Dr Greg Bahnsen - Mid-Level Apologetics: Antithesis, Presuppositions and Evidences (Part 4)

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.

All right, how did Paul defend the faith? What is the biblical or New Testament outlook on these same questions? In John the 17th chapter, we see Jesus praying that his followers would be set apart from the world by the word of God's truth, or God's truth found in his Word set apart. That is to say, we don't do things in a worldly way and the revelation of God makes a difference in the way that we think and we conduct ourselves. We interact with people. To put it very simply, there is an antithesis between the thinking of God's people and, and the world. Now you've picked up on that in this one article that you read, if you did your homework, at war with the Word. And I argue that this theme of antithesis is crucial to the Bible from beginning to end. Isn't that right? At the very beginning of the Bible story, God does what when man falls into sin, part of the judgment that God brings, as he says, I will set enmity between thee. And I see you're going to have two different humanities, two different ways of seeing the world, two different ways of living. It begins with a God ordained hostility between the world and his people, his covenant people. Of course his covenant people are tied to that one seed, Jesus, who finally comes to crush Satan and to destroy his works. But the fact is the world and God's people there have an enmity between them. And then we see this at the end of the Bible, if you will, not only because it's revelation, but the end of the story of history according to the teaching of the Bible is what an eternal antithesis between heaven and hell. It's amazing to me how our culture always wants to overcome that antithesis. We always want to blur the distinctions, you know, and I think I quote in the article, don't I, the John Lennon song Imagine, Imagine there's no heaven, there's no hell, right? And if you do that, then all the world can be at one. And he's right, he's right. If you've got the biblical teaching about heaven and hell, about the antithesis that God has established and will establish for all eternity, then maybe all mankind could be at one. Of course it would be a oneness in confusion, in the dark and immorality and all that, but nevertheless there would be a kind of oneness there. But the Bible says there is not a oneness. We are set apart, we are Consecrated. We are distinctive from the world. In 1 Corinthians, chapters 1 and 2, Paul especially drives home this fact that the word of the cross is, to those who are lost, foolish, whereas to those who are saved. It is the power of God. We have to understand, before we enter into apologetics that the gospel will be contrary to the presuppositions of unbelieving thought. The Gospel does not cater to the rebellious man's demand for evidences and logical demonstration and autonomous scrutiny. You will not find in the Bible anything of this evangelical evidential flavor that says God says, please just try me out, put me to the test, see if I can answer your questions, and so forth. There was a person once in the Bible who thought that he could do that with God. Remember the story of Job? Job said, I'm angry. I've got some questions for you, God. God said, fine, Job, I'll answer your questions after you answer mine. Where were you when I made the goats that walk in the mountaintops? Where were you when I made the crocodile? Do you understand all these things, Job? And eventually Job is humbled, of course, before God, and he puts his hand over his mouth and he says, what? I spoke too soon. No one, no one has the right to cross examine the Almighty. The Bible teaches us that in First Corinthians 1 and 2, when it tells us that the word of the cross is, to those who perish, foolish, you will never be able to make the gospel. The word of the cross appear reasonable to people that continue to use the mindset of autonomy, their sinful, depraved, rebellious mindset. Now, at this point, you might say, well, then, Dr. Bronson, aren't you saying we shouldn't do apologetics? Because until people are saved and regenerated, then they aren't going to be able to understand the message and believe it? No, what I'm saying is you need to realize that they need to come to a crisis. They cannot, as it were, by increments, use their reason and say, okay, God has satisfied this, God has satisfied that. God has satisfied this, God has satisfied that. I guess finally I can believe Jesus is God. It doesn't happen that way. They need to come to repentance. And repentance involves the moral side of things, where they see their guilt and pollution before God. But it also involves thinking a different way. In fact, one of the major Greek words for repentance, metanaeo, means to have a change of mind, to have your mind turn around. So when I appeal to an unbeliever, I Don't appeal to him to say, well, on your presuppositions the gospel will make a lot of sense. I say your presuppositions are wrong. Your presuppositions don't make sense. Because in the same two chapters where Paul says the word of the cross is foolishness to those who perish, he also says, where is the wise man of this world? He challenges, where is the debater of this age? Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? And so my approach, if I can put it in real general, broad terms, my approach is generally not to cater to the foolish presuppositions of the unbeliever trying to prove by his standards that the gospel is true. My approach is to take the negative one, to say on your basis you couldn't know anything, as in God made foolish the wisdom of this world. That is, I want to show him that Christianity is the only rational option he has left, that if he doesn't take the approach to man knowledge, the world that is taught in the Bible, he couldn't know anything at all. Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? So, no, I am not saying that we cannot argue with unbelievers. What I'm saying is, since by their presuppositions they have to look at the word of the cross as foolish, why should we play to their presuppositions? I mean, Paul tells you, here's the outcome, you leave the unbeliever unchanged with respect to his mental framework. He's going to say it's foolish. And isn't that true? Why should the unbeliever, who I've already arrested, who thinks that his intellect is somehow part of the divine, who thinks that he's neutral and autonomous, why should he accept the kinds of stuff that we preach? Why should he believe that he is so guilty before God that he needs blood, atonement? Remember what Socrates, what our culture thinks, Men don't ever do anything wicked because they're bad people, they must not know better. We have one rationalization after another. But when the unbeliever looks upon himself as innocent in the eyes of God, and when he says God has not provided sufficient evidence and my reason will be judging God, you can't ever expect that he's going to agree to the gospel, and so your alternative is to stay at home and pray, or when you witness to bombard his presuppositions, try to show that on your basis, it's not just Christianity that is foolish, everything is foolish. You couldn't know anything at all. So that's why, as we do apologetics, there is a high degree of moral beseeching in our attempt to persuade men. We call upon men not to show that they participate in a rationality with God or all other men. We call men to be reconciled to God. To be reconciled to God is the very opposite of what Socrates thought. Socrates thought that all men have this spark of the divine in them, all men have rationality in them. And so all you need to do is exercise that gift you've been given better. And what we want to say is you're not in contact with God. You are alienated from God. He is angry with your sin, including the way you think, the way you reason. So let me pick up some high points of this article. I don't. We'll stay here too late tonight if I say everything according to Paul. He looked upon men, Romans 1 here, as suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. And because they suppress the truth in unrighteousness, they have become foolish in their thinking. See, Paul's not just saying you've really tried to run away from God. He says you've run away from rationality too. In the process of. Of getting God out of your knowledge, you've destroyed the possibility of knowing anything. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. Nevertheless, they knew the truth in their heart of hearts. We see in a passage like 1 Corinthians 1:17 that Paul refuses. In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul refuses to use the wisdom of the world, lest the cross of Christ be made of none effect. So Paul does not exalt the intellect of man. He does not believe man is neutral in his thinking. He does not suggest men should try to be a law unto themselves or autonomous in their theory of knowledge. Paul rather teaches over and over and over and over again the depravity of the human mind. When you think about it, if you put together all the things Paul said about unbelieving thinking, and you have that in the syllabus that you've been reading, right in one of the chapters and some other places as well in your reading, if you put all those verses together and you hand that to an unbeliever, I mean, that's insulting, isn't it? Paul doesn't have a lot of respect for unbelieving thought. He says unbelieving thought. He says the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it's not subject to the law of God. Neither indeed can it be. You need to Understand that men are not. It's not like they've made some intellectual mistakes and that's why their lives are so bad. In their minds, they are at enmity with God. The hostility extends to the way they reason, and that's why you've got to undermine their reasoning. We've got to go after that. In Romans 1 again, Paul tells us what can be known about God is plain within them. And he says this because God has made it manifest to them. Consequently, there always is a point of contact with the unbeliever. We know that we can speak to unbelievers and they can understand our message and they are accessible to our defense of the faith and to the. To the plea of the gospel because they know God. In order to deal with unbelievers, then you need to follow your conception of the unbeliever, which is given by the Bible rather than the unbeliever's conception of himself. Because not many unbelievers are going to say, oh, yes, I know God, but I'm suppressing it. But the Bible says that's what they're doing. And so, you know, you, you. If I use this analogy last time, forgive me for repeating this, but I really like this. It's kind of like, you know that this is the truth and you know, you can get through to them because they do know God in their heart of hearts. And if they say, oh, yeah, I don't know God. If you were to say, oh, well, if you say you don't know God, then I guess I have to take a different approach. That would be like having somebody mug you in a parking lot who's holding, you know, a knife and you pull out a gun. He goes, well, I don't believe in guns. You say, oh, I guess if you don't believe in guns, throw it away. It's absurd, isn't it? Sure, he's going to say he doesn't believe that he knows God. Sure, he's going to act like he's innocent and not suppressing the truth, but you know better. So don't throw your gun away. Shoot him. Four zone. Good. What I mean is, drive the argument home. Show that you do know God, because if you didn't, you couldn't know anything. And he's going to scream and yell and protest. What do you expect? We're not dealing with, you know, trivial points like the World Series. We're talking about life and death matters. So expect it. Expect him to say it isn't true. And then you're going to have to do what? Close this. You have to show that on your own approach to things you, you couldn't know anything. Only if you know God could you know anything. And you do know God and therefore you know things about God and this world. According to Paul's approach to knowledge, there's really two levels of knowing. There's God's thinking, which is behind the creation of the world and the control of every event in this world, and the interpretation of the details of this world. And then there's man's thinking, which of necessity must submit to God in order to understand the world at all. In our first session tonight I said Socrates could never deal with the problem of how a particular man, part of the flux of history, could know the universals. Now is there any particular man who can know everything so that he could say, I've got this universal law or principle? No, but what if the person who does know everything reveals himself to us? You see, we do have a basis for believing. Let's just talk about two different kinds of laws. I'll keep it real simple tonight. Later on we'll get more detail. Let's talk about laws of science. The laws of science tell you that the way in which your car engine starts last week is the way it's going to start tomorrow. Because everything is supposed to work uniformly. In fact, just because we believe in the uniformity of the natural world, when our car doesn't start, we don't say, oh, there's nothing we can do about it because we live in a changed universe. Who knows, maybe it'll start tomorrow, maybe it won't. We say no, if it doesn't start and it used to, something must have changed. And then we start looking for what has changed. Like, I'm out of gas, somebody took the smart plugs out of the car. Whatever. We start looking for something because we know there's got to be a reason, that is to say a law like explanation for why things have changed. Now how could any human being know enough to make a universal statement like that, that the future will be like the past? Well, we can't. But of course those of us who are God's children are in touch with the divine mind, God's own word, and promised to us that what seed, time and harvest will continue in regular succession. We know that God is a God of order. He isn't fooling us. He has promised to keep things running regularly so we have a way of knowing because we're in contact with the mind that knows all things or how about the laws of logic. Laws of logic that tell us, you know, you're not supposed to contradict yourself. And if P, then Q, P, therefore Q. All these sorts of things are meant to be universal in their application. They apply to everything. But now what? Human beings had an experience of everything. How do you know? I mean, unbelievers who have studied logic will laugh at this because they just take it for granted. But you, how do you know the laws of logic are the same in China? Have you studied the laws of logic in China? How do you know the laws of logic were the same in the 17th century? Well, now if somebody will say, well, if you knew the nature of the laws of logic, you wouldn't ask that. To which I say, well, I have a PhD in philosophy. I think I know the nature of the laws of logic. Now let me ask my question again. How do you know that the laws of logic are unchanging? Because you decree it to be so. No, but. And they'll say, well, how could you know? I mean, you don't know any more than I do that way. So. That's right, I don't. Except God has revealed himself to me, and I know the nature of God's mind. He doesn't lie, and therefore I'm not the lie. And so I don't contradict myself. And on and on and on. I can show that because I know God, who has this universal knowledge, that I can make universal statements based on His Word. The unbeliever cannot. So we as Christians recognize two levels of knowing. And we argue that to know anything, we must think God's thoughts after Him. To know anything, we have to first have faith in his revelation. And then reason makes sense. We can use it to learn about car engines and about logic and baking cakes and all sorts of things. When you see the world in light of God's revelation, you can understand man's dignity. You can understand moral absolutes, you can understand the need for logical consistency. You can understand why the laws of science are fruitful and knowable. But if you don't have that revelation, if you don't have that faith, then reason becomes absurd. The psalmist put it very nicely. You can make this maybe your memory verse for next time. Psalm 36:9. In thy light shall we see light. In thy light shall we see light. What the psalmist is saying is in terms of the light that comes from God, then we're able to see created light as it were. But if there were no light from God, everything would be darkness. In terms of the New Testament approach to knowing things. Man is able to know the truth, provided he begins with the word of God. Notice the words of Jesus in John 8. If you abide in my word, then you are truly my disciples and you shall know the truth. The truth shall set you free. You can know the truth if you do what? Abide in His Word. You begin with the outlook of faith, and then truth is knowable. Of course, specific truth obviously is about salvation and the character of Christ, but it's truth in general, too. Apart from the word of God, you wouldn't be able to know the truth. The first and great commandment according to Jesus is that we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, strength and mind. So we are not neutral. We live and think subject to the authority of Christ. And there can be no neutrality because Jesus said, no man can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Jason said, he that is not with me is against me. So Paul, or the New Testament in general, takes an approach to man, his thinking, to truth and knowledge, which are diametrically the opposite of Socrates. Socrates thought man's reason should be exalted as free of sin and depravity, that it was neutral, that it was the final authority, it was autonomous. And in every one of these ways, the New Testament says, that's wrong. Our mind should be submissive to God. We can't know anything apart from the word of God. Men are suppressing the truth when they tell you that they don't know God. We're under obligation not to be neutral, but to be obedient. And so what happens in the Bible when the word of God is questioned? You see, this is all of a piece. It's all tied together. There's a system here. There's a reason why the Bible responds to challenges to God's authority and to God's truthfulness in the way that it does. It's because of the biblical view of human nature, the nature of truth. I've already told you about Job. Remind you there that when Job thought he could inquire of God, God put Job in his place, didn't he? Basically humbled Job and reminded him, you don't know what I know, Job. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, remember at one point, Jesus responds to him, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Jesus does not endorse this idea that God comes and like, stands in the dock before the Judgment of autonomous man, you know. So God says, let me prove myself to you. Jesus says, it's wrong to put God in the dock. You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Without the word of God, this world is sound and fury signifying nothing. You cannot make sense of this world world. You cannot make sense of logic, cannot make sense of science, of human dignity, of moral absolutes. That's why Paul considered those who question the word of God to be fools who trust in their own heart. According to Paul, those who proceed in the way of fools will end up contradicting themselves. They oppose themselves. He says in second Timothy chapter two. We know from the Old Testament the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Two more passages and then we will move on. 2nd Corinthians 10. Paul says, the way in which we are going to be equipped, we're going to be mighty, to cast down strongholds and reasoning that's exalted against the knowledge of God is by bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. So instead of seeking these autonomous ways of reasoning with people, kind of like stepping outside of our face, saying, look, I'll reason with you on a common platform. You tell me how you reason and what your presuppositions are, and I'll try to, you know, show that God passes your test. Rather, we should bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and then we'll be able to pull down strongholds and reasoning that is raised up against the knowledge of God. And finally, Paul's method. I'm going to leave it to you to read the Acts 17 section of this chapter again. Paul's method is typified in First Corinthians 1, where he just says, where is the wise? Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? So instead of catering to your demands, I'm going to show that your demands, understand that you present them, will create foolishness. This lead to utterance, absurdity, you won't be able to know anything at all. I'm going to read, as a summary for the history of apologetics the top of page 221 of the article. And then I'd like to set a different kind of contrast before you that is more contemporary, the contrast between evangelical evidential apologetics and reformed presuppositional apologetics. But to summarize, I say here the most characteristic thing about the apologetic arguments which one encounters in the history of the Church is that they were Socratic in their outlooks. They tended to divide the corpus of dogma into that which can be rationalized. That's the lower story and that which is mysterious, what you have to know by supernatural revelation. They held that man's mind is competent and authorized to prove truths in the lower story by means of autonomous test. And so they subjected God's word to validation by the sinner's alleged neutral and self sufficient intellect. They played down the antithesis between believing and unbelieving theories of knowledge, as well as toning down the sufficiency, the clarity and the authority of God's natural revelation. Like Socrates. Historically, most apologists have taken a piecemeal approach, proving a few items here and a few items there by argumentative appeal to factual evidence, logical coherence, social and individual benefit, and inward personal experience. In contrast to that you'll find in the history of apologetics in people like Tertullian, Calvin, and finally Cornelius Van Till approach that says we don't look at this in a piecemeal way. We argue worldviews. You have the Christian worldview set over against the non Christian worldview. And instead of arguing that our worldview can satisfy the standards professed in yours, we want to show that your worldview is internally destroyed. You couldn't know anything on that basis. And then we argue as well, you really do know God. In your heart of hearts you've been suppressing the truth and that's how you've been able to know anything at all. So we find men to be culpable for running away from God and we call on them to repent of that. Repent not just of their sexual immorality, but of their mental immorality as well. Okay, questions about the history of apologetics. You've read the article. There are things you would like to ask me about that before we move on to another subject. Yes, sir. How.

How does brawl deal with.

Your tape with him?

But I served a hard copy of those.

How do you deal with Fenfield, all these men? Because they're coming at him too. Well, you'd probably need to ask me more specifically how he deals with this or that issue in that debate between. And by the way, if you have a poor copy of that, I recently found out that there must have been two or three students who had tape recorders going that night. And their copy is. Generation after generation obviously get weaker, but I do think there's a clear copy you can get from Covenant Tape Ministry if you want to hear that better. Here's the interesting thing. I debated Sproul this one night and the next day. The next morning in my office at the seminary, I said, RC, I'm not sure that you really understand Van Till. You've been true to him because you say things about him which I can contradict reading right out of his book. So then I started reading, I would guess, a half a dozen quotations from Van Till. And Sproul jumped up from his seat and said, what are you reading from? And I showed him all these publications by Van Til. He was flabbergasted. Now, that told me something. Namely, he should not have been publicly debating yet the point. But the sad thing is, a few years later he went into print with John Gerstner and another fellow, Arthur Lindsley, arguing in favor of an approach to apologetics and really hammering on Van Til for not following that approach. What we're turning to right now, actually, is something I would recommend to you if you want to pursue this further. In the article Machen Van Till and the Apologetical Tradition of the opc, which you have all read by now, I trust. On pages 268 to 277, I have a real tight, condensed summary of the Van Till's approach to apologetics. And in it I tried to show how Van Till disagrees with the theistic proofs and then how he thinks they ought to be put together. How Van Till does believe in the use of historical evidence, but then how those evidences ought to be used for the two things that you hear over and over and over again about presuppositionalists or Dr. Van Till is that they don't believe in proving God's existence and they don't believe that there's any historical evidence that you should use, or it's wrong to use historical evidence. And this is completely cockamamie. I don't know where people get this idea, except that it's easier to have preconceptions and pigeonhole people and create a straw man down. Dr. Van Til has never said any of those things, but he's been very critical of traditionalist ways of arguing for God's existence. He's very critical of autonomous attempts to use historical evidence. But he says with all his heart he believes there is such evidence. In fact, at one point in one of his writings, he says, my colleagues in the seminary do that better than me. That's why I. I don't spend a lot of time doing that. But he encourages them, of course. Look into the historical evidences, embarrass the unbelievers when they say, you know, we don't have evidence for this and so forth. That's fine. But his point is you can't appeal to evidences and evidences and evidences without what, a theory of evidences? Finally, that makes sense of what you're saying. So in the time that we have remaining here, which is less than I'd like, let me try to set forth a contrast between the evidential approach to apologetics in our day and presuppositionalism. The first thing that should be said is this is horrible terminology, very misleading terminology. The reason for that is it suggests that evidentialists don't have presuppositions. That's dead wrong. They do. And it suggests also that presuppositionalists don't use what evidences. And so that terminology is just bound to confuse and mislead people. They say, well, Dr. Bronson, why are you using it? Because it's so common. The nomenclature is so common that I have to use the tags that you'll recognize the approach to apologetics that you find in people like Montgomery Sproul and so forth over against what you find in somebody like Dr. Van Til.

Uh oh, their titles are evident.

What's that? There's a title.

The title Are Evident.

Okay. On page 268, I say we should begin by observing that Van Til's criticism of the theistic proofs has always and only been directed against the proofs as they were traditionally formulated, understood and applied. And here are some things which are assumed in the way. Throughout the history of apologetics, most people have used the theistic proofs. One, they suggest that the evidence for God's existence is ambiguous. Ambiguous meaning you have a right to interpret it one way or another. It isn't absolutely clear. Two, that matter, there are some things which are more epistemically certain than God himself. That is God isn't the beginning of your knowing process. There are some things you know more certainly than God, like the laws of logic or your own experience and observation, okay? And it's on the basis of these more certain things like the laws of logic or your observations that you prove God's existence. Thirdly, the theistic proofs that's traditionally used have assumed that the unbelievers presuppositions about reality and knowledge are sufficient to account for the intelligibility of his experience and reasoning. That is, his reasoning is okay as far as it goes. And in terms of his reasoning, he can call God into question. The unbeliever is approached on the basis that way you are able to know things and your autonomous approach to the world makes sense. Now what I would like to do is to show you that if you did your homework better, you would also believe God exists. Fourthly, that the unregenerate can be intellectually neutral and open mindedly fair about this subject. The unregenerate is intellectually neutral. He comes with an open mind. He goes, I'll just consider any evidence that you have. I have no axe to grind. Right. And fifthly, that the God which can be rationally proven may or may not be the God of the Christian scriptures. Okay, you prove a God rather than the living and true God. And what you prove is that a God may be known very probably. Now let's contrast this evidential approach to proving God's existence to what we read in Romans 1, 18, 20. In Romans 1, Paul tells this that the living and true God in all of his eternal power and divine character is known. Not a God. God says it. I mean, Paul says it's the God, the living and true God. And what you know is his eternal Godhead, his divine power. Moreover, this God is so clearly and inescapably revealed in man's experience that all men know him and have no excuse. So God is clearly and inescapably revealed in man's experience. There is nothing more certain than God. God is inescapably known. So that men are without excuse. They have no excuse for failing to confess this God and to live as he is revealed. The evidence is not ambiguous, it's not very probable. It's without excuse that God is inescapably known by men. The living and true God. This is what Romans 1 says. Nevertheless, all men strive to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They are not neutral, they are suppressing the truth that's not neutral and open minded. That's to say they've got a program you will never argue with. Unbeliever who is hoping that you'll be right. Paul says in Romans 3, quoting the Old Testament, that none seek after God. Even when they talk about oh yes, I'd like to know God and so forth. They're always seeking a God of their own devising and imagination. A God cut down through the dimensions of what they can handle. Not a God who will condemn them for all eternity or tell them how they're living their lives, you know, or how their reasoning is displeasing to him. And finally, Paul says in Romans 1, men end up becoming vain and foolish in their reasoning. Their reasoning is not intelligible. But they become fools in reasoning. Now, I don't know, maybe this is old hat to some of you, but I still remember very vividly as a student of apologetics a number of years ago when I kind of put this kind of chart together, I said, this is incredible. Every distinctive of evidentialism is counterfeited or Contradicted by Romans 1. The whole approach is wrong headed because that's what I was accustomed to doing and I thought I was pleasing God. And then I read what Paul says and I said, well, well, I'm not telling people that their reasoning is foolish. I'm not telling people that they know the living and true God and that there's no excuse. And so clearly my apologetic is falling short of what God wants me to say to people and what Paul tells me here. And so Van Till realizes that the theistic proofs that we're going to formulate have got to be better than what the traditional method has given us. Van Till says, I do not. I'm quoting here. I do not reject the theistic proofs but merely insist on formulating them in such a way as not to compromise the doctrines of Scripture. Now recently someone published a review of a book about Van Till in Westminster Seminary. This person is a real avid follower of Gordon Clark and that obsession comes out. But nevertheless you get this kind of argument from some apologists. Well, Van Til says there's a theistic proof, but he never states what it is. Let me quote. Okay, Van Til. The argument for the existence of God and for the truth of Christianity is objectively valid. We should not tone down the validity of this argument to the probability level. He says Christianity is the only reasonable position to hold. And therefore. Now listen to this. The only proof of the Christian position is that unless its truth is presupposed, there is no possibility of proving anything at all. Here's my proof of the Christian reject. Remember the faith reason model here. Reject Christian faith and you won't be able to reason at all. Well, not that you won't be able to as part of human behavior, but you'll have no intellectual foundation for your reasoning. Reasoning will become absurd. Without Christian faith, without this God, you can't prove anything at all. Now that is an argument for God's existence. And in the history of philosophy it's what's called a transcendental argument. You're arguing from the impossibility of the contrary or from what's called preconditions of intelligibility. That is, we're arguing about something which is the very foundation of arguing at all. And so it has to be true, because if it weren't, our argument would fall apart.

Vic, where is that quote?

Oh, you know, I'm not even sure I brought the footnote page. Let me tell you where you can find it on page 269. And this is about three. Well, it begins halfway down the page, and then the actual statement is 3/4 of the way down where he says, the only proof of the Christian position is that unless its truth is presupposed, there's no possibility of proving anything at all. Anyone who has the whole article here might look up for me. Footnote 66, tell me where. Oh, I've been going through the apologetical tradition of the OPC. Okay, it's in Jerusalem and Athens. Page, page 21. Thank you very much. Yes, Larry, you've heard me say a.

Lot about how the existence of God, the Christian God, validates reason and all these things. And I think it's pretty easy to see how that. Not only how that undermines the Socratic view and how the Socratic view undermines. But what about other religions, other theists that you use, whether they be Islamic or.

Let me give you a thumbnail sketch answer to that question, but then encourage you later in the course we're going to get into that more looking at specific worldviews and how to answer them. But the quick answer is you approach them just like any other philosophy. They may appeal to a religious revelation and so forth, but you can still ask them, okay, what is the nature of what is truth? How do we know what we know? And you do an internal critique of their worldview to show that on that basis you couldn't know anything at all. The fact that they presented in religious terminology doesn't change the fact that from our standpoint, it's just another philosophy of life. And so the thumbnail sketch answer is, don't be bamboozled by religious talk. Just treat it like everything else Mantill says on page 270 in my article, I quote him, end of that first paragraph. There is objective evidence in abundance and it is sufficiently clear. Men ought, if only they reason rightly, to come to the conclusion that God exists. That is to say, if the theistic proof is constructed as it ought to be constructed, it is objectively valid, whatever the attitude of those to whom it comes may be. Then Vantua goes on, as I indicate on page 270 and 271, to criticize thoroughly the notion of fideism. Fideism is the view that we Believe this, and we have faith in faith itself, that reason is not the basis for what we believe, but we've just made a volitional commitment based on our experience of faith. And so you can't really use reason as the foundation. You just have to make a commitment, kind of like a leap of faith. And Van Till utterly repudiates that. Van Till says, we cannot let Christianity be reduced to feedism, where men choose religious commitments like they do hats, you know, which is in the 1930s, you know, was kind of like different strokes for different folks. You just can't say, okay, this satisfies you. So, you know, that's your. You make that leap of faith. This satisfies me. I make this leap of faith because we've got to reason with people. We've got to show that they can't prove anything, can't know anything apart from Christianity. Then let me turn now secondly to the question of evidences. Is there any use for evidences? Can we ever appeal to archaeology and to history and to science and so forth to verify Christianity? Say that again.

Not unless you have a presupposition.

That's right. The only way in which those evidences form is if you have the right presuppositional framework. But now the question is, is there ever a place for us to use those evidences with unbelievers? And people have said, well, presuppositionalists, they don't believe in the use of evidences. Well, we certainly do. I use them. I usually use them to embarrass the critics. You know, people will say things about, well, you know, who knows what the Bible really says? You know, we have all these years of copying and so forth. And I'll say, well, now let me tell you something. I've studied textual criticism with Plato and Aristotle. In graduate school and in seminary, I studied textual criticism of the New Testament. And so from the standpoint of somebody who seen the difference between these two, I think it's amazing that anybody would criticize the Bible and say, well, who can know for sure? Because we take for granted we know what Plato and Aristotle said, and the textual evidence for them is 900 to 1200 years separated from the earliest documents. Not that way in the case of the New Testament. Now, does a presuppositionalist ever have a place for those kind of evidences? Of course we do. When the evidence is being challenged, when things are being said which are contrary to the facts, we can appeal to those facts and embarrass our critics. Of course we can but now, in the end, if our critics want to, they can backpedal and backpedal and backpedal from all sorts of evidences and not let the evidences prove what we think they should. Let's say that I show that Jesus cadaver resuscitated. I know you don't like to hear it put that way, but you see, that's the secular version of what we call resurrection. We believe a dead body started breathing again. Now what do we do with that? Thomas says, what my Lord and my God the unbeliever says, Strange things happen. What's the difference here? His approach to the evidences is not informed by a Christian worldview, but by a secular approach. And Van Till would say, if you use that secular approach, you couldn't know anything in history. It's not just that you couldn't know the resurrection. You couldn't know anything. If you don't begin with Christian presuppositions, it's not possible to have a knowledge and history. Let me quote Van Till. The point is, we are told that in an infallible Bible there should not be any discrepancies. There should be no statement of historical fact in Scripture that is contradictory to a statement of historical fact given elsewhere. Yet higher criticism has in modern times found what it thinks are facts that cannot possibly be harmonized with the idea of an infallible Bible. What shall be the attitude of the orthodox believer with respect to this? Shall he be an obscurantist and hold to the doctrine of the authority of the Scripture, though he knows that it can empirically be shown to be contrary to the facts of Scriptures themselves? It goes without saying that such should not be his attitude. So we just keep holding on for dear life, you know, in faith to this Bible that the higher critics have just hammered and hammered and hammered on. He says, of course not. Mansell says, it is quite commonly held that we cannot accept anything that's not the result of sound scientific methodology. With this we can, as Christians hold heartily agree. The Christian position is certainly not opposed to experimentation and observation. And on the top of 272, I quote him, the greater amount of detailed study, and the more carefully such study is undertaken, the more truly Christian will the method be. It is important to bring out this point in order to help remove the common misunderstanding that Christianity has opposed the factual investigation. And then a third of the way down the page, I quote, historical apologetics is absolutely necessary and indispensable to point out that Christ rose from the grave. One more. Every bit of historical investigation, whether it be in the directly biblical field, archaeology or in general history, is bound to confirm the truth of the claims of the Christian position. A really fruitful historical apologetic argues that every fact is and must be such as proves the truth of the Christian theistic position. So Van Till, the presuppositionalist, believes in appeals to evidence. God has provided plenty of infallible proofs. There are plenty of infallible proofs to be found in the realms of history and science, things that confirm the teaching of the Bible. But as we've already pointed out, and I'll just repeat, as we conclude tonight, those proofs could not be understood if we didn't have a general framework, a general understanding of how man knows anything from the facts that makes sense of history and of man's ability to know things. You have evidentialists, for instance, who will say, the way in which we know anything from history is we assume the uniformity of all things. And then they turn around and having assumed the uniformity of all things, they want to prove what? Well, not evolution. They want to prove a miracle which contradicts the uniformity of all things. And so on the one hand you've got this uniformity presupposition and on the other hand you have this non uniformity conclusion. It's like oil and water. Van Till says the evangelical approach to the evidences doesn't make the evidences speak in the way that they should. It undermines a really fruitful approach to the use of evidences. And so I'll quote him one more time, page 275, right in the middle. Consequently, Van Till has taught that it is impossible. I'm quoting. It is impossible and useless to seek to defend Christianity as a historical religion by a discussion of facts only if we would really defend Christianity as a historical religion, we must at the same time defend the theism upon which Christianity is based. And this involves us in philosophical discussion, a philosophical discussion where the fact of the resurrection is not artificially and sharply separated from the system of meaning in terms of which it is inevitably understood. Therefore, Van Till would not in the least disparage the usefulness of arguments for the corroboration of Scripture that came from archaeology. He would simply want to insist that such corroboration is not of independence power in our day and age. And then we'll come to questions in our day and age. These are the two most popular approaches to apologetics in evangelical circles. There are others, you'll have some who promote actually a kind of subjectivistic apologetic of the heart, that's real popular in some Christian circles, but for the most part, these are the key contenders and what I will be trying to show you throughout the remainder of this course. This is what tonight's lecture was meant to set up. I'd like to show you that what I've called the Pauline or presuppositional approach over against the Socratic or the evidentialist approach, not only has the support of Scripture, but has the support of what we know in terms of philosophy and theory of knowledge. And I'd then like to show you how a presuppositionalist applies this. I'm going to show you the method of defending the faith and we'll get away from all these theoretical considerations eventually, I promise you, and we'll get down to how do you answer a Mormon, how do you answer a Muslim, how do you answer an atheist or an evolutionist, and so forth? So the rubber will hit the road, but before we do that, we have to have some idea of what our choices are. Tonight's lesson has primarily been an attempt to show you two different mindsets. One that assumes the autonomy of man's mind and then says faith is based on that, and the other that says reason wouldn't have any function at all if we didn't have the Christian worldview to make sense out of it.

LARRY Then here is this why then the evidentialists, really, I don't know how well they do, but compared to how well they do amongst particularly CHI would say college campuses like ucsd, they do pretty well amongst Christians going to churches and so on, because the Christians or the church people there already have general presupposition.

Yeah, And I'm not trying to make excuses for my own failures and deficiencies, but when I was a college student early involved in apologetics, I think that's why evidentialism made so much sense to me, because from where I was coming from, the evidences all seem so clear, you know, and when I look back on it now, having grown up a bit, I don't mean that in a condescending way, but having come to a different conviction, I say why did it seem so compelling to me originally? And I think what you've just brought up as the answer is because I was brought up in a Christian home, you know, and I had these convictions and so forth. And so then when you bring the evidences for the resurrection, I say, yeah, that's right, it doesn't make any sense not to believe in the resurrection, and it doesn't make any sense not to believe in the resurrection. There is a place for evidences confirming and strengthening the faith of a believer. But I found out through experience as well as through philosophical inquiry that, you know, unbelievers don't have to respond to the evidences that way if they don't want to praise God, the Holy Spirit uses those evidences. Not everyone's as tenacious and as argumentative as they might be. But if I were an unbeliever, and you know, you hate to play the devil's advocate, but if I were an unbeliever, I've yet to have including scroll, tend to think of it sitting next to me on a plane one day. They cannot argue this with an intelligent unbeliever. It takes about seven minutes, and you finally shredded everything they've got. You got to have something stronger than just an appeal to the autonomous mind of man and his neutral consideration of evidences right here.

Reconcile the apparent or the contrast between.

His method and Roman force. Do they? They don't. They don't. One of the reasons why I set this out the way I have, and I've written, you know, articles and so forth, is that I'm hoping that evidentialists will stop and think about this again. There was a time when I read Romans 1 and I said, oh, yeah, sure, that's what I'm doing here. And why did I make that mistake? You know, it helps me to think through my own history to try to get through to them, because it appears in Romans 1. Paul is saying, you can go to the world and there's evidence for God out there. But the problem is, he says more than that. And so if you go there just wanting to get kind of a general pious authorization for what you're doing, then Paul seems to be saying, yes, there's evidence in the unbelievers without excuse and so forth. But then you have to stop and say, without excuse. But I've been telling people very likely this evidence points to God. When you think about it, Paul doesn't say very likely. He says, you're guilty if you don't see God when you look at the evidence. So I suppose the most charitable answer I can give is that our evidentialist brothers do not look long and hard at the details of what Paul was saying to realize that their method is really not matching up. I hope this chart helps you. When you talk to evidentialists, point that out to them. Say Romans 1 is really not doing what you think is not doing what you're doing. It's pointing to something quite different. Say that now. Yeah, I tried to in that debate. If you can get a copy, you'll get a better answer than I'll give you right now. But he argued, Romans 1 supports natural theology. And in the debate I said, no, RC, it supports natural revelation. Romans 1 teaches us that God has revealed himself through nature and so forth. But natural theology says, I keep telling you, we're going to end this class, we'll go on and on. I love this material. So we found it to the point of agreement, didn't he?

And then found out it was.

Yeah, right. It turned out not to be natural theology. I'll put it to you quickly and I promise then we'll close in prayer and go home. Natural theology says God has provided raw data out there which the neutral mind of man can go and interpret. And when done properly, it will very probably show that there's a God. That is to say, God doesn't begin with pre interpreted information coming across to us. He just puts out there the materials for an argument that can be developed for God's existence. Now one of the ways in which I know that isn't what Paul is saying is as a matter of fact, most people cannot argue from God's existence, just from the facts of experience. In fact, the best philosophers, the best philosophical minds in the history of Western thought have struggled to do that. How am I supposed to believe that? Sophie the wash woman goes out there and says, oh look, there's motion and everything that moves needs a mover. Therefore this whole world which is in motion needs a mover. There must be a God. Now that argument's a terrible argument, right, because it actually proves there should be many movers. You know, for everything that's in motion, you should be able to move back to, you have, you know, a chain of causation to a first mover, not for everything, but for every particular. I mean, peach trees and cars and everything have their own individual first mover. But my point here is I know that people don't go out and get the raw data and come up with these sophisticated philosophical arguments. They just don't do it. Paul says all men know God and are guilty before him. And so what I tried to present to Sproul is that in Romans 1 we have pre interpreted communication. That is, God has taken the data and told us what it means. And then it's like he reveals that to us through the created order. When we see the world, we know our Creator. We don't just see motion or design. And therefore we think, oh, there must be a designer or a first mover. But those of you who've heard the debate, I think it's probably fair to say I don't think Sproul got that point. I think that was something that he struggled with, the distinction between natural theology and natural revelation. And I promised that we would close in prayer and go home. So thank you for your enthusiasm tonight, though. This encourages me. We'll come back on the 16th of December and we'll begin talking about the method for defending the faith. Try to get down to a specific approach to doing this sort of thing. Let's pray. Thank you, God, that you have given us this time to look at your word. And we do ask that we will become more faithful to that word. We all confess. I certainly confess for myself, Lord, that even when we think that we are obeying you and serving you, we often do not pay attention and we need to become more faithful. And we pray that you will use our class sessions to that end, that we would become more diligent to know you and to to reliably and faithfully present your claims to this world that needs you so desperately. We want to thank you again for the grace that you have shown in our lives as we know that we are not here tonight and we do not believe in you because we are somehow smarter than other men or better than other men. We are here simply because you lifted the blindness and took away the hearts and by your Holy Spirit, gave us new life and enlightenment. And none of this comes to us because we deserve it. It comes to us because you somehow, amazingly, loved us. We pray that we would carry that thought home with us, that you protect us as we travel and that you'd bring us again together in a month. Help us to again take this further, that we would know you and that others would come to know you as well. In Jesus name, Amen.

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