Dr Greg Bahnsen - Mid-Level Apologetics: Evidentialism Part 2 (Part 14)

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. I had pointed out that there are a number of philosophical problems surrounding the alleged universal assumptions of the traditional method, and I referred you to my article Inductivism, Inerrancy, and Presuppositionalism to get something of a further detail of that particular charge or criticism. In terms of Sproul and Gerstner and Lindsley have an example of their painful naivete with respect to philosophical issues. I say, for instance, the causal principle is defended against the stringent critique of Hume by replying that it is true by definition. Now, this is very, very. In one sense, maybe we don't want to spend a lot of time on it, because not every traditional approach to apologetics, certainly JP Moreland, for instance, at Talbot, would not make this big a philosophical mistake, but you need to be aware that Sproul and these others do. Hume's critique was this. How do we know that there's any necessary connection between what we call the cause and what we call the effect? How do we know that they aren't just related randomly or that they are contiguous, that is, they are next to each other? You know, I hit the cue ball across the table, and it hits a ball, and then that ball goes further across the table, and we say the cue ball caused the second ball to go across the table. But we didn't see causation, did we? We just saw one event followed by another event. The cue ball goes this far, and then the ball that it hits goes the rest of the way. Now, how do we know that there's a necessary connection there? Well, we don't know that there's a necessary connection unless nature is uniform and so forth. This could just be one random event and another random event. So that is one of the toughest problems that's come up in the history of philosophy, which Sproul and Gerstner solve not by explaining how the causal principle can be justified, but by saying it's true by definition. All these philosophers who struggle with this have just that stupid, well, the causal principle is not something that's true by definition. We're talking about something that allegedly happens or is true of the world outside our stipulations of how we use our words. What you have here is a mistake on the order of we're supposed to be given some basis for believing reality, characterized by uniformity. We're supposed to be able to have some reason for believing that nature works in a uniform fashion, which is to say every event has a cause. And now our authors come along and instead of showing that every event has a cause, they say every effect has a cause. Did you catch the shift from every event has a cause to every effect has a cause? Well, of course every effect has a cause by definition. The question is, are the events in this world effects or are they random? So you see, they haven't even caught on to the depth of the problem. And that embarrasses me. That's one of those cases where you're sitting there, if they're giving a lecture, you say, oh, I hope my university friends don't hear this. That's horrible. Now I think, I'm sorry that they took that as uncharitable for me to point that out. By the way, they don't think they've made a mistake here. They go on to defend this, but it is a huge, embarrassing scholarly lapse. That is not the issue that needs to be solved. And you don't solve it by saying it's true by definition. And I say this does not give the reader confidence in the book's philosophical discernment. But for our purposes here, let us single out for examination our author's cosmological proof of God's existence according to the traditional method of natural theology. Okay, so what we're going to do, look up here on the board, we're going to take a specimen of natural theology found in this particular book, which is self consciously non presuppositional, and examine it to see whether it is going to be an effective way of arguing they reason. And I quote, if something exists now, then something exists necessarily. Something must have the power of being within itself. And I point out that this line of thinking is logically fallacious. It does not follow from the fact that X exists that it is necessarily true that X exists. The fact that something exists does not show that it exists necessarily. I also think this reasoning is unintelligible because I have no idea what the power of being is supposed to be. That is one of those expressions that has a pseudo profundity to it that amateurs in philosophy will often. They'll write these things in, you know, the power of being. But if you're trained in philosophy, you say, what are you talking? What is the power of being? I have no idea. I really don't. And by the way, I've had correspondence with Dr. Gerstner over this. I still don't know what he's talking about. We get closer to Understanding what the authors are trying to argue when they claim that anything that exists must have a sufficient reason. The problem is that this interpretation of their cosmological argument contradicts an earlier statement. And I quote them. We say, not that everything has an antecedent cause, but that every effect has an antecedent cause. After all, as we saw above, the causal principle is simply a definitional truth. The critical question, therefore, is whether anything that exists or any event is an effect or not. See, they may want to say that the causal principle is true by definition, but then the question becomes, is the world an effect? If it is an effect, then of course by definition it has a cause. But that's just what the unbeliever is going to argue with you about. He's going to say, the world is not in effect. That's kind of like proving that the world was created because it's a creation. But that's just what's at stake. You see the unbelievers and say, no, it's not a creation. You say, yes, it's a creation, and therefore that proves a creator. Because you can't have a creation without a creator. Now, you have any problem with that? That's true by definition. Say, yeah, that's true by definition. A creation requires a creator. But I'm telling you, the world's not a creation. And so here the authors are going through all this stuff about the causal principle being true by definition. The unbelievers is going to say, fine, I don't believe the world's in effect, and so I don't have a first cause for the world because I don't believe it's an effect. Hello, is anyone listening out there? The argument is all about whether there's a God who made this world. You can't beg the question by saying, well, it's an effect and so forth. Well, then of course they're going to try to give reasons for believing it's an effect. There's no force to an argument that God is the first cause or sufficient reason for the world, unless one first proves that the world is an effect. Now, why shouldn't the unbeliever simply take the world as uncaused? After all, the God of the cosmological argument does not need an antecedent cause. Why not simply say the same of the world itself? Do you understand that the unbeliever is going to say, okay, if everything requires a cause, then what caused God? And they're going to say, no, no, God by definition is the first cause. As Though you could win arguments by just finding yourself into the position of being right and the other's wrong. God is the first cause. Well, why isn't the world the first cause then? Okay, so we can play that game too. If our authors are going to be arbitrary, then they have to grant the unbeliever the right to be arbitrary. So a philosophically astute and personally tenacious unbeliever is not going to be bowled over by this at all. And even if the things or events in this world are all effects, why shouldn't there be an infinite regress of purely natural causes? After all, our experience of causation is limited to the natural world. So how can we extrapolate beyond natural experience? When the authors say, well, you look at the natural world, everything's got a cause. The unbelievers are going to say, yeah, I guess in the natural world everything does. But that doesn't give you any right to draw conclusions about what lies beyond the natural world. The authors have no philosophically adequate answer and become a study in arbitrariness. The authors claim that an uncaused molecule could not be contingent, but must exist necessarily and eternally. I hope that the quick way in which I deal with this will give you some boldness in your reasoning. They throw these words out here. Must exist necessarily and eternally. Yes. Oh, why is that? Just be willing to be the little boy along the parade route saying, sure. Seems to me the emperor doesn't have any clothes on today. The fact that everybody talks a good line doesn't mean. I'm going to ask a few questions here. Embarrassing. Why is it that a molecule that is uncaused would have to be eternal? How about this? The molecule randomly, contingently and arbitrarily sprung into existence. It wouldn't be eternal, and it wouldn't be necessary then. And I say what the authors are telling us is sheer prejudice. It's not an argument. If a molecule appears randomly and without cause, that is by chance, there's nothing in such an event itself which demands that the molecule necessarily appear or that the molecule never cease to exist. On the other hand, and now this gets real close to what you need to see as a problem in most of the traditional arguments for God's existence. If the molecule is thought of as part of an infinite series of contingent causes, our authors commit an elementary logical fallacy by concluding that the chain of causes itself must also be contingent and thus in need of a cause. As they say, nowhere is there to be found the power of being within the Causal chain. What I want to show you in this is the fallacy of composition. The fallacy of composition is committed whenever you take something and reason from what's true of its parts to what must be true of it as a whole. What is true of its parts must be true of the whole. You have composed from the parts. What is true of the whole. See if we can think of examples of this. All of the parts of a machine are lightweight, therefore the whole machine must be lightweight. That seems like a good argument to you. What's true of the parts is true of the whole? No, not at all. That's fallacious reasoning. Now, the argument that we get for God's existence goes like this. This part of the universe is contingent. This thing we see in the universe is contingent. In fact, every part of the universe that we look at is contingent, and therefore the whole universe must be contingent. Is that a good argument? It's a horrible argument. It's a fallacious argument saying that what is true of every link in a chain must be true of the entire chain. Well, how about this? Every link in the chain is an inch and a half long, therefore the entire chain is an inch and a half long. This is just not good reasoning. And yet this is passed off as the Christian apologetic by people over and over and over again and again. If you've had any training in philosophy or even a course in logic, you just cringe that our brothers, and they are my brothers, I really do, for all my criticism, love them and I want to encourage them. But this can't be accepted. Logicians realize that a property of something's individual parts is not necessarily a property of the whole. For instance, imagine a 20 foot replica of the Statue of Liberty made out of plastic Legos, 20ft high, made out of plastic Legos. The parts all have the property of weighing less than an ounce. If I argue that therefore the whole statue must weigh less than an ounce, my reasoning would be readily dismissed as not worthy of serious attention. To argue that the parts of the world, the causal chain, are contingent and therefore the world itself is contingent, deserves no better response. Go ahead. Isn't the argument there more analogy though? To say that each Lego was created and made, therefore the Statue of Liberty was created and made. It would be. Why is that okay? What you have in the case of a fallacy is a pattern of reasoning that is not reliable. To say that something is fallacious is not to say that when you use this pattern of reasoning, it never reaches a true conclusion. As you're saying that it's not a reliable way to find a true conclusion, that when you do have a true conclusion, you have it so by accident, rather than because the argument would demand it to be so and so. Many times fallacies will lead to the truth, but they will not. Well, when I say lead to, they eventuate in a true statement, but they don't lead to the truth in the sense that they don't support the truth. Let me give you another example. This briefcase is on the table, and this book is on the briefcase, and therefore this book is on the table as well. Now, in that case, it's the fallacy of composition, but it's true. Both the book and the briefcase are on the table. Does that mean therefore I can reason from the parts to the whole anywhere I want to? No, it just means in this particular case I didn't happen to make a mistake. But the pattern of reasoning is not reliable. You can point out an argument that looks like it's good. Here, the unbeliever is going to say, well, when you argue that the whole universe is contingent, you're reasoning fallaciously and it's unreliable. And if you say, well, but it might be a good argument, okay, it might be. But since you've used an unreliable line of reasoning, no one can know whether it is. And the point of an argument is to show that the argument's true and not that it might be true. And so all I'm getting at is you have not rescued them in the slightest when you say sometimes it's not fallacious to reason that way. So, yeah, well, sometimes it's not. That's fine. Is this one of the times? That's what's at stake, you see. Okay, this is somewhat like the fallacy that I've already pointed out to you in another class session of reasoning, that everything in the world has a cause. Okay, so I'm going to start numbering the things that are in the world. You know, there's trees and children and briefcases and automobiles and so forth. Ought to stop with five, but you know, it's going to go on to, you know, 50, zillion billion, whatever. Okay, now somebody says number one was caused by something, that tree was caused by something. Number two, this child was caused by something, this briefcase was caused by something, so forth and so on. Okay, so everything in the universe has a cause. And then the conclusion is the universe as a whole must have a cause. But that's a huge logical leap. That's if you understand logical notation to say that there exists a cause for each and everything in the universe is not to prove that there is a cause for everything in the universe. Those are two different things. To go back to the illustration here, to say that 1 has a cause, 2 has a cause, and 3 has a cause is not to say there's a cause for all of it, just that there's a cause for each of it. And so if anything, this proves polytheism, proves that there's a God that goes all the way back for this tree and a God that's is at the end of the causal chain for this car and God end of the causal chain for this child and all the way back. You don't prove that there is a first cause. You prove that there's many first causes if you prove anything at all. All right, for the sake of time, I want to surge ahead here. What we have found out thus far is that the first step of the traditional apologetic trying to prove God's existence, where we take this neutral approach, where facts are brute and we have common conceptions with the unbeliever, is just really embarrassingly bad. And if you want a summary of the problems with it, you can also look at the article I had you read earlier in the course, Machen van Til and the Apologetical Tradition of the opc. And there's a nice little summary of the problems in the traditional attempt to prove God's existence. What I want to do at this point for the remainder of our class is turn to the second part of the argument, which says after we show that there is a God, a first cause, we want to show that it is the Christian God because Jesus rose from the dead. The argument for Christ's resurrection. And for this, let's turn in your reading assignment to the long essay A Critique of Evidentialist Apologetical Method of John Warwick Montgomery. Small book booklet. Am I Detecting Rebellion in the ranks? Was this a. Yeah, it was a little bit longer than your ordinary reading assignment. But then you're better than ordinary students and so thought I could just take that for granted. Page 40 you get a summary of John Warwick Montgomery's argument that's found in his book the Shape of the Past. And it goes like this. Premise 1. On the basis of accepted principles of textual and historical analysis, the gospel records are found to be trustworthy and historical documents, primary source evidence for the life of Christ. 2 In these records, Jesus exercises divine prerogatives and claims to be God in human flesh, and he rests his claims on his forthcoming resurrection. 3. In all four Gospels, Christ's bodily resurrection is described in minute detail. Christ's resurrection evidences his deity. 4 the fact of the resurrection cannot be discounted on a priori philosophical grounds. Miracles are impossible only if one so defines them, but such definition rules out proper historical investigation. 5 if Christ is God, then he speaks the truth concerning the absolute divine authority of the Old Testament and of the soon to be written New Testament, concerning his death for the sins of the world and concerning the nature of man in history. 6 It follows from the preceding that all biblical assertions bearing on philosophy of history are to be regarded as revealed truth, and that all human attempts at historical interpretation are to be judged for truth value on the basis of harmony with scriptural revelation. And then, Beginning on page 41, I offer what I call an audit of each step of this argument. Please don't think that I take a lot of glee in doing this. Again, playing the devil's advocate is somewhat uncomfortable. I believe much, probably most, of what Montgomery believes as an evangelical Christian. I also believe that God has given us evidence in history for his truth, the truth of His Word for his reliability. But I don't believe that a philosophically astute and personally tenacious unbeliever needs to be pushed by this argument at all. The first premise has to do with textual and historical analysis of the biblical records, finding them trustworthy historical documents in the first place. There's a conspicuous exaggeration here. Montgomery attempts to give evidence pointing to the conclusion we have in the extant New Testament documents an early picture of Christ. From that, Montgomery goes on without any explanation or indication that a huge jump in argumentative development is transpiring to designate the New Testament documents an accurate portrait of Christ. And reliable sources should be easy to see, however, that the early character of a document tells us nothing about its positive reliability and accuracy. Joseph Smith's famous golden plates have a very early authentication, but this fact certainly doesn't infer their trustworthiness or even intelligibility for that matter. Or else two morning newspapers which conflict in the reporting of an event would both have to be accounted as reliable. But beyond this, Montgomery is overstating the results of textual analysis. If he grants non evangelicals an opportunity to be heard, common historical excuse me, There is very little reason to conclude as he does that the evidence points to 1st century eyewitness accounts of Jesus. Now I happen to think that they are 1st century eyewitness accounts of Jesus. So don't get me wrong, I'm playing the devil's advocate. My whole point is, though, Montgomery can't think the scholarly world just takes that for granted, that everyone's agreed on that. They aren't all agreed on that. I go on to give some more detail about the exaggeration of his claim. If you look at the middle of page 43, I add, one wonders how Montgomery could make the evaluations, which he does in the above references when it's recalled that Thomas Altizer, the famous God is dead theologian, in a public debate with Montgomery, Thomas Altizer challenged him to the very opposite effect in their dialogue, thereby certainly giving the impression that the vast majority of scholars would not accept the New Testament fully as Montgomery does. I go on to say, of course they should. I believe that the New Testament is reliable. But he just can't say that unbelievers accept it as reliable source information about Jesus. When we turn to examine Montgomery's second premise, we see that it contains two basic ideas. Christ's claim to deity and Christ's prediction of his resurrection. Now, there is some probability that Jesus never made these claims, never made these predictions in the first place. That is, you can't say in some neutral fashion that the historical evidence proves that he did. But even if there is historical accuracy in the gospel records, that wouldn't establish the authority or deity of Christ on his mere say so. Now you see, the unbeliever is presented by Montgomery with this dilemma. Jesus was either a charlatan or a lunatic, if not truly divine. Or his disciples were charlatans, lunatics or naive exaggerators. And what I point out is that's a false dilemma since there are other legitimate options. That is Jesus was teaching a new concept of God based on modified Eastern ideas, or he taught a different kind of messianic view, an adoptionist messianic view. But you see, even if the unbeliever accepts the dilemma as stated, he can choose any of the options. And Jesus or his disciples could have been deceptive on this one point in order to achieve a more lasting impression for their otherwise noble ethic. The unbeliever could say that there could be an end justifies the means mentality in Jesus or in his followers, especially if it would maximize the good or happiness of people if that would result. Moreover, they could easily have been willing to lie if that would be helpful in shaking down established Judaism of its dead orthodoxy or messianically as should be imperial Rome. On the other hand, we could view Jesus or his disciples as having mental problems. The astute believer unbeliever could say, Montgomery says, we cannot avoid the conclusion that Jesus was A deranged schizophrenic who retreated from reality. And we cannot account for the fact that a psychiatrist sees Jesus teachings as a blueprint for successful living in mental health if he is not accounted as actually divine. But the unbeliever's reply comes without any difficulty. Montgomery has to get away from his hopelessly outdated conception of mental illness. Then a man has a particular mental problem does not necessarily mean he's irredeemably crazy or demented in everything he does or says. Jesus simply had one of many personality hang ups expressed in a very unique way. Maybe he needed counsel. It doesn't mean he needs white coats. After all, his behavior is the key to his treatment. And his behavior wasn't so psychotic. So I really don't enjoy doing this. But when Montgomery throws this out like the unbeliever is just going to wilt in the face of this, the unbeliever can easily say, no. I have high regard for Jesus, but yeah, he said some things were a little wacko. That is a possibility for the unbeliever. I go on to give other things that could be said about that particular problem. I want to hurry along here. The second element of premise two in Montgomery's apologetic six step was listed as Jesus prediction of his own resurrection. There are definite problems with this consideration as well. The first is Montgomery wants to point out, as part of his demonstration of the resurrection and its significance, that Jesus predicted his own victory over the grave. Jesus rested his very claim to deity and authority on this prediction of his resurrection. And it's that prediction, you see, that gives the interpretive context for the event so that it can't be dismissed as a weird, unexplainable biological mishap that no one expected. So this prediction is integral to Montgomery's argument. And yet Montgomery grants that the gospels were written 30 to 65 years after Jesus death. Taking these accounts as nothing more than historical records. How could we think that these men were able to recall with precision gospels that Jesus actually made these specific predictions or claims about himself? Now listen, Montgomery's answer, and this is what Sproul uses, and everybody who follows this line of apologetic Montgomery's answer is that Jesus gave his apostles the gift of total recall. Anybody detect a problem here? Okay, my argument is Jesus predicted his resurrection. Jesus said that he was God. Now, as an unbeliever, I'd say I don't think Jesus really said those things. Jesus was a pretty good guy. Jesus, pretty down to earth guy. I'm sure that his followers made this up later or they didn't remember what he was getting at. I mean, they got. 60 years later they write these sorts of things. But, you know, psychologists have shown us what memory does and so forth. You, you interpret past events in light of present needs and so forth. So no, I don't think Jesus did that. And the answer is no, they didn't make any mistakes in reporting what Jesus said because Jesus gave them total recall. Jesus gave them total recall. Now, can I give you total recall? Can I just hand that to you? Can I confer total recall on. You have total recall. Did it work? Obviously not to say that someone has the ability to confer total recall is to say that that person is God. And so for the resurrection argument to work, you have to have the apostles having total recall, which means you have to assume that Jesus was God to give them total recall. So the resurrection argument can work. What's the resurrection argument supposed to be? Proving that he is God. That's what seems like there it is. Exactly right. And thank you for saying that, because though they accuse us of engaging in circular reasoning, it turns out they're the ones who are begging the question. But it's worse than that. And I see the time getting away from me, so I'm just going to have to get away from going line by line here and summarize for you. It gets worse than that. The argument says Jesus rose from the dead, therefore Jesus is God. Is that pattern of reasoning reliable? How about this? If it is, you can plug anything into the slot. If blank rose from the dead, blank is God. Lazarus rose from the dead, therefore Lazarus is God. Resurrection doesn't prove that the person resurrected is God. But now, of course, the comeback is going to be, yes, but Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. And so on. Montgomery's reasoning, since it's God who raised Lazarus from the dead, then Lazarus doesn't get to be. But that assumes what? That Jesus was God. But worse than that, the unbeliever can say, oh, okay, well, but God raised Jesus from the dead. So that doesn't prove that Jesus is God. He just loses his argument completely at that step. But it gets worse than this. First you got to assume that Jesus is God so that you can have the raw materials for the resurrection argument, the total recall of the apostles as to what he said. Secondly, you've got this resurrection implies deity problem, which it doesn't. We're all going to be raised one day, we aren't going to become gods. And then you got another problem. Montgomery says if Jesus is God, then he told the truth about everything. Well, that's all very nice if you assume the Christian view of God. On the Christian view of God, God tells the truth about everything. Is that true of every other conception of God available in the world? How about the Greeks? Let's just start. Did the Greeks have gods that always told the truth? Really? No, they were horrible creatures or beings. I shouldn't call them creatures, I guess, you know, they were, as Schaeffer tells us, just magnified humanity. They just had all the foibles of humans, including sexual problems, lies, arguments, jealousy and so forth and so on. So what I'm getting at here, we're supposed to have this allegedly neutral, brute fact approach to proving that Christ rose from the dead. And we have anything but that. We have exaggerations as to what all scholars will grant. We have fallacious arguments, we have unreliable patterns of reasoning. All of this in the. In the way of showing us that allegedly Jesus rose from the dead and that makes him God. But then there are other philosophical problems as well, not just these particular problems in the outworking of the specific details. The philosophical problems would include those some that we've already talked about. Does Montgomery assume uniformity when he engages in his historical argumentation? Well, if he doesn't assume uniformity, then of course he has no basis to draw conclusions from the evidence that he finds. But if he assumes uniformity, then he has to assume there are no miracles. By assuming uniformity, he cannot ever find a miracle based on the principle of uniformity. So now what does he do? I mean, he's made a philosophical commitment that rules out his conclusion being true. On the other hand, if he says as he does, miracles can't be ruled out in advance. What he's saying to us then is you have to be open to this being a supernatural universe. And then believer says I don't have to be open to this being to a supernatural universe. You're just begging the question. All I know is my natural experience. For you to say I have to be open to something beyond that. You're actually asking me to grant you what you're supposed to be proving. Now what if we did prove that Jesus rose from the dead? Dr. Van Till has pointed out that that might be a fine specimen for Ripley's Believe it or Not. If Jesus rose from the dead, should we conclude that he is God? This shows the New Testament to be true, that we're all in our sins and need a savior and so forth. It doesn't prove all of those things to the Unbeliever. The unbeliever could say, wow, there must be some principles about the natural world that we haven't discovered yet that accounts for some dead bodies resuscitating. Maybe one of these days scientists will uncover what those principles are and we'll be able to explain it. Now, of course, I feel terrible pointing all these things out, but the reason I keep pointing it out is that you need to know that the philosophically astute and personally tenacious unbeliever does not have to be pushed by this at all. He could say, Jesus rose from the dead. Wow. Weird things happen. And you're going to say, no, that shows that he's. God's going to say no. It doesn't just show us that, man, we live in a strange universe. Wow. Kind of awesome, isn't it? If you don't have the right presuppositions, you're not able to prove anything. And if you don't start with Christian presuppositions, the evidence God has given can be naturalized. And by that I mean put into a naturalistic framework where it doesn't prove anything at all. And so what if I'm talking to an unbeliever and he says, well, I can't believe in miracles. I don't believe Jesus rose from the dead. And I say, well, there were people who were willing to lose their lives for that claim. And this unbeliever says, you know, I'd never thought about it that way. That's right, the early Christians, I was always thinking they would. They were just exaggerating, trying to make Jesus out to be this great guy, but they were willing to die for that. And I said, yeah, you know, do you think Charles Dickens would have died for Tiny Kim figment of his imagination, just some good story. Then believer might say, no, I don't. And at that point, conviction coming to him might say, I really need to get right with Jesus, don't I? And I say, yes, you do. So here's somebody who's not personally tenacious. Here's somebody who's not necessarily philosophically astute, but he realizes, I guess, the Bible has more to say for it than I thought. Now, does the Bible have something more to say for it than he thought? Yes, it does. And is it true that in general, authors will not die for a figment of their imagination? Yes, that is true. And so if that's all the unbeliever needed, and I offered that, I'd be willing to let it go at that, I wouldn't say oh, no, no, no. Fight back, fight back. Here, let me give you some ammunition. And so let's get into philosophical apologetics. Let me show you these really great arguments. I have. No, because what I have said is true. What I have said is helpful. And if that's all he needs, fine. But if he says, well, now, is there no way out? Does that absolutely prove that Jesus did have to rise from the dead? I'd be a liar if I told him, yeah, there's really no way out. And that's what I meant by that is you have to understand there's no way out, because if you don't accept the truth of the Scripture, you can't prove anything. There's no way out in that sense. But if you mean in the limited sense that, well, the apostles would never have died for something that was a lie, no, I can't say that. I'm not claiming that. That there's no way out. I'm just saying that it's one confirmation to me that they were telling the truth. But if you don't want to believe they were telling the truth, let me give you another unbeliever. Another unbeliever can say, what do you mean? People won't die for a lie. Political revolutionaries do it all the time. They are committed to a cause. They want to overthrow some established authority, and they will tell lies about that established authority. And if they are put on trial and threatened with their lives for those lies, they'll die for the lie, because in so doing, they are dying for the cause. An unbeliever could, and I don't go out there spreading this around so that unbelievers have all this ammunition to use against my evangelist brothers. But an unbeliever could easily say, sure, the apostles knew they were lying and were willing to die for it because they were willing to die for the cause of bringing Rome down or bringing Judaism down or promoting the claims of Christ, their leader. People are willing to die for lies, but at first when you look at that, you think, well, generally they don't, though if they know they're lying, they usually save their life. True, but in extreme cases, people will die for a lie. So again, it all depends on how personally or how philosophically astute and personally tenacious the unbeliever is as to whether these evidences are going to be very helpful or not. Is there a place for evidences? Absolutely. I've just described one. Sometimes evidences clear away the debris and show unbelievers, like in the creation evolution controversy. You know, most people I run into in our culture, they just take it for granted. The evolutionists have won the argument. So if you tell them you believe in the Bible, you believe in creation, they just will have all this debris mentally. It says, oh, well, then you must be superstitious. You don't care to be rational or look at the evidence? And with such a person, I don't usually start with, well, what are your epistemological presuppositions, buddy? No, I don't do that. I usually start with, well, maybe you're not aware of the fact that evolutions come on pretty bad times as a theory. And I offer some of the evidences against evolution, some of the problems they have, and here's the person who says, oh, gee, I didn't realize, it doesn't look so good after all. And, oh, wow, there are some things that seem to favor the biblical account. And at that point, what I'm doing is I'm clearing away the debris so we can hear the Christian message for what it is rather than just dismissing it as superstition. But now what if I don't have somebody that is allowing the mental debris to be cleared away because he's just heard all the stuff that evolution's proven as a fact and so forth, but rather a professor who has not just got some mental clutter up there, but he's established that as his wall of defense against God. You know, he's not just had somebody dump this on him and he's accepted it. He's building this wall. What am I going to do? I'm going to blast the wall. I'm going to say, you can't build anything on your principles. It's not just that you haven't got the facts right, the brute facts that everybody can see. I'm going to say you couldn't get any of the facts right on your worldview because you couldn't understand the facts at all. So you got to be pushed beyond the evidences to presuppositional apologetics in many, many cases. Well, I should give you an opportunity before we stop tonight to ask questions. My conclusion is that the traditional method is not just unfaithful and philosophically naive. It's just not good argumentation. Usually if you're dealing with a philosophically astute and personally tenacious unbeliever, not all of them are, but if they are, I don't think they need to be moved by this line of argument at all. Okay, questions from you now, if any, right here. How obviously this debate has been going on for some time how men answered these criticisms. Do they just criticisms or come back with the same superficial circular reasoning answers? Again, most of the answers I get from non presuppositionalists have been to misrepresent what presuppositionalism is and say, well, boy, we don't want to be these guys who reason in circles or beg the question or just our feeding. So I'd rather have what I have than what you're offering. Of course, what that means is they don't understand what the alternative is, so they set out a false antithesis. They say, okay, ours may be weak, but you don't have any argument at all. I'm saying, wait a minute, that isn't the choice. Because presuppositionalism does argue and does have a very strong and philosophically sound form of argument. So one way to answer this is to misrepresent your opponent, knock him down as a strong man, and say, I'm still the best on the block here. Sadly, another alternative is to campaign against those persons who, who tell them this sort of thing so that they don't get published, don't teach in institutions and so forth, and just politically prejudice the waters. The public against this point of view try to silence it, which I've never thought makes a whole lot of sense. I mean, if they can refute it, they ought to refute it. That'd be the best way to silence it. And then I am glad to say that in some cases, I find in our day, there are a few evidentialists and traditionalists who are saying maybe we need to go back and talk more to each other about these things. Maybe we have something to learn from each other and that's the one glimmer of hope and the bright light that may lead the way to the future for us. Because I'm convinced that we've come to pretty much a dead end in the evangelical community about this. Presuppositionalists and evidentialists are just talking past each other. And so I hope we can do better. Yes, And one of the things at the very end, folk have been asking. I don't get it. I don't see it. As far as the argument was, he was asking about arguments of contracting letters, the presbytery army. I want you to explain it and explain it. I still don't see it differently and still use it. Have you ever seen it? Well, you're asking specifically about Sproul. He said at the end of the debate he just didn't see it, and I tried to explain it two or three different ways, and he still didn't. Has he finally seen it? No, just this last summer, taught one of the students from the school where Sproul, the student came out to study with me for a month. And it's very obvious that Sproula just continued down the same line of misrepresenting, whether purposeful or not. I'm not going to get into, but not getting it straight what Van Till is all about. And I don't think that he does understand what a transcendental argument is. For most of these guys, they have the idea that all arguments are the same form. We have common assumptions about logic and about causality and the reliability of sense perception. And then we just go at it as to who can prove things. And I don't think they've ever stopped to ask what is necessary to make sense out of causality, sense impressions and so forth. So I don't know what else to tell you. One of the things I noticed is that he uses a lot of philosophical words and thinking, but again, it doesn't really seem like he has a real good grasp of philosophy. No. And that's one of the things I was dwelling on earlier in my lecture. I don't believe that he really does understand these things, philosophical concepts. And I'm not trying to put him down personally. It would be true of many, and he has a lot to contribute to the Christian community, even despite this problem. But I'm afraid that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing for a lot of people. And if you get just a little bit of philosophy and you think you know a lot of philosophy, you can do a lot of damage. Real quickly regarding the. I don't know, are we to judge their other scholastic endeavors by what I think is a shameful lack of scholarship on their party in this area? Well, we don't want to reason from some to all that would be a fallacy. And so what I would say is in the case of Sproul and some others, they may have shown that they don't know philosophy real well, but only a little bit. And so you might not, you know, if you read something of a philosophical nature, you might want to take it with a grain of salt and say, this calls for checking, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be more reliable when they're talking about some intramural theological problem or evangelism or something like that. I don't want people to dismiss me completely as a teacher and as a scholar. Because of the mistakes I've made at particular points and I want to be sensitive not to do that to them either. Well, you've been very patient tonight. I appreciate this. I hope you will enjoy what we do in our next class because now we're going to start taking some specific problems in apologetics and applying our method to them. And we'll start out with a debate I had with atheist Gordon Stein, and I would appreciate it very much. In fact, maybe I can have you teach the course in the first hour of the course when you come next time, try to tell me how what I was doing there is an app what I've been teaching, of course, and if you catch places where I wasn't, tell me that too. But I'd like you to show me that you know, the presuppositional method was being enacted in that debate. And if you can catch on to that, then I will be convinced that we've made some progress this year together. See you then. This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute. 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