Presuppositional Apologetics with Eli Ayala

Creation Fellowship

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All right, so we are now recording, and then we'll wait for the little, and now we're live streaming, so let's go.

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Hi, I'm Terri Kammerzell, and I'm here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee.

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We're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account, as told in Genesis, is a true depiction of how

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God created the earth and all life in just a matter of six days a few thousand years ago.

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We've been meeting here online in this format since June of 2020, and we've been blessed with quite a number of speakers now on top with a good blend of topics from creation science to other theology topics and even some current events.

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You can find links to most of our past presentations by typing in tinyurl .com forward slash cf santee c like creation f like fellowship and santee is spelled s -a -n -t -e -e or you can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com

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so that you can get on our email list. We don't spam, but if you do that, then you won't miss any of our upcoming speakers.

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Tonight, we're blessed to have Eli Ayala with us. Eli is the founder of Revealed Apologetics, and as creation groupies, we recognize

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Eli because in July of 2020, he moderated a discussion between Dr. Jason Lyle and Dr.

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Hugh Ross about the age of the earth, and if you haven't seen that, we recommend it, but here tonight,

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Eli is here to talk to us about presupposition apologetics, and he has a lot of experience studying that topic with his ministry called

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Revealed Apologetics, and also he's a Bible and logic teacher for middle schoolers at a private

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Christian school, so with that, we're happy to turn it over to you, Eli. Well, thank you so much for having me.

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It is an honor and a privilege to be here to be able to share about such an important topic, defending the faith.

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It can be very daunting and very intimidating, but it is something that the Bible commands that we do, and of course,

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I never get tired of quoting 1 Peter 3, verse 15. That's kind of the generic biblical passage.

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We kind of get the injunction to do apologetics, but I mean, it's so important, right? We are to set apart

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Christ as Lord in our hearts, always being ready to give a reason for the hope that's within us when someone asks, yet doing so with gentleness and respect, so it is always a privilege to be able to participate in things like this and to be able to share, at least from my experience, how

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I've found, you know, the best way to do that in a biblical way, and when we talk about apologetic methodology and presuppositional apologetics,

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I believe it to be a biblical method and a very powerful and effective method, so I'm super excited, and it's a privilege to be here, so I guess

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I'll just jump right in. I'm going to share my screen here. Just give me a few moments here, and what

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I'm going to be sharing is actually, let's get this up here first. Okay, let me see here.

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Can you see my screen? This is how we can still see. We can see like the program, so if you just hit start the slideshow, then something looks off here.

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Let's see here. Participate, new share. I'm going to stop the share right now for a second here.

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Sorry, just bear with me. Okay, so when I do this, that should pop up my screen here.

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I don't know what's going on. Hmm. Okay, let's see here. Boom. No, that looks weird.

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Now, if you start slideshow. Let's see. Where does it say start slideshow?

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It says up at the menus on slideshow. Click on slideshow.

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I don't see. Oh, okay. Let's see here. Boom, boom. Start. Play from start. Let's see what happens.

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Oh, there we go. I told you. See, I'm not really good at this stuff, so let's move.

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I have a couple of things in the way here. Let me move those out of the way, and let's see here.

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Okay, so let's do this here. Click there. Okay. All right. You guys can see that okay?

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Can everyone see that? Can I get a verbal? Yes. Okay, wonderful. Okay, so this is actually part of a five -part course that I teach.

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It's available on my website. People can check that out at revealedapologetics .com.

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It's a five -week course on presuppositional apologetics, and this is one of the sessions, and I picked this one because I think it's very practical because it is related to how to apply presuppositional apologetics, but before we get into that,

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I want to kind of define our terms here. Okay, so as we all know, hopefully we all know that apologetics refers to the defense of the faith, and when we speak about defending the faith, we can speak about that in terms of different methods.

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Within the realm of apologetics and theology, you have what is called the evidential method, the classical method, and the presuppositional method.

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There are some other variations within that, but for our purposes here, those are kind of the three main methods of apologetics.

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Now, if I can really briefly explain the difference between these methods without going into too much detail because I have a lot to cover,

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I would say that the classical method of apologetics and the evidential method of apologetics are bottom -up approaches to defending the faith.

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That's to say that they seek to work their way up to the conclusion that God exists.

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I was going to say that God most likely exists. Some of those arguments kind of give these very high probability sorts of arguments, so you work your way up to the conclusion that God exists.

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That's the same for evidentialism, and that's the same for what we call the classical method of apologetics, and the classical method is pretty popular.

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You have proponents like William Lane Craig and others. They'll typically do what I call the one -two punch.

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The first punch is to demonstrate the existence of God through using traditional classical proofs for God's existence, arguments like the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, things like that, and the second punch is a focus on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

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So the classical approach seeks to demonstrate the existence of a kind of generic theism, and then the second step is to demonstrate the nature of that God is the one that has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, and of course the resurrection is part of that case.

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So again, it's bottom up, evidential and classical. They're working their way up to the conclusion that God exists.

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Presuppositional apologetics is completely opposite. It's so different from those other methods.

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Presuppositional apologetics is a top -down approach. We do not work our way up to the conclusion that God exists.

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Rather, we start with the existence of God and his revelation, and we argue from God and his revelation, and we argue something along the lines that unless you start with the

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God of scripture, the God of Christianity, you lose a foundation for everything. Knowledge, science, history, philosophy, anything that you could utter in a meaningful way, you lack a foundation if you do not start with the

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God that has revealed himself in the scriptures. So you have these bottom -up approaches, classical, evidential, and then you have the top -down approach of the presuppositional method, where we start with God and his revelation, and we argue from that.

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Now, when we argue presuppositionally, or we engage in apologetics from a presuppositional perspective, we can talk about apologetic theory and how this works in theory, or we can kind of go straight to how is this applied?

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What's going on when we are applying a presuppositional approach? Well first, before I kind of unpack this in detail,

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I want to highlight that the way we apply the method is that we apply it in such a way that does not conflict with the teachings of scripture, right?

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For the presuppositionalists, we are not ashamed to speak of the Bible, to bring the Bible into the discussion at the very beginning.

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We believe that everything that we do springs forth from the soil of holy scripture, and that includes the way we engage in defending the faith.

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And so we are very much concerned with consistency of our defense with the theology that is the soil out of which our defense arises.

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So consistency is a very, very important thing to keep in mind. We also tend to focus on worldviews.

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A presuppositional apologetic method is a worldview apologetic. We are not defending piecemeal elements of the

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Christian faith in isolation to the broader system of Christian truth. In Jude chapter 1 verse 3, we're told that Jude says that he found it necessary to contend for the faith once for all delivered.

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He finds it necessary to contend for the faith once for all delivered. What is that faith once for all delivered?

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Well, it's the apostolic teaching. It is the body of Christian truth. It is the system of Christian truth as revealed in scripture.

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And so we are defending as presuppositionalists a worldview system, not isolated context -less facts.

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That's very, very important. Once you forget that you're defending a worldview, then you will run into various pitfalls when you're discussing apologetics and the defense of the faith with an educated unbeliever who understands the importance of worldviews and where our beliefs fit within the broader system of truth that we're coming from.

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Okay? So a presuppositional apologetic methodology is a top -down approach. It is a worldview apologetic, and it is an all or nothing apologetic.

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We are arguing for the whole kit and caboodle. I'm not just arguing for the resurrection of Jesus. I'm arguing for the entire

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Christian system of truth as revealed in scripture. That sounds very ambitious. But then again,

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I think the word of God calls us to be very ambitious. We are so confident that God has given us a sure revelation.

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We're so confident that in the pages of scripture, we find the very wisdom of God. We're so confident that in the word of God, we learn the nature of the unbeliever and how we are to approach him.

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We learn in the word of God that the unbeliever to whom we are speaking to has a knowledge of the creator that we present to him.

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So we take all of these biblical facts and we bring them all to bear in the apologetic context, and we do not hide our hand, so to speak, right?

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We are biblical apologists. We put our cards out on the table. We are arguing for the truth of scripture.

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And so with that context in mind, how do we apply this particular apologetic approach?

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Well, first, I want to kind of go through a checklist of things to remember when we're doing apologetics, okay?

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Number one, you don't have to be an expert to do this stuff. We can use highfalutin vocabulary, but we don't have to.

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It really is going to depend on the level of discussion that you're having with the people within your circle, right?

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That's why our prayer should be that God allows us to be effective in the context that he places us in.

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If you are in the context of academia, you're going to sound a little highfalutin as you're interacting with scientific theories, philosophical theories, and things like that.

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And if you are, as Greg Monson said, dealing with Sophie the Washwoman, you may not be using fancy terminology, but you're going to be talking about things that are very relevant to one's worldview, very relevant to, you know, those sorts of things, the sorts of things that we assume when we, you know, confront questions about the existence of God and the nature of evidence and things like that.

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We also want to recognize the importance of exposing the fact that when we explore the main issue between the believer and unbeliever, that we expose the fact that neither of us are neutral observers of the fact.

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We are not neutral people, unbiased and untainted by our assumptions.

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We're not just simply following the evidence wherever it goes, as though we are kind of these neutral bystanders.

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As Christians, we do not believe in what philosophers call brute facts. Brute facts are kind of these self -evident facts that can be understood independent of a broader worldview context.

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They're just true, right? Christians who have a consistent Christian worldview, in terms of which we believe that God has created all things and has given meaning and context to every fact, right?

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A fact means what it means because of the father of the facts who assigns the meaning to the things that he's created.

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Because we are unbiased, we're not unbiased, sorry. We recognize that brute facts don't exist.

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As Van Til, as Cornelius Van Til said, he said that brute facts are mute facts. Facts do not speak for themselves.

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We must interpret. But in the issue of apologetics, we must ask the question, who is interpreting the facts through the correct lens?

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And that's where the issue of worldview becomes very important. I'll also be kind of unpacking the apologetic procedure.

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How does this look? What does it look like when we're actually unpacking the presuppositional method in a real live conversation?

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We'll talk about the challenge of ultimate context, and I will reiterate this idea of what it means and why it's important to understand

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God as the father of the facts, okay? So that's kind of the checklist of things that I want to run through with you guys here.

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So let's continue here. So checklist. Here we go. Number one, apologetic engagement is a biblical necessity, all right?

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So this is something that we need to do. I know people who are listening to this are probably already kind of apologetic nerds.

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They kind of like this kind of stuff. But even if you don't like it, the Bible says that it's a necessity that we engage in the defense of the faith.

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So as faithful believers in Jesus Christ, we should be willing to put in the hard work to think critically about our faith and to think critically as to how we are to interact with the unbelieving world.

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So this is something that we are all called to do. Biblical apologetics requires us to act biblically when engaging unbelievers.

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Gentleness and respect. We do not want to be pugnacious, argumentative.

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We want to be gentle. We want to be respectful, but we want to be logically cogent. We want to be intellectually rigorous, and we want to be critically minded.

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But this is important. Our attitude in the way that we do that is very, very important. It doesn't matter if you speak the truth.

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If you speak the truth like a jerk, the truth is going to fall on deaf ears. We want to be able to convey the truth with gentleness and respect.

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So the content of the apologetic method, the arguments, must be held in tandem with a

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Christ -like spirit and attitude with which those truths are delivered. This is so key because we can come across as very confident in the arguments and really come across as really like jerks.

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People don't want to talk to us. We seem cocky. We seem prideful. But the

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Bible doesn't say if you want to be biblical and you're apologetic, that includes the manner in which we deliver our message.

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So that's very, very important. Biblical apologetics requires us to act biblically when engaging unbelievers.

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Always keep that in mind. Our authority in apologetics is the same as our authority in theology.

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I'm going to say that one again. So important. And this is the issue I was discussing just a moment ago about the importance of consistency.

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The method and manner of defense must be consistent with the theology and biblical teaching of the scriptures.

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Because if we're defending the Bible, we need to defend the Bible in the way that the

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Bible tells us we are to defend the Bible. So our authority in apologetics, defending the faith, is the same authority that we have in theology.

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My authority in theology is scripture. And so what I believe theologically will be governed by the scriptures.

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And how I do apologetics, because the command comes from scripture, the manner in which

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I do apologetics will be governed by scripture. If you're wondering about the name of my ministry,

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Revealed Apologetics, I called it that because I believe that apologetics as a command and apologetics as a method is part of divine revelation.

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We literally have divine revelation that's telling us, God is telling us and showing us how we are to engage in the exercise of apologetics.

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And so that's why I called it Revealed Apologetics, right? We have the divine commentary on how we are to engage the world of unbelief.

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One of my favorite definitions of apologetics, I don't remember who gave this definition, but the first time

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I heard it was from Dr. Scott Oliphant over there at Westminster Theological Seminary. He said that apologetics is

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Christian theology applied to unbelief. Let me say that again.

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Apologetics is Christian theology applied to unbelief. When we apply ourselves in apologetics with unbelievers, that is an extension of our

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Christian theology because apologetics is theological. And if our apologetic is theological, it must also be biblical, okay?

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And that includes the way we view the Bible as our authority, okay?

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So the scriptures is our authority, it informs our theology, and by extension it informs our apologetic because apologetics is under the umbrella of theology, all right?

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Now, our claim is that we know the Bible is true and we have justification for believing it to be true.

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The reason why I included this in my little checklist here is that many of the criticisms of presuppositional apologetics is that presuppositionalists simply make the assertion,

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God is the necessary precondition for knowledge. You need God in order to make sense out of anything. You need

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God in order to make sense out of logic. You need God to make sense out of the uniformity of nature. You need God to make sense out of fill in the blank.

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And so the unbeliever will listen to that and say, well, okay, saying it doesn't make it, make it so, right?

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So we need to go beyond simply saying the popular presuppositional catchphrases that we learned from Jason Lyle and Greg Bonson and others, which by the way are super helpful, but we need to go beyond the catchphrases and actually move to the actual arguments themselves so that we can push the ball a little further and actually engage what the unbeliever is bringing forth in the apologetic encounter, okay?

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So our claim is that we know the Bible is true. And notice I don't simply say we believe the

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Bible is true. I actually think we can know the Bible is true. We can know the Bible is true with absolute certainty.

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And when I speak of absolute certainty, I am not simply speaking of a psychological certainty, the sort of certainty that we could be wrong about.

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Okay. For instance, my wife right now is sleeping in the bedroom. I am psychologically certain that she's there, but for all

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I know, she could have snuck downstairs to grab some cookies or a midnight snack or something like that, right? I could be wrong.

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I'm not saying that we can simply have psychological certainty of the truth of the Bible. I'm arguing that we can have an epistemic certainty about the truth of the

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Bible, the kind of certainty that we cannot be wrong about. All right. I remember when

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I was in a debate with someone, they said, so are you telling me that you can't be wrong about the

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Bible, right? You know that the Bible is true and that you can't be wrong about it. And I said, yeah, it's like, oh my goodness, that's, that's so arrogant.

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Like it's arrogant to actually be consistent with my belief system, right?

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If I believe the Bible is true and the Bible lays out for us that we can know with a certainty that the

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Bible is true, then why is it arrogant to just simply affirm? Yes, I believe that, right?

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A lot of people will call you arrogant because you affirm this narrow truth, but then in essence, all truth is narrow.

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Is the person who thinks I'm arrogant being arrogant themselves? Don't they think that they're right and I'm wrong with respect to how

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I view my own position, right? So truth is narrow by definition, right? If something's true, the opposite has to be false.

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So, uh, there's nothing, nothing weird here. Okay. But, uh, we are claiming that we could know the

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Bible is true and that we have a justification for believing it to be true.

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The truth of the Bible can be demonstrated. Um, so that's kind of the fully throated presentation of what we're arguing for.

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It's not simply a bare authority claim. You see this accusation a lot when someone says, um, like the, you know, someone says something along the lines, well, the presuppositional list says that the

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Christian God and his revelation provide the necessary preconditions for knowledge.

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And then the objector will say, well, wait a minute, couldn't the Muslim say the same thing, or couldn't the Mormon say the same thing?

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Now, when they asked that question, what they are fallaciously assuming is that the claim of the presuppositional list is that it is a bare authority claim that we can replace with some other authority claim.

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You say it's the God of Christianity. Well, he says it's the God of Islam. You see, there you go.

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Pack up your bags. Presuppositionalism has been refuted. Not so fast. Can a

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Muslim argue presuppositionally? Yes. Okay. Can the

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Muslim pay the bills on the claim? No, we are arguing that anyone could argue presuppositionally, but it is the

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Christian worldview that could actually make good on those claims and we're willing to talk about it. That's why we have in that last little bullet point there, we believe the

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Bible is true and we have a justification for it. Okay. And that justification comes in the form of our argument.

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Okay. And the inner witness of the Holy Spirit as well. Okay. Now the conflict between the believer and the unbeliever is that over, that is, it is over competing worldview systems of thought.

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We speak of worldviews as Christians, but the unbeliever has their worldview as well. If you want to be an effective presuppositional apologist, you must always, always, always, always, always think in terms of worldviews.

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Okay. I'm going to repeat that again. If you want to be an effective Christian apologist, the presuppositionalist, you need to always think in terms of worldview.

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This is going to be helpful when you are critiquing the unbeliever and it will be helpful when the unbeliever critiques you.

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When you think of things in terms of the context of worldview systems, you will be able to differentiate between what we call internal critiques of a worldview and external critiques of a worldview.

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An internal critique of a worldview is when you hypothetically grant the truth of the person's worldview and demonstrate its falsity on its own terms.

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That's what we're supposed to be doing. But many of the attacks upon the Christian faith are misrepresentations of the

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Christian faith. For example, when I say that the God of the Bible is the necessary precondition for knowledge because of God and his revelation, we can know things, right?

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We'd have knowledge, intelligible experience. Perhaps the unbeliever will say, well, wait a minute.

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How do you know your God's not deceiving you? Maybe your God's deceiving you about these things.

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And if he can deceive you, then he can't be the foundation for knowledge because for all you know, you could be a brain in a vat or you can be, this could all be an illusion.

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The problem with that is, is that that sort of objection is an external critique of the

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Christian worldview. I reject the very possibility that God could be lying because a

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God who can lie is not the Christian God. You see? So the objection and the assertion made by the unbeliever is actually, he's making an assertion that is alien to the

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Christian worldview system. And so I simply kindly point out, well, wait a minute. If the

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Christian system is true, what you're saying is literally impossible, right?

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Because a God who can lie is not the Christian God. I'm defending the Christian God, right? So understanding my worldview, right?

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Helps me identify whether someone is giving a legitimate internal critique of my worldview or if they're throwing stones from outside my worldview.

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In that case, we want to make that differentiation. Okay? But to be sure, the conflict between the unbeliever and the believer is an issue of differing worldview systems.

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This is the reason why when you tell your friend, oh my goodness, God has been so good to me. I was sick and the elders, they prayed for me and I was healed and it was amazing.

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And your unbelieving friend will take your wonderful story and he'll filter it, or she'll filter it through her worldview lens or his worldview lens.

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And we'll have a perfectly valid, natural explanation as to why you were healed, right?

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Because the issue is not your story. It's not the evidence. It's not the facts. It is worldview interpretation.

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So if you recognize that everyone has a worldview, that's going to be very, very helpful in navigating the apologetic encounter.

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All right? All right. Now, because the issue is worldview disagreement, we must argue by the impossibility of the contrary.

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Okay? Because the issue between the believer and unbeliever is worldview system. It will not be enough to argue directly with the unbeliever by throwing facts at them and throwing evidence at them.

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Facts and evidence do play a role to be sure, but it can never rest at just simply,

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I have more facts than you do. The issue is entire worldview systems. So the presuppositional approach will require us not so much to argue in a direct fashion with the throwing of facts and arguments like that, but rather we will use an indirect argument.

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And in philosophical literature, this is called a transcendental argument. It is to argue for something by the impossibility of the contrary.

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Okay? So that's going to be very important in the presuppositional method. The Bible says that the unbeliever is self -deceived and is suppressing the truth.

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He rationalizes the evidence all around him. Why? Because he has a worldview.

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Why? Because his worldview is contrary to the scripture. That's why he rationalizes the evidence.

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He does not want your God to be true because he knows that God in his heart of hearts and without a regenerated heart, he hates that God.

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That is what the Bible teaches. Well, Eli, you don't understand. I know many unbelievers and they're just really good -natured and they really want to know, well, you know, they say,

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I don't know that God exists. Well, now I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. I'm pitted against what

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God says about the unbeliever or what the unbeliever says about the unbeliever. If I'm going to argue consistently and Christianly, I'm going to have to go with what

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God says about the unbeliever. And God says that the unbeliever has a suppressed knowledge of his maker.

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And so we need to consider that when we confront the unbeliever, because that is going to impact the manner in which we engage them.

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When we're doing apologetics, are we giving new information to an otherwise ignorant person?

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Or are we unmasking the fact that this person knows precisely the God we are presenting?

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Right? That's a very important issue to keep in mind. It's a good question to ask, right? Because that can kind of help us navigate whether we're doing apologetics in a biblically consistent way, right?

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The unbeliever is not ignorant. He is not in need of more facts. He is in need of being exposed for suppressing the truth and unrighteousness.

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And we do that with gentleness. We do that with respect. We do not do that simply by walking up to them in the discussion and say, you're suppressing the truth.

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I know, you know, that God exists. That's not very helpful. The best way to show that he knows that God exists is to ask penetrating questions, to expose the fact that the things that he says with his mouth, he does not believe in his heart of hearts.

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You could do that by asking questions, asking the right questions and focusing your arguments and your points precisely where they need to be at those foundational worldview foundations.

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Okay? Now let's see here. Oh, there we go. God is not on trial when we're doing apologetics.

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So we're not putting God to the test. The unbeliever is on trial. That's kind of straightforward. Don't need too much expansion there.

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We're arguing for the certain truth of the Christian worldview, not its probable truth. Once again, you have this thing that really differentiates the presuppositional approach with all these other approaches.

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We're not content with arguing with the probability of God's existence. We are going to go for the whole kit and caboodle.

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I'm going to bite the bullet and say, God most certainly exists. And without God, we have no foundation for anything whatsoever.

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Okay? So that's the nature of our claim as presuppositionalist as Christians. All right?

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We want to avoid neutrality in our thinking, reasoning, and argumentation, avoid neutral assumptions like the plague.

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If you do that, you will do as Cornelius Van Til told his student, Greg Bonson, you will be pushing the antithesis.

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There is no place of agreement between the believer and unbeliever and a, an apologetic strategy you want to use is to push that fact.

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We have nothing in common with respect to our worldview foundations. Now we do have something in common in a sense we're both made in the image of God, but with respect to our worldviews, we have nothing in common.

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You want to reject God, build me a worldview that can ground knowledge, science, history, or anything else.

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And don't borrow from God. You don't want God, show me what you can do without him.

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Right? We're not going to grant. Well, if you just grant me this over, no, I'm not going to grant you that on your worldview. You need to justify those things, right?

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There is no neutrality. It reminds me of that silly little story where, you know, there are these scientists who said, you know, well, you know,

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I don't need God to create life. I can create life myself. And God's like, well, that's pretty impressive. Why don't you show me?

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And so the scientists said, well, first you got to gather a little dirt over here. And God says, wait a minute, timeout, get your own dirt.

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And that's really what we need to do. There is no neutrality. We are not going to let the unbeliever borrow from the

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Christian worldview. When he does, we're going to point it out. Wait a minute. That doesn't belong in your system. That's a part of my system, right?

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There is no neutrality, very important assumption that we bring to the table because the

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Bible teaches it. And philosophically, it is impossible to be genuinely neutral. So we want to avoid that in our thinking, our reasoning, and our argumentation.

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We want to identify inconsistencies in the unbelievers reasoning. We want to be careful that we are not committing inconsistencies.

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We want to be able to identify arbitrariness and empty claims that are being made in the discussion.

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We want to identify logical fallacies. This is where Dr. Jason Lyle's works have been very helpful.

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He's written an entire book on logical fallacies. I think folks should pick that up and really master those things to be able to identify faulty lines of reasoning is a powerful tool when sharing the faith, not simply to embarrass the unbeliever.

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Oh, look, you committed a fallacy, but because we desire to get at truth, pointing out fallacies, right?

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With gentleness and respect throughout the course of our discussions is going to be helpful to that end. All right.

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Jesus did this all throughout his ministry. He would point out logical fallacies, and he would do what we call in logic, reductio ad absurdum, where you reduce your opponent's position to absurdity.

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Jesus did this all the time. He was really good at, you know, springing these traps that were set for him.

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You look at Jesus and how he interacted with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, you actually can get a nice little crash course in logical analysis.

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Of course, he didn't use those philosophical terms that are typically associated with these sorts of discussions, but he's definitely using logic when he's disputing and debating with others.

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So that's an important point here. We want to engage with a humble confidence that is not logically incompatible.

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You can be humble yet confident, okay? And we don't need to know it all. One of the things that people are scared of doing apologetics is they think they need to know everything, and you don't, right?

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There is no need to know all the particulars of an unbeliever's position, okay? When I do apologetics,

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I only look for three things. That's it. I'm looking for three things. And the three things that I like to look for are the worldview foundations, okay?

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What is the person's worldview? What is their theory of reality? What do they believe about what's real?

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What is their theory of knowledge? How do they answer the question, how do we know what we know?

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And what is their theory of ethics? How ought we live our lives? How should we live our lives? These three foundations are important because all of the intricacies of their beliefs are built upon those three foundations.

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If you put C4 on one of those foundations and blow it up, the entire belief system crumbles because those are the foundations.

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So I look for worldview foundations. I don't look for knowledge of every single aspect of a person's worldview, although it is important to be up on what a person believes, right?

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All right. What you do need to know are the underlying presuppositions of a particular worldview.

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And you want to know, this is so important, you want to know how to ask questions that bring out those worldview foundations.

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When you're discussing or debating an unbeliever, you're not always going to be told their worldview.

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There's a lot of, sometimes there's a lot of, unbelievers are not even always aware of their own worldview. You need to be able to ask questions that allow you to grab at what they believe about those three foundations.

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And when you're able to ask questions and bring those points out, then you can do the critiquing of those foundations, showing logical inconsistencies and things like that.

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Very, very helpful, but you need to learn how to ask questions. A quick commercial, if you really want a nice book that teaches you how to ask questions,

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I highly recommend Greg Koekel's book, Tactics, a game plan for talking about your faith.

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And he teaches you how to ask good questions. And so I highly recommend that. We want to expose those foundations as the rope that hangs them intellectually.

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Greg Bonson often said, the best way to argue with the unbeliever is to let them talk. Eventually they'd give you enough rope that's required to hang them with.

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Now, I know that's extreme language there, but you get the point, right? When people speak, they oftentimes will utter inconsistencies and it will be apologetically useful for you to exploit those in the discussion for the purpose of getting at the truth.

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So we want to expose the foundations. We want to expose non -neutrality. So I want to jump through this here.

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So here's an example of exposing the fact that no one is neutral. You can raise your hand.

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I can't see you. So I suppose I'll just have to believe you're raising your hand. How many people have ever heard an atheist say,

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I lack belief in God, but I am open to the evidence. Okay. Raise your hand if you've ever heard that.

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That's a very common, you know, statement from, from unbelievers. I lack belief in God, but I'm open to the evidence.

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The Christian says, God says that all men know that he exists and they are without excuse for rejecting him.

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Do you believe this? Well, what is he going to say? Well, he said, well, I don't believe that. Then you're not neutral.

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When you say I lack belief in God, what you are implicitly saying is that God is a liar because the

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God of the Bible tells us in his word that all men have a knowledge. It doesn't say that men lack a knowledge of God.

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So in this statement, I lack belief in God, but I'm open to the evidence is actually a statement that is implicitly claiming that the

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Christian worldview is incorrect because it is contradicting what God says.

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Right now, what's the point of this? It's to expose that the person who says I lack belief in God, but I'm open is not neutral.

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He's not neutral because of the explanation I just gave. There is no neutrality. When the atheist says, no,

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I reject that. I know you're God. Then there you go. The nature of his non -neutrality is exposed.

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Okay. Now the Christian says, well, good. So then you do not simply lack belief in God, but reject the existence of the

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God who says, you know, exists. You are not neutral, my friend. I'm going to read that again. When the person says, no,

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I reject that. I know you're God. So then you do not simply lack belief in God, but reject the existence of this kind of God.

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This is the kind of God you reject. The one who says, you know, you know that he exists. Okay.

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So again, very easy to point out the fact that people are not neutral. Okay. Now you don't need to use this in an actual discussion, but it's a good way to illustrate that we're not as unbiased and neutral as many people think we are when we're confronting these important questions.

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All right. The agnostic. What about the agnostic? Surely the agnostic is more neutral than most, right?

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He'll say, I don't know if your God exists, right? The Christian says, well, God has revealed in the

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Bible that all men have a knowledge of his existence, but suppress the truth. Do you reject this?

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Okay. If he doesn't reject it, then he admits he knows God and he's no longer an agnostic. If he does reject it, he exposes the fact that he's not neutral, right?

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If he rejects it, well, what is he rejecting? He's rejecting the existence of the God who says he knows he exists, right?

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So again, you see very clearly that there is no neutrality. The agnostic says, yes, I do not know whether your

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God exists. Well, your position as an agnostic is an implicit denial of the truth of the Christian God who says that all men know that he exists.

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See how that works, right? Very easy to expose the fact that a person is not as neutral as they claim to be.

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All right. All right. What is the apologetic procedure? How do we do this? How do we work it? How do we set the table?

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How do we engage in the actual stuff of apologetics? Okay. Well, first we want to lay out the

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Christian worldview, right? This involves explaining the Christian view of reality. In the philosophical language, that is to lay out our metaphysic, right?

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Really quickly, if you don't know what that looks like, very simply, the Christian theory of reality is simple.

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That we make what is called a creator -creature distinction. There is a creator and there is a creation and they're not the same.

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Okay. The nature of that creation is twofold. There is a physical aspect of creation and a non -physical aspect of creation, right?

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We lay out the bits and pieces of our theory of reality. This involves explaining the

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Christian view of knowledge as well. We want to lay out our worldview by saying, right? We say this often in the scriptures, it says in Proverbs 1 .7

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that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. In Colossians, we say that in Christ is hidden all the treasures of knowledge.

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Our theory of knowledge involves the revelation of God in Christ Jesus in scripture, these sorts of things, right?

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This involves explaining the Christian view of right and wrong in our ethics. We lay this out as our system, okay?

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Now, our position in light of our argument in light of our worldview is that the

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God of the Bible has revealed himself both through natural and special revelation.

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He has created man in his image such that man can and does know their creator.

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That's our position, okay? Now, here's the argument here. To reject God and his revelation is to lose any justification for knowing and proving anything whatsoever as God is the only grounding for coherency and meaning at all, okay?

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That is our point. If you reject this God, look what results.

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That's part of our argument, okay, in simple form. Do you reject the God of the

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Bible? Okay. Now, if they, you know, we await the unbeliever's rejection because he's going to reject them.

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Otherwise, he wouldn't be an unbeliever, right? In rejecting the Christian system of thought as the necessary context for meaningfulness of any fact whatsoever, he is also affirming that facts can be meaningful and intelligible apart from the

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Christian system. I want to read that again. This is so important. In rejecting the

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Christian system of thought, the Christian worldview as the necessary context for the meaningfulness of any fact whatsoever, ready?

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He is also affirming implicitly that facts can be meaningful and intelligible apart from the

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Christian system. You follow that? If you reject the Christian God as the necessary foundation, you must believe there is some other foundation for meaningfulness and intelligibility, right?

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And we're going to ask the unbeliever, well, what is that system? What is that worldview? Lay out your worldview.

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And at that point, we want to engage in the critique, okay? As part of our argument, challenge the unbeliever to make good on that assumption.

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What assumption? The assumption that facts are meaningful and intelligible apart from the

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Christian system. If you believe that facts and intelligibility is meaningful, independent of the

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God of Christianity, okay, make good on that claim. What is your foundation? How do you know what you know?

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These sorts of things, right? If the unbeliever does not want God, then let's see if they can have meaning without him, okay?

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And this is where you ask the questions. You ask the worldview questions. How do you account for knowledge? How do you account for science?

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How do you account for the uniformity of nature? How do you account for objective moral values and duties?

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How do you account for this? How do you account for that? How do you account for enduring personal identity through time?

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Okay? All these simple things that, oh, I know I exist. You know you exist? How do you know that?

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Well, I exist. I'm experiencing my own existence. I? How do you make sense out of a personal identity?

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I had an awesome conversation with a young man who was a materialist. He believed that human beings are purely physical and that our physical body is constantly undergoing chemical changes so that we are not physically the same person we were moments ago.

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And so I got him to admit that we are constantly changing. So if something's constantly changing, you cannot identify something as constantly changing.

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So if you're constantly changing, there is no I. As the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, a man never steps into the same river twice.

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The moment he steps in the river, steps out of the river, and then steps back into the river, his feet are not touching the same water because the water that his feet touched before is already downstream.

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You have constant change and flux, and so you have no enduring identity. And so I told the young man that I was speaking with, if we constantly change, then we don't have identity.

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You don't exist. And he told me, that's right. I don't exist because I am constantly changing.

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I am constantly in flux. And then I told him, well, I guess I win this discussion. I win the argument.

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He's like, well, what do you mean? He's like, well, if you don't exist, I'm not arguing with anyone. And he was like, well, that's not what

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I meant. That's not what I meant. I thought you said you didn't exist. You see the foolishness that comes along with rejecting what

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God says about who you are, right? In some cases, people reject the fact that they exist, okay?

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That's why the Bible says, the fool says in his heart, there is no God, right? And that's just one illustration as to how that can be brought out.

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Now, the challenge of the ultimate context, okay? Now, this is important.

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I'm going to talk about this idea of ultimate context, right? Our worldview, okay? Our worldview system is the broad context that gives meaning to the individual things we believe, okay?

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That makes sense, right? For example, a fact, any fact, without a context is meaningless.

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Isn't that true? Right? Without a context, you couldn't know what a fact is without a broader context to interpret it in, okay?

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Now, oh, sorry. Let me see here. A fact is understood in relation to other facts.

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So, a fact without context is meaningless and facts are understood in relation to other facts.

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Example, the dog is chasing the ball, okay? Key question.

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Oops, sorry. The dog is chasing the ball, okay? What does dog mean?

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What does chasing mean? And what is a ball? You could only know that by knowing the context, not just the context of the sentence or the context of the sentence as it's placed within a broader paragraph, but you have to have the intellectual context of the meaning of words.

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So, you can't know what dog means unless you have the context of language and intelligible experience.

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So, facts are understood in a system. So, we have a system, our worldview, that gives meaning to the individual facts, okay?

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Now, these are key questions. We must ask the question, what grounds and gives meaning to all derived facts?

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What is a derived fact? A fact that is derived is simply a fact that is brought about or comes forth or has meaning because of another fact.

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It is derived from something more ultimate. What grounds and gives meaning to all facts?

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If there is no ultimate and final grounds, then facts ultimately have no meaning.

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If there is no ultimate worldview foundation, then the individual facts that one asserts has no meaning whatsoever.

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If there is an ultimate and final ground for all derived facts, is that ground personal or impersonal, okay?

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What is the foundational aspect of reality? What is it? The bare bones.

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When we get down to the essence of reality, is it personal or is it impersonal? If it's impersonal, this broader context in which individual facts have meaning, if it's impersonal, then how do we know the relationship between the fact that I experience and the system of facts of which gives that fact meaning?

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How could I know? Unless I had knowledge of the relationship of all the facts and how they fit together.

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If the universe we live in is purely impersonal, then we do not have an omniscient source that can tell us the true meaning of the individual fact and its relation to the broader context.

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And that's what the unbeliever is stuck with. Because there is no ultimate personal

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God who knows all, then our experience of individual facts will always be limited because I do not know the relationship of that fact as it stands to the other facts that give it meaning.

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For all I know, I could assert a fact and there can be a new fact that comes in the future and falsifies everything

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I thought I knew about this one other fact over here. Right? Omniscience is actually necessary for us to know the meaning of one fact because omniscience can tell us the relation of that fact to all other facts and hence we can know the true objective meaning of that fact.

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So if there is an ultimate and final ground for all derived facts, is that ground personal or impersonal?

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Well, if he's an atheist, it's going to be impersonal and there's problems as for the reasons I just laid out. Okay. Now here's the key point.

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If the ultimate and final ground is personal, then an ultimate personal God who grounds and gives meaning to all facts exists.

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I'm going to say that again. If the ultimate and final ground for these derived facts is personal, then an ultimate personal

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God who grounds and gives meaning to all facts exists. This is to admit that the fundamental grounds or context for all existence is an absolute personal being.

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And for us as Christians, this being is the one who has revealed himself in scripture and in general revelation.

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Okay. If the ultimate and final ground is impersonal, then how can limited and finite persons have access to know about this impersonal ground that supposedly gives meaning to all derived facts?

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It would have no way of knowing. Impersonality does not reveal. And if there is no revelation, then you are stuck with the subjective opinion as to what you think the individual facts that you confront in your life mean, what they mean.

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All right. Now our conclusion here, and then I'll summarize this and make it more simpler. If the finite person does not have access to the ultimate and final ground of reality, that gives meaning to all facts, how does the person know if he understands any fact truly, since he lacks access to the ultimate grounding that defines facts and their relation to all other facts.

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Okay. There would be no way the finite person would never know any fact truly because he does not know the ultimate context, which gives meaning to all facts.

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And the only way to know the ultimate context is to know the personal

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God who knows all of the facts because he is the father of the facts. Okay.

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Now the unbeliever at this point would be disarmed. Now, this might sound complicated, but I'm going to go over real quick a very simple way to present this.

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Okay. Now, if the unbeliever then can know no fact truly, then how can they assert facts in arguing against your

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Christian worldview? I'm going to say that again. If the unbeliever then can know no fact truly, then how can they assert facts in arguing against your

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Christian worldview? Now, a consistent and smart unbeliever will admit, well, ultimately

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I can't have epistemic certainty about these things, right? They say, well, I can't know objectively without a doubt.

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You know, I could be wrong about these things. I was debating an atheist. His name was, his YouTube name was

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Suris the Skeptic. And he held to an epistemology, a view of knowledge in which he was a pragmatist.

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You know, what's true is what works. And he's like, I asked him at cross -examination, do you think we could have objective knowledge about the world?

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I wanted to ask this question to kind of push him in the corner to make this very point that I was just expressing to you guys.

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Do you think we could have truth about the world? And he says, no, he admitted, he said, no, we can't.

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And then during the Q and a, he was answering questions as well. Science has told us this, and we know this.

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And I was like, well, timeout, timeout. And the beginning of the debate, you said, we can't know objective truth about reality.

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Now you're asserting a bunch of things. You're claiming that we know, see, so now you see the tension and the inconsistency at that point.

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All right. We want to, we want to disarm the unbeliever. If we can get the unbeliever to the point of showing that his worldview takes the rug right out from under his feet.

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You did not dodge the bullets he was shooting at you. Rather you took the gun out of his hand. And that's what we want to do when we're doing apologetics.

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We do not want to be bullet dodgers. We want to be able to remove the weapon from their hand. And we do that when we expose the really the shaky grounds upon which he stands when he rejects the

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God who's revealed himself in scripture and in general revelation. All right. The father of the facts, the

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Christian worldview provides a context in which the absolute personal God grounds and defines all facts and how they relate to each other.

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Finite persons can know facts truly because on the Christian worldview, the ultimate ground of reality is the personal triune

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God of scripture who reveals. How do I know what I know? God has revealed it.

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Notice the complexity with which I explained all these things. Yet when push comes to shove, it boils down to the simple truth.

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Jesus loves me. This I know because the Bible tells me so. God has spoken.

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Right. Very simple. We can be highfalutin. I tried. I was a little technical there, but it really boils down to the fact that God has spoken.

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We can know that he has spoken. And if you reject the fact that he's spoken, you lose the foundation for everything.

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Science, history, philosophy, mathematics, morality, you name it.

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He is the father of the facts. We are to bow to the father of the facts. It is the connection of revelation that brings us into contact with the ultimate reality and how all the facts coherently relate to one another.

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How do I know one fact truly and its relation to all the other facts? Because there is a personal

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God who is the father of the facts and he reveals it to us in his word.

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And with that, I will end my presentation. There's more, but I don't want to go too long here.

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Let me stop the share here. All right. And just real briefly, if you can give me just a few more moments, what does this look like in a non -complicated, non -philosophical way?

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I've used words like metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Listen, I teach my sixth graders this.

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You can hear my sixth graders walk in the hallway talking about metaphysics. I start my logic class with this question, this exercise.

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If I told you I had a pet unicorn, would you believe me or would you not believe me?

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Why? And so they'll say, well, I wouldn't believe you because unicorns don't exist. And we began to talk about whether unicorns exist and how do they know?

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And I use that as the foundation to bring up the fact that in the way you answer that question, it will expose what you believe about the nature of the world.

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Isn't that right? We live in a world where unicorns don't exist. And here are my reasons. How do you know? Well, show it to me.

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Ah, you believe knowledge comes through our senses. Why should we trust our senses? Right? We got into discussing what makes a worldview.

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And we got into discussing the things that we simply take for granted. You don't need to use all this philosophical language, but be worldview minded.

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When you're talking with the unbeliever, ask them in a very simple way. I believe that God has revealed himself in scripture and it's

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God in his word that gives meaning to everything that I know. How do you make sense out of your life without God?

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What I just said right there is a simple lay person, lay level presentation of a transcendental argument, the argument for God's existence by the impossibility of the contrary.

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God must exist because he is the only precondition that makes sense, gives us meaning and intelligibility about anything.

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How do you make sense out of things? How do you make sense out of morality? What do you think of murder? Is it wrong? Should we punish criminals?

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You can use all the hot button social topics to talk about these things. And in doing so you will be engaging in a presuppositional apologetic method.

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As long as we also include that it is the context of God's revelation that gives us as Christians answers to these very profound questions.

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So this can look very different depending on the nature of your discussion. All right. All right. Well, that's it.

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That's all I've got right here. And if you guys want to take the floor again and we can move on and move on to our next portion.

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You guys have any questions or anything like that, I'd be happy to engage those. Yes, that was very interesting.

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It was a lot of information. And I think that maybe some of us, I mean, even

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I'm speaking for myself and I'm sure I'm not the only one, maybe it'll take a couple of times of listening to it to let it all sink in.

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And I've even taught Dr. Lyle's logic course before. And I've read his books about the fallacies and stuff, but it's still, it's a highly, what's the word

56:28

I'm looking for? But you have to use your brain to really think about it and to, and to focus on these concepts and be able to process them and then practice them.

56:39

So Robin would like to know, do you have a rhinoceros at home?

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Do I have a rhinoceros? She said, does he have a rhino at home?

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I think that you used a rhino as in an example that you need. Unicorn, maybe, maybe it was a unicorn.

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Okay. I do not, I do not have a unicorn or, or a rhino at my house. I usually ask that question to my students to see, to, to show them that in their answers, they're actually exposing what they believe about the nature of the world.

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And so, you know, I usually do that to bring out that teach, like teach them about worldviews and things like that.

57:20

Okay. So here in Zoom, Jessica says, though I attended a Christian school and college,

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I am just now learning the term presuppositional apologetics, which I am finding a bit shocking.

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I did not know what it was until I discovered Dr. Lyle last fall. Would you agree that perhaps one reason why presuppositional apologetics isn't taught or held in the church slash slash

57:44

Christianity is because it requires a consistent biblical worldview?

57:49

Is it because it's much easier to give facts and bits of evidence as proof of God's existence versus living, believing, and defending our faith in a way that reflects a consistent biblical worldview and hermeneutic.

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And, you know, that's something that, you know, we are a creation group.

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And so we do talk a lot about that, that there's a difference between presenting somebody the facts and presenting somebody, you know, challenging their worldview, because we all have access to the same facts on this planet.

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And so it is our worldview. So I'll let you go ahead and answer that. All right. So why, why is it not used today in a lot of areas?

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Well, first it is related to theology. So people who use presuppositional apologetics tend to be reformed in their theology.

58:39

Cornelius Van Til definitely developed presuppositional methodology within the context of a reformed understanding of theology, reformed understanding of God and God's sovereignty and things like that.

58:49

So that may be part of it. Apologetics is very popular in the evangelical world. And because of the theology of most evangelicals, it will, their apologetic will manifest in the more classical or evidential forms.

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So again, your theology will inform your apologetic. So, and I would say that the reformed, the reformed

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Christians aren't the massive population of Christians today. Right. And that's one of the reasons.

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Another reason is that while believers are saved, our thinking is not always consistent with the

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Bible. We will say that the Bible is our authority for our theology, but for some reason we don't think that consistently when we're talking with the unbeliever, we tend to concede a lot.

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What the unbeliever, you know, we, we, we literally, we, we sometimes concede a lot of ground to the unbeliever.

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We tend to kind of argue on their level. And in so doing and doing so we adopt categories of neutral thinking, and we allow for a sense of autonomy with respect to the unbelievers thinking and what he knows and things like that.

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We don't challenge, we're not taught to challenge the foundations. We're taught to give facts because that's the world we live in, right?

01:00:03

We live in the world of science. We live in the world of technology. So that's what we throw at them. We try so hard to convince the unbeliever that Christianity is rational by throwing these facts, but we don't go to the foundation, right?

01:00:18

Why? Because the talking about foundation, it's not practical, right? So a lot of people don't use presuppositional apologetics because they don't think it's practical.

01:00:26

I was asked, someone asked, well, I'm interested in presuppositional apologetics, but does it work? And I was like, that's the wrong question.

01:00:32

The right question is, is it biblical? That's, that's, that's the question. If it's biblical, it's going to work.

01:00:38

And what do you mean by work? Our job as apologists is to share the faith, defend the faith, and trust

01:00:45

God for the results. Work for what? What do you mean work? Like, does it produce believers?

01:00:51

Well, if you are a Christian and you believe that salvation is of the Lord, no one believes, if you're consistent, that it is because of your wonderful arguments that someone becomes a

01:01:00

Christian. Your arguments are just one of the means whereby God uses to produce the regenerative work by his spirit in the heart of the unbeliever, right?

01:01:11

So we've got to be very careful when we talk about whether this works or that works. It's really the issue of, is it biblical?

01:01:18

And I think a lot of people in today's world can be ashamed of the Bible. You see this in the creation debates, right?

01:01:25

It's like, well, I don't want to go against everyone who's saying, you know, Big Bang and billions of years. And I don't want to sound like a doofus when

01:01:30

I say, you know, I don't really hold to evolution. I mean, you know, we don't want that. We want to, we want to save face, right?

01:01:36

We want to, and I think that can be very intimidating for people. So I think that's one of the reasons why people don't tend to use this, this method.

01:01:44

Yeah, I was thinking along that line too. I was just thinking about how I think I've heard the expression that the

01:01:50

Bible can be offensive to people and, and it can't, I mean, it is offensive to sinners because it shows them their sin.

01:01:58

And in a, in a world where we just want to belong or fit in or not make waves for Christians to always stand on the

01:02:06

Bible means that you're going to be offending people and, you know, and be attacked for being judgmental or whatever, but it's what the

01:02:13

Bible says. And so I can see what you're saying about why, you know, it's hard for Christians to always take that approach.

01:02:22

Well, I also find to another reason why people don't use presuppositional apologetics because they don't understand it.

01:02:29

Like I, I, I was talking to someone and I explained it to them because they thought like, okay, I have these really cool arguments.

01:02:35

You know, I watched like William Lane Craig and I watched like Frank Turek and they've got some really cool arguments. And when I think of the presuppositional, it's like, well, that means

01:02:42

I can't use these other arguments. So, so they, they kind of create this, this thing in their mind where it's either

01:02:48

I'm a presuppositionalist and I argue worldview, or I'm this other thing.

01:02:53

And I could use all these evidences because presuppositionalists can't use evidence. They use the presuppositions, the evidence, and that's false.

01:03:00

I told the person like, I don't mind using evidence, right? We use evidence within a presuppositional framework.

01:03:05

And when he's like, well, I never thought of it that way. Wow. That makes so much more sense. I think when we explain ourselves, right?

01:03:11

Explain what we're not saying, because it's apparently it's very easy to misinterpret what a presuppositionalist is saying.

01:03:17

It happens all the time, right? When we're able to explain ourselves, right? Sometimes it clicks for people.

01:03:22

And I've experienced that where people are like, man, now that I understand it, like I completely see the power in this method.

01:03:29

Yeah, that makes sense. Robin here in Zoom is asking how would you approach someone who has no defined moral compass?

01:03:37

You mentioned about people agreeing murder is wrong. We can all agree on that. But there are people who believe that transgenderism is real or that same sex marriage is okay.

01:03:48

Many churches also believe this. What kind of logic would you use? Would you apply to this?

01:03:54

Well, you had a couple of things in there. Can you put it into a more concise question?

01:03:59

Because I think you asked two questions. There was one with no moral compass. And then you talked about some transgender stuff.

01:04:06

Well, I think that she's kind of being more specific about the moral compass. I mean, in our world, we see a lot of compromise, not just,

01:04:16

I mean, there are people, you know, unbelievers, obviously, they don't have a moral compass. And they're going to rationalize a lot of things.

01:04:24

Just like, you know, we talked a lot in here about Dr. Lyle's example of the man who's bleeding.

01:04:30

And, you know, oh, well, what do you know, dead men do bleed. So they always are going to come up with their rescuing devices.

01:04:38

So somebody who doesn't have a moral compass, like you can't appeal to that morality that, you know, everybody agrees that murder is wrong, but do they?

01:04:49

Or what if they don't? Or what if they don't have a moral compass? And she's saying not just unbelievers, but a lot of Christians who want to compromise, especially on those topics of gender and sexuality.

01:05:04

Right? Well, there's the snarky response, if they have no moral compass, then just steal their wallet.

01:05:12

Steal their wallet, see how they react, you know, who knows, maybe you'll get a couple of bucks out of it. If they don't react, or they get upset, and they're like, wait, what's wrong?

01:05:20

I mean, there's nothing wrong with this, right? Now, of course, I'm just joking, we don't want to do that. But that but using that as an illustration, suppose someone were to take your wallet, do you think that person should be punished for robbing you?

01:05:32

Right? You can kind of show them what it could kind of ask them that question, see what they think. Or you can just leave this okay,

01:05:37

I have I have no moral compass. I just think it's whatever, right? Okay. Well, I know one thing you can't dismiss, and that's logic.

01:05:44

What do you what do you do with logic? How do you make sense out of logic in your perspective? You can dismiss morality, right?

01:05:50

We know that they don't do it consistently. But you can't you can't. You can't reject logic, right?

01:05:55

By the way, you need logic to explain that you dismiss morality, right? Isn't that isn't that true?

01:06:01

So I would ask the person to account for more fundamental things that they can't they can't run away from, from your worldview perspective, how do you make sense out of like laws of thought, you know, consistency and contradictions and things like that, and see what they say, right?

01:06:14

There's no magic bullet. I mean, it really just depends on, you know, the nature of your discussion, right?

01:06:20

So I would just shift the discussion and not harp on morality too much. You could show that really, they do believe in morality.

01:06:28

But let's suppose you don't want to go down that trail, you can shift the discussion into something else that we both will know that they agree on.

01:06:36

How do you account for that? Right? Are you a man of science? How do you account for these other things? Right?

01:06:41

God is not on trial, they are. So we just pick the things that we want to, we asked them, can you account for these things?

01:06:49

Why not? We can from a biblical perspective, what do you think about this, right? So there are different ways you could you could navigate those sorts of things.

01:06:55

Now, when you're dealing with Christians, who are kind of like the liberal sorts that are saying, you know, homosexuality is fine, and things like that.

01:07:03

Well, that's a violation of logic and the Bible because it is in contradiction to the explicit statements of scripture.

01:07:08

So if a person professes to be Christian, there should be the common ground of authority of scripture.

01:07:14

Then you go to the scripture with them. It's very simple. There's no magic bullet here. If someone says they're a Christian, and they're saying things that are unbiblical, your job as the

01:07:22

Christian brother or sister is to bring the scriptures to bear on that person. And if they reject the scriptures, then you've just exposed that they're not

01:07:30

Christian. Right? You can't be a Christian and reject the authority of scripture. Now you can be a

01:07:35

Christian and disagree with my interpretation. But at that point, we are lovingly, as brothers and sisters, doing a

01:07:42

Bible study at that point. Let's look at what the Bible says about homosexuality and identity and things like that.

01:07:48

Right? And if the person is truly a believer and calls Jesus as Lord, we hope, we pray that that person will see the truth of the scriptures and bow to that and discard those beliefs that are distortions of what the

01:08:00

Bible teaches. But again, it's not, there's no magic bullet. Person might be hardheaded, and it might take a bunch of times, right?

01:08:06

I just spoke with someone on the phone today. They were like, well, my friend said this, and I, I gave him this response.

01:08:12

But he, he says, that's just your interpretation. And, and we were going back and forth. And I realized that the answers that this person was giving to his friend,

01:08:20

I was like, those are perfectly good answers. Why are you calling me? Those are great answers, but he didn't accept them. So there's a difference between proving your point and persuading your opponent, right?

01:08:30

Greg Bonson said that, you know, if you shoot a bear and the bear keeps coming at you, that doesn't mean your bullets didn't work.

01:08:38

It just means that some bears take more shots to kill. And that means we can give biblical responses, biblical interpretations to unbiblical positions.

01:08:48

And just because it doesn't seem like it's working doesn't mean we're doing it wrong. Just stick with the text of scripture, appeal to the authority of, of, of Christ speaking in the scripture.

01:08:57

And you work with that person. You pray, you pray for that person, right? These are the sorts of things that the

01:09:02

Christian, this is what the Christian life is all about. We're in the mess of relationship and grappling with God's word, seeking to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

01:09:12

Yeah. And it's not our job to convict people. That's the Holy spirit's job. It's just our job to tell people.

01:09:20

That's right. So Rob here in zoom, what asks, what do you think of J Warner Wallace's cold case approach?

01:09:28

I think it's useful in this sense that J Warner Wallace, who I've had on my show before um, uh,

01:09:35

J Warner Wallace is an evidentialist. I love evidence. I think we should know evidence. I think the problem with presupposition lists is that sometimes we are so concerned with worldview that we are not really good on the specifics because we're always from this broad perspective.

01:09:50

Pardon. Um, so I think our evidentialist brothers and sisters are doing a great job in laying out the facts.

01:09:56

We would just make the adjustment of placing those facts within a consistently biblical context. But for what they are,

01:10:03

I mean, I love the way J Warner Wallace, you know, uses his kind of cold case approach to connect the historical facts and things like that.

01:10:10

That's very useful when you're having a discussion. I'm a hardcore presupposition list, but when someone asked me a question, what's the historical evidence for the resurrection,

01:10:18

I'm not going to say, how do you make sense out of any evidence? That's not what I'm going to say. Now in a debate,

01:10:24

I might say that if I'm in like a formal debate, yeah, I'm going to go straight for the jugular. But if someone asked me a question, what's the evidence for the resurrection,

01:10:31

I don't mind giving them the evidence. Cornelius Vantill even said that this was what we should do.

01:10:36

He says that at this point he said, and I quote Cornelius Vantill said, I find historical apologetics necessary, but we do not argue endlessly about the facts without challenging the unbelievers philosophy of fact.

01:10:54

So let's talk about the evidence, but we can't stay there. We have to have one foot in the discussion of the specifics and the other foot attached to our broader worldview context that gives meaning to those specifics.

01:11:04

So I would say J. Warner Wallace, good stuff. Of course, take it with a grain of salt, take the good, eat the meat, spit out the bone, contextualize and bring things into conformity to that broader biblical worldview perspective.

01:11:16

And I think his work can be very useful. That's a nice way of expressing that, the balance between the evidence and the worldview approach.

01:11:28

So they work together and complement each other very, very well. So why don't you,

01:11:35

I think that's the end of our questions for on the air. So why don't you, Eli, go ahead and tell people again, how they can find your ministry, tell them a little more about yourself and then

01:11:46

I'll close things up as well. Sure. Well, once again, my name is Eli Ayala.

01:11:52

I'm the founder of Revealed Apologetics. If folks are interested, I've got some articles. I've got a blog post on my website, revealedapologetics .com.

01:11:59

And of course, the main thing that I do that I'm known for are my interviews on my YouTube channel.

01:12:05

And I cover mostly issues relating to presuppositional apologetics, but I've covered a wide range of issues from reform theology, creation, and other areas of theology that folks might find super interesting.

01:12:16

So they can check me out at revealedapologeticsyoutube. You can follow me on TikTok where I have short little videos and you can follow me on Instagram.

01:12:25

And if you have a question and you don't want to follow any of those things, you just, I want to ask you a question, you can email me at revealedapologeticsatgmail .com.

01:12:32

I will either respond to you through email or I will take your question and answer you via a blog article.

01:12:39

So those are the number, those are different ways that you can contact me or anything along those lines.

01:12:44

And if you're interested in learning apologetics and kind of like an organized classroom setting, folks can sign up for my biblical apologetics course on my website,

01:12:56

Revealed Apologetics. It's called PresuppU. So you click on that button, you could purchase the recordings.

01:13:01

It comes with the PowerPoint slides and the outlines. That's one way people support the ministry, but it's also useful for folks to kind of just take this stuff at their own pace and work through it.

01:13:11

My thing, my advice to people is when something sounds complicated, when you master those details, then you contextualize it.

01:13:19

I never talk with unbelievers on the street using words like metaphysics. I might use worldview, metaphysics, epistemology, ethic.

01:13:28

Oh, well that's your epistemological. No, we just ask the questions. Hey man, how do you know what you know? How do you make sense out of life without God?

01:13:35

How do you do that? How do you navigate? How do you make sense out of like death when you lose a family member? I mean, God gives me so much peace.

01:13:41

He gives me so much meaning. These things can be said very simply and they can be complicated as well.

01:13:48

So. Yeah, you have a good way of explaining things. So we appreciate having you.

01:13:53

And we are Creation Fellowship Santee, and you can watch the rest, you know, other presentations that we've had by typing into your web browser, tinyurl .com

01:14:05

forward slash CF Santee, C for creation, F for fellowship. Santee is spelled

01:14:11

S -A -N -T -E -E. And this month in February, we've had a lot of creation topics.

01:14:18

We had Dr. Jason Lyle talking about the James Webb Space Telescope updates. And we had

01:14:23

Dan Letha, the cartoonist talking, giving his testimony and how God has equipped us all with creativity.

01:14:30

And then, of course, the other side of the coin of how to defend the

01:14:35

Bible, including Genesis and creation, from a worldview approach, which we learned tonight. Next week, we're going to have one of our topics where it's more about applying those kinds of principles to current events.

01:14:50

And we'll welcome back our past speaker, Brian Lauer. His topic is going to be tools of tyranny.

01:14:56

So tune in for that next week. And in the meantime, have a great week.

01:15:02

We're going to sign off for now. And then Eli, if you'll hang back in the Zoom room, I think maybe some people might want to at least greet you.