.
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Such as, he is the universal that binds all the particulars together.
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It's actually where we get the word universe from. It's a unity of diversity. The diversity of all the particulars, all the different facts in the world, and he provides the unity, the coherence, so that when we talk about something in our worldview, it's connected to something else, connected to something else, and we have an ultimate foundation for it in God.
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When the atheist is looking at the facts in the world, they're disconnected.
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Well, morality has nothing to do with science, and science has nothing to do with ethics, and all these things are unrelated.
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Science has nothing to do with history, and history has nothing to do with ethics. It couldn't be further from the truth. You start separating these things, they become subjective.
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Well, this is what science means to me. This is what history means to me. Does this world have ultimate meaning?
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If it has ultimate meaning, it points us back to a God who's given it meaning.
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Otherwise, there is no objective meaning for the world. It's subjective.
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You think it's this, I think it's something else, he thinks it's something else. There's no real meaning for it. It's just subjective meaning.
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Nelson would go on to say, The very nature of presuppositional apologetics is to argue the
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Christian's worldview against that of the unbeliever's worldview. It is to strike at the heart of the unbeliever's belief system.
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In other words, the presuppositions that form the foundation of his worldview. It is to challenge the unbeliever's system of thought to show that the unbeliever cannot make sense out of anything in this world without using the
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Christian worldview. So now the unbeliever starts off with, Well, I believe in logic and reason and science.
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So the question we would ask them is, Well, what's the grounding for logic? Why should we hold to logic?
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Well, because logic helps us to think. Think well. Did you reason to that conclusion?
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Yes. So you used your own logic to say that logic is what we use to understand all of reality.
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Do you see the flaw in that? Again, as sinful human beings, all of our thoughts,
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If your mind, your heart, was a deck of cards, 52 cards,
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Every one of those cards, if you would turn them over, would have some sin stain on them. They're all stained.
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So when you reason with your mind, your reasoning is flawed, because what are you starting off with?
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Yourself. You're starting with yourself as the center of the universe. So although he picks logic, he picks reason, and he understands that because he's created in the image of God, he cannot ground that on his worldview.
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Think about the laws of logic. Are the laws of logic material or immaterial? Uh -oh.
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Immaterial. Are they objective or subjective? Say what?
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Subjective. No. No. So what's true for you is true for you, and what's true for me is true for me.
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Two plus two is five. So are you saying two plus two could be five?
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Okay, no. Would you want to drive over a bridge that was built by an engineer that thought two plus two was three and the bridge doesn't quite get to the other side?
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Objectively, objectively, two plus two is always four. And if somebody says it's five or three, they're marked wrong, unless you're doing
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Common Core, right? So it's immaterial. It's objective.
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Now, where do the laws of logic apply? Just in America? They're universal.
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So they're immaterial, objective, and universal, something that an atheistic, materialistic worldview cannot support.
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I like to use immaterial, objective, and universal because it's the initials IOU. Every time an atheist uses the laws of logic, he's issuing an
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IOU to God. He's borrowing that. He's stealing that from the Christian worldview to try to support his own, but he has no grounding for that because in his worldview, all that exists is the material order.
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He has no basis for immaterial, objective, or universal truths. The bottom line is this. He starts off with himself and reasons to how everything revolves around him.
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The problem is you cannot know anything for certain if you don't start with God. If you start with God, who's the designer, the creator of the universe, and defined his creation, and he's omniscient, and he reveals it to you, well, then you can know for certain that this is what this particular fact means and how it applies in the world.
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If you don't start off with God, you're starting off from a subjective point of view, you're not omniscient, so you can't know for certain if you're right about this particular fact.
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That's why we said, thank you, brute facts are mute facts. Facts don't tell you anything.
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God's word describes those facts and how they relate together. Human beings try to describe those facts and how they relate together.
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Sometimes they come to the right conclusion. Sometimes they come to the wrong conclusion. Look at what science has done with evolution.
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Oh, evolution is a fact. No, it's not, not at all. In fact, the scriptures scream against it.
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God created this world in this way. God created human beings, male and female.
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He didn't create a little cell that split and became this, became this, and just keeps going down the line.
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This special creation for a man and a woman, God created them specifically.
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So science is going to come to a much different conclusion. Why? Because the atheist scientist presupposes that God doesn't exist.
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That's his supposition presupposition. He starts the game by saying God doesn't exist. We start reality with the existence of God.
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Okay, that makes sense. Any questions right now? Good. Okay. All right, let's continue.
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So where is this in scripture? Right? Because again, if I'm telling you something, it's one thing.
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If God's telling you something now, you better listen. So this is not me. I'm just repeating the scriptures for you.
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Colossians 2, it says, in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
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So where do we go for wisdom and knowledge? In Christ. See to it, Paul goes on to say, see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.
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So when we read that verse, set apart Christ as Lord of your heart. It means he sits on the throne of your heart.
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He sits on the throne of your thoughts. Everything has to be run through his filter to understand what it actually means.
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Yes, well, I wouldn't say that that was is the elemental spiritual forces of the world.
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I think this is talking about God's realm is it's all spiritual.
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We are human beings with spirits. There's angelic beings. And how all these things work together,
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I would say, is the elemental spiritual forces of the world. Now, there's demonic forces.
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There's forces that pull us in different ways, although they're it's changed after the resurrection of Christ.
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Satan is bound. He can no longer deceive us as far as who the Christ is and what the plan of salvation is.
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But he can use human beings to go in a different direction.
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He can lay a trap, a snare for them, and they can follow it. And that's how we get to stuff like evolution. Right. Even given the the plain facts of that gird ride against evolution, scientists still try to twist these things and say, no, no, no, no.
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They reinterpret it based on their worldview. Harvard, the top renowned
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Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gold. Okay, he's dead now. But he's a guy who studies fossils.
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So as they're going through the fossil layers, all of all of a sudden, he sees fully formed fossils like at the bottom of the
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Cambrian layers. Now, if evolution was true, you'd have one type of fossil and then it gets better and better and better and better.
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But what they see in the Cambrian layer is fully formed fossils throughout the whole layer. So rather than abandoning the principle of evolution, he says, you know what?
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I still believe in evolution, but I have to reinterpret the evidence based on what I believe. This is punctuated equilibrium.
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A fancy way of saying things popped into existence really quick. We have no explanation, but evolution is true.
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Punctuated equilibrium. The evolution happened really, really fast at a certain point in the history of the earth.
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That's why we see these fully formed fossils. So even given the evidence, seeing fully formed animals, he's going to reinterpret it based on his worldview, his presupposition.
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God doesn't exist. The science I see points to evolution. This must be evolution.
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Follow? Does that help you? Okay. All right. Next scripture.
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For the weapons of our warfare are not of flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.
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We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey
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Christ. Let me ask you something. Where do arguments and opinions take place? Thank you.
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Say it out loud. In your mind, right? You hold opinions in your mind, right?
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You form arguments in your mind. That is where we have to point our attack.
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How do we point our attack and destroy strongholds? These arguments that people have in their minds by proclaiming the truth, by proclaiming the truth of the scriptures.
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This is what the scripture says about this topic. This is what you need to see. You will stand before Jesus and give an account of your life based on what you're thinking right now.
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Right? So we use the truth. That is one of the weapons of our warfare.
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We present it to unbelievers and we pray that the Holy Spirit moves on their hearts. They're not going to understand it until God opens their eyes anyway.
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But that doesn't relieve us of our responsibility of proclaiming the truth. We simply proclaim the truth of God's word in God's world and let the
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Holy Spirit do what He does in the minds and hearts of people. Paul again goes on to say, but I'm afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
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He's saying that Christ is your foundation. That's who we're supposed to be devoted to. That's who we're supposed to listen to.
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Every single thought in our minds must be held captive to what Jesus says about the topic that we're thinking about.
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Our goal is to think God's thoughts after Him. Right? We believe that God is perfect.
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His thoughts are perfect. When our thoughts line up with His thoughts on a particular topic, we'll have perfect understanding of them.
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Not in our stained mind, stained sin minds, but thinking His thoughts after Him is going to give us accurate understanding.
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Wisdom and knowledge come from His lips. Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar?
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Where is the philosopher of this age? Has God, has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
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Right? Our wisdom compared to God's wisdom is foolishness. Again, we're talking about God who's an omniscient being.
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He has all knowledge and reveals it to us such that we can know things for certain.
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I couldn't know anything for certain if I didn't start with God because I'm not omniscient. And my starting point is vastly different than God's.
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I have to sit from His point of view and see things the way He's described them. Paul goes on to say,
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For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
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So people are not going to believe if we give them wisdom. Man does not come to understand and know
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God through wisdom. He comes to understand and know God through the proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus lived according to the
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Scriptures, was crucified, died, buried, rose again on the third day in accordance with the
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Scriptures, sits at the right hand of God the Father, waiting for His enemies to be made a footstool for His feet.
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Jesus is Lord. That's the good news. That's the Gospel. He's ruling and reigning right now.
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You need to bend your knee to Him now or later. Either way, you will. Bend your knee to Him now.
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Confess your sins. Repent of your sins. Trust in Him as Savior. That's the Gospel. That's what opens people's minds and hearts by the power of the
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Holy Spirit. It's not man's wisdom. We're not going to teach people about God and get them to know
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Him, have a relationship with Him, through wisdom. Finally, Psalm 110 and Proverbs 9 -10.
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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Proverbs 2 -6.
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For the Lord gives wisdom from His mouth, come knowledge and understanding. I think I've beat this drum enough at this point.
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We know true wisdom, true knowledge comes from God Himself, not from our interpretation of the facts.
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Now, does that mean that an unbeliever can't know anything? No. He can know things.
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Why? He's created in the image of God. He's given a mind. He's put in God's world.
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Think about math. I think Bonson says it like this. Unbelievers can account for things.
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They can balance their checkbook. The problem is they can't account for accounting. They have no basis for it in their worldview.
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Again, numbers are conceptual. They're abstract. They're immaterial, objective, and universal, which they can't substantiate on their worldview.
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Okay. So, so far we've gone over what it is, where it is in Scripture, and now we're going to talk about why it matters.
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Any questions at this point? We're good? Okay. Why does it matter?
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Because theology matters. Because God's Word matters. Because what God says about a topic and a subject should be what we want to know about that topic and subject.
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So we're talking about presuppositional apologetics. The fact that we have basic assumptions, we hold to a basic assumption.
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God exists and the Bible is His Word. There's also two different other kinds of apologetics. First, one called classical apologetics, which uses philosophical arguments to argue to the existence of God.
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So these guys are going to use reason. They're going to use arguments like the teleological argument, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, which are all good arguments.
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Okay. But they're presenting them to unbelievers and allowing the unbeliever to judge whether this argument is a good argument for the existence of God or not.
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They're not arguing from their foundation and showing them evidence, which is what we do.
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They're arguing from the evidence and trying to point them to God. Now, what did the Bible just say about wisdom and man?
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It comes from God. What does it say about man and knowing God? Man does not know
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God through wisdom. Okay. God has given man enough evidence to know
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He exists, Romans chapter 1. Ever since the creation of the world, God's invisible attributes, His divine nature and eternal power have been clearly perceived through what has been made so that man is without excuse.
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Now, we're going to give them better evidence than God has given them already and try to convince them?
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If God's evidence hasn't convinced them, what makes you think our evidence that we're going to give them is going to convince them?
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It's not going to work. So, although we use evidence, we don't start with evidence and argue to a generic
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God and then try to show them that it's the God of the Scriptures. We argue from the existence of the triune
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God and show them how the evidence lines up with what this God created. Another version of apologetics or another class is called evidential apologetics.
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And they use evidence, the resurrection and fulfilled prophecy, again, to argue to the existence of God.
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So, they start with man and his wisdom and they attempt to give that person evidence so that they can say, wow, yes, this
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God does exist and then place faith in that God. Both argue for a generic
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God and then use a two -step approach to allow the person to judge the evidence and then get to the
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God of the Bible. And I think I spilled my candy in the lobby because this is the verse
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I was going to just show you, okay? The problem with giving the unbeliever evidence is that God has given them evidence already for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.
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So much so that they're without excuse. We know what the word for apologetics is, apologia or apologia, two different ways.
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I don't know which one is right. Apologia. This word, without excuse, is anapologia.
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The word A, like theist, you put the letter A in front, non -theist, this is without an excuse.
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No apology, no defense. People are going to stand before God without a defense. They know that God exists.
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So, the problem is that mankind is sinful, suppresses the truth, and is self -centered.
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This is not an issue of evidence, it's an issue of sin and suppression. Mankind suppresses the knowledge of God because he loves his sin.
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Man is a sinner, suppressing that knowledge of God and apart from God bringing that dead sinner to life, opening his eyes, his heart, they're never going to accept him.
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What do you think a self -centered sinner is going to do with the facts he sees in the world? If he starts off with the fact that God doesn't exist.
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He can do anything he wants with those facts. He can justify them ten ways to Sunday. Man wants to use his own reason as the foundation by which to build his worldview on.
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How are we supposed to build our house? You build your house on the rock, something that can't be moved. If you build your house or your worldview on the foundation of your own reasoning, that's building a house on sand.
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That will never last. I like to use this illustration. Have you ever been at a stoplight and you have your foot on the brake but all of a sudden it feels like you're moving?
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Because the other car is either rolling backwards or forwards and you put your foot on the brake even harder?
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What's the first thing you do after you really press the brake? Why? You're looking to find something that's not moving.
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Once you find something that's not moving, you evaluate yourself in light of that. Okay, I'm not moving. If you didn't find something that wasn't moving, you'd realize you were moving.
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So what does the unbeliever -believer automatically do? You look for a point of reference that does not move and then you evaluate where you are in light of it.
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It's the same thing with us and our apologetic. We need to fix and focus ourselves on something that doesn't move,
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God, and then work our apologetic around God, not ourselves. If we work our apologetic around evidence, well, evidence to you, evidence to you, evidence to you, it's all different, right?
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They are brute facts and everybody has an opinion about them. It's subjective. We have to go to the one
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God whose objective defines it first and reveals it to us. Yes, Chris?
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Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
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And you're going to have a gaggle of different opinions because every human being is sin -stained and has their own opinion about how the world works because they're self -centered.
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It's only until God changes your heart and you're standing on the foundation of Jesus Christ and looking at things the way
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He sees them and the way He defines them that you can know for certain what we know about reality.
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Does that make sense? So the first thing we have to do is look out that window, look to something that's not moving to determine if we're moving.
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If we don't have that objective, concrete point of reference, we're never going to know.
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And that's what the unbeliever has because he's taken the objective point of reference off the table. He has no point of reference except to himself.
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And he'll hold to whatever opinions he has until someone else comes along with their opinions and argues with them and maybe sways them.
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So the only way we can know anything for certain is if we start with God as our foundation.
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That's the way we build a house. Okay, so let's move on.
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The problem is not that the unbeliever needs more evidence. The problem is that the unbeliever needs spiritual life.
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He needs a new heart. A new heart means a new mind. Understanding is the seed of our will, intellect, and emotions.
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Heart and mind are not two different things. They're one thing in the Scriptures. So the unbeliever needs to be brought to life first.
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He needs the Holy Spirit to illuminate the world around him so that he understands what the
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Scripture says about it. He can now read the Scriptures with understanding because the Holy Spirit is illuminating it for him.
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But man has a solution when he looks out at the world. First, man's solution is empiricism. Empiricism is the view that sense experience is the foundation of human knowledge.
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In other words, seeing is believing. So I see it. It must be true. Do you think that works?
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How many times have people seen something that wasn't true? How many times have people made a mistake?
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How many times do people not see past the facts? Look what's going on in society today. This is what
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I saw. Do you know the facts behind what you saw? Do you know the truth of the matter? Seeing is not always believing.
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The next way man tries to solve the problem is rationalism. It's the view that human reason is the final judge over what's true and false, right and wrong.
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Human reason is to be trusted over sense experience. Thinking is believing.
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Now we go to empiricism. Seeing is believing. How many people in the
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Christian church suffer from that? I saw a miracle. God moved.
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I had goosebumps. It was the Holy Spirit. They're going based on that sense experience.
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And then you have rationalists who see everything in the form of arguments.
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Thinking is believing. And what does the rationalist use? He uses logic.
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He uses his own mind to reason to the conclusions not knowing that his own rationality has been stained by sin.
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It's marred. The funny thing is both positions use logic and reason but neither one of those positions can account for it.
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They have no grounding. No foundation for logic or reason.
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Where do the laws of logic come from in a naturalistic atheistic world view? Think about this.
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Without God as the basis for logic and reason argumentation isn't even possible.
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The very fact that we can have an argument and when I say an argument I'm not talking about a shouting match. I'm talking about a reasoned conversation from two different perspectives.
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We're going to argue over something. Argumentation is not possible without the existence of God.
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God should never be the conclusion of the argument because without God argumentation isn't even possible.
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God is the necessary grounding for logic. Make sense? So that's our foundation, that's our base.
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We're going to start with the assumption that God exists and reason from that. So presuppositionalism argues from the existence of God our foundation, to the evidence.
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This is a top -down approach. Very similar to our soteriology. You have
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Calvinists and you have Arminians. What's the difference? Calvinists start with God.
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They understand that God is the source of all life. It's a top -down approach. Arminians start with man as the center.
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Man has the ability to choose. Man has the ability to think and reason correctly and reason to God.
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No. Scripture says over and over and over, man's reasoning is flawed. The things of the spirit are spiritually discerned.
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The man in the flesh cannot know them. There's a list of ten cannots that I list in Scripture all the time on Facebook to people who say, oh, you can get to God.
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I say, no, you cannot. You can't get to God unless He draws you. There's so many different... You cannot see the kingdom of God unless you're born again.
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All these different things. So without God, you couldn't prove anything.
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He supplies what's called the necessary preconditions of intelligibility. Now, I know that's a very big -sounding phrase, the necessary preconditions of intelligibility.
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So I'm going to put up here what Paul Nelson says about it because he describes it and explains it very succinctly and easily.
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He says, the unbeliever's worldview cannot account for the preconditions of intelligibility. Those things that are required in order for us to know anything.
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Preconditions of intelligibility include things like the laws of logic, uniformity of nature, and absolute morality.
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Without a rational basis for the preconditions of intelligibility, the unbeliever cannot really know anything based on his own worldview.
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He can certainly believe things, but he has no way to prove them, and thus he doesn't actually know them based on his own worldview.
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That wasn't Paul Nelson. That was Jason Lyle. My apologies. So the preconditions of intelligibility are the necessary, the things that need to be in place in order for us to know anything.
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In other words, we know what information is. Are all the facts in the world information or not?
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Are all the facts in the world information or not? Is it information?
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Ah, you had to ask me that, right? Information requires an informer, right?
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And an informee. If there is no God, then they're just brute facts.
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They don't tell us anything. But every piece, every fact, every thing in this world is coming from a
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God who's informing us through those things. The heavens declare the glory of God.
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The earth, the firmament, the work of His hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech.
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Night after night, they bring us knowledge. All of those facts are information doing what?
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Revealing Himself to us. So you have an informer and an informee. All of that is information.
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So the preconditions of intelligibility require an informer and an informee. In God's world, we can understand things because we're created in His image.
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We're created to take information in, process it rationally, which, again, you cannot do on an atheistic, materialistic worldview, and then understand how these facts work in God's world.
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So you need to be able to receive information. We would call it revelation.
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God's revealing Himself to us through nature, in a general sense, and in a specific sense, through Scripture.
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Okay? We have natural revelation and specific revelation, special revelation, where we can come to know and understand who
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God is. You look out at the natural revelation, you automatically know God exists. You read the
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Scriptures, you know who this God is. Yes. Well, we observe them, but if they're carrying...
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if they're carrying... if they're... they're from God.
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So if they're from God, He has an intent and a purpose in every fact in the world.
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Right. They're assuming that it's not coming from anybody, it's just a brute fact. The funny thing is, you know, they have something called the
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SETI program, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, right? And they have these giant dishes pointed towards space, and they're listening for communication from, you know, aliens or whatnot.
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And if you ever saw the movie Contact, all of a sudden, they start tapping out the prime numbers.
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Right. And all of a sudden, they recognize a pattern. And because they recognize a pattern, they say, that's not random, that's information.
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And if it's information, it needs an informer. There must be life outside, you know, outside of our universe.
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They automatically conclude because of the pattern, that it's information, and it comes from the outside.
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If they would have only taken those dishes and pointed them inward to the human cell, and saw the pattern and the information in each one of our cells, in our
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DNA, they would automatically infer information, informer we were created.
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Of course, of course. Evolution is a fairytale for adults. No question about it.
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Complete, utter fairytale for adults. There's no way that you can get new genetic information into the cell.
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The cell is born with, the very DNA that you were born with will, you're going to die with. It will never change.
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So the question for the evolutionists is, well how does new genetic information get added into the cell so that you can sprout wings, or gills, or whatever it is.
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No new DNA, no new information is ever added to your DNA. And they can't account for it. But that doesn't matter because they don't care.
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God doesn't exist. So I need to interpret these, these facts in light of my world view.
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So rather than arguing facts with the unbeliever, we test their foundation. We attempt to chip away at what it is that they're standing on in order to come to the conclusions they do and expose them for what they are.
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They have no grounding for the laws of logic, the uniformity of nature.
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Why doesn't gravity change? Why don't all the 120 plus physical constants in this world never change?
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The speed of light, the Planck's constant, the gravitational force, the atomic mass.
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Why don't any of those things change if we live in a random chance universe? Shouldn't we expect that tomorrow is going to be vastly different from today if this is just a giant accident?
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But it's not. In fact, science is based on observations today that they know are going to hold true for tomorrow.
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How is that possible without a God upholding all these things by the power of his hand, which is what the scripture says.
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He says, I've created seasons and days. Those things are never going to end. Okay?
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So without an omnipotent God upholding the universe and keeping everything in order, we shouldn't expect anything like this.
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But we do. Okay. So, before you start building the walls in your house and installing doors, laying roofs, you need to lay the foundation first.
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So the foundation for us is important. God exists and the Bible is his word. All right. Let me move along a little quicker here.
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All right. So, what does this look like in action? And I have a sound thing here. I don't know if it's going to come through,
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Shane. But this is probably one of the most popular or debate moments in the history of Christian atheistic debates.
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This is Greg Bonson debating Gordon Stein. And watch what he says about the laws of logic.
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The laws that exist out in nature. Are they simply concessions then? They are conventions, but they are conventions that are self -verifying.
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Are they sociological laws or laws of thought? They are laws of thought which are interpreted by men and promulgated by men.
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Are they material in nature? How can a law be material? That's the question
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I'm going to ask you. Thank you. I would say no. I'm not saying that you have an opportunity to try to examine
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Donald Bonson. Dr. Bonson, would you call
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God material or immaterial? Immaterial. What is something that's immaterial? Something not extended in space.
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Can you give me an example of anything other than God that's immaterial? Laws of logic. Could I ask that you hold that down?
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I can listen to that ten times a day every day. He just totally just totally annihilates the guy's worldview because in his the atheist's worldview all that exists is what you can see, touch, way, or feel.
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Yet he's using the laws of logic to argue against Greg Bonson. He's stealing from our worldview to try to support his own.
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So the unbeliever's worldview comes crashing down because he has no grounding for it.
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No foundation for the necessary structure to make sense of reality. So just quickly to wrap up I just want to do a quick little review.
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A presupposition is a basic assumption about reality. The Christian presupposition is
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God exists and the Bible is His Word. We couldn't know anything for certain outside of God revealing it to us.
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An omniscient being revealing the facts to us. An unbeliever's presupposition is that man's reason and experience are the foundation for his worldview.
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Only in the Christian worldview can you have certainty. We can know with certainty because an omniscient being who created the universe has revealed it to us that way.
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Man's problem is an issue of sin and suppression. The Christian worldview is the only one that can ground the preconditions of intelligibility.
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Does that make sense? Any questions? All good?
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Okay. That's it guys. Thanks for hanging in. Peace.