Dr Greg Bahnsen - Introduction to Apologetics: Foundations V (Part 5)

Begin with a word of prayer. Our Father, we come to you tonight acknowledging that you are the Lord of all truth, you are our ultimate authority, and that everything that we believe and beat our entire lives is based upon your own authority. We thank you that you have communicated with us that you communicated the truth and given us a sure foundation for our lives. We pray that you would help us tonight to understand the implications of our Christian confession of faith and in understanding that know how Confucian defend it in the face of those who have questions. Or we pray, Father, that you would teach us very practically tonight how we might better testify to you and be faithful to your word and your ultimate glory. We're on chapter six in our syllabus which is intended as a summary of the previous five chapters. Makes application to the issue of God's self attesting authority. Now you're going to be hearing discussions of God's self attesting authority from time to time in this class. And so we want to make it very clear tonight what we're referring to. I put up here on the board a question that you can kind of keep in your mind, very simple practical question to ask whenever you're debating something with someone when there's a difference of opinion between people. And that's the question, what authority do you say this or by what authority do you assert that? By what authority should I believe what you are saying? So let's, let's say that I'm having a discussion with an unbeliever and he tells me that he believes it was all right for him to engage in premarital sexual intercourse. And I'm going to want to find out from him how he made that ethical judgment, how he came to that conclusion. If I can ask him, by what authority do you say that and what basis do you say that? Well, one way or another this is going to lead him, I think, to say either that there is no God or the Bible is not the word of God. Because when I point out to him, well, the Bible condemns it in this passage and that passage and the other, then he's going to have to say something to the effect then in his ethical point of view, he's going to have to say something about the nature of reality or the nature of how he knows things. He's going to say that's not the word of God. Or let's say he says there is no God. I want to know by what authority does he say there is no God. And I'm going to make this a not Real sophisticated, unbeliever, most of the one he relates to or not. Let's say he says, well, everything we know, we know through our senses. You either have to see it or hear it, or touch it, what have you. Okay, so the authority upon which he says there is no God, that he has not seen God, heard God, touched God, because all knowledge is limited to what we know through our senses. But then I have to ask him a further question, right? It's by what authority? By what authority? By what authority? By what authority do you say that we only know things through our senses, that everything that man knows is to be verified through one of his five senses? So we keep pushing the question back. I want authority. My what authority? I want authority. Now let's put the shoe on the other foot. You need to realize we're in the same situation. I'm telling the son of the Libra, let's say I'm trying to lead him to conversion and I'm using his sexual immorality as a basis for calling him to repentance. And I say, your sexual immorality is under the wrath and curse of God. He goes, by what authorities? You say that? He may not use those very words, but so how know that? Well, because the Bible says when I point out the passages and so forth, and this is why you need to read that, he goes, well, why do you believe that's the word of God? By what authority do you say that? And so he has pushed things back to what is really the ultimate apologetical question. By what authority do I believe that this is the word of God? On what basis and by what authority should he believe that? Now our dispute then is going to be pushed back, pushed back, pushed back on the basis of this authority, this authority, this authority. Where does that chain end? Does it ever end? Well, it better end somewhere. Better to get started, really. So the question is going to be, when we get down to rock bottom, we finally get down to our final authority, what then authorizes our final authority? Now my final authority, I'm going to say, is the word of God or God himself. If God himself is my final authority, speaking in the scriptures and the young believer says, well, by what authority do you believe what God says? I'm going to say there is no authority in the world, am I? I'm going to say God is my final authority. So when you ask the question now about why I believe we're God's, you're not asking a question that needs to be given an answer because God is the final Authority. Now, here's where I think is a crucial mistake made by most evangelicals and apologetics realizing that they're embarrassed when the unbeliever says, well, then you're reasoning in the circle. You believe what God says because God says you have to believe what God. And what we need to learn, what we need to recognize and then learn to do, is to point out that the unbeliever has an ultimate authority as well. Now, because the unbeliever can easily appeal to all sorts of other unbelievers in the very spirit of our age, you know, in favor of his ultimate authority, he tends to think, I don't have an ultimate authority that authorizes itself. I have an ultimate authority that everybody believes them. But you see, if he holds to his ultimate authority, let's say his ultimate authority is we can only know what we know through our senses. And I say, well, then what authorizes that? On what basis do you say that? If he says, well, everybody knows that, that's just what everybody believes. So that's what I'm proceeding with. Then what has he made his ultimate authority? What everybody says, or since not everyone will say that there are some superstitious lunatic types and people like me that are religious that don't hold to that, then it's not what everybody says, but what the vast majority of people say. This is an aside. It's always kind of cute to do this. Usually what it means is most of the people I hang around with, most of the people I like, whatever they think, and that's what I call them, authority. They say, well, because everybody knows the fun. You should say, you don't know everybody. How can you possibly say that? Okay, but let's say that he does know everybody or nearly everybody, and he says, my final authority for believing that sensation or observation is the basis of all knowledge. If he says, well, everybody believes that, and I'm saying, well, how do you know that? What's he going to have to ask? Well, I observed it, I heard it, I saw it, I checked, I did a empirical survey. But he's back to trusting the senses, isn't it? Well, why do you trust your senses? Well, because everybody does. Well, how do you know that? Well, I use my senses to find out. See, there's a little circle here, too. It's a very destructive one. But his ultimate authority is being verified by his ultimate authority. Let's kind of teach this my way in antithesis. Let's say the opposite is the case. You, as the unbeliever, say to Me, why do you believe the Bible is the word of God? What does God say? So the word of God says in the Bible. Well, you're thinking the Bible is, you know, the salt of authority. And I'm asking you why you should. Why should you believe the claim of the Bible that it is the word of God? I said, well, I guess you got a point there. I wouldn't want to reason in a circle. So let me think. Why should I believe? Well, because I did a lot of study in philosophy, science and history, and what I learned from the experts in those fields has led me to believe this book is worthy of our respect. Now, if I say something like that, by the way, that's what most apologetic practice today is all about. It may not be quite as crass like that's what it comes down to. I mean, I've studied history and I've done, you know, this analysis, and I think this book's very reliable. That's why I believe this is what it does. And what has become my ultimate authority? Expert opinion in history, philosophy and science. Someone might say perhaps that I'm the ultimate authority because I decided to push experts. I'm going to read in those fields. That's kind of a little slang there, where the end of it shows his surprise. But let's just say he said, I'm just going on the accepted opinion of the expert, and he doesn't even know the existence is free. Now. I said, unbelievable. If the believer says, I'm going on what the experts have said and I think this book is worth trusting, then I don't think this book is the ultimate authority, because this book must come and bow at the feet of the trusted experts in history, science and philosophy. And when they say, oh yes, very good, very good, then this book is worth trusting. So if I give up the ultimate authority of God's word as the basis for belief in God's word, then I've lost my argument, haven't. Because I'm saying this is the ultimate authority, but I'm defending it in a way that says there's really something more ultimate than it. Consider the undoing. What if he is an empiricist? He's an example. All knowledge is based on observation or sensation. And so I put the question to him. How do you know that by one authority you say that? Well, I'm either going to trust my senses and use them to prove that, or I'm going to go something. I'm going to go to something that's an authority apart from my Sense. Now if I say to the Christian, I believe sensation is the ultimate authority because I found out on the basis of sensation, then I'll be reasoning in a circle. But if I appeal to some other philosophical consideration other than sensation, I'll be saying to something more ultimate than sensation. I'll be giving up my ultimate authority. The self conscious unbeliever will have to admit that he reasons in a circle as the ultimate foundation of his system of thought too. Because all authority, in the end, the ultimate authority can only be defended and only authorized by itself. So when we ask the question by what authority? If, if you just learn to keep pressing that, not let people slide around and start changing their ultimate authority. If you stick to it, just a chain of command all the way down the line, when you get to the final authority that they're willing to appeal to, then you have to point out, well, ultimately that authority must be self contesting, which is a way of saying the authority at the test to itself. What authenticates that authority? That authority itself does. This is not a great analogy because it might seem unflattering to the Almighty. But sometimes parents do that with their children, right? Children want to know why, why, why does finally the parents say, because I said so, and now it's become a test of my authority? Well, why do you have authority? Of course, the Christian family, Because God says I have authority in terms of the social interplay of child and parent, my authority is my authority and I don't have to justify it to you. All right? Now, does God have to justify his authority to anybody? Think about it. When it comes to the authority of God, I mean, in the case of a child, we can imagine at least where the parent has to reveal to God. But when we get to God, who does God have to look to to authorize his support? Does he have to look beyond himself? If he did, would he be God? You have to point out to the unbeliever, in a sense, if you understand the concept of God, at least the Christian concept of God. Of course, God doesn't appeal to any other consideration to verify his authority. If he did so, he'd be abdicating his crown, right? He is the sovereign, he's the ultimate authority. So the unbeliever has an ultimate authority that authorizes itself attesting or at least claims to be self attesting. And the Christian has an ultimate authority which is self attesting. And in the end people are going to decide which is the most credible claim to being self tested. The word of God in scripture or the word of the unbeliever, saying sensation or whatever else is the self attesting authority. Since sensation or observation is such a popular option, I'll just use that as my illustration. Is observation or sensation self attesting? The nature of the case cannot be. Let me show you why observation is made the justification for all knowledge. Our statement is all knowledge is justified by observation. Now that is meant to be a self attesting position. A position that authorizes itself and is not arbitrary. Then we have to take a look at this word all and ask whether the person holding the position has justified, has looked at everything that is known so that he can verify through observation that all knowledge has been justified by observation. Is there anybody who's observed everything that is knowable even by observation? I agree some things are knowable by observation, but I haven't seen everything that's knowable by observation, have you? Even if we pooled all the things we've seen, we wouldn't come close to getting everything. So on what basis does he say all knowledge is justified by observation? It's not observation. Observation is it? Observation for that individual couldn't possibly justify this statement. And so when the unbeliever claims that he has a self contesting authority, one of the things you want to do is to show him is that his authority doesn't justify itself, but it actually undermines itself. If observation is the only way to justify statements, then this statement here isn't justified. So he's refuted himself just so you don't let the guy slip out the back action. Philosophically, what will ordinarily happen? Even though the unbeliever probably won't be able to put words on this, describe it. What the unbeliever will attempt do is to say, well now this is, this is something I take for granted. This is my starting point. And after this, all knowledge is justified by observation. That is, he wants a freebie. He wants one exception to be made. We're used to that. You know, we like to give one chance and we get a trap ticket or something. People think that's legitimate, but in philosophy there are no freedoms, there are no exceptions. You cannot allow arbitrariness or inconsistency at any point. Well, some people would say that there are axioms in philosophy or the Clark argued that way. He said there are some things that physic man would just. You just choose them. Okay, and then we start from there. I would as a philosopher disagree with that. I think that undermines all circumflex knowledge. I would say that. I would say that there are some things which are presuppositional which are not proven directly, but only indirectly. This is part of what we learned in this course, that the way you justify a presupposition it shouldn't be a possibility for contrary. Rather than giving direct evidence for the presupposition which gave three suppositions, you have to give evidence of the sort that if you deny this and you're unable to prove anything, this becomes a necessary assumption for all rational thought or all ethical behavior or something like that. Okay, so no freedoms. Don't let the unbelievers flip out saying, well okay, I begin with this. This is kind of like my value judgment at the beginning. And then I, you know, do my philosophy. Showing the impossibility of the contract. By demonstrating that if you deny this presupposition, you've undermined the possibility of rational thought or moral absolute source, human dignity, any number of things you can consider. But if he starts with reason, oh, you're going to have to bring that other thing with reason. There's a notoriously ambiguous word. What do you mean reason? Does it mean it begins with sensation or it begins with the ability of the human mind to interpret sensation, or it begins with self evident truths? What does he mean by reason? He means I begin with man's reasoning ability. How does he justify that man has reasoning ability. Out of the young man. It's reasonability. The problem is when unbelievers talk that way, they're usually not even clear in their own mind what they're saying. So part of the task of apologetics is to pin people down analytically. What do you mean by that? And once we finally get hold of something, then how do you justify that? Do you want to follow that up? Well, one more about big cotton sex. Descartes is a name that you probably don't want to know. You'll know him because when people want to make jokes about philosophy, they lucky to hold the Descartes. I think therefore I am introducing. Reason is the foundation for Descartes thinking in the sense of clear and distinct ideas are thought to be unassailable. Anything that is clear and distinct in my consciousness cannot be denied. In part felt that everything that was less than certain was in some sense shaky, even in my way of thinking of it. There's a long debate one philosophers as to what apartment meant by that metaphor later in the script, ideas that don't have that kind of shakiness about them. Descartes said if we methodologically doubt everything is in our consciousness, can we get to the place where there's anything we cannot doubt? So Descartes says, can I doubt that I am, that I have a body? Yeah, I can doubt that I have a body. I could read as a body, soul. Can I doubt that I'm awake right now, this may be a dream. And I doubt that there are people out in this room that I'm talking to. Yeah, maybe an illusion. So on and on and on it starts going back, back, back. What is it that I can't doubt? And Descartes conclusion, as you know, is, well, I doubt, therefore I am. If I'm doubting, I must at least exist to be doing the doubting. So I may doubt everything except my own existence. I can't doubt my own existence because if I didn't exist, I wouldn't be here to doubt. I'll use the untutored translation I think rather than I doubt, therefore I am. It's been pointed out that what Descartes has done here is beg the question of I think I am. I am is built into the sentence I think. And Descartes says I do anything. He assumed his existence and so when he proved his existence from this statement, he really begged the question. As some philosophers pointed out, Descartes could have as well said I stink, therefore I am and I think, therefore I am. I stink, therefore I am because all of the I do the followings assume that I'm here to do them. So this is not a true at all, it's just begging the question. Bertrand Russell pointed out that Descartes, had he been more philosophically precise and honest, should have said there's thinking, therefore I am. And if he had done that, everyone would have said, well that's not there's thinking, therefore you are. All he knows from his doubting or his thinking is that there's thinking going on. For him to make some metaphysical statement about individuation himself and the assertion of his own existence is quite a bit from just his thinking going on. So once we get the premise straight, it turns out that this is not a self attesting authority, it's just an arbitrary circular argument. So Descartes is a rationalist. He assumes there's things we can know on the basis of reason apart from observation, and he reasons in a circle. The empiricist, on the other hand, says that everything we know is based on all observation, but observation can't justify his ultimate premise. So you have arbitrariness on the one hand, and self reputation on the other. And since rationalism and empiricism are the two major, by no means the only, but the two major schools of epistemology in the history of Western thought. By pursuing this line of thinking, you can show that just about anybody is going to have philosophical problems, either arbitrariness or inconsistency, the foundation of the system. One other remark that I want to very quickly summarize the chapter for you. Some Christian apologists, as I told you, want to have an authority that authorizes God's working in the Bible. If. I think the point can be made by Congress, if someone says, if the Bible has been shown to be historically and scientifically reliable, then it is to be, it's very probably the word of God is plainly. Well, in the first place, there are a lot of scientifically and historically reliable that we wouldn't say are the word of God. For all I know Winston Churchill's book the Gathering Storm, I didn't make any historical mistakes. His proofreaders caught him. Anyway, by the time it went to press, there were no historical mistakes in that book. We say, oh, it must be the word of God. Then. Is there no historical mistakes in it? There are probably some articles published by scientists that at least at this state of our knowledge, there are no scientific mistakes. They say, therefore it's the word of God. Now someone says, well, there are no historical and scientific mistakes in this book, therefore it's the word of God. That argument is no more convincing there than it is in the other. And yet apologists spend so much of their time arguing that we don't even realize the fundamental assumption. The anatomy of their argument is mistaken. Just isn't a good argument. But if they say that, we go on the mission of scientific and historical verification. What if someone else comes along and says, no, no, no, no. The way we find the word of God is by whatever gives us the greatest happiness. Here we have, you know, the consistent hedonist who is going to be a hedonist even in epistemology. It's not just that the right thing to do is what gives me happiness and pleasure, but what is true is what gives me happiness and pleasure, okay? And so he reads, he says, well, you know, this Playboy magazine gives me more pleasure than reading this book over here. And so I don't think this is the Bible. I think for magazine is the Bible. Now here you have the apologist who says, no, I've got scientific credentials for this book. And there's the heathenist who Says, yeah, but I've got pleasure credentials for this book or magazine over here. Now, how are we going to settle that? Well, you have to know what God would want us to be looking for, right? In order for the hedonist and the Christian empiricists to settle their dispute, they have to have some way of knowing what God says His Word would look like. Is it possible, I mean, just try to, you know, think through the theology, the projected theology of the Hugh Hepner. Is it possible that the God who made heaven and earth. We're just dealing with philosophical problems. Is it possible that the God who made heaven and earth is not in us, in science and mystery or atrocity, but he's more interested in pleasure? So God, maybe God does want us to find His Word on the basis of pleasure, not on the basis of research and intellectual scholarship. Well, how would we know. How would we know how to identify the Word of God? Just think about this. Who alone could tell us what the marks of divinity would be for God's Word? Steve? Only some of whose divine. Only God can tell us what you better look for if you want to find My Word. So if we have here we have this book that's being examined and evaluated, and someone looks at this book on the basis of this standard here and says, that's God's Word. Someone has another candidate over here using a different standard and says, no, this is God's Word. We have these parallel arguments developing. We want to know which standard is the reliable test for God's Word. Well, then we'd have to have God tell us, right? Well, this person says, God tells me here to trust this standard. This person says, no, God tells me here to trust this standard, and therefore this is His Word. Where's this going to end? And finally, where God's saying, this is my word because I say it's My Word, period. In the nature of the case, God could be the only one sufficient to testify through his own Word. If I got everybody in Corona del Mar to agree that the Bible is the word of God, would you then say, oh, that must be the word of God? Hopefully not, because God hasn't said that. The way to find His Word is by doing a nose count, by seeing what everybody believes. In the nature of the case, God alone is sufficient to witness to himself from the fact that God is the sovereign creator of heaven and earth, and the fact that the world and history are only such as his plan decrees from the fact that man is the image of the God, a creature made in God's image. We conclude that all knowledge which man possesses is received from God because God's the one who made the world, controls the world, made the mind of man, and so forth. God is the originator of all truth, and he himself is the standard for the original truth. Our knowledge must be a reflection of the primary, affirmative, absolute and creative knowledge of God himself, which is a way of saying we must think his thoughts after Him. Now that is a way of summarizing what I've said in premise one in your chapter. All knowledge is deposited in Christ and man's knowledge of the truth depends upon God's prior knowledge. It begins with the fear of the Lord and requires submission to God's Word. This sentence is false. Well, of course, if this sentence is false and its truth value is yet in reverse it right, in which case the sentence is true. But if the sentence is true, then it must be the case of a sentence false testament claims Anyway, I'm sorry, maybe many of you have the first sentence of the syllabus. This material from the pass by sentence cannot be arranged into following way. And he just got kind of stuck right there. Computer keeps repeating itself. Where do we go from here? By my authority. Now summarize number one. However, unbelievers hold down the truth about God, and because they do that, their thinking and their interpretive endeavors necessary necessarily are misdirected into foolishness and error. Or as Umbratude puts it, philosophy which does not presuppose God's word must be or is a vain deception. By suppressing the truth and submitting to human traditions and reasoning according to the presuppositions of the world instead of Christ, such thinking leads to a darkened mind and futile conclusion John will make through which the vaunted wisdom of the world. Our task in apologetics is to show that. To show that God makes foolish with his belief. We're going to try to pull the rug out from under the unbelievers. In a sense, we're kind of doing the reverse on the unbeliever. He comes to us saying, why don't you believe all this superstitious stuff? How can you believe that? We're going to turn around and say, how can you believe anything at all if you don't? We're going to show the foolishness of his world. We need to realize that there can be no middle ground between the worldview of the believer and the unbeliever. That too is a common misconception. What you have is kind of this middle ground that we share with the unbeliever. And he moves this way given what he knows about the world. And we move that way given what we know about the world. We need to go back to this middle ground and see who's really doing his homework properly. He's got the right answer, but there is no middle ground. One consciously begins with God in his thoughts or he does not. As Famous3 puts it, Endeavoring to take a neutral stance between presupposing God's word and not presupposing it is an immoral attempt to serve two lords. Jesus has no name and serve two masters. Your ultimate authority is either going to be me or something other than me. Now if believers try to establish this kind of of middle ground neutrality, then they'll either lose their own solid ground or will end up working on the unbelievers basis which isn't ground at all. This is what premise forces. Mutualist thinking would erase the Christian's distinctiveness, blur the antithesis between worldly and believing mindsets and ignore the gulf between the old man and the new man. Apologetics that is not presuppositional and doesn't press the antithesis, you see is wearing down the antithesis as though in sanctification. I'm not really all that different than what I was as an unbeliever in my thinking anyway. Krishna describes neutrality and willingly endorses assumptions that will be possible to his faith. The very nature of what it is to be a covenant. Live as a Christian sufficiently establishes that the believer must presuppose the truth of God's word and give up any sinful claim to self sufficiency and neutrality. Put it in the words of premise five, a Christian is a new man having a renewed mind, new commitments, a new direction and will, a new Lord and hence new presuppositions in the world of thought. The believer sanction ought to to be rooted in Christ in the same way that he was converted, submitting to the lordship of Christ in the realm of knowledge rather than the thought patterns of the pseudoism of apostate thinkers or unbelieving thinkers. The Christian renounces the arrogance of human autonomy and seeks to love God with all his mind reason in such a way that God receives full glory. And so if that's the case, if there can be no middle ground, one is facing an obvious choice. To live under the authority of God or not to live under the authority of God. That's what it comes down to. As six says, the alternatives are quite clear. Either ground. All your thought in Christ's Word and gain the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, or according to the Bible, follow the dictates of autonomous thought and be deluded and robbed of genuine knowledge of the truth. That's what I want point out to the unbeliever. I don't want to say, you know, I've done my homework in science and history better than you have, although I probably have. Unbelievers are notoriously shoddy when it comes to their research because of their prejudices. But the fact is, I want to point out much more than that. I want to say that you're going to be robbed of genuine knowledge if you don't submit to the ultimate authority that I put in before you. And so reflection upon the Creator, creature distinction, the nature and prerogatives of God versus the nature of the creature cannot fail to lead us, if we are consistent to the conclusion that God's Word in Scripture has absolute authority for us and is the final criterion of truth. Now this evening I have for the most part been using conceptual analysis to show that this would have to be the case in some cases theological analogy of the nature of God. Is that what the Bible says? Does the Bible teach the self attesting authority of the Bible? Well, yes it does. And this is what the remainder of this chapter is an attempt to show you in the last four or five minutes here. Let me just summarize that real quickly. In Matthew 7:29, you notice after Jesus delivered what's called the Sermon on the Mount, the people were amazed at his teaching. Well, what specifically does the text say that they were amazed with? That he taught with authority. And that day a Jewish teacher, if he wanted to be persuasive, would give an opinion and then he would back it up by saying, rabbi so and so says, and rabbi, Rabbi so and so is backed up by rabbi such and such, and on and on and on. And so they said, they said, they said. But in Sermon on the Mount you remember what Jesus did. He said, you've heard it said by them of old, by the elders of Israel. But I say amazed, they said, wait a minute, he's claiming authority. He's not going by one authority. And then he appeals to some rabbi who appeals to some rabbi, appeals to some rabbi or some, you know, other teacher. Jesus says, I don't need to appeal to anybody. I carry authority in myself. I say to you, that was. Well, even in our day and age, you really understood the significance of that. That's offensive to people today. You don't sit up and say you should believe this because I said even people who act like that usually have to kind of, you know, be a little more suave about it and present it in a better way. In Jesus Day it wasn't taken well to either. He claimed authority in himself. In fact, in Matthew 7 he said, if you don't build your life on his words, then you're a fool building on destructive sand. Oh how I wish Christian apologists just remember the story of the wise men built his house upon the rock and the foolish man upon the stand. The end of the story says Jesus says my word is rock. Okay, he's talking about build your life on what I say. And why? Because I said it on my authority. And in John 12 I'm sorry we're going to kind of look all these up, but I trust you've already done so. You have to. In John 12 Jesus said that any man who rejects his words will be judged by those very words. Jesus says on the day of judgment, I'm going to get the experts out here and they'll show that you're wrong. He says, on the day of judgment the very word that you're rejecting will prove to be the authority that condemns you. Again, self authority. Woe to him who strives with the I have some passages here that point to the Word of God being our ultimate judge. First John 4:11, Isaiah 8:20 to the law and the prophets. James 2 condemns being unstable and being double minded. We are to be driven by the word of God's spirit and not be caught in the cunning craftiness of humanistic error. Ephesians 4 verses 13 and 14 Hebrews 10 says we must unyieldingly hold to the confession of our Christian faith. Some people say, I'll confess Christian faith. I'll yield it while I argue for it. Then I'll come back and show that's why I can't really give up my Christian faith. Hebrew says unyieldingly hold to the confession of your Faith. In Romans 3:4 Paul shows us again the self attesting authority of God. Let God be found true, though every man is a liar. When someone raises something against the authority of God, all better. Well, so much for your research. And I know that you're inaccurate because you come up against the Word of God because God's going to be found true and every man will have to be declared a liar even if they all joined in unison against what God said. So the word of the Lord self attestingly true and authoritative. It is the final criterion the final standard for judging all other words. As I say here, it's our presuppositional starting point. And a person's starting point can only be self authenticated. If something else authenticates it, then he doesn't use it as his ultimate starting point. Romans 9:20. Paul says, no man is in a position to reply against God. Who are you, o man, to speak against God? And Job, of course, you remember this will close tonight. Job finally got worn down by his temptations and so forth. And he said, I have a few questions for the Almighty. And God said, well, let me ask you humbled Job. And finally Job puts his hand over his mouth and he said, I spoke. As I end the chapter here. I came in thunder with a voice like Job recognizes the ultimate authority of God. So what I've been teaching in terms of the necessities of the apologetical situation based on philosophical concepts and even the theological concept of God's nature is also textually supported, I think in Old and New Testaments quite extensively. The ultimate authority for apologetics is the very thing we're trying to prove, that God has final authority. The nature of the case will have to argue that way. In the nature of the case, the underleater has to argue that his final authority authorized itself. And then it becomes a clash between those worlds. On that basis, we're a real good position because all the other worldviews needed. Any questions real quick? I'm sorry I took you over. Things are different. We have the believer with a circular reasoning that is valid, and the unbeliever with circular reasoning breaks down one way or another. But does this not mean then that there cannot be a common ground in which the two can argue with each other reasonably struggle? Keep coming back, y' all read. Because chapter 10 of the source is on that very question. Common ground which is not neutral. In chapter seven, which you're going to read for next week, three arguments against what I've been teaching. That's one of the arguments that people will come up with. And I'm going to be answering that next section. So I'm going to. The different types of deists tempted to construct their parallel arguments. For example, where would the breakdown or the non parallelism begin? Later we're going to see even better. But I will answer very briefly that when we make an authority claim to the Bible, it is not a, what might be called sheer authority, just formally whatever's between the covers of this book. And who knows what might be in there, since God says it's the Bible Well, I don't know that God says this is the Bible, except by looking at the content of the book and the kind of God talks about in this book and so forth. And so in the end we have to compare the theology of the Muslim and the theology of the Christian. And on that basis we have two different worldviews. And I would show in the case of any other religion that the worldview propounded by that religious book or divine revelation is not self authenticated. Just to answer the Muslim example, Muslims teach about Allah that Allah is so different from creation that nothing that comes from the created order can be predicated of Allah, nothing can be said of Allah that is based on man's experience. But of course the Quran is precisely an attempt to speak of Allah and human words and experience. And so their theology, if God is what they say he or it is, then he couldn't reveal himself, in which case they don't have a religious book. So their own religious book undermines the religious book ness of their religious book. That's much fascinating. If what their book says is true, the book couldn't be what it claims to be a revelation of God in human terms. So you have to forget the Muslims for a minute. When you have a competing religious claim, don't be bamboozled by the fact that it claims God. It has religious credentials. Just say, well you've got a worldview, I've got a worldview. Let's do an internal examination of both of them. And when we do that, we'll see that our religion, most of them fail because they don't have a divine revelation which you can hit them with right away. It's really just arbitrary. Why should we go out and chant and do all that kind of stuff on the corner in order to be right with the divine love source that you're talking about here, you can undermine there's no authority there because there is no divine revelation. And so that reduces it to those that claim the divine revelation. And as one thing that I really appreciated, John Fring pointed out once, he said all these other religions of the world claim the divine revelation are in essence Christian heritage because they're borrowing the Christian concept of revelation and trying to dish out their own content through it. And they're able to show the inconsistencies within what they're claiming. Yes, I philosophical terms, you categorize things broadly as either rationalism, useful reasons and rationalism claims that there are things we can know apart from observation. Perhaps the best illustration, if I were arguing for the rationalist position today would be the truths of mathematics. It's very difficult to justify the truth of of mathematics on an empirical basis. And yet they don't seem to be arbitrary because we're able to shoot rockets to the wing and build bridges and so forth on the basis of what map the application of our mathematics. Everything else generally falls into comparisons. E, M, P, I, R I, C, I, F M which says no, all knowledge is based on observation. So some is not based on observation or all is based on observation. Those are the two essential positions in Western history. Both of them have problems. The one is arbitrary, the other is implicit primary sense of scholars. The arbitrary or the system. Okay, thanks a lot.