Dr Greg Bahnsen - Introduction to Apologetics: Foundations IX (Part 9)

All right, we'll get underway with our lesson for the evening, and we'll begin with a word of prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we come into your presence thanking you that because of Jesus Christ we can stand before you. We thank you for your grace that has brought us new life and enlightenment. We thank you for the Holy Spirit that lives within us. We pray that that Spirit would help us this evening as we study your word and its application to defending our holy faith. We pray you would give us clarity of thought and faithfulness to you, and that with these we might be more persuasive in dealing with people, more courageous to witness, because we know that there is an answer for the questions that they have, indeed, the only answer. We are not worthy to have been entrusted with that precious treasure of the Gospel. We thank you tonight that you, by your Son's work, did grant us salvation, did grant us insight. We thank you for the scriptures that have shown us your promise and your goodness and mercy to us. And we pray that we would revere them all the more that because they are the very truth of God, as we say when we defend the faith, that we would take them seriously, study them seriously, and make a serious effort to live according to them. Forgive us for our falling short not only in our witnessing but in our own behavior. As we try to obey your word. We ask that you would encourage us. We thank you that you've given us your people to encourage us in. We thank you for the love and mutual fellowship and benefit of our congregation. We do pray, Father, you would bless us in all of our ministries and in particular our lesson tonight, for it's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. We come to chapter 12 in our syllabus biblical approach to apologetics. And chapter 12 was designed by me to be a summary outline of the material that has been covered in chapters one through 11. And we've done a pretty good job of summarizing in every lesson that we've gone over since we began this course. And so I'm not going to do any initial summary of my previous lessons. I'm just going to jump right into this, try to end on time for once tonight and see if we can't digest and put into a different form now what we've been looking at. There are three particular things that I want you to pick up on in tonight's summary, and they are centered in the middle of the columns in this chapter. The first is the epistemic lordship of Jesus Christ. That probably doesn't mean a whole lot to you. Just yet, but I'll explain what that means. Secondly, we have a summary about the use of man's reason and then some concluding points about presuppositionalism and its operation. As you know, in the first part of the syllabus, the lordship of Christ in the realm of knowledge was the emphasis, and we tried to apply that truth that Christ is Lord in the use of our minds to the exercise of man's reasoning. We concluded, and I believe with Calvin, that God's word must be presupposed in order to have knowledge in either the realm of creation or redemption. The special emphasis here is that God's word must be presupposed to know anything about the created order. It's not just that we presuppose God's word to have knowledge in the realm of redemption. However, our culture has been saturated with the contrary demands, as I say here, of autonomy, neutrality, the idea that man is really self sufficient in terms of the use of his mind and he doesn't need to depend upon God in order to arrive at the truth or to make sense of his experience in this world. That's autonomy. And on the other hand, saturated with the demand that if you're going to discuss controversial religious points, then everyone's got to have an uncommitted, no one knows, a jet attitude. Everyone has to be neutral from the outset. You can't assume your conclusion as you go into the discussion. Three basic objections, the presuppositionalism and the theory of knowledge, arise from just such a culture as I've described, an unreformed culture. And we've considered those three not only to see that they were invalid in terms of their the thrust of the objection, but also to give us an opportunity to see the strength of what we were defending, the presuppositional approach. So let's see if we can give a little more detail to this thing. The first point being Christ's epistemic lordship. Epistemic is an adjective pertaining to the word epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the nature and limits of man's knowledge, or if you will, the theory of knowing. So when we speak of Christ's epistemic lordship, we're talking about the lordship of Jesus Christ, his sovereignty in the area of man's knowing, not only the practice of knowing, but the theory of knowledge as well. Okay, five points then, about Christ being Lord in the realm of knowledge. First, God's knowledge is the original knowledge. It is comprehensive and it is creative. By saying it is the original knowledge, you have to understand God and man don't approach any truth as equals. God originally knows everything that is known. In fact, it's God's knowledge that makes things the way that it is. It's God's knowledge that is creative. My esteemed professor, Dr. Van Till used to say that if I want to know how many socks I have in my drawer, I have to go open it and count. God doesn't. And it's not just because God has X ray vision. He can see through the drawer, through the socks. It's because it's God's knowledge that made the situation the way it is that I'm now investigating. God's knowledge is original. It's comprehensive and creative. So there can be no higher principles or standards of truth to which God looks to bring his thoughts into conformity. It isn't like God has these rules. He has to keep rules of logic or science or morality that he looks up to. It's God's knowing, it's God himself that sets the rules for our knowing, for our morality. There is no mystery surrounding his understanding. For his understanding is infinite. Isn't it? Like God knows so much more than everybody else and he has this really big area of knowledge. But then beyond what God knows, who knows? Now there is no mystery once you've pressed, and we're speaking metaphorically as little children, obviously when we're talking about God here. But once you press to the outer limits of what God knows, there isn't anything beyond that. He knows everything. There's no mystery surrounding his understanding. God's mind gives the diversity to this world, the change that we see. God's mind gives the order and the continuities that we see in this world. That is to say, God's mind guarantees not only that there are particulars, that is to say, on the particular human being being, you're a particular human being and we are different. And it's God's mind that guarantees our uniqueness, our differentiation, our particularity, as well as assuring that these particulars are intelligible. Because, you see, if we didn't have anything in common, we couldn't talk about one another. We can talk about human nature, but there are things which we have in common and things which are different. That's true of ducks and human beings and it's true of apple trees and everything that's real there. You can't have knowledge of the world if there are not universals or orders of things. And yet you can't know the world if everything's the same either. You got to have particularity and universality, and it's the mind of God that brings those two together. Now, in the history of philosophy, this has been nicely called the problem of the one and the many. Oneness and manyness. So we resolve our philosophical problems by referring to the creative mind of God. Point number two, in terms of Christ's epistemic lordship, is that all knowledge and wisdom pertaining to every field, every area, has been deposited in Christ. He is the source of all truth. He is the standard of all truth, and he's the embodiment of all truth. Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth and the life. So any truth has got to conform to the mind of Christ. And any truth to be intelligible to us must be intelligible in terms of the revelation of Christ and who he is. Thirdly, God's Word will. Therefore, if you follow those two points I just given about the nature of God's knowledge being original and the lordship of Christ, God's Word has got to be supreme. Its authority has to be beyond question. Not just in morality, where we say, okay, well, if God tells me to do something, then I'm obligated to do it. But whatever God says about the nature of the world, about any truth whatsoever, is beyond question. Not just true. I say many true things. By the grace of God, I'm able to say many true things. But even when I speak the truth, you have the right to question me. Because I'm a mere human being. I'm fallible. God's word, however, is not only always true, but it's beyond the possibility of error and beyond the possibility of challenge. Do you understand the difference then? The prerogatives of the Creator are much different than the prerogatives of the creature, even when they're both saying the same truth. This also means that God's Word must be the final standard of truth for man, in which case it cannot be challenged by some more ultimate criterion. If God's Word tells us that Jonah was three days in the belly of a great fish, if some scientist comes along and says, well, now I've studied all of you know, the digestive tracts of all the great fishes, and I can tell you that that's impossible, what to say? Well, I respect all your research and what you know, sir, but if you say that what God says can't be true, then you haven't done enough research. And if he says to you, oh, you know more about fishes than I do, say, no, I don't necessarily know than you. But I do know that you couldn't know anything about fishes if it weren't for what I do know about God. And consequently, when you challenge God's word, you're undermining all of the research you've done so far. So you'd be far better off to say I haven't done enough research to confirm what God's word says than to challenge God's word. Now that all sounds very nice and pious, but as you know, that ain't the way it goes, right? What most people do is they seem to learn about some area of life and then they say, oh well, this won't fit in with what the Bible says. And so ergo, the Bible has got to be challenged, it's got to be discredited. The fifth point that I would draw from these four that we've already seen is that the authority of Christ is self attesting. This is detestable to the autonomous mind. Autonomous mind doesn't want you to say, well, Christ has ultimate authority and therefore he doesn't refer to anything beyond himself for authorization. Christ's word doesn't need to be authorized by anything higher or beyond him or more sure than Him. And I'll not get you out on time like I promised if I go over everything we've said. But you remember our discussion about self attesting authority. When someone objects about that, what you have to say is, well now wait a minute, wait a minute. You've got your self attesting authority too. It's not as though you want to give up all thought of self attributes attestation. Everybody has an ultimate authority. And if it's really the ultimate authority, their ultimate authority authorizes itself. That's true of you and it's true of me. I mean, that's just part of the conditions under which we have to live in terms of epistemology. And so your real objection is not that I said Christ has self attesting authority and you don't like self attestation. Your objection is that you don't want Christ to be the ultimate authority. We believe and according to Christ's own teaching, that that's the kind of authority he has. He speaks with the authority of God. He's the repository of all knowledge and is subject to no standard or authority that's more basic or beyond Him. He's the only one really who is adequate to witness to himself and to the truth of his word. So that is first. I mean, that's a huge step from this. Everything else develops if we see the lordship of Christ in the realm of epistemology, the theory of knowledge, those five points are just scratching the surface. We're trying to summarize it. Then that will lead us to have a particular view of the way man exercises his reason. And that view will not be the one that is shared with the world. Maybe it would be a good analogy to think of an apologetical skirmish. Whether you're talking to the Hare Christians at the airport or to your next door neighbor, you know, while you're out gardening, one end of the scale to the other. Whenever you're defending the faith. You might think of it as like two football teams arriving at a stadium to engage in this encounter. But they can't agree on what the rules of the game are. One team shows up and brings what we call baseball bats and metal cleats and wants little round hard balls like this to be used. And the other team shows up with an oblong kind of pigskin looking thing and big shoulder pads and all sorts of other sorts of things. And they have all these different rules and so forth, but they're going to do battle with one another. You see, when we argue with unbelievers, we're not arguing simply about the conclusions we come to. We're also arguing about how we come to any conclusion at all. We're arguing about the rules of the game for argument too. So our view of Christ's epistemic lordship, as I say, leads to a particular view of man's exercise of reason. We don't think man's exercise of. We don't think of it the exercise of man's reason. We don't think of it in the same way that unbelievers do. We say one, that there is absolute truth and that the knowledge of that absolute truth is accessible to man. Man doesn't know everything. He doesn't know exhaustively, but he does have adequate knowledge. Okay, you might think of man's knowledge as God's knowledge is the whole jigsaw puzzle put together. Man's knowledge may be a little piece here and a little piece there and so forth. But you see, all by itself, what man knows doesn't seem to be connected. And because we don't have everything, a lot of people would say we don't really know anything. That's all relative. But in terms of our theory, God has the whole jigsaw puzzle and pieces of it ours. And because those pieces are part of God's puzzle, they do have a relationship to each other. They do make sense and they are honestly part of that puzzle. They are truth, absolute truth, but they're not the whole picture, man's knowledge. I say secondly, here must be a receptive reconstruction of God's original creative knowledge. Okay? God thinks something. That's what makes it so. If I want to think the truth, I got to think what God thinks. So I'm receiving God's revelation, I'm receiving His Word. And in terms of that, I reconstitute, as it were, or reconstruct what he knows about the world. Augustine had a catchy way of putting that. He said we must think God's thoughts after him. To think the truth is to think God's thoughts after him. I can't think God's thoughts as God thinks God's thoughts because I'm not God. I have to think God's thoughts on the creature's level. God's thoughts are creative. Mine are recreative, reconstructive of what God has originally thought. Okay, and here's five quick sub points about this receptive reconstruction of God's original knowledge. The starting point for all knowledge is going to be God. The Bible says the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord. The starting point for epistemology is respect and submission for God. You want to see the crass idolatry of the unbelieving world. Every epistemology class that I know of, including, I don't want to say I know everything about all of the schools, so I won't say 100%, but high 90s, 90% or better of Christian schools start their epistemology classes somewhere. Other than in bowing the knee before God, we tend to think, well, religion's over here and chapel, that's good for this reverence and so forth. But epistemology, if we really understood the theory of knowledge, it would begin in worship, to begin in prayer, begin in bowing the heart in the mind and offering everything as a living sacrifice to God. The starting point of knowledge is therefore God. And in particular, one must submit to the truth of God's revealed Word. We don't know anything about God unless He chooses to tell us. And so we have to go to His Word. It's not like we can independently discover things about God. Man must be grateful to God for whatever he possesses. And that would include gratefulness for our understanding what we know that comes from God just as much as the food that's on our tables. That being the case, our belief, which is to say our trusting God at His Word, our belief precedes understanding the world. God's revealing himself to us and our receiving of that in faith is the beginning of our being able to see the world as God would have us see the world, and to know the truth. And this is not just a shot from my favorite area of the curriculum, but that means theology is foundational to every area of study. If you wanted to do it schematically. Everything you study should begin with theology. Every course in physics, in geometry, in history, in foreign language and physical education, and whatever you have should begin with theology. We should have a theology of art and a theology of science and a theology of industry and economics and politics and history, and on and on and on. And out of that theology, we then go study the particulars. And I realize that isn't the way we do it, but in theory, that's what we should do. And another obvious application is that man does not have the prerogative, pardon the spelling, to call God's word into question. God is not in a position. Man is not in a position, given God's position, to question Him. Okay, a third major point then, under the exercise of reason, is that any philosophy, that philosophy that suppresses rather than presupposes the truth of God will evidence, in one way or another, a darkened mind, a sinful mind, because it is in rebellion against God. And that rebellion, I'm saying, is not simply moral. That rebellion is intellectual. It's possible to intellectually rebel against God. Of course, that's. In one sense, everything's under the banner of morality. The use of our minds is a moral thing. So I just want to make it clear that my accusation against the unbeliever is not just that he's sleeping out of marriage with somebody. I want to say that he's prostituted his mind as well. Now, when people prostitute their thinking process, as unbelievers do, their thinking will be made foolish by God. It will be led to futile conclusions. In fact, it will ultimately make the use of reason impossible. God's word assures us of the foolishness of unbelieving thought. We need then to be able to step back and just look at unbelievers hang themselves, really, in the way they use their reason. Thinking, which submits to the elementary principles of worldly philosophy in the traditions of men, deludes men with crafty speech and misleads them into destruction. You remember our lesson on Colossians 2? That's kind of of a summary there. Principle four, neutrality in scholarship, apologetics and schooling has to be seen then as both impossible and immoral. No man can serve two Masters, there can't be any middle ground between two ultimate authorities. And if we were to achieve neutrality, it would only erase the distinctiveness of our position. It would muffle the antithesis between godly thinking and ungodly thinking. Neutrality is not an ideal for the Christian apologist. A Christian who strives to be neutral denies the lordship of Christ in knowing and loses his solid ground for reasoning. And whether he confesses to it or not, he has endorsed assumptions that are really hostile to what he's trying to do. Kind of like a man who says, let me, let me assume that I'm wrong in order to prove that I'm right. So you've given up in principle, you've given up the argument at the outset. If you grant to the unbeliever that you're really all right as far as you go, you just need to add Jesus for the sake of your eternal salvation to your life, which is really just fine. Your thinking process is really all right as far as it goes. But of course you don't think correctly when it comes to religion. No, that's not what you want to communicate. Because then you've really given up the point of what the Christian faith teaches. And then the fifth principle about the exercise of man's reason. The believer must act as a new man, a new man in Christ. His mind, Paul says, has been renewed. Not just his conduct and his words, not just his heart as it were, but his mind has been renewed. Just think about the beginning of our Christian experience, conversion. There is no true conversion without repentance. Repentance, literally in Greek, one of the Greek words for repentance, means change of mind, turning around of the mind. To repent means to think differently. Now second sub point, once we become Christians, we walk by faith. We don't walk by good works or our self sufficiency, our own accomplishments. We walk by faith. Faith in the regenerating and illuminating power of the Holy Spirit. I mean, the last people on earth that should be giving the idea that their intellect is self sufficient are Christians. We know that what we have, we have only by the Holy Spirit's work in our life. And so we now try to make every thought captive to Christ. That is to say, when we go to work, whatever work we do, whatever field, we work in every truth that we know at work, when we go home, everything we know about our family, or about cooking supper, or about interpersonal relationships, or when we go to a movie. And we have certain principles of art and human experience that we apply. Everything that we know, we Say we submit to Jesus Christ and to His Word. His Word governs us, directs us. And then finally, the believer must love the Lord, his God, with all of his mind, seeking in all things to glorify Him. So when I go out to do battle with an invitation believer, the first thing I think about is not, have I won the argument? That's a hard, hard thing to break free of and probably takes longer than you realize when you start arguing with people, even in a kindly way, to set yourself free from this desire to dominate your opponent. Now, if you do a good job, you will end up dominating your opponent, tying him in knots in a sense. But that isn't what we're there for. We're not there to say, see, I did a better job than you did. I realize no one's going to crassly say that, but I'm afraid in our heart of hearts, that's what we're concerned about. Our first concern should be to glorify God. Did I tell the truth about Him? Did I represent his glory? And it has been misapplied. But there's a nice little, I don't know what you would call it that is said about defending the faith. Someone once asked, how do you defend the faith? And the answer was, the same way you defend a lion, just let it out of its cage. And unfortunately, obscurantist fundamentalist Christians have used that kind of saying or response to say we don't really have to be educated people. We don't have to do our homework, as it were. I'm not suggesting that, but I am suggesting that when we are engaged in apologetics, let's just remember God doesn't really need our forcefulness. Let the lion out of the cage. It'll take care of itself. Just glorify God. The persuasive end of it will be in the power of the Holy Spirit anyway. So you do what faithfulness calls for rather than what you think manipulation might accomplish. Okay, I think we're going to make it one last section of this chapter, summarizing the first 11 chapters. What a terrible subheading, right? Could have called it miscellaneous. Note further crucial aspects of presuppositionalism. We have some truths about the epistemic lordship of Christ I hope have now been burned into you permanently. We have some truths about the way man's reason is supposed to work and what happens when you don't do that. And now a few final comments. 1. Men come to presuppose the truth of God only by God's grace. Because it is the truth and grace of God which have transformed us. We can be bold in our challenged intellectual belief. It's God who's done this work and that gives us boldness. But since it's the grace of God and not our own wisdom that accounts for our change of mind, humility is befitting the Christian scholar. And therefore we have this, this apparently ironic state of mind and attitude. That is appropriate, humble boldness. I'm going to be humble, but that doesn't mean I'm going to let up on the argument or the challenge. I'm going to press it with all my might. I'm going to be bold about this. But it's a boldness that evidences, hopefully, if I do it right, the humility that comes from being a sinner saved by grace. Secondly, the men we're talking to, that is to say all men are without excuse for rebellion against the Lord. Can't stress this enough. When you talk to people and they give you all these arguments about how there can't be a God or how the Bible's full of mistakes or this problem, or that was being a Christian, they will often sound very genuine. They may have a list of 30 objections. It looks like they've really tried to be responsible. And we sometimes think, well, that's really too bad, if we could just kind of answer all these things and maybe they would. They are without excuse. You do need to answer them. Not just pooh, pooh what they bring up. You need to show there are answers for these particular things. But yet when you approach even that dealing with their particular questions, understand that God says they have no excuse. And the reason they're without excuse is because they do know the God that they are fighting against and arguing against. They know him very well because he's revealed himself. Romans 1 says, all men know God. They cannot help but know God. And now the problem that they are in comes not from God being somehow faint or God being somehow obscure, or God mumbling, as it were. But they are in trouble intellectually and morally because the truth that they so very well know, they're holding down. They're suppressing it. They say, no, wait a minute, that's not the answer. I want it. Let's try again for something more, more to my liking. So all men are without excuse. Despite his contrary profession. The unbeliever knows what men be known about God from nature and conscience, because God himself has been sending him the message, has clearly revealed it. And yet all men attempt to suppress this knowledge of God. And this is manifest in the diversity, profuse diversity of anti Christian philosophies and non Christian religions. People have a lot of creativity and individuality. But in all of these cases, what men are trying to do is build a roof over their head so that the revelation of God won't get into them. And they're so caught up in building the roof and so sincere about building the roof that they kind of lose sight of the fact that they're building that roof just because there's something from outside that they don't want to get in. As many commentators have put it, just in the machinations of the unbeliever, he gives testimony to his knowing the truth. Just in their efforts to fight against it. You see that the truth is pressing on them so much because the unbeliever cannot rid himself of a knowledge of God. And in fact, though he's trying to deny that he knows anything about God, he's really living on borrowed capital. The truths about God, theistic truths, are necessary for him to make sense of mathematics or science or morality or history or whatever. Because he cannot rid himself completely of that knowledge of God, he then has the ability to come to a limited understanding of the truth about the world and himself. However, the understanding and knowledge of the unbeliever, even the smartest unbeliever you can find, is an understanding gained despite his autonomy, not because of his autonomy. It's not as though his autonomy has done only a little bit of good for him. And if he had, then Christian principles, he could do a lot of good with that intellect that he has. No, it's only the common grace of God that has enabled him in his autonomy to come to know anything whatsoever. And then our third point, under aspects of presuppositionalism, that we not be misunderstood and criticized. God has created all things for himself. Doctrine of creation, the doctrine of Providence is that God directs all things to his own sovereign ends. God owns everything. In that case, everything in the created realm must serve him. If it doesn't serve him. If the way we study any part of the created order or the use of our created minds, if it does not serve him, then we're stealing from God. As Paul puts it in Romans 1, neither gave, they thanks, and so God blinded their minds. And so this precludes the possibility of any neutral ground between the believer and the unbeliever. Whatever we hold in common with unbelievers cannot be a matter that's neutral, but it also assures us that there is all kinds of common ground between the believer and the unbeliever. Because we all are creatures of God, we all live in God's world, and therefore everything that we have, we have in common with unbelievers. Christians don't have new noses, nor do they have new laws of logic. We hold these in common with unbelievers. So there's all kinds of common ground, but it's not neutral ground. It's God's ground as God's creature, created in God's image and living in an environment that constantly brings the revelation of God to bear upon him. The unbeliever is therefore always accessible to the gospel, regardless of his philosophy. He can't run fast enough and far enough away that we can't catch up with him. He's always accessible. He may try to be autonomous, he may pretend that he has a philosophy of life that wouldn't even allow for us to be able to speak to him. But he is always God's creature, regardless of what he says. Just like a person who has tuberculosis has it. No matter what they say about they may try to talk themselves out of having tuberculosis, but they've got the condition. And unbelievers have the condition of being God's creature. That's what's true of them. That's their character, whatever they may say about it. So they're always accessible to the gospel. The believer always has a point of contact with the unbeliever. And I've broken that down into two things. The unbeliever is the image of God, and this person who is the image of God has the truth of God deep inside him, suppressed, misused, abused. But the fact of the matter is he is God's image and he has God's truth. And that being the case, we have confidence and depress our apologetical challenge, which is what I'm going to do now in the next lesson. All of these lessons have been foundational. Now we're going to turn to methods of apologetics. We will have a two week break in my lessons because our midweek meetings as a church for the next two weeks will be in connection with one, our school Christmas program and then secondly, our church Christmas party. So our midweek meetings will be on different nights of the week and so forth. And then in three weeks we'll come back together for the last lesson that I'll be teaching on Thursday evenings. Then I'm going to continue to teach apologetics in Sunday school when Tony and I make the transition, the shift. Okay, we got a couple of extra minutes do you have any questions you'd like to ask now? You think by now, Dr. Bronson, you said this to us so many times, we've got it, got it down, and it feels good when we get to together and say these things because we're all agreeing. When you get out there on the battlefield, that's when I'm afraid you'll start forgetting your foundations. You know, you kind of start seeing things in a different way, John. Well, that's what we're getting into in the next section of our lesson. And so I'm going to resist the temptation to jump right in and start telling you, read the next. Actually, I should give you a reading assignment, shouldn't I? How to Defend the Faith. Read just chapter 13. And by the time we finish the next section, John, this question that you've posed to me a couple times now will be receiving an answer. That's my whole point of doing this, showing you. What do you say then, when they say to you. The methods are general? In the same way that there are certain models a basketball coach teaches his players, methods of defense and offense and that sort of thing, and they work on their methods. But when it gets into a game, those methods have got to be brought to bear on particular situations, like a particular player dribbling a particular direction and shooting a particular way. Now, what are you going to do? Use those methods in dealing with that particular. So when someone brings up, say, the problem that the King List in the Old Testament have discrepancies in them, that's one of the claims. That's a particular problem. But the way in which you respond to that dribble of the unbeliever is going to be based on the methods you have been learning in practice here, certain things you want to accomplish and what you're looking for. For the evidential kind of things. No, I'm going to hold off on that, Brian. Once you see the method of presuppositional apologetics, you'll see that evidences are seen in a much different light than people who take what's called the evidential approach. Yeah, I'm just saying that it provides a framework. Yes, it does. It provides a framework. Evidence can be used. Once we understand the presuppositional approach, and that is our main thrust. But once we get off that and say, well, evidences alone are going to be used to deal with this person, then that won't work. Okay, very good. And we'll see you. Well, I hope I'll see you the next two weeks at our midweek meetings, but for class in three weeks.