Dr Greg Bahnsen - Practical Apologetics: Arbitrariness (Part 1)

I'm glad that you're here to hear about practical apologetics. The last two years that I've been at the Life Preparation Conference, I've been speaking on apologetics, but it wasn't called practical apologetics the last two years. So that was impractical apologetics they had previously. And now this year we're going to get around to the practical apologetics. Now, actually, it's being called practical apologetics because Gary wanted me especially to emphasize answering specific detailed problems and objections that are raised against the Christian faith. And I won't spend a lot of time in the process. I'll have to spend some time, but I won't spend a lot of time dealing with apologetical theory and procedure or, if you will, the abstract steps behind it. I'm going to try to take up problem after problem after problem and deal with it. And in the process, you should learn how to do apologetics by watching what's done. I want to really encourage you to not simply try to memorize the answers that Dr. Bonson or somebody else might have to a particular problem. It is helpful to get started by hearing somebody defend the faith and know what they say. But it's far more important that you learn the method. And so if you watch all of the different problems being dealt with, ask yourself, what is he doing here? What kinds of things, maneuvers is he using intellectually? What kind of reasoning is being applied to answer this problem? The reason why I want you to do that is in the 10 hours. I guess that's what I'm going to be using this week. Lord willing, I can't possibly answer every particular problem, deal with every false religion out there, every cult and so forth. It's just not possible. There's really two different ways to approach apologetics. I want you to think of yourself as being in a room with a man that has a revolver. You have no weapon to use against him, and he's got all these bullets in his gun and he's getting ready to shoot you and there's no exit. Now, as I see it, there are two things you can do, or if you knew you were going to be put into this room, there are two ways you could prepare. One way to prepare to deal with all of those bullets that are going to be shot at you is, is to practice dodging bullets. Really work on all the maneuvers, up and down and so forth. And so you say, I hope that even though this guy's got six or eight bullets in his gun, that I can just jump around and miss. He just won't hit me any of those times. Or another way would be to practice disarming your opponent so that he is not able to shoot anymore. Now, of those two, which do you think would be the more practical way to approach apologetics? If we have any bullet dodgers out there in the audience, this week's going to disappoint you, though. I'm going to be dodging some bullets, dealing with specific arguments. What I want you to learn is how to get the gun out of the other guy's hand. I want you to disarm your opponent. And the method of apologetics that I teach, often called in academic circles presuppositional apologetics, is especially designed to do that, to go after the presuppositions by which the opponent of Christianity is able to shoot those bullets at you, and you're going to take away his ability to do that. So we're going to be looking at specific arguments. Toward the end of my second lecture hour this afternoon, we're either going to pass out some cards to you or ask you to donate your own paper to the cause. And I would like you to be thinking right now or throughout my lecture, what is the toughest, or for some of you, maybe two toughest arguments you've run into against your Christian faith? I want you to write those down and turn them in so that over the next few days I can organize them and look at them myself and make sure, if at all possible, that's going to be my goal, to in one way or another, address every one of those. In the process of doing my lectures, I would like you to know that the particular problem that you've heard does have an answer, and I think we should be able to accomplish that. It all depends on how wide, how varied the problems are. So be thinking about that. I'd like to hear your specific and detail the toughest thing you've heard, or maybe you honestly don't know yourself. You say, well, what do I say when somebody says, if God is all good and all powerful, he should be able to and willing to stop the wars that are in the world. But since there is war, he's either not all good or he's not all powerful. And we call that the problem of evil. You don't have to know the name of the problem, but if you've heard somebody say that, or just in your own heart, you thought to yourself, I don't know about how can Christianity be true given? And then whatever it is, you write that down, you do not have to Put your names on there. If you wish to put your name on there, then I'll know who to speak to about it if you want to come up and talk more and so forth. But you give me those and I'll try to address them. So let's get started. How do we answer objections to the Christian faith? When I was getting ready to come to the conference, I left from Orange county to fly here. I had to fly through Chicago. Interesting routing. Go to Chicago so you can get to Atlanta. But nevertheless, the flight was delayed for a few minutes. And if you know anything about people who fly a lot, they get very nervous. And so the stewardess got on the line and was telling everybody, don't worry, we're delayed here at the gate because we have to finish up some paperwork for the mechanics that are down below. I've always thought if you tell people mechanics are looking at this plane and we're going to have to wait a few minutes to get you in the air, maybe that would worry them all the more. Mean mechanics are fixing something. I sure hope they fix it right. Well, so as a matter of fact, there are just standard things, whether the plane's in good or bad condition, that they have to go through and they have to check off to make sure that they have flight clearance and they can back away from the gate and go on out and the tower will let them take off. So what I would like to do is something similar. I'm going to give you a checklist of things to be looking for when someone argues against the Christian faith so you can figure out whether their argument flies or not. Will this thing, you know, really, you know, get into the air and be able to sustain itself or not? And you want to go through, in your mind, mentally, this checklist. I suppose you could write it all down very small on a card and pull it out every time somebody's arguing with you and say, okay, now what about this? Maybe for the first few times you will do that. I don't know. But that's not what I have in mind. I would like to tell you what the checklist is so you have some idea. Internalize this so you can use it. When you're sitting at the university and you hear a professor say things that are contrary to the Christian faith, start asking these questions. And I tried to boil it down to just four, although there are going to be some subdivisions underneath that. But if you can remember these four issues, I guarantee you you'll be able to deal with any argument that comes up. I don't care what bullets they put in their gun, you going to be able to take the gun away. So let me put them on the board for you and then talk about them. The four things we're talking about here amount to the key intellectual sins that all men commit. Sadly, Christians commit these sins too. We're not here to talk about renovating the mind and sanctification of our thinking process as Christians so much. This week we're going to be looking at the foibles and defects of unbelieving thinking. But I want you to know that what I'm talking about, though it's being applied to apologetics, really has application through all of the different departments of the university as well. Any person who is an academician must worry about these issues when he publishes something, when he puts an article out there, when he gives a lecture, whatever it may be. Every argument can be evaluated in terms of these things. First of all, you want to ask, is he being arbitrary? And I'm going to have, according to my notes, four subdivisions here of different kinds of arbitrariness. But let me get through the main divisions. First, ask is this argument arbitrary? Secondly, ask whether this argument is inconsistent, That is, is there something wrong with this argument because it's in conflict with itself or with some other known truth? Thirdly, ask about the consequences of this argument. This is what is known in the Bible as judging a tree by its fruit. Look at the consequences of the argument. And then finally, this is a It's hard to put this into one word. And I will, I promise I'll explain it later. But for brevity, I'm going to call it asking about the preconditions of this argument. I think some of you know that part of the ministry the Lord has given me and has been very gracious to me about is public debate. And when I go to a debate, although I try to read what my opponent has written and know something in advance, it is far more important to me to know how to argue with people. So, you know, whatever kind of thing the opponent comes up with, I'll be able to deal with. It's far more important to master the technique than the specific things that he has written previously. And the four things that I'm always asking myself, although I do it a little bit differently, I think this will be easier for you. Is I ask about is this arbitrary? Is this inconsistent? What are the consequences? And does he have the preconditions of intelligibility to argue this way? Anybody have any problems so far? You understand Minimally, what we're talking about four areas of examination. Let's begin with number one. I'll try to explain it in more detail. How are people arbitrary in the way that they argue? The most obvious way is they offer a mere opinion. A number of years ago, when I started teaching apologetics, I would not have stopped to deal with this, the idea that people offer just mere opinions. But now that I've got a lot more practice and I've been out there and I've heard from people what they run into when they try to defend the faith, I realize I've got to say something about this. In fact, at this conference, I've had this happen in the past. Just about everywhere I go and put on apologetics conferences, I can offer people pretty powerful arguments, you know, against unbelievers and I think pretty strong arguments in favor of Christianity. However, almost always there's somebody in the audience who says, well, but then what if somebody says, yes, but my opinion is the following. I say, yeah, okay, well, then you can refute that. And then they say, yes, but it's my opinion. I say, yeah, but you've refuted it. But then my friend says, well, you believe one way, and it's my opinion. This then finally kind of hit me in terms of my academic, theoretical approach to apologetics out there in the street. This is one of the most common ways to oppose Christianity. People say, well, yeah, you believe that, But I don't, okay, so I'm going to stop and cover what I would have thought was really obvious previously. But since apparently it's not obvious, we'll talk about it for a few minutes. One of the key, and probably the key intellectual sin committed by people is arbitrariness, the very reason why you go to school. Allegedly, modern colleges don't teach critical thinking very well. They're not too interested in it anymore. But it used to be the case that the reason you went to school is to learn to reason, to think, to have some facts, to make educated, as we say, educated judgments about things and not just be flying off the handle with, well, I believe this, and other people believe that all there is to it. People who are educated are supposed to have principles by which they test theories. They're supposed to have a manner of reasoning that will allow them to draw a conclusion without just, you know, saying, well, I feel this way. I feel that I got to thinking about this. Why is it that Christians don't jump on that when unbelievers do that? Because the minute an unbeliever Says, well, you've got all those arguments. But my opinion is this. I mean, they have conceded the case, they've lost. That's it, it's all over. If I was doing a debate, I'd take the microphone and say, speak up for the audience. Tell them this is simply your opinion because your opinion has just been sliced and diced. It doesn't make any difference if it's your opinion, it's wrong. But it's my opinion. I thought to myself, why do Christians put up with that? Why do they think, oh, what am I going to do now? How do I twist his arm even more so he'll cry uncle? And I think I've come up with the answer, or at least a good part of the answer. And that's because so often when Christians go to Bible studies, that's the kind of garbage they hear too. You go to Bible studies and you'll read a passage and then everybody kind of shares their opinion. Well, I want to think of God this way. I want to think of God that way. Well, you know what? God doesn't care what you think. I mean, he's not affected by what you think. He cares in the sense that ultimately you'll answer to his word for what you think. But nevertheless, often enough Christians, even when it comes to the most authoritative word people can have, they still think we have the right to sinner. And goes, well, my opinion is this and somebody else's opinion is that you see this all the time when we talk about the sovereignty of God. If I do a Bible study or preach a sermon on the sovereignty of God, and people don't like the idea that God predestines every detail in advance. That's what the Bible says, even to the hairs of our head. But I'll have people tell me, they'll say, but I don't want to think of God as being like that. Big deal. You don't want to think of God being like that. Well, now, what if this last year I had something happen to me which I considered fairly tragic. I was very unhappy about it. It was real test to my sanctification. I was diagnosed as having diabetes. Now I already have heart problems. I've already had emergency open stomach surgery to save my life. And so it's tough enough, I think. You know, it's one of those times where you're wondering if you don't want to say, God, isn't this enough? Thank you, but God decided that it was for my best, and I'm sure it is. But at the Time. It was very hard. And when the doctor told me, greg, I'm sorry, but the tests indicate you have diabetes. I argued with him nicely and politely. In fact, I had enough questions for him. He finally said, greg, you have to understand, I'm a doctor. Trust me. I told him, I'm a doctor, too, and it's my job to ask questions. I want to know more about this. But now. I didn't want to have diabetes. I don't want to have it now. It's not fun. But if I were to say I don't want to think of myself as having diabetes, is that going to change anything? Why is it when it comes to something medical, we all realize, well, you'd be a fool. What if I were to say, no, I'm not going to take my medicine because I don't want to think of myself as somebody that's a diabetic? I don't want to miss all those sweet desserts and especially drinking the real thing, Coke and so forth. I'm getting so tired of iced tea. I'm telling you, I don't want to be like that anymore. So in my opinion, I don't have diabetes. That'd be preposterous. And yet, when it comes to things that are far more important than our own personal health, things having to do with our eternal well being, you still have people out there who will tell you, well, I don't want to think of God being that way, or my God is not like that, or if I were running the universe, I wouldn't. But you're not running the universe, and you're not God, and. And your opinion is really irrelevant. Please understand that I'm not telling you how to speak to the unbeliever. There may be a place for being sarcastic and saying, well, big deal, that's your opinion, but usually you want to be more polite and so forth. But you need to know that when someone says, it's my opinion, that has no weight intellectually, opinions are a dime a dozen. Actually, it's not even a dime a dozen. It doesn't cost anything, and it isn't worth anything. If someone wishes to assert that such and such is true, they need to do more than say, I believe it. Because the intellectual question that is asked in every department of the university, not just in philosophy departments, is, well, why? Why do you believe that quinine relieves malaria? Why do you believe that Napoleon was mentally unfit? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? What's your evidence? What's your proof? Until somebody is going to go beyond mere opinion and offer an argument, some line of proof or evidence for their views, they haven't got anything worth hearing. A second form of arbitrariness that you should be looking for is similar to this mere opinion, and that is relativism. Somebody says, well, it's not my opinion that there is a God. It's not my opinion that God is like that, so forth and so on. That has no cash value at all. The cash value of the relativist is the relativist says, well, you're convinced by that, I'm convinced by other things. And so it's different strokes for different folks. As I like to say, say good 60s expression. You know, you like to think this way, I like to think that way. And you probably have very good reasons for believing that. You know, the relativist can deal with the Christian apologist, who is kind of naive very easily by saying, oh, I've heard all your arguments, and, you know, that's pretty impressive. But that's true for you. It's not true for me. I'm curious, have you ever heard people say things like that? It's kind of like, well, we all create our own reality, you know, recently, when I was in Moscow, I went to an international conference on religious liberty, which in itself is very significant. I think that in Russia they're having a conference on religious liberty. And they held it, I think probably purposely to be ironic and maybe a bit pointed, they held it in the former building that was for the Communist Youth Project brigade, where people were taught atheistic communism. Now, in Russia, we have religious liberty. But of course, as you might realize, religious liberty means different things. And they probably didn't realize what they were getting into when they invited me to speak to them on that subject. Because for two days I had to endure all this barfy stuff about how, you know, religion is the realm of the mysterious. And we're all doing our best, you know, and we're all very sincere, and we're all, you know, really brothers under the skin, and we really love each other and we respect each other. And poor Dr. Bonson stood up and said, well, no, as a matter of fact, we don't all respect each other, and we aren't all brothers, okay? Basically, the argument for religious liberty that I was hearing from Muslims and Hindus and Roman Catholics and Lutherans and Seventh Day Adventists and Russian Orthodox and Old Believers and so forth, the argument I was hearing is known as relativism. No one knows for sure. And so you create your own reality. You know, you've got to live with your own understanding of God. You've got to make your way in this world. And if your view of God helps you feel better, then that's true for you. But then there are other traditions which should be equally respected in Russia now that we're opening the door to religion. That's what they are arguing, other traditions that have to be respected as well. Okay, so when I spoke. I'm not going to give you that whole lecture. Let me boil it down. I basically said religious liberty cannot be founded on relativism. See, they thought relativism was just another way of talking about religious liberty. Everybody has a right to their own opinion. I said, if you believe that everyone creates their own reality, then Hitler creates his own reality too. And Hitler, therefore, in terms of his reality, has the right to kill the Jews because that's the reality he's created. And so here you have a suppression of religious liberty, in fact, genocide. And relativism condones it because, after all, everybody creates their own reality. And then I went through an ugly laundry list of all of the persecution each of the groups in the audience, including Protestants, American Protestants, were guilty of in terms of religious liberty. I said, every one of us is guilty if we're a relativist, of persecuting other people and allowing for it and holding to views that would allow for that. When someone tells you you create your own reality and everybody's right, the answer is, if everybody's right, then clearly nobody's wrong, including the IDI Amines of the world, the Hitlers, the David Koresh's and all the rest. Relativism kills itself. It isn't sufficient for somebody to say, well, you believe that, but I believe something else. And in a reality, this kind of twist and turn to fit everybody, it's like reality becomes a smorgasbord. You go into the smorgasbord, maybe you'll choose the eggplant. I sure wouldn't. But I'll choose the fried chicken. And you don't particularly want fried chicken. In fact, reality will be whatever you want. You have the eggplant approach to reality, of the chicken approach to reality. Pick whatever you want. It's not like that. And certainly God is not like that. God is not a smorgasbord. God doesn't say, well, just please let me into your life. I'll be whatever you want me to be. And that's what I call the Mr. Potato Head approach to theology. Some people will put Mr. Potato Head together with eyes here and ears over Here and all the rest. Other people say, no, no, no, God's not like that. He's really like this. And it was not going to be adequate to say, well, God is whatever you want him to be. What an insult. If God is whatever you want him to be, he is not God, or she is not God, it is not God. Relative says, well, it's true for you. It's not true for me. True for you is one of the most asinine statements in the English language. Truth is not person relative. You know, let's go back to the doctor's office. Dr. Bronson is told by this doctor he's supposed to know. He has the blood work, he has the lab tests and so forth. He says, Dr. Bronson, you've got diabetes. I say, well, that's true for you. It's not true for me. The relativist says, nobody can know anything for sure, and this is what you're going to get. I guarantee you, if you go to a secular school and the teacher likes you. And interestingly enough, in many cases, teachers do like Christians, even though they're not Christians. You know why? Because the Christian students are the few students that will challenge them and seem to be alert, at least they'll talk intelligently. And I'm not saying that as gratuitous, you know, flattery to you guys because you're Christians. I mean that. I've seen that over and over again. Teachers will say, please come around and talk about this more. At least you're thinking, these other kids, you know, just want to party or just want to get through the class, whatever. But if the teacher talks to you after class, wants to hear more, and then wants to, you know, it's always this condescending. Let me help you out of your Sunday school superstition and ignorance. You know, the university is going to really mature you. This is going to be the age of enlightenment for you. Let me tell you. Well, after you hold to your faith and you give answers to the objections and so forth, you'll often have the teacher tell you. And then you have roommates and others who will say this in a less sophisticated way. The teacher will say, well, you have to understand that, you know, truth is relative, and you're very committed to this. But in the university, you're going to learn there are other truths, there are other universes to explore. Oh, barf. Other universes. I'd like to live in the one where I find myself, thank you. I want to deal with this one. When someone tells you the truth, is relative, that there is no absolute truth. The question you're going to have is, is that absolutely true? Let me say that again because some of you started to nod off. Now I'm going to begin the sentence, and when I get to the end, I want to see all of you still looking up here, okay? When someone says there is no absolute truth, you're going to say, is that absolutely true? Now we're on the horns of a dilemma, as logicians put it, because if the teacher says, nope, even that's not absolutely true, you say, well, then, fine, then I'm free to believe otherwise and there is absolute truth. If the teacher says, oh, well, I don't want to do that. So, yeah, it's absolutely true. You say, well, then you're wrong that there is no absolute truth, because it's absolutely true that there is no absolute truth. And by the way, if it's absolutely true that there is no absolute truth, you've contradicted yourself. And so maybe you ought to go back and get some more education before you teach this class. Don't say that relativism is just another form of being arbitrary. Educated people know better than to be arbitrary. There are not many educated people in our culture today. Most college graduates are not educated people. I do not mean that to be just a slur and a slam against college graduates, but it's true. Literally, descriptively true. People can get a piece of paper from college and not know how to think, not know how to research, not how to put together one paragraph of a decent argument. And the reason, well, it's among many reasons, but a major reason why people don't think anymore is because we've gotten used to being arbitrary, offering mere opinions. And then when there's a clash between the mere opinions, running to relativism. Because isn't that a lot more comfortable? If you're a relativist, then you can go to cocktail parties and everybody's welcome. I've done this. I go to parties when I was at SC in the graduate school and so forth. Jesus would be welcome at their cocktail parties as long as Jesus didn't say he was the only truth. That'd be fine. Then we have Buddha and we have Jesus and we have Confucius and we have Mao and all the rest, and everybody's just having a good time. We respect each other. Then you. We don't have to worry about people getting down on us. I'm welcome. You're welcome. Hey, I'm okay. You're okay. It's relativism. And it's academically shoddy. People who contradict each other cannot both be right. In some cases, depending on the nature of the contradiction, both can be wrong, but both cannot be right. I cannot have diabetes, and it not be the case that I have diabetes at the same time. Now, for the rest of this week, I'm going to talk about other problems, but I dare say that the other problems I'll be talking about will only be 20% of what's out there. I realize we've only spent a few minutes together, but in all honesty, what you're going to run into over and over and over again are these two problems. Mere opinion and relativism. Mere opinion and relativism. So get used to that and tell people, if that's only your opinion, it's academically worthless. If it's only your opinion that God doesn't exist, then you're in real trouble. Or if you say, well, it's true for you, but it's not true for me, point out that doesn't even make sense. True for you. True for you is actually a paraphrase of the verb to believe. When someone believes something, that is simply to say they think it's true. So when someone says it's true for me, they're saying, I believe it. Every year we get into this. Gary was a student of mine, and he's getting even with me. He puts up these signs. There's no way that's right. Redo your clock. Okay. You say there's only 15 minutes left. Well, that's true for you. It's not true for me. Oh, we're going to negotiate now. What is that something? Looks like only 15 minutes. That's right. Gary, Another form. I haven't left myself enough room. Another form of arbitrariness, ignorant conjecture. Many times people will argue against the Christian faith and they'll offer what they think are pretty intelligent considerations against it. But when you ask what is the foundation where they're making those claims, you find out they don't have any research, they don't have any evidence behind it. It's just pure conjecture. Let me give you an example. For a lot of people, it seems that since the Bible was written so many hundreds of years ago, it's just very likely that you cannot trust the text of the Bible that we have in our hands today. I have a Bible here today, published. Well, I'm not sure when it was printed, but this is the 1901 edition of the revised version of the Bible. Now, if the Bible was supposed to have been written in the first century, and this one was published at the beginning of the 20th century. Then obviously there are hundreds of years between the first manuscript and it being copied and then translated and translations being copied and so forth. Until we finally get to the 20th century, we have this particular Bible that's here. And many unbelievers will simply take it for granted that the Bible you have in your hands cannot be true to the original text. Surely they'll say scribes have altered, Scribes have supplemented the original text of the Bible. We can't be sure what Moses really wrote, or Jeremiah or John or Paul. In fact, we can't even be sure that those were the authors of those books, much less if they were what they actually said originally. For all we know, I've actually had unbelievers. I've had people who have PhDs say this to me, it is so preposterous. But they say, for all we know, some monk in the Dark Ages penned those lines and then they got picked up by the next scribe and the next scribe and gets carried down to the 20th century. We don't really know what the original author said. And that kind of ignorant criticism will seem intellectually sophisticated to some unbelievers. They'll think, well, in our natural human experience, messages that are passed from one speaker to another get garbled. They get distorted, don't they? Wouldn't you expect that would be true then of this book as well? You all know what I'm talking about. If you don't, you should live in my house for a while. When phone messages come to my children, the way they get to me often doesn't look a whole lot like the way they began. Messages get garbled. And now if that happens when there's two or three people in between the speaker and the recipient of the message, how much more would it be if there are hundreds or thousands of people? It just seems to unbelievers you've all played telephone, right? Isn't that what it's called? You start, you know, around the circle with a message, and one person whispers to the next to the next. By the time it gets around, it doesn't look anything like the original. And so unbelievers will say, obviously we don't even know what the text of the Bible is. Any number of people could have added or taken away or distorted what was originally there. Now, when unbelievers say something like that, you must point out that their argument rests upon ignorant conjecture. It may seem likely that the biblical text would no longer be reliable, would no longer be authentic after all these years. But that likelihood is an evaluation based not on evidence but upon prejudice. Let me point out a couple of the prejudices. First of all, there's the prejudice, the assumption that the biblical text is no different from any other written document which we find in our natural human experience. Please pay attention to that, because one of the easiest ways unbelievers, and especially unbelieving professors, suck Christians into their way of thinking is by saying, well, now, wait a minute. You can't just assume that this Bible has a supernatural origin, supernatural preservation. We've got to approach this book like any other book. But at that point, whether the assumption is stated or just taken for granted, you need to say, but it's not like any other book. It won't do any good to use the rules that apply to just any other book when this is an extraordinary book. Of course the unbeliever is going to tell you, well, then you're begging the question because you're taking it for granted that this is an extraordinary book. And I'm trying to show you that it's not an extraordinary book. Well, say, I guess that's the nature of the debate, right? I approach it assuming as my ultimate authority that it is an extraordinary book. And we're going to see what happens when you deny that later on when we look at other things and you take it for granted that it's not. But the point is, when an unbeliever says, if this happens when you play telephone, then it's got to happen when you write the Bible too. And you say, hey, you're comparing apples and oranges because a God has overseen the process of copying and translating. And this God has promised that his word will not pass away. And therefore I believe with all my heart that I have a copy of what God wants me to know. And that though there may be some variations between different types of textual lines in any line of text, the basic message that God wants me to have is here because he has promised. So now there's a second kind of prejudice, though, you need to see in this. And this prejudice is perhaps more obvious because the unbeliever who says, you don't really know what the Bible originally said hasn't offered any concrete evidence that some medieval monk tampered with the text before us. Today, when I had this person in the university as a Ph.D. tell me, I mean, throw it out, kind of like a throwaway argument, like, well, for all you know, some monk wrote These words, and it got carried down to us. I simply said I'd like to know what the literary evidence is for the idea that some monk added this to the Gospel of John. Oh, well, I don't have any. It's just that it's a possibility. Oh, in other words, I'm supposed to be refuted by a possibility. You think that would work in any other department of the university? I mean, if it does work, what a sore university that would be. A historian is refuted by the possibility that there's evidence against your thesis. You're not refuted by possibilities or conjectures, especially ignorant conjectures. That is very arbitrary to advance the hypothesis, and it doesn't have any evidential credentials. If you want to play that way, if you want to be arbitrary, I could say with equal arbitrariness. Well, actually, the words that have come down to us as Paul's were written not after Paul wrote them, but before Paul wrote them. Now, I don't happen to believe that. But you see, if you're going to play the arbitrary game, you can go any way you want. You say, well, maybe this was written by Isaiah, and then Paul found the manuscript and put his name on it. Now, you know, the opponent would not respect it. He'd say, oh, you're this playing game. I'm saying, wait a minute. I learned this game from you. You're the one who said, maybe some medieval monk added these words, but you don't have any evidence in a medieval monk out of these words. So if we don't need evidence, why don't we all make up our own reality? The third indication of prejudice is that when an unbeliever says something like that about the text of the Bible, it shows they haven't read about the subject. If the critic had taken time to look up the subject to textual criticism, he or she would not have offered the outlandish conjecture that maybe a medieval monk or somebody else along the line added these lines to the Bible. That came home to me very clearly. Again, when I was in graduate school, I took my PhD in Philosophy in one of the areas my specialization, that's what it says on the paper anyway, is ancient philosophy. And so we had to do detailed study of Plato and Aristotle and others you would not have heard of. You have heard of Plato and Aristotle, though, right? Okay. And part of what we did when we studied Plato was textual criticism of Plato. Let me explain. We have a corpus of writings that you can go into any university bookstore today, and you can probably buy the collectible Works of Plato. And this body of writings is attributed to Plato. But as you know, the book that you buy in the bookstore was not handwritten by Plato. You didn't know that. Assure me that you knew that. Okay, Somebody copied another copy of Plato and that came from another copy on down, right? Now then somebody could ask the question, did Plato actually write this particular line in the Republic? Is this paragraph his? You say, well, let's go back to the original. Problem is we don't have the originals of Plato. We only have copies. And we do our best to construct what Plato actually said from the copies that are at hand. Now, our earliest extant manuscript of a work by Plato dates right before 900 AD. It's the Oxford Bee manuscript. It was found in a Patmos Monastery by E.B. clark. It was a wondrous find in terms of Plato scholarship and so forth. But what I want you to see is this manuscript dates, even according to unbelievers, back to Plato. But the earliest we can go back is 900 years after Christ. Now Plato flourished 350 years before Christ. So let's see if we can do our elementary math. 300 BC or 350 BC roughly. Plato is writing things, or so we believe. And these things are copied and copied and copied and copied and copied and copied. And finally a copy that was made about 900 AD is made. All the others at this point anyway have not been found. The earliest extant manuscript of plato dates from 900 A.D. now, what's the span between 350 BC and 900 AD over 12 centuries. Right. Now my philosophy professor and professors and others as well will hardly blink an eye about the reliability of the text of Plato that we have. They will occasionally raise a question here and there, but it's taken for granted. Of course we know what Plato wrote. And yet the very same people, or the students who are taught by the very same people will ask this ignorant question about the Bible. Was it written? I mean, is the text we have before us, is it original? The gap between the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament that we have and the date of their writing is about 50 years. I'm going to use round numbers just to keep this simple. Anybody see what I'm getting at? The unbeliever who says out of ignorant conjecture? Well, I don't think you can trust the text of the New Testament. Just doesn't know what he's talking about. Anybody who studied the subject knows that the Bible is the best attested manuscript from ancient history. Unbelievers will tell you that that doesn't mean that they believe the Bible. That doesn't even mean that they're going to trust what it says. But they know that we're on far better ground in saying what Paul actually taught than what Plato actually taught. The text of the New Testament is remarkably uniform and well established. The reliability of the Old Testament text was demonstrated by the discovery of the Dead sea scrolls. Now 40 years ago, in fact, the overall authenticity and accuracy of the biblical text is so well known that Frederick Can Kenyon once said, and I quote, the Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries. Such assessments from competent scholars could be multiplied rather easily. But the fact is you're going to run into people who say, well, the Bible's like any other book. Probably some medieval monk added things or took things away. We stand on very good ground when we say the text that we have in our hands reflects the original that was given hundreds of years ago. All I'm getting at here, and we're going to take a brief break, is that when unbelievers throw opinions at you, you must be willing to ask whether that's conjecture or whether there's evidence for that. If somebody says, well, I would imagine, I would imagine the text has been changed, you say, well, your imagination doesn't have any authority. I'd like to know if you have any evidence that the text has been changed. And when we get done with a brief break, I'll give you another example. There's actually people who say we don't even know if Jesus ever lived. And that too is a case of ignorant conjecture. Another way in which we see ignorant conjecture being ye believers in the place of research and evidence and argument, is in the radical opinion that we have no literary or historical basis for believing that Jesus of Nazareth actually ever lived. And you will hear people say that. You may hear again, professors say that. And when they do, you need to spot the obvious prejudice and conjecture in that kind of remark. You see, such a criticism simply takes it for granted that the Bible should not be taken in any way as a literary source of historical information. Somebody says we have no literary evidence for the existence of Jesus. You've got to hold up your Bible and say, well, there's quite a bit in here. Oh, well, but that doesn't count. Oh, why not? Now, again, just meeting the unbeliever on his own turf for the time being, which is not the most important way of doing apologetics, as you'll see. But the point is unbelievers should be embarrassed by their intellectual prejudices. And you can point that out. Just about any unbelieving historian of the ancient world will have to admit that the Bible is a source of information about the ancient world. Now that doesn't mean that they're willing to accept all that the Bible says or the way in which the Bible puts things. In fact, when you're studying, you sometimes will run into, at secular universities, courses on Christianity as a religion or the Bible as literature and so forth. And undoubtedly you're going to run into an interpretation of the Bible that says something like this. Well, in the Old Testament we read predictions of the Babylonian captivity, but of course we know that predictive prophecy is impossible. So these portions of the Old Testament were really written during the captivity or after the captivity in Babylon, you know, and people who are willing to be negative toward the Bible will float right downstream with that reasoning and say, oh yeah, that's right. Can you see the prejudice that's involved in that? If the Bible is what it claims to be, then it's predictive prophecy. But if you say predictive prophecy is impossible, then you must know an awful lot lot. You must know that God does not exist. He is not personal, does not reveal Himself, and doesn't bother to give prophecies like that. And if you, I mean, if you know all of that, it's not just your mere opinion, if you know all of that, then of course you can interpret the Old Testament and say, well, this must be written afterwards. So I'm not claiming that, that unbelieving scholars who read the Bible are willing to accept, accept every bit of it. But even those who say stupid things like there's no predictive prophecy and therefore this had to be written later, even those professors tell us that the Bible is the main source of information about the ancient Near East. And so when someone says we don't have any evidence, they're totally throwing the Bible out. They're not treating it like they treat other literature, which of course they say is their approach to things. And that kind of criticism doesn't show familiarity with the secular allusions to Jesus in ancient literature. Let me give you just a few examples. There was a Roman historian by the name of Tacitus. Want me to spell that for you? T A C I, T, U, S Tacitus. And in his annals, book 15, section 44, he refers to a man by the name of Christus who he said suffered the extreme penalty at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate. The Jewish historian Josephus, in his Antiquities Book 20, Section 9, refers to James, the brother of Jesus, who is called the Christ. And so when unbelieving scholars or worse, students at the university will throw things out like, well, we don't really have any historical reason to believe that there was a Jesus at all. Not only are they prejudicially dismissing the Bible as a source of information, even on their own terms, they may want to explain away the supernatural about Jesus and so forth, but this is a source of some kind of information that has to be done, dealt with. And they don't deal. I mean, they haven't read in the field. If they did, they'd know that there are allusions to Jesus even in secular literature. There was a time when critics of the Old Testament ridiculed it for mentioning a tribe of people known as the Hittites. At that time, the Hittites were unknown outside of the Bible. That is, the Bible talked about the Hittites, but at that point, scholars didn't have any other information except the Bible about the Hittites. And believe it or not, I can give you the books. If you go to a library that had books, I can show you books where the Bible was ridiculed for mentioning the Hittites. We all know there were no Hittites, but the Bible makes up this term Hittites and uses it. Such presumed flaws in the biblical record were taken as rendering it worthless as a historical document until Hittite artifacts and monuments began to be discovered around Carchemish by archaeologists beginning in the year 1871. The Hittite civilization is today one of the best known cultures of the ancient world. And yet prior to 1871, the Bible was ridiculed for its historical inaccuracy. In speaking of this unknown tribe, the Hittites, archaeology has over and over and over again proven that to be the enemy of Bible critics because it unearths their negative prejudices and repeatedly confirms the accuracy of the Scriptures in the particulars of history. H.M. orlinsky once wrote, and I quote him more and more, the older view that the biblical data were suspect and even likely to be false unless corrobora. Excuse me, learn to talk. Corroborated by extra biblical facts is giving way to one which holds that by and large, the biblical accounts are more likely to be true than false. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not real proud of somebody who says the Bible is More likely to be true than false. That's not a Christian opinion and I'm going to do better than that when we defend the faith. But what I'm saying is when unbelievers say, oh, you can't trust, you know, the history, Hittites, historical Jesus and so forth, then it realized that even unbelieving scholars will tell you other than that, even as unsympathetic an umpire as Time magazine in a lead article back in 1977 entitled How True is the Bible? Had to admit, and I'm quoting, this is a scholarly source. Huh? Time magazine tells us that was tongue in cheek for those of you who didn't miss it. After more than two centuries of facing the heaviest scientific guns that could be brought to bear, the Bible has survived and is perhaps the better for the siege. Even on the critics own terms, historical fact. The Scriptures seem more acceptable now than they did when the rationalists began the attack. Now I'm only trying to make one very simple point here, and that's that you must be prepared to expose the conjecture and the prejudice of unbelievers. They don't always come out and say, oh, I haven't read this, I haven't done the research and it's just my opinion, but they'll throw this conjecture out. Well, you can't trust the text of the Bible. We don't even know that Jesus existed. Or you can't count on the Bible to be accurate historically. You need to be able to embarrass the unbeliever when he uses arbitrary and ignorant conjectures in the place of evidence reasoning. We have to point out how unreasonable it is to be prejudiced in any area, but especially in an area that has to do with eternal consequences. The more people come to know about the facts or the details of the text of the Bible or the historical reports of the Bible, the more they come to know about that, the less likely they will be to dismiss the book and out of hand. I'm not saying that the more they come to know, the more likely it is they'll come to be Christians. That's a much different matter. What I'm saying is even in the field of secular scholarship, it's the least well read that have strong prejudices against the accuracy of the text or the history of the Bible. People who aren't even Christians will say, well, in general the Bible has fared pretty well given the fact that everybody's gunning for it. It examples of arbitrariness, mere opinion. Secondly, relativism. Thirdly, Ignorant conjecture, and then, fourthly, as a form of arbitrariness, unargued bias. Even if enough external corroborating evidence were available from textual criticism and from archaeology and from the related sciences such as history and linguistics and so forth, even if we had enough evidence to deal with all of the historical points in the Bible, people would be quick to point out to us that the most important features of the biblical narrative are not simply the accounts of the Hittites or of military battles and migrations and other sorts of things there, but rather the accounts in the Bible of things like floating axe heads and fiery chariots and water being turned to wine and virgin birth and resurrection. When unbelievers read of the miraculous accounts in the Bible, their first inclination is to say that such things cannot happen, and thus they disbelieve the written report of them. They'll say things like, we all know that people can't walk on water, and so the story of Jesus walking on the water must be fabricated. And I think all of you are familiar enough with that line of reasoning that you may easily be drawn into it when somebody talks about the Bible. I think we use the same line of reasoning when we're standing at the checkout counter at the supermarket. I don't know where you all live, but back in Southern California, the land of fruits and nuts. At our checkout counters, we have all these tabloid newspapers. Do you have that too? You know, girl gives birth to her own father. Headlines, fantastic tabloid headlines. You know, alien comes down, you know, and marries Julia Roberts or something. Nothing Alien. That's a Country in Western singer. I'm sorry, but they have things like that. And the implicit argument that we would use is, well, things like that are impossible, and so they could not have occurred. And unbelievers will dismiss in advance the possibility of the miraculous events reported in the Bible because they use an unspoken premise. They cast a doubtful eye upon the biblical narrative, saying the since the Bible says Jesus rose from the dead, and yet we know the dead do not rise, therefore the Bible is wrong. And unbelievers easily assume that people who live in the enlightened, scientific 20th century cannot accept that kind of superstitious bogus stuff. That's myth, that's fairy tale, they'll say, after all, we use refrigerators, we use computers today, Jesus couldn't have risen from the dead. But now, if they are being rational when they argue in this way, if they're going to be fully rational, unbelievers who doubt the biblical narrative with respect to Miracles have to pause and recognize and scrutinize their controlling assumptions. And that's why I'm saying when you do that, you're going to find, lo and behold, there's an unargued bias in this argument that has to be exposed. And that unspoken assumption is we know that miracles are impossible. To which you need to say, we know that. Now we're going beyond mere opinion. It's your opinion miracles are impossible. You know that miracles are impossible. How much would a person have to know? How much information would a person have to have taken in about the natural world to say that miracles are impossible? Impossible. Notice, not unlikely or rare, but impossible. Can anyone figure this out? It's not a really tough thing, logically. How much would you have to know about the natural world to dismiss the possibility of miracles? You'd have to know everything, wouldn't you? You'd have to know every fact of science, every conceivable fact of science, and say, okay, I've looked at all of them and I now know that there's just no room for the miraculous here. And so an unbeliever, without even arguing the case, dismisses miracles as impossible. You need to point out that is being arbitrary. Now, it would be a very interesting argument for somebody to show the impossibility of miracles. And I don't want to say it's impossible that somebody would try that. But you know, the vast majority of people you talk to, even at the university level, the vast majority of professors are not going to bother to argue the impossibility of miracles. They're just going to, what, take it for granted? That's a bias. Rational people don't just take things for granted. They don't just say, well, I don't want to think this universe is capable of producing miraculous events, and so I'll just not interpret anything as miraculous. Unbelievers feel that they know that such events cannot take place because they have a scientific outlook and they're convinced that all of nature operates in a predictable and a law like fashion. And so you need to say, and how do you know that all of nature operates in a predictable law like fashion? The answer will come back because the portion of nature that I'm familiar with does. Let me go over that again, because you should be at this point ready to pounce on that argument. How do you know that all of nature operates in a predictable law like fashion? The answer is because in all of my experience, nature has operated in a predictable law like fashion. Yes, but not all of nature is Contained in the sum of nature, the little bit of nature that you've experienced in logic. What do we call that? Krista, you know the answer to this. That's right. Hasty generalization in logic, that is taking a little bit of evidence and then universalizing the evidence. A person hasn't got a good argument to say, well, it's always been predictable. Then if you point that out to unbelievers, what they're going to tell you, I love this. They'll say, oh, well, yeah, that's right. I don't know that all of nature is like that. But miracles would run counter to the regularities in my experience. They would not be predictable, given the world that I know. And so they're really extraordinary. Then if there are miracles, they would be really extraordinary. And you want to go, duh, yeah, isn't that the point? We wouldn't call them miracles if they weren't extraordinary. Okay? Now an unbeliever who hears that and realizes, you know, I've really got a bias here that I've been pushing, you know, in my argument, and I have no argument, no logically sound argument for that bias is going to have to fall back then on not allowing for any possibility of miracles. Because he believes that causality operates in the universe. In fact, everything that is to be explained according to the unbeliever. If you wish to be scientific, if you wish to be rational, if you wish to be modern and enlightened must be explained in a causal fashion. We're not just talking about what causes malaria here. We're not just talking about how to build a bridge or send a rocket to the moon. We want to explain human behavior in causal terms as well. Anything that happens must have some kind of natural causal explanation for it. Okay, for the time being, let's assume that the unbeliever. Let's assume that the unbeliever is going to be able to rule out miracles as soon as he arrives at a foundation for causality. Okay? We say, okay, yes, that's true. If everything operates in a causal fashion, then we aren't going to have any extraordinary or supernatural events like miracles. But I want to ask you just before you leave here, could you explain to me now why is it you believe that there's predictability in the universe at all in general? Now, just why can you use causal analyses when you explain anything on the end believers as well? We've used causal analyses in the past. I mean, the sun has come up every day in the past, just like we predicted. We can Tell you the time of sunrise and sunset and so forth. We can give you a causal analysis of that. And causal analyses have you have been used in the past to build bridges and blah, blah, blah, blah. All these successes in the past, you say, oh, okay, I buy all that, but it's kind of like the Columbo thing. But just one more question before you leave now, please just. What? Yeah, you have to understand, I really appreciate all that causal analysis in the past, but my question was really about the future. How can you be sure that the causal analyses that you've used in the past are going to apply in the future? Now I understand why you think it's applied in the past. By the way, you're being very generous when you let them have that. Because if you're going to be a vicious philosopher like Dr. Bonson is paid to be, sometimes you'd say, oh, in other words, we have memory traces of the past that you're relying on, and you have a reason to trust your memory or somebody else's. I mean, we could get pretty nasty, but that wouldn't be very Christian, would it? So we want to. Usually you want to give the unbeliever a lot so that when you do finally, you know, hang him with his own rope, he realizes that you did it charitably. So I said, okay, I really do appreciate all this memory we have of the past and how causal analyses were helpful. And I understand that people saw these things and they tested them with their senses and so forth. They observed how the causal analysis allowed for predictability in the past. But I want to know in the future, will this be true? Now? If the reason unbelievers know that causal analyses were legitimate in the past is because they observed it, then you would expect unbelievers to say, well, and we've observed the future, and that's how we know. But of course, they're not going to fall for that, because if they could observe the future, then there'd be predictive prophecy and we'd be back to the Babylonian captivity. We'd have to grant the Bible could do that, too. Now, no one has observed the future, Dr. Botson. Okay, well, then you are reasoning from the past to the future. I'd like to know on what basis you do that. How can you expect uniformity between previous experience and future experience? To which the answer will be, you love the way unbelievers reason in circles. And yet they accuse us of this. They'll say, well, because it's always been that way in the past. It's always been predictable in the past, and so it'll be predictable in future, say, okay, I appreciate that. That's really good. It was predictable in the past. But again, how do you know that even though the future was like the past in the past, that the future will be like the past in the future? Now, look, the first lecture was right after lunch. I could understand you having trouble then, okay? Not enough blood to the brain and so forth. But now I don't want to see anybody looking at me like, what's he talking about? Okay, in the past, this podium separates past from future. Okay, on this side of the podium, can I get a ring? Okay, on this side of the podium, this past was analogous to this future, or if you will, this future was predictable based on this past, okay? And this future was predictable based on this past. And so when I say, how can you know that the future will be like the past? The version says, it's always been like that in the past. But the question is not that I agree that in the past the future has been like the past. I want to know whether on this side of the podium, the future is going to be like the past. Does the unbeliever have any basis for that? Well, yes, he does, as a matter of fact, but not as an unbeliever. We do have a reason to believe the future would be like the past. And that reason is that we have a sovereign God who created this universe and controls it sovereignly. And he is true to his word. And he has promised that the future will be like the past. In fact, he even built that into the Noah covenant. You can count on the fact that seed, time and harvest will follow each other. God had been governing the universe that way previously as well. You can count on this that if we are to have dominion in this world, we're to subdue all the world to God's glory. The world is a predictable place. If you learn more about the world, you'll be able to have control over the world, and you can use that to the glory of God. Given a Christian view of the universe, I do expect the sun to rise tomorrow. In fact, I've got promises about that. And the only exception is if Jesus comes. And that's an eschatological issue that we don't want to get into right now. I don't expect he'll be back tomorrow. But if, apart from the hypothesis, Jesus comes back tomorrow, the sun's going to rise tomorrow. I know that because I'm a Christian. But now the unbeliever would then have to run to a Christian view of the world and say, everything operates in a law like fashion. And then having used the Christian worldview to prove the predictability of the natural world, turn around and take the predictability of the natural world to argue against miracles which are found in the Bible and then say, see, Christianity is not true. And some of you are smiling, so you see what has happened. What I'm getting at is the unbeliever would have to assume a Christian view of the world in order to have a foundation for his argument against the Christian view of the world. His argument is miracles can't happen because there's predictability or causality in this world. But the only way that can be defended, and we're going to do this again later, by the way, when we look at Bertrand Russell, the only way you can defend the predictability of the natural world is to have a Christian view of it. And so how can you then use the predictability of the natural world to argue against miracles and therefore say Christianity is false? Dr. Van Til used the example of a child that was sitting on his father's lap on a train one day and he saw this child reach up and slap his father in the face. Dr. Van Til said, that's a good analogy. What the unbeliever has to do intellectually, the unbeliever sits on the lap of God, assumes the truth of the Christian worldview so that he might be in a position to reach up and slap his heavenly father's face. You have to first believe the Christian view of the world before you could reason against the Christian view of the world. So here you have another form of arbitrariness when unbelievers have the unargued bias. In the case of miracles, everything operates in a law like fashion, and so there can't be miracles. The fault here is not that unbelievers have philosophical presuppositions that they bring to the evidence. Please understand, because there are some teachers of apologetics that would tell you see what's wrong with the unbelievers? The unbelievers got some assumptions. Well, that's not in itself bad because everybody has assumptions when they reason. In fact, everybody has fundamental presuppositions. It's not that the unbeliever has presuppositions is that the unbeliever could only make sense of his argument by using our presuppositions and then turning around and trying to refute Christianity on the basis of them. All right, will the argument fly. The first thing on your checklist, you're listening to your roommate or your professor at college. Ask yourself about the argument or the alleged argument. Is this mere opinion that's being thrown out at me, in which case it's worth exactly zero? Is it relativism that's being appealed to, in which case it's self contradictory? Is it ignorant conjecture that is, it just seems to me the text would have to be flawed. Or it just seems to me we don't have any evidence for the historical Jesus. Is it unargued bias, the assumption that the universe works in a law like fashion, even though the unbeliever has no evidence for the universality of causality and so forth? Or if the unbeliever has evidence, it's Christian evidence, and then they turn around and try to use that against the faith, which is self contradictory. One of the key intellectual sins of people is arbitrariness. A second key intellectual sin is inconsistency. And because I'm out of room on the board, I'm going to erase this much and start over again. As with arbitrariness, there are different or varieties of inconsistency. That's why you like coming to these lectures. It's like going to 31 flavors, right? We offer you many different things to please you. The kinds of inconsistencies that you are going to look for. First of all, logical fallacies. Another kind of inconsistency you want to be on the lookout for is perhaps best typified by the expression reductio ad absurdum. There's a little bit of Latin we can all learn. You don't even have to know Latin. What does reductio ad absurdum mean? Reduce to absurdity. Okay, you can take the argument of your opponent and reduce it to absurdity. You have demonstrated an inconsistency in the sense that you assume people will not hold to absurdities. And so since they don't hold to this absurdity, but their argument leads them to this absurdity, they're holding to something that they don't hold to. That's an inconsistency. And then there's the form of inconsistency that can be labeled actions speak louder than words. And then finally, a form of inconsistency that I'm going to call presuppositional tension. I cannot give you this afternoon a course in logic. I want to encourage you all to take a course in logic, preferably from a Christian. But even if it's not a Christian, the fact is, you're going to learn something about argumentation and how to identify fallacies. You might work through a book on your own. If I can give a commercial interlude here, you can take a course in critical thinking from the study center where I teach as well. You don't have to come to Southern California to do that, although it would be a lot more pleasant for you if you did. So you can get the sunshine and the surf and so forth, but you can learn logic from Christian sources, others besides myself. I want to encourage you to do that because I can't give it all to you this afternoon. But it will be very helpful for you to see the kinds of foibles and mistakes that are made in reasoning so that when unbelievers do that, you can say, well, your argument's, you know, fallacious. And it's fallacious for this reason. Okay, how about if we say, well, Christianity is not true because remember the Inquisition? In the Inquisition, people who professed to be Christians did horrible things. They tortured people and they killed people. And so Christianity can't be true in logic. Does anybody know? Can you tell me what is that fallacy? Anybody heard of the ad hominem fallacy, arguing against the man rather than against what he believes? If I had a person in the room right now who is a Marxist, believe it or not, there are still Marxists around. When I went to Moscow, they weren't very happy with me. I argued with them about Marxist utopianism and economic realities, and they really got burned about that. Now, if I had a Marxist come into this room and tell me, I don't know why a Marxist would say this, Follow the hypothesis. If I had a Marxist come into the room and tell me the plan for socialized medicine in this country is not going to work, it's going to. To actually make it more difficult for people to get medical attention and certainly more difficult to get competent medical attention. And it won't simply be that the poor suffer, but that everyone will suffer. Now, again, I don't know why a Marxist would say that, because they would tend to favor socialized medicine, obviously. But if a Marxist did say that, you have to understand, it would be totally irrational for me to say, don't believe what he just said. That man's a Marxist, and we all know how bad Marxists are. If I said that, I would be arguing against the man and not against his argument. Likewise, when an unbeliever says, well, I could never be a Christian because I think what you did in the Inquisition was terrible, I always say, me. Pardon me, excuse me, I wasn't even around when the Inquisition was active. Well, but people who said they were Christians did that. I said, yes, but I want to know whether what they believed was true. And the fact that you don't like the people who profess to be Christians has nothing to do with whether they said this, when they said this, or that it was true or not. That's known as the fallacy of arguing against the man. Now, there are a lot of different versions of ad hominem argument, but I have to resist getting into that because Gary keeps telling me my time is short. You need to know something about logical fallacies so you can point out the inconsistencies in the unbeliever's argument. But beyond logical fallacies, you should especially know the technique of reasoning that I have labeled reductuat absurdum, reducing your opponent to absurdity. Reductio ad absurdum rests upon a particular law of logic that says whatever implies that which is false is itself false. Want that again? Whatever implies what is false is itself false. And I'm afraid in the short time that I have, I was going to explain to you why that has to be, but maybe you just have to take it on my authority right now. If some premise or some position implies a false premise, the original premise is false as well. If it really does imply that, then the original premise must also be false. And so that being the case, if you can reduce your opponent's position to something which is false, are known to be false, that is reduce it to an absurdity, then you have refuted the position of your opponent. This is what's known in debate as reductio ad absurdum. I'm going to take what you believe and ring the logical changes on it. I'm going to show that it leads to another position, a position which we all know to be false. Let me give you an example. First premise. If there are no universal moral principles, then it is invalid for one culture to condemn the activities of another culture. The position that I've just stated is known as cultural relativism. It is not right for 20th century Americans to condemn any other culture because all ethics is relative to the society in which you live. If there are no universal moral principles, then it is invalid for one culture to condemn the activities of another culture. William Graham Sumner once wrote, he thought he was very clever, that if there is a law of God that applies to all mankind, God has been suspiciously secretive about it, which is his way of snidely saying what you take to be God's universal law. Isn't it interesting that the Samoans didn't hear about it, God only told Americans about it or whatever it may be. The cultural relativist says if there are no universal moral principles, then it's invalid for one culture to condemn the activities of another culture. And what gives at least minimal credibility to the cultural relativist when you hear that presented in class is that then the cultural relativist will go on and seem to live in terms of that will say it's wrong. The famous example in our generation is Margaret Mead's work with the sexual practices of unmarried Samoan girls. And she came to the conclusion, which by the way was later pretty much demolished in terms of its historical factuality by another researcher or sociologist. But nevertheless she came to the conclusion that since these Samoan young girls don't practice the kind of chastity that is taught in America for unmarried young ladies, that therefore all moral values are relative, where there's some huge leaps of logic that are there. But my point is that's the sort of thing people will bring up. They'll say, different cultures have different standards for marriage or for private property or for life, whatever. You know, we all know that Eskimos send their, you know, invalid, which is to say they're invalid parents on ice, floats out to sea and let them die and so forth. And so it turns out that from culture to culture you have different moral standards. So you hear those kind of examples and people will think, okay, well then the person's willing to live in terms of his premise. There are no universal moral absolutes. And so one culture cannot condemn another culture. But then you have to learn to bring up the counter examples that are not so easy for the cultural relatives. You say, well, then I guess it would be wrong for us to condemn Hitler's Germany, right? The Nazi atrocities were fairly true to the Nazi philosophy of life. So in that culture it's perfectly alright. Or if you really want to step on toes, I suggest you try this one. Well then Martin Luther King Jr. Was certainly out of his place to try to reform American culture, wasn't he? Because the absolutes of any culture give us our moral standards. And he was trying to criticize the absolutes of racist American culture, or at least what he took to be racist American culture. The irony is that cultural relativism doesn't allow you to criticize it. And yet cultural relativists will turn right around and do what? They'll criticize racism. They'll criticize Hitler, they'll criticize IDI Amin, they'll criticize the genocide of the Jews, they'll criticize the practice in India of a widow being burned on the funeral pyre of her husband. And on and on and on and on. They'll say, this is horrible. These sorts of things shouldn't happen. We've got to change the world. But if you're a cultural relativist, you have no reason to change the world because everything's relative. So here's the reductio ad absurdum. What did I say the first premise was? If there are no universal moral principles, then it's invalid for one culture to condemn the activities of another culture. That is, relativism implies something that you know is not true. It implies that you shouldn't condemn a Hitler, you shouldn't condemn racism, you shouldn't condemn any number of these atrocities that might be brought up. And since relativism implies what is known to be false, then relativism itself is false because it's been reduced to absurdity. You reduce relativism to absurdity by taking it ringing the logical changes on it, taking it to its consequences and showing that no one's willing to accept those consequences. They may appear to, but once you bring up the right illustrations, they say, oh, no, we don't believe that. So you've reduced relativism to absurdity and therefore shown that that the relativist is inconsistent. Now, why is inconsistency such a bad thing? Well, sometimes I'm tempted to tell people, if you accept inconsistency, what's so bad about that is that people can get into an argument and say, yes, it is. No, it isn't, yes it is, no it isn't. And that's all you'll ever have. You can accept both of them because inconsistencies are acceptable. It can be, yes it is and no it isn't at the same time. But then not everyone understands what I'm getting at. And so. So I have to point out that inconsistencies are unacceptable because from an inconsistency you can believe anything. Maybe when I have more time tomorrow, I can put a little argument on the board to show how that is from P and not P. I can prove anything. Anything. In fact, I'll level this challenge. Somebody write down on a piece of paper something you think that I cannot prove and I'll show you I can prove anything from an inconsistency. That's why in intellectual circles, if you're trying to Be rational. You cannot accept inconsistencies. Logical fallacies reduct you out absurdums. Another kind of inconsistency can be called the actions speak louder than words fallacy. I'm making that up, but it'll help you remember it. Actions speak louder than words. It is not a mark of rationality for a person to assert one thing and then live contrary to that assertion. That might be considered a kind of moral hypocrisy, but equally, it can be seen as a kind of irrationality. There's an inconsistency or tension within the reasoning of the unbeliever because the unbeliever has one belief that he's using when he linguistically asserts his position. But then he has a conflicting belief evident when he behaves in a way contrary to what he asserted previously. So when people live contrary to what they say, they are being moral hypocrites, but they're also being irrational. They have an inconsistency in what they believe or what is evident about their beliefs. And the life of the unbeliever, it turns out, is riddled with just such inconsistencies. Let me give you some examples quickly. An unbeliever will presuppose human dignity and attend the funeral of a dead friend, honor a relative who has passed away. And yet, at the same time, the unbeliever is known to have argued previously that man is, in principle, no different from any other product of evolution like a horse or a dog. Now, social events like funerals or solemn events where Christians don't want to make asses of themselves by doing this. But hypothetically, I've often thought when I've gone to a funeral, especially when unbelievers are going through all this stuff about human dignity and so forth and so on, how wonderful this person is. I say, what are we doing here at this funeral? We don't have funerals for dogs. Well, some people in Southern California do, but they're considered weirdos. We're gonna have funerals for horses, for aardvarks and cockroaches. Why are we having a funeral for this particular part of the evolutionary chain? See, on the one hand, the unbeliever says man is nothing but advanced protoplasm, just the slime that's evolved. And yet he doesn't treat him like slime or her like slime when the death takes place. It's a kind of irrationality. The unbeliever will insist that man is nothing more than a complex of biochemical factors that are controlled by the laws of physics. And then the unbeliever, who has argued all day that way in the science lab or in the lecture hall at the university, goes home and kisses his wife and children and says he loves them. Man is nothing more. Chemical reactions controlled by the laws of physics, and yet he acts like there's something more, something above biochemical responses. When he kisses his wife and says he loves her. The unbeliever will argue that in sexual relations, anything goes. There are no moral absolutes. I heard that so often when I was a college student during the sexual revolution. And then the same unbeliever who says anything goes will turn around and condemn the war in Vietnam is an absolute moral atrocity. Excuse me, isn't there something wrong with this argument? When it comes to shacking up with my girlfriend, anything goes. When it comes to the United States getting its pleasure by beating up South Vietnamese, that's not okay. Once you say anything goes, guess what? Anything goes. You can't turn around and be a moral absolutist. Then the unbeliever will indignantly condemn child molesters, even though he said you can get your sexual pleasure any way you wish. Well, of course I think child molestation is horrible. I think it's a capital offense. There's no doubt about my negativity about it, but I can make sense of what I'm saying when I condemn child molestation. The unbeliever cannot. What you have in the case of the unbeliever is somebody who says one thing with his words, but his actions betray it. Actions speak louder than words. That's another kind of inconsistency we wish to point out. And when we come back after our question and answer period now and tomorrow for the next lecture, I'll talk about presuppositional tensions you should look for in the arguments of unbelievers. Remember, just by way of review, when you hear the unbeliever argue, you want to do a checklist. You want to ask, first, is he being arbitrary? Secondly, is he being inconsistent? Thirdly, what are the consequences of this argument? And then fourthly, what are the preconditions of intelligibility for this argument?