Dr Greg Bahnsen - Introduction to Apologetics: Methods V (Part 15)

Will take about 20 minutes. A shortened lesson this morning, but you're going to learn so much philosophy in these 20 minutes, you're going to be amazed. Let's have a word of prayer. Father, we ask that you would make us faithful to your word and make us persuasive in communicating that word to others. We pray that you would increase the number of opportunities we have for defending our faith. We pray that you would increase our courage and and our readiness to speak. We do pray that you would give us an answer for every man who asks us, a reason for the hope that is in us, and an answer that glorifies our Savior Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. Last week we looked at a passage in second Timothy, chapter two, and I'll read it for you once again. Verses 23 to 25. Avoid foolish and undisciplined questions, knowing that they produce quarrels. And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but must be gentle toward all, skillful in teaching a patient. There's something missing in here, someone who is patient, I'm sure it must be, and who courteously instructs those who oppose themselves if perhaps God may grant to them conversion unto a genuine knowledge of the truth. And we do need to spend some time eventually talking more about the gentleness of the person who defends the faith, who can do so effectively without quarreling with people. It's very easy to fall into that. I confess that myself. I'm sure you're aware of that, that when we really intend to glorify God, it turns out we. I guess we're more afraid that our own glory is being compromised and we quarrel with people. We shouldn't be doing that. But last week our focus was not so much on personal style, but was on this aspect of opposing themselves. We need to be aware that the people that we're talking to are at a real disadvantage. I know many Christians feel like they're second class citizens when it comes to intellectual matters. And it's like, well, it's a matter of faith. And these people, they can be committed to reason or to science or to something, and all I have is my faith to fall back onto. But as a matter of fact, the people that you're talking to oppose themselves. They have internal conflicts in their way of looking at the world and their way of living which cannot be resolved. Apart from renouncing their self sufficiency and bowing to the lordship of Jesus Christ, you have a real advantage to them. Paul put it this way in 1st Corinthians 1 hasn't God made foolish the wisdom this world? So the word of the cross, though it may appear outwardly to be something silly, frivolous, irrational, foolish to the world the word of the cross, that little thing in the eyes of the world, is mighty before God for pulling down everything that raises itself up against the knowledge of God, it will make foolish the wisdom of this world. And so it's my job, not so much to play the part of person ridiculing worldly thinking, but it's my job to help you see the foolishness of worldly thinking so that you'll have that confidence as defenders of the faith. One way in which you have seen that already is that everyone who wants to be reasonable, who wants to think in a scientific way, has got to assume that the future will be like the past, that there's continuity in history, that our experience is not completely disjointed and random, that the kinds of. If I could use a scientific analogy or illustration, that the kinds of things that take place in the test tube on Tuesday will take place in the test tube on Friday, if all the factors are the same, that the way you drive your car today or start your car today will be the way it starts tomorrow morning, you still need fuel, you still need a battery. You still need all the same things that the future is like the past. People need to assume that for there to be any kind of projection, any kind of scientific mastery of this world, and yet the unbeliever, because of his or her understanding of reality, has no assurance that the future will be like the past. We live in a chance universe according to them. And so, you know, one question. Will the future be like the past? And you know that the unbeliever can't answer it, but you can. Now I'd like to take up. I was going to do a whole bunch of them today, but I promise only 20 minutes. So I'll take just a few and we'll continue next week. Another one of the questions in philosophy that everyone has got to. Well, everyone assumes something has got to have an explanation for that assumption, and that's that there are. How can I put it to you? Likenesses in this world I struggled with. I don't like the word likeness, but I think that's probably the best way to put it to you. There are categories in this world where things fit into the category because they are like one another. There are. Universals is another term philosophers use. A universal is a class concept. Duck is a universal. Ducks are not. If we were to go out and look at the pond, we might be able to see Huey, Dewey and Louie. They are ducks, but when we speak of them as being ducks, we're referring to something that is not a duck. That is, when we call them ducks, that which we are referring to is itself not a duck. The ducks are on the pond, but what I'm talking about is not on the pond. Have I lost you yet? The category, the class, the concept is not on the pond, is it? Duckness as an idea is not on the pond. Don't shake your heads. You philosophers talk this way. You talk this way too. You don't just talk about individuals, you don't just talk about particulars. You talk about categories. You talk about concepts or classes or what I'm going to call likenesses today. There are likenesses in this world. When you go to the doctor, he is able to help you because he knows about likenesses. He says, oh, well, what I see here is like what I saw there. Or he'll say about you, well, you're like a human being. And so I treat you with human being type medicine instead of horse medicine or dog medicine. But by the way, when he speaks of horse and dog, horses are things that are like one another, and dogs are things that are like one another. But the thing that makes dogs like one another is not a dog. The dogs are what are alike. The likeness between the dogs is not a dog. I'm getting the most horrified expressions from some of you. Anything that we talk about that unites particulars is itself not a particular. Okay, so if I take Huey, Dewey and Louie and I'm going to refer to them as ducks, it's this category or class or concept of duck that unites them. But the concept is not a duck. It's a concept of a duck, isn't it? Isn't that right? See, Diane's following this real closely. There are likenesses in this world, and if there weren't likenesses, we would not be able to reasoning, in many cases, a matter of finding out that a particular is a member of a class. I know this is real abstract, lipid, but I'm going to give you an example now. When you go to the doctor and let's say you have some kind of a growth on your hand, you want the doctor to treat this. You don't like. This is ugly and it's somewhat painful and it's awkward. Now, in order for the doctor to treat this growth on your hand, the doctor must say that is a particular instance of what of a class of things? Let's say it's a wart. The doctor must be able to say there's such a thing as wartness, and here is a particular wart. Now, here is what we do with warts. Now, when he gets ready to treat the wart, by the way, he's assuming the future will be like the past, Right? In the past, we found out that warts are treated this way, and that's what we're going to do with this wart, too. But even before he starts applying the future will be like the past thinking to this thing on your hand, he must first be able to say, that falls into a class of things called warts. Now, what if it were not a wart? What if it were some kind of other growth? I don't know enough about medical science to see what it might be. Jeff, give me help here. Yeah, one of those things. It could be one of those instead of a wart. But you see, before the doctor can say it's one of those, he has to have what, the concept of a ganglion. He must know the difference between the concept of ganglion and the concept of wart. Right here it would be okay. Now, when the doctor is doing his work, he's thinking in class terms or universal terms. He's not just thinking in particular terms. When he gets ready to diagnose your body, he's being very particular. That thing on that hand, on that body is a wart or a ganglion. But when he talks about warts and ganglions, he's talking about a concept or a category, things that are like one another. So likenesses in this world, remember that what makes Huey, Dewey and Louie all part of the same category, that that which unites them is not a duck. But what is being united are ducks. Likenesses are like relationships. The relationship is not the same as the two things related. This Bible is on the podium. When I say on the. I'm talking about a relationship, an easy one. Now is the. On the. Don't think about the Bible and don't think about the podium right now. Think about the. On the. Is on a Bible, is on a podium, no. So we have a Bible, a podium and relationship. Now I'm going to talk about a real special kind of relationship. Relationship of being part of the same class, an identity relationship. When we say there's a likeness between those three feathered things out there on the pond, and we call that duckness, is the duckness. A duck is the relationship that unites those three Things. A duck. No, it's the ducks that are related to. But the relationship is not a duck. And that relationship of class membership or being an instance of a universal is something we have to talk about. Because you can't reason without that. It's impossible to reason only about particulars. The barn is red. What is particular in that sentence? Somebody barn, right? Or how about this? That barn. And then make it ripple. And I go, that barn is red. I'm talking about something particular, but I'm also talking about something general or universal. Redness. I'm saying that barn participates in redness. That barn has redness about it. Okay, but I'm not saying that that is redness out there, is it? Because if that is redness out there, if I go burn the barn down, redness doesn't exist anymore. But if I burn that barn down, bar still exists. There may be barns elsewhere. The barn is particular. The color red is universal. It's a likeness. It's a category. It's a class. Everyone with me, that's good, because it takes philosophy students about half a semester to catch on to this stuff. It isn't that hard, really. There are particulars and there are classes. And when we speak to each other, we put particulars in classes. That thing on your hand is a wart. That barn is red. Particulars are understood in terms of the classes that they belong to. That is, the likenesses that they have. We say, well, that's like this. Those things out there are like the other things. And we call that likeness duck or duckness or hoarseness or triangularity. There are things in this world. There are instances of triangles. But if we were to erase. You probably had a geometry class once, and your teacher put a triangle or many triangles up on the board. And so you know that there are triangles on blackboards around this world, geometry classes and elsewhere. And they're probably triangles on engineers, you know, workstations and things like that. But now, what if we could secretly get into every classroom and every engineering office and everywhere there's a triangle, erase it completely. Erase every instance of a triangle. Would there no longer be triangularity? Let me ask you this. Your name's written down a few places on a birth certificate, on letters. Okay? You can expand the illustration. What if we were to find every writing of your name, every place it's ever been written, and erase it? Would you no longer have a name? No. You'd say, well, all the instances of my name have been erased, but my name still exists. I'm still Greg. You Erase Greg. Every place you find it. You're not going to get rid of Greg Ness. I'm still Greg. So we have these things that are necessary for talking to one another in reasoning. We have names, we have categories, we have classes, we have relationships, we have things that are like one another. Now, what's the point of today's lesson? You've been waiting for the punchline, right? The point is that you can't touch any of those likenesses, can't taste them, can't touch them, can't smell them, can't see them, can't hear them. They're not in the physical world anywhere. In fact, if you could find where Gregness is, I wish you would call me, you know, because I'd like to go protect it. Make sure no one destroys Gregness itself rather than the instances of Greg. Okay? Or redness. I'd like to protect redness from being destroyed. If it were a physical thing, it could be destroyed, right? Well, not only destroyed, it could be encountered in some way. Maybe somebody has redness in their cabinet somewhere at home. We don't know that, but they call us. Really. The universal redness is right here in my cabinet. Of course, if they said that the universal redness was in my cabinet, you would say, well, if it were in your cabinet in a particular place at a particular time, it wouldn't be the universal, would it? So don't worry, no one's going to destroy those relationships, those categories, those classes, or those universals. But that isn't really the punchline, because you weren't worried about him being destroyed. Punchline is when you're talking with an unbeliever. If the unbeliever doesn't believe in anything except what we can experience, then the unbeliever must stop talking and stop reasoning. Because the unbeliever, when he or she talks and reasons, refers to things which, on their approach to the world, cannot exist. Things which are not physical, like names, concepts, categories, classes, universals. We started out today's lesson with some abstract, philosophical type talk. The point of the lesson, though, is for you to be able to explain this to your neighbor, to your milkman, to use the illustration, so that you can explain that when you are reasoning with somebody, they're not always talking about things you can touch. That barn is red. Well, but I can't touch red. I can't find red. Well, I can find a particular instance of red, and I can find a particular instance of barn, but I can't find Barnes or redness. And so if There is nothing in this world but physical objects. They are all particular physical objects, aren't they? There's no such thing as a universal particular object. This is a particular piece of paper and a particular podium and a particular book and a particular suit and a particular human being and a particular microphone, particular piano. But none of these things are universal, they're all particulars. And if they are all only particular, then I can't refer to them in the way that I just did, because there's no such thing as piano ness if there's only physical things. Piano ness is not physical. We just talked about that, right? If someone were to call you and say, I've got piano ness in my bedroom and I shut the door so it wouldn't get out, you would say you couldn't have piano ness in your particular bedroom because if you did have it in a particular place, it wouldn't be universal. The concept of a piano, the class or likeness of things that we call piano cannot be made particular in that way. So when the unbeliever starts insisting only those things we can touch and, and see and hear and smell and so forth, only those things exist, only the physical world exists, then you have a way of saying, well, then all reasoning has to stop, doesn't it? In fact, we couldn't even be using these sentences we're using to talk about reasoning stopping. All reasoning must stop because there are no classes or universals or likenesses in terms of which we could reason. The doctor couldn't say, that is like a wart, that is like a piano, this is like a human being. Because there wouldn't be anything wartness, piano ness or human beingness. There'd only be particular things. Now why did I call them likenesses? And with this we'll end today. Because at this point, if you talk to an unbeliever, their first out is going to be, well, I can see that there's a likeness between those particular thoughts, things. And so that's what I'm talking about. I see this and that and that, and I say they're like one another. And what I call that likeness is piano or piano. Or I see the, the three things out on the pond, and what I call the likeness between them is duckness or duck. And I see a likeness between all of the things breathing and sitting in chairs in this room. And I call that likeness humanity or human beingness. So the unbeliever is going to say, well, there's only particulars. But then I do see that some particulars are like each other. And then I give a name to those. The Bible tells you that unbelievers oppose themselves. And I want you to see how. Now you know the teeth of this trap are just going to snap closed. You say there's only particulars in this world. But then you see a likeness between them. And what I'd like you to show me is the likeness. Don't show me the duck, show me the likeness. Don't show me pianos, show me piano ness. Could you please. I would like to. I'd like to know what a piano smells like. Since it's a particular thing, it must have some kind of odor. I'd like to see what it feels like to kick piano ness. I'd like to. Well, some of you are getting the point. When the unbeliever says I can see a likeness, you can say, well, you're seeing something that doesn't exist. Because on your worldview nothing exists that isn't physical and the likeness isn't physical. The likeness is no more physical than on physical. Remember the book on the podium. The book may be physical, the podium may be physical, but on is not. And the likeness between things, the relationship of identity between things is not physical. So the unbeliever, in order to reason would have to have concepts, universals, likenesses. But because of the unbelievers worldview, he or she cannot appeal to such things. So how are things like one another? And will the future be like the past? Those are the two questions you now know about. You don't have to know the philosophical jargon, but you know what the essence of the problem is. And if we had more time next week, hopefully we will. I'd like to engage some of you in talking about about this on a practical level to make sure that you can now bring this to bear in talking to somebody. If nothing exists except physical things, then there can't be any. If nothing exists except physical things, then there can't be any reasoning at all. Because reasoning uses universal things, concepts and classes and likenesses. Okay, questions. If they don't admit to categories or these things. Yeah. Their problem is bigger than intuition though. As you say, if there are no relationships or categories and there's no reasoning at all, whether it's intuitive reasoning or discursive reasoning won't make intuition difference.

I was just going to point out that, I mean even the particulars today that they claim to. They say when they look at the duck, they say that's beauty. They don't really, even if they point to it, they will have the true meaning of that. Because the duct's chemical nature, that's what they're referring to, is changing from time to time too. So even, even when you talk to about a particular ear.

Yeah, you're moving, moving ahead to a further problem in philosophy. And that's that even if you could get your categories and justify them, in this real world in which we live, the world of experience, things are constantly changing. And so what is the identity of something over time? What is personal identity over time? When you were born, Kent, you didn't look like you do now, I hope. Right. And when you die, if the Lord gives you many more years, you will not look like the way you do now. And there are, and you might be in an accident someday, you might say lose a limb or something now, but we would still say it was Kent who was born Kent who is asking the question, Kent who dies? It's Kent, whether or not he has lost a hand in this accident. So what is identity over time for a human being? That's a further problem though, and I don't want to complicate this class to just yet. The, the basic problems of philosophy will all turns out be great mysteries for the unbeliever.

Does the what if the unbeliever just says, well, concepts don't exist. The categories that are in the mind of man, they don't exist?

Well then they're not in the mind of man, are they?

Okay, well you would say they are categorizations of bonies of.

No, they don't exist in the mind either. So what are you referring to when you say a category doesn't exist?

Well, unicornness.

What about it?

Does that category exist?

Sure it does. Unicorns don't exist, but the category of unicorns does.

Okay, so how do you go from that point telling to showing that God exists?

Because. Because what? The only point. I think you're getting ahead of yourself. The only point we're at right now is showing that if the unbeliever doesn't grant that there are non physical things, the unbeliever can't reason. Now we have, we have further to go. But all we're doing now, see, we're standing in his worldview and we're just doing a lot of damage to him. We're just saying, oh well, when he says that to me, then I've got an answer. I'll answer the fool. Not according to his fault. Folly, lest I be like unto him. I'll show him that on the Christian approach to things that God made this world and God is not physical. And therefore there is a relationship between non physical and physical things. And we can continue the Christian story, which I think you know, we have a way to understand that problem. The unbeliever doesn't. We are made in the image of God and I can think God's thoughts after him. And so as God thinks of. Of unicorns and as God thinks of mathematical relations or red or barn or whatever, so I can think as well. Okay, Anything. Real quickly. I know I've taken you over time now, three weeks in a row and. Go ahead. Do universals give identity to particulars? Is that the right way? Particulars are identified in terms of the universal of which they are the instance. Does the idea of stereotyping fit in here? Well, you're typing, it's not so much stereotyping, but you're typing a particular. When you say that's a barn, that's red, whatever. And if we didn't do typing, if we didn't put particulars into categories, we wouldn't be able to reason about them at all. There'd be nothing you could say. You'd just say, this is particular, that's it. And remember, particulars would only have names. They would not have class concepts. Names are meant to be individual. I realize we share names. There are more than. There's more than one Greg in this world. But this human being is called Greg. Greg L. Bonson. Okay. And there may even be a Greg L. Bonson somewhere. I hope not. But if there weren't anything but particular physical things in this world, everything would have to be named in that way. Just think of it as numbers. Instance 1, instance 2, instance 3, instance 4. And there's no relationship between 1, 2, 3, 4. There's just the numbers out there. Yes, I know. And then you couldn't even call them numbers, could you? Because numbers are not physical. Is that what you're going to say, Willie? Oh, you're going to really mess people up now. But Willie's right. When we talk about particulars, we have a universal of particular by which we reason concerning particulars themselves, John, Because. Well, that's not the issue. It's not a matter of how we know about the categories. Is on your worldview. Are there categories on your worldview, Mr. Unbeliever Materialist? There can't be categories because categories are not material. Then. Then we're going to move on to another problem. That's right. But at this point he has to give up his materialism, doesn't he? If he doesn't give up his materialism, he will have to give up reasoning. And if I give you that tool, I've given you something very potent, very important. You can show the materialist that if he's really going to be true to his worldview, he should stop reasoning and stop talking. That's a good way to shut up unbelievers. Say on your worldview, you couldn't even talk. Okay, more of this later.