Dr Greg Bahnsen - Mid-Level Apologetics: Four Things in All Systems Pt 2 (Part 8)

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

Tonight we're going to be talking about how to defend a method. And my prediction is that this will probably be your favorite class of all the nine that we have. I may be wrong, of course. I love it when students say, oh, we Love them all, Dr. Bonson. How could we ever choose one?

But this is the one where the.

Rubber hits the road and I find a lot of people say, finally, I can get a handle on this and.

I can do this.

So there may be something that will attract you tonight and then next time we get together will be your worst, the most hated.

Because we're going to be looking at.

Philosophical issues and I just want to give you a word of compassion and encouragement and tell you I have been where you are. I know what you're feeling. When you're up late at night reading those essays and going, what on earth does this mean? Please persevere to the end. Plug on and we'll try to make it worth your while when you get here next time, even though it'll be difficult. But tonight we're going to talk about the issue of in order to make very clear what presuppositional method is all about, let's review in a diagram way.

What we know about the unbeliever to.

Whom we are speaking, both in terms of the nature of the unbeliever and the nature of God and his revelation. So here's how we look at the unbeliever.

Even though the unbeliever may not be.

Self conscious about this and maybe not even able to discuss it in a real clear way. The unbeliever professes to have certain convictions, but the Bible tells us that the unbeliever, contrary to his or her outward profession, also knows God in his heart of hearts. Because the truth which God has made known to all men is being suppressed in unrighteousness. So the first thing that you have got to see when you engage in apologetics is that the unbeliever is double minded. And if you don't catch how the.

Unbeliever goes back and forth between the.

Presupposed truth known that is known because of God's revelation, which makes sense out of the moral and intellectual convictions of the unbeliever, goes between that and what.

Outwardly is said, then you'll never be.

Able to effectively get to the bottom.

Of their worldview and try to unravel.

It so on the one hand, the unbeliever has professed beliefs. And by professed, I mean these are the ones that the unbeliever says out loud, professes, and he or she believes that this is where they're coming from. On the other hand, the Bible says the unbeliever has suppressed beliefs. So, as you see on the board here, we have to divide between what the unbeliever suppresses and what the unbeliever professes says outwardly. Now, in these sets of beliefs, even in terms of the professed beliefs of the unbeliever, there will be what we call presuppositions, most basic assumptions about reality, knowledge and ethics. The presuppositions that an unbeliever, or a believer for that matter, has the presuppositions that any individual has will not be those things which are all the time openly acknowledged or discussed. They are, if you will, taken for granted. So when you're in a discussion with an unbeliever, even about his or her professed beliefs, they may not always bring to the surface, as it were, and acknowledge what their presuppositions are. They may be relying upon underlying assumptions without necessarily recognizing it, or even when they would acknowledge it, not always talking about it or waving the flag. The unbeliever doesn't talk to you. And all the time say, I'm assuming a chance universe. I'm assuming a chance universe. So that presupposition is there, but it's not always being discussed. So anyway, presuppositions about the nature of reality. If you want to be philosophical, this is what we call metaphysics, presuppositions about the nature of knowledge. The fancy word for that is epistemology. And presuppositions about ethics, how we should live our lives, what our conduct should be, our attitude should be, and so forth. In addition to these professed beliefs about reality, knowledge and ethics, the unbeliever has suppressed beliefs, presuppositions about obviously reality, knowledge and ethics. Now, the Bible assures us, because of the clarity of God's revelation and because man is made in the image of God, that all men have these beliefs and they act in terms of them, they think in terms of them. And yet, because all men are sinners and in rebellion against God, they say something other than that. They will say outwardly that reality is of such and such a nature. And here's how we know what we know, and this is how we ought to live our lives. And we're clearly in conflict. So the Unbeliever has an internal conflict right within himself or herself. They're spiritually, intellectually schizophrenic. In addition to the unbelievers presupposed beliefs, the unbeliever has a whole network of other beliefs as well, which I'll just call the web of particular beliefs. And in this web of particular beliefs you have such things as the unbeliever thinks that ice is cold, believes that General Washington won the War of Independence, believes that a bird is chirping outside the window right now. That is all of the specific day to day mundane things that unbelievers hold to about history, about their present experience, about art, about what tastes good, anything. This is called a web of particular beliefs because not all these beliefs are on equal footing. The unbeliever uses some of those beliefs or sees some of those beliefs as more important than others. And so if there was a challenge, say to the idea that there's a bird chirping outside the window right now, most unbelievers would say not even worth arguing about unless there's some personal tit for tat going on and they want to rise to the occasion. But that's not a real important belief. They happen to hear the bird chirping and so forth. But if you were to challenge them, say about, oh, what, the sexual purity of their mother, then they might think that's a real important thing to argue about. Okay, I give these things as absurd extremes. So you get the idea that this web of particular beliefs is a structured sort of thing. We can't always see what the structure is, but we know that some things are real important, other things are less important. But all of these beliefs, all of them are based upon and are understood in terms of the presuppositions of the unbeliever. Okay, this is by way of review. We haven't put it this way before, but you know all this already. The unbeliever must be seen as having two sets of beliefs, two sets of presuppositions. The one they will not acknowledge, the other they profess, and then all of their particular beliefs are tied to their presuppositions. How should we defend the faith when we're dealing with somebody that if you want to put it on the blackboard, looks like this, somebody wants to die. No, there actually is a place for evidence and we're going to see what that is tonight. So why don't I begin there since that's what you're interested in.

In dealing.

With the unbeliever this is what you want. Like, okay, here's the manual for how you do it, right? First thing you want to do is deal with the intellectual debris and challenges that the unbeliever might have, okay? And by challenges, I mean those questions, critical questions or objections which the unbeliever will bring to you. Take one example. We'll get into this in a minute in more detail, but let's say that the person you're talking to says, well, no intelligent person believes the Bible anymore. Now, I do not want you to think, because we are presuppositionalists, that what that means is we just immediately start talking about presuppositions. You know, I've seen seminarians make this mistake. They think, okay, now what you want to say is, well, you have your presuppositions and I have mine. Now what you want to say is, well, you say, no intelligent person is a Christian. But I mean, we can name some people that are regarded in this world as intelligent and they're believers in Jesus Christ. Is that calculated to make them say, oh, okay, well, then I guess they must be right and I have to become a Christian? No, that is not the heart of our apologetic. But that's where you're meeting this person. And on that level you need. Wait a minute now, let's get rid of some of these prejudices that will keep you from talking about this issue. Clearly, there are intelligent people that are Christians. Or maybe the person will say, how can anyone believe in creation after Darwin? To which you want to say, how can anyone after. And then name some of the books that just, you know, rip Darwin up. How can anyone believe in Darwin after this? You know, you want to show them that we're not evading the issues, we're not being superstitious, obscurantist and so forth. If it comes and says, well, you know, you just can't believe the Bible because these king lists in the Old Testament, you have a list of kings in the Book of Kings and a list of kings in the Book of Chronicles. And it's hard to reconcile them if that's where the unbeliever is. Go do your homework and show them how to reconcile the king list of the Old Testament. But obviously you're going to go beyond that, right? So here we're dealing with evidence, if you will. The evidence will never get to the bottom, will never deal with the real issue, but hopefully it will open the door.

It will do a little bit of.

What we call ad hominem. It will embarrass the unbeliever for their ignorance and leave them a little more open to discuss what the real issues are. So that's step one, debris clearing and dealing with challenges. Often that means using the evidences that are at your disposal, never thinking that that's your biggest gun or weapon or that that'll do the job, but that it has a place in softening up the unbeliever, if you will. And then secondly, you want to do a comparison of worldviews. Yes, comparison of worldviews. After we get beyond the initial intellectual debris that has kept the unbeliever from thinking about the real issues, you want to carry on your discussion in such a way that the unbeliever realizes that two underlying philosophies of life are at war with each other here. This is not, as the evidentialist thinks, just an issue of who has gone out to the historical facts and found enough facts to support their hypothesis. You want to show the unbeliever that they really have a philosophy of life. Now, this is where most people who study apologetics fall down, I think, because this doesn't come easy. In fact, I've had many people who, when they catch on to what they're supposed to do after they go out in the world and do some of this, come back and say, people don't think philosophically, Dr. Monson. They don't even realize what they believe. I said, that's right. Your job is to educate them about what they themselves believe. In a sense, you have to help them along. Say, okay, I guess then what you're saying is man doesn't have any freedom because he's just part of this biological machine. The unbeliever may not be able to draw that all out himself or herself. You have to help them.

You have to show them, or if.

You will, make them more epistemologically self conscious, you need to show them what their philosophy is so that now they know there's a difference between their worldview and your worldview. And given their worldview, of course, this evidence may not be all that important. Given our worldview, this evidence is remarkable. I look at the account of the Resurrection and I say, a sovereign God raised his son from the dead for the justification of his people and has shown to all mankind. He'll be the judge. On the final day, the unbeliever looks at this and says, boy, free things happen in nature. Our two worldviews determine how we see the facts in the evidence. So once you've made that clear to the Unbeliever. Then you want to show, thirdly, I'm going to put it in terms of a universal negative. But you can't talk about everything at once. But the point here is to show that nothing makes sense on the unbelievers worldview. Nothing makes sense. Now, when I talk about apologetics through my classes, you just have to expect that you're going to get illustrations that fit into my field of expertise and study. I'm a philosopher, and so I talk about things like the laws of logic or the underlying presuppositions of science or ethics and so forth. And in many cases that's what you're.

Going to want to do also.

But it's crucial for you to see that step number three applies. So let me give you a different kind of illustration, not one that I can follow out. But let's say you're interested in opera. Let's say you have a friend that's equally, or to a certain degree like you, interested in opera. You want a witness to this person. One of the things you can do is show that the sorts of evaluations that are made in opera and the ability to put together a beautiful opera all have presuppositions which are contrary to the worldview of the unbeliever. You want to show that all this discussion we've been having about opera makes no sense on your worldview. Again, I am not a musician, so please don't anybody ridicule me, try to tag me on this. But it would be something like this, right? Music, good music, requires a certain sense of order and repetition, right? And then you've got to do some kind of, you know, complication on that repetition and this resolution, so forth. How am I doing anyway? In a chance world, there's no such thing as repetition or harmony. In a chance world, everything stands on its own. Nothing that happens later has any relationship to anything that happens before. And therefore, in a chance world, I don't know if you ever thought music's impossible in a chance world. You can't write music in a chance world, nor could it make sense to evaluate music, nor would it make sense to even have the more general idea that there's a sense of beauty, musical beauty, that could be evaluated so that one opera or one piece of music is more beautiful than another, more mature than another, or something like that. So if you're an opera buff, my hat's off to you. But if you're an opera buff and you have a friend who's an unbeliever that you Know knows opera. Then you may want to talk about opera rather than the laws of logic. Remember that we're talking about worldviews. Nothing makes sense in the unbelievers worldview. Those things which the unbeliever takes for granted are what you're finally going to pull the rug out from under him on or her. It doesn't have to be something intellectual. We talked about opera, logic and so forth. What if it's just raising children? You may have a neighbor who's an unbeliever and that neighbor has certain beliefs about raising children. If you stop and think about that, if you draw out what your neighbor's worldview is, you can show that their most basic non negotiable assumptions about raising children make no sense. Well, what's one of the things people believe about children raising them? I mean even unbelievers discipline. Well, some don't believe that children aren't necessarily bad. Or let's. Again, I want to make this as as little controversial as possible. Children ought to be nicely treated, right? Whether because they're innocent or they're made in God's image. Whatever. Most parents believe that children ought to be treated nicely. I know you're not going to like this, it's bloodthirsty. But on the unbelievers worldview, is that true? Why shouldn't we molest and beat up our children on their worldview? Again you want to say I agree with you that children ought to be treated nicely. We ought to be kind to our children. But I've got a reason for that. I believe these children are made in the image of God and they have as much dignity as I do. And though I have authority over them, my authority is delegated from God for the sake of their good and nurturing them and raising them. So what you're doing is you're saying stand on my worldview for a minute. Raising children with kindness makes sense. Stand on your worldview for a minute. Make any sense at all. Totally arbitrary. You can beat your children. After all, they're nothing more but the product of evolution. Anyway.

This is a dog eat dog world.

So why shouldn't parents eat their children, for crying out loud? I know it's all gross, but if you don't force them to think in terms of the antithesis, they won't get the point. The point is you believe in loving your children and being kind. But that only makes sense if you're a Christian. You've been borrowing from our worldview all along and you never acknowledged it. You Never gave thanks to God. Okay, so you want to show that nothing makes sense, whether it's logic or whether it's science, whether it's history, opera, raising children, driving a car, whatever it is that you can get the unbeliever to talk to you about. You want to show where it appears that you agree that agreement makes sense On a Christian approach to life, and it doesn't make any sense on a non Christian approach to life. Into number three, here is this showing that things do make sense. On the Christian approach, it does make sense to honor our promises. If you take a Christian approach to life. Non Christian approach to life. I don't know why it does make sense to condemn war, at least some wars. On a Christian approach to life, it makes no sense to condemn war. On a non Christian approach to life. On and on and on. Fourthly, you want to do an internal critique of the unbeliever's worldview to show its contradictions. The example that I've used often, it's easy to get hold of, and so I'll use it very quickly when I talk to one of the radicals of the 1960s and this person says that in terms of sexual morality, it's different strokes for different folks. But when it comes to the war in Vietnam, that's absolutely wrong. What I have to do is I have to say, on your worldview, you need to understand that you're using contradictory principles.

You're going back and forth.

On the one hand, you say everything's relative, and then you're an absolutistic ethicist on other issues, and you want to show, therefore, that this worldview is contradictory. You may want to do that with respect to science. The one hand, they believe everything is determined by the laws of physics, so there's no freedom. Then on the other hand, they think the scientists have the freedom to go about discovering the truth and evaluating hypotheses and choosing between them on the basis of the merit of each case. You can't have it both ways. If I were a determinist, you want to say to the unbeliever, if I believe that everything is determined by the laws of physics, then it wouldn't make any sense to write a physics textbook, would it? Because that assumes people read and that their reading convinces them by means of, you know, the truth being set before them, and then they choose to believe this rather than that. But people can't help believing what they believe. And so since everything's determined, it doesn't make any sense to engage in intellectual debate. Argument or education. Again, here's this internal conflict in the unbeliever system. The unbeliever will say that we only know what we know based on observation. We have to either see it or hear it, or taste it or touch it or what did I leave out?

Smell it?

I guess you know, only through our five senses do we know anything. And then you will say, well, but this proposition that we only know things through our senses, did we learn that through our senses? Contradiction, internal conflict, tension within their worldview. And then fifthly, you want to expose the arbitrariness of the unbelievers convictions, their arbitrariness of these convictions. Now why do we expose the contradictions and the arbitrariness? Because those are the two key sins of intellectuals. The whole reason for being rational is that you avoid being arbitrary and avoid being inconsistent. And so your point is what? You want to show that the unbeliever is inconsistent and arbitrary. Sometimes we make apologetics out to sound so philosophical and difficult that we forget how easy it can be sometimes. I've had people, after taking a course from me, I mean, maybe this is my fault, but I've had people say, well then what do people say when they, what do you do when people come to you and say well I've got a different religious approach. Well ask them why, why do you believe that? Why do you believe that Vishnu did the following so forth. Where did you get that idea? What, what are you doing when you're asking questions like that? You're showing how arbitrary it is. Well, I mean any, anybody can come up with a creative idea about man or God or the world or religion, what have you, that doesn't make it true. And so when a person is being arbitrary, has no basis for what they believe, then you want to expose that. Or if the person has contradictions between his or her beliefs and then they arbitrarily follow these sometimes and those sometimes you need to expose that. So you are being arbitrary. Arbitrariness is a violation of rationality. So in the end we have done our job. If we clear out this intellectual debris. The challenges of the unbeliever. Compare the worldviews, indicating that on the unbeliever system nothing makes sense, but all the things we hold in common would make sense on the Christian worldview. Demonstrate the internal contradictions in the worldview of the unbeliever and the arbitrariness that he or she is guilty of. Because at that point what you have shown is that only Christianity is a rational option. Only Christianity Makes sense of the world, avoids contradiction and arbitrariness. All right, let's get a little more detailed with that basic outline in mind. If our task is to refute the challenges of the unbeliever and offer an internal critique of the unbeliever's worldview, I.e. the unbeliever's presuppositions, then the Christian apologist needs to be alert to point out a number of things. I'm going to kind of COVID this now in a different way. Here are some of the things you. You want to start pointing at. Start looking for these things when you deal with the unbeliever. Number one, you want to point out, first of all, that the unbeliever has certain prejudicial conjunctures.

Pardon me, prejudicial conjectures.

One will often find that unbelievers, both.

Educated and uneducated, take the offensive against Christianity before they have become familiar with.

What they are talking about. If you talk to people and they.

Think they are attacking Christianity, they don't.

Know what they are talking about.

In the place of research and honest.

Assessment of available evidence concerning some aspect.

Of the Bible, many unbelievers have substituted.

Personal conjecture about what seems likely to them.

For instance, since the Bible was supposed.

To be written so many hundreds of.

Years ago, it just seems likely to make we cannot trust the text of.

The Bible which we have in our hands today.

Surely they'll say scribes have altered and supplemented the original text so much that we cannot be sure what was actually written by Moses or Jeremiah or John or Paul, if these characters were in fact the authors in the first place. For all we know. I've heard a believer say this. For all we know, what you're reading in the Bible came from the pen of some monk in the Dark Ages. Now, that kind of ignorant criticism seems intellectually sophisticated to some unbelievers. I mean, they wouldn't be saying it to me, to you, if they didn't think, hey, that's weighty. After all, in our natural human experience, messages which are passed from one speaker to another usually get garbled or distorted.

Or augmented, don't they?

We know that to unbelievers who reason this way, we must not tire of pointing out that they are relying upon conjecture, not research. It may seem likely that the biblical text would no longer be reliable or authentic after all these years, but that likelihood is an evaluation that rests upon prejudice. I am wondering, can you see this already? I hope you can. When an unbeliever says well, it's very.

Unlikely the text of Scripture hasn't been.

Altered in some major way. What prejudice is coming out here? The first prejudice is the assumption that the biblical text is no different from any other written document which we find in our natural human experience throughout history. That is, that the Bible is no different than any other book. And we know other books are subject.

To that kind of augmentation and distortion by scribes.

Why not the Bible? But notice that begs the very question, right? Because we're not presenting the Bible as any other book in history. We're presenting it as what God's inspired word, providentially protected and so forth. If the Bible is, as it claims to be, the inspired word of Almighty God, then the history of its textual transmission may very well be quite different than other human documents, since God would have ordained that its text be preserved with greater integrity than that of ordinary books. So did you catch that the unbeliever was begging the question? Well, probably the Bible has been altered by medieval monks. You know, the second indication of prejudice is that the unbeliever doesn't offer any concrete evidence that some medieval monk tampered.

With the text before us.

Today, that kind of remark is simply and arbitrarily advanced as a hypothesis to be endorsed for its likelihood rather than.

For its factual credentials.

You know, if we want to play that way, if you're going to allow arbitrariness, we could, with equal arbitrariness, conjecture that the words which came down to us as Paul's were actually written not years later than Paul, but years before.

The time of Paul.

I mean, if you can be arbitrary, why not be arbitrary that way? Why not say Paul was copying something years before him? Arbitrariness is a fickle friend to the scholar. Cut loose from any demand for evidence, we can believe any number of conflicting things. There's a third way in which the unbeliever shows his or her arbitrariness in.

This illustration.

And that's that he or she has just not taken account of the actual evidence which is publicly available regarding the text of Scripture. Now, what am I doing here? Debris clearing.

Right.

The interviewer says, well, probably the text has been altered.

You know, you can't even be sure of what you're reading.

If the critic had taken time to look into the subject, he or she would not have offered that outlandish evaluation that the biblical text is unreliable. This came home to me very clearly when I was taking an advanced course in graduate school on Plato, a course.

Which required us to do Textual criticism.

Of the literary corpus of Plato's works. Okay, so now you need to do.

Reading on these things so you can offer this kind of answer to the unbeliever.

Unbeliever says, well, the biblical text is probably corrupted.

I mean, how can you count on it? And so forth.

But say our earliest extant manuscript of a work by Plato dates from right before 900 AD.

It's the manuscript known as Oxford B. It's found in the Patmos monastery, was discovered by a man named E.B. clark, 900 AD almost at 900 AD.

And we must remember that Plato is thought to have written roughly 350 years before Christ, thus leaving us with a gap between when Plato wrote and the earliest written manuscript of what he wrote. A gap of nearly 12 centuries. 12 centuries. Imagine that. By contrast, the earliest fragments of the New Testament date less than 50 years after the original writing. The bulk of our most important extant manuscripts date from 200 to 300 years after their original composition. The text of the New Testament is remarkably uniform and well established. The reliability of the Old Testament text has been demonstrated by the discovery of.

The Dead Sea Scrolls.

And so the overall authenticity and accuracy of the biblical text is well known to scholars. When the unbeliever says, we can't even be sure what the Bible says, probably some medieval monk distorted things. If you say, you haven't studied this.

At all, have you?

You take for granted, you know what Plato said and there's a 1200 year gap, and yet you accuse the New Testament of being unreliable and there's at best a 50 year gap. Does that seem fair minded to you? Or maybe there's a little bit of a double standard. Maybe an accent's being ground. Maybe some prejudice is coming out here.

Isn't it obvious?

Frederick Kenyon concluded, and I quote him, he's a well known classics scholar. The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries, assessments like that could be multiplied easily over and over again. Which only goes to show the prejudice that operates in the thinking of unbelievers who will offhand to say, well, the Bible is very likely without a reliable text. It's dubious to me. And so when we defend our Christian faith, we must constantly be on the lookout for the way in which unbelievers reason by means of prejudice and conjecture. Guesswork. It crops up repeatedly. I've even heard some people mouth this radical opinion. We have no literary or historical basis for believing that Jesus of Nazareth actually ever lived. I've had people in university settings say that kind of asinine remark and think that they're being really intellectual when they say that. But can you see the obvious prejudice in that remark? Such a criticism simply takes it for granted that the Bible itself should not be taken as a literary source of historical information. Contrary to the general practice of even unbelieving historians of the ancient world. Here the unbeliever just, with a wave of the hand, dismisses the Bible as any kind of historical evidence whatsoever. Moreover, such criticism doesn't show familiarity with the secular allusions to Jesus even in ancient literature. Such as the reference by the Roman historian Tacitus to one named Christus, who suffered the extreme penalty at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate. That looks like a pretty good secular reference to Christ, who died at the.

Hands of Pontius Pilate.

Or the reference of the Jewish historian Josephus to James, who he describes as the brother of Jesus, who is called Christ. Criticism like this usually ends up telling us much more about the critic than about the object of his criticism. It tells us about his prejudices. There was a time when critics of the Old Testament ridiculed it for mentioning a tribe of people called the Hittites, which were at that time unknown outside the Bible or the biblical text. Such presumed flaws in the biblical record were taken as rendering it worthless as a historical document.

Until what?

Until Hittite artifacts and monuments began to be uncovered on Carchemish by archaeologists beginning in the year 1871. The Hittite civilization is today one of the best known cultures of the ancient world. And a little over a century ago, people were ridiculing the Bible for mentioning this unknown tribe known as the Hittites. Archaeology has over and over again proved to be the enemy of biblical critics, unearthing their negative prejudices and confirming the act of scriptures and historical particulars. I quote a well known scholar in the field here, H.M. orlinsky. He said more and more the older view that the biblical data were suspect and even likely to be false unless corroborated by extra biblical facts is giving way to one which holds that by and large, the biblical accounts are more likely to be true than false. So here's a non Christian scholar who says for the most part, we look at the Bible now and say it's more likely to be an accurate record.

Than unlikely to be accurate.

Even as unsympathetic an empire as Time magazine, an elite article from about 10.

Years ago, as I recall, entitled how.

True is the Bible. Had to admit, and I quote, Time magazine, right, no great friend to the Christian faith. After more than two centuries of facing the heaviest scientific guns that could be brought to bear, the Bible has survived and it's perhaps the better for the siege. Even on the critics own terms, historical fact, the scriptures seem more acceptable now than they did when the rationalists began the attack. You need to have those little zingers at your fingertips. I don't mean you need to overwhelm the unbeliever with them, because that's not in the end what's going to change his or her heart and outlook. But when they start out with this, oh well, everyone knows there was no Jesus of history. Oh, the biblical text was unreliable. And he said, wait a minute, even unbelieving scholars have this kind of thing to say. So maybe we need to slow down.

And take a look at this.

The simple point that I want to make here is that apologists need to be prepared to expose the prejudicial conjectures of unbelievers when they appear. Many of the negative preconceptions held by those who criticize the Bible or who criticize Christianity prove to be arbitrary or embarrassing when you press on them. Such pressure should be humbly but confidently pressed. There are large numbers of those who reject the Scriptures on the basis of things about which they are really not familiar or well studied. We must point out how unreasonable it is to to rest upon prejudice and conjecture in any area, but especially in an area having to do with one's eternal destiny. The more people come to know the facts about the biblical text, the more they know the facts about historical reports, the less likely they will be to dismiss the book just with a wave.

Of the hand and say, oh, everybody knows that's wrong.

Secondly, you're talking to your unbelieving friend. You've been showing some of these prejudicial injectors conjectures, just their creative imagination at work arbitrarily saying things for which they have no basis. You want to point out their unargued philosophical bias. Don't let them get away with this. When you're talking to the unbeliever, you need to be looking for the bias, the philosophical bias that the unbeliever takes for granted and doesn't argue or offer any reason forth. Unargued philosophical bias. This is another tool used in arguing.

With those who are critical of the Bible.

The philosophical pre commitments of the critic should not be taken for Granted, they should be openly argued and supported. And when the unbeliever does not openly acknowledge his philosophy and does not argue for it, he is being arbitrary.

Consider.

Even if enough external and corroborating evidence were available from textual criticism, from archaeology and the related sciences to authenticate all of the ordinary data that we find in the literature of the Bible, all of the linguistic data, the cultural data, the chronological data, and so forth, even if we'd done all of that, there would still remain important features, indeed the most important features of the biblical narrative over which conscientious unbelievers would intellectually stumble. You see, we not only read of Hittites and high places and houses and military battles and migrations and marriages in the Bible, we come across other things like healings and floating axe heads and fiery chariots and water turned to wine and virgin birth and resurrection. When unbelievers read of miraculously in the Bible, their first inclination is to say that such things cannot happen, thus disbelieving the written report of them. We all know people can't walk on water, so that story must be fabricated. You know that attitude, You've run across it. I'm sure we're all familiar with that line of reasoning, and we engage in that kind of reasoning ourselves. You know that you do that at the supermarket, don't you?

I do.

I mean, if you ever, you get stuck in line, you have to read these remarkable tabloids of things that have happened. Woman gives birth to her own father. I look at that and I say, sorry, that kind of thing doesn't happen. I don't believe it. So you can't get down on the unbeliever automatically when the unbeliever says, floating axe heads, people walking on water, water.

Turned to wine, forget it. That doesn't happen.

But the implicit argument is that such things are impossible and so they could not have occurred. Unbelievers dismiss in advance the possibility of miraculous events, and in light of that unspoken premise, they cast a doubtful eye upon the biblical narrative. See, here's the interesting thing. I may stand next to an unbeliever.

At the checkout counter at the market.

We might both laugh at woman gives birth to her own father. But the reason I'm laughing at it is because I know the God who does miracles, and I know he doesn't do silly things like that because he said so. That's a long argument that. Please don't expect me to give you all tonight. But you know what I'm getting at. I believe in miracles and And I know the one who performs them, he doesn't do this kind of thing. So I laugh at it. The unbeliever says miracles are impossible. And so he or she laughs at the Bible. Jesus did not rise from the dead because we all know that the dead do not rise. Unbelievers usually assume that people who live in the enlightened, scientific 20th century cannot accept the superstitious myths and fairy tales of the Bible. And after all, we use computers today, we use refrigerators.

You can't believe in resurrection when you do that kind of thing.

But now, to conduct their thinking in a fully rational manner, unbelievers who doubt the biblical narrative of miracles ought to pause to recognize and scrutinize their controlling assumption. We know that miracles are impossible. Go slow on that one.

We know that miracles are impossible.

This is the unbeliever. We know that miracles are impossible. I mean, if you just stop and.

Think about it, it's laughable, isn't it? You know that miracles are impossible.

You know them. Unbelievers feel that they know that such events cannot take place because having a scientific outlook, they're convinced that all of nature operates in a predictable law like fashion. They'll say miracles run counter to the regularities of our ordinary experience. Miracles would not be predictable. To which the astute apologist would say, isn't that just the point? If miracles were not extraordinary, they wouldn't be miracles. It's amazing. The unbeliever says, well, that would be totally unpredictable. And you say, exactly. That's what made it so remarkable that it was unpredictable. God did what you could never have expected. The unbelievers bias against extraordinary events needs to be challenged for its rational foundations. Does the unbeliever know that all of nature operates in a law like fashion? Does the unbeliever have knowledge of all of nature? But if the unbeliever doesn't have knowledge of all of nature and its workings.

The unbeliever can't say that miracles are impossible.

If the unbeliever doesn't have that universal knowledge, the unbeliever can't preclude exceptions to our ordinary experience. That's a lot to know. Involving as it does insight into the very nature of reality, the and the metaphysical limits of possibility, what justification could one puny, finite, limited, fallible unbeliever have? I'm not talking from a Christian standpoint. Even if I were an unbeliever, I'd say, well, how could you? You don't know everything about nature. How could you? You make mistakes. How could you? You don't know everything. How could you know that miracles are impossible? But you see, if the Christian worldview is true, miracles are not a philosophical problem at all. An all powerful creator and a governor of this world could certainly do things that are out of the ordinary and contrary to the regularities of our human experience. A creator of heaven and earth could raise the dead. To reject the Bible because of its account of miracles is thus simply to beg the question. Somebody says, I don't believe that the Bible is true.

And you say, why not?

Because it talks about miracles.

And you say, well, that's the question.

If what the Bible tells us about God is true, miracles are no problem. Now listen, the fault here is not that critics have their presuppositions that they use in evaluating the evidence. That's inevitable. Everybody's got presuppositions, believers and unbelievers. The notion that we can be characterized by philosophical neutrality in our argument is just naive. That's unrealistic.

In our next lesson, you'll see some philosophical evidence for that, but you've already.

Seen biblical evidence for that. No one can be neutral. The problem is not that unbelievers have their presuppositions, but that they don't recognize those presuppositions for what they are and don't offer a warrant for them. They don't offer any defense for their presuppositions over against the conflicting presuppositions of, say, a Christian. Obviously, believers and unbelievers approach the biblical record of miracles with different controlling assumptions about what is possible, with different assumptions about God's existence and power, with different assumptions about God's intervention in the world. It is part of the task of apologetics to disclose the character and function of those conflicting presuppositions in the argument between Christians and non Christians. The debate must not, of course, end at that point, as though we are left with some kind of irresolvable intellectual standoff between ultimate philosophical perspectives.

You've got your assumptions, I have mine.

That'S the end of it. The next step involves argumentation and comparison regarding the opposing presuppositions regarding the opposing worldviews of the believer and the unbeliever. That takes us then, closer to the heart of philosophical apologetics. What we want to show now is that only the Christian worldview makes sense out of logic, makes sense out of science, makes sense out of morality or anything in human experience. Indeed, only Christianity makes sense out of the very process of reasoning and arguing when you stop and think about it. Let's take a five minute break and when we come back, we'll continue by looking at the third thing you should be checking for. And that's presuppositions that do not comport with each other.

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute. Duplication, sharing and distribution is encouraged. For more information about the life and Ministry of Dr. Greg L. Bonson, visit our website, Bonson Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.