Dr Greg Bahnsen - Practical Apologetics: God, Culture, Precondition (Part 2)

We're going to review what you learned from yesterday. Remember I said I wanted to give you a checklist, Just like the airline pilots have to go over the checklist to make sure that the airplane will fly. When someone is arguing against the Christian faith or presenting some kind of opposition to the Christian faith, you want to go through a checklist looking for certain things as you're defending the faith, and so will this argument fly. I should say that calling certain things that unbelievers urge against the Christian faith an argument is honorific. I'm being polite, I'm being charitable. To do that an argument is technically the presentation of certain premises or lines of evidence with an inference drawn from them. There are deductive inferences and inductive inferences and adductive inferences and seductive inferences and all sorts of inferences. But often enough, what unbelievers present to us is not an argument at all. It's just a mere opinion. Right now, what is it on our checklist that you are pointing out when you see that someone's only giving a mere opinion against the Christian faith? What is the general category problem? Arbitrariness. Exactly. So the first thing you look for when someone is arguing against the Christian faith is whether their consideration is arbitrary. And I'm not going to write these down because I really need to get onto a lot of things today. But do we have a mere opinion being offered here? If so, the appropriate response. I'm not talking about literally what you say, but you have to understand academically, the appropriate response is, so what? Opinions are free. Everyone can have an opinion. You haven't entered into any kind of truly academic or serious consideration when you're just saying, well, my opinion is as follows. A second form of arbitrariness, a step above mere opinion, is relativism. The relativist says, well, you've got a lot to say for your opinion, and someone else has a lot to say for their opinion. And it's different strokes for different folks. The relativist ultimately contradicts himself. There aren't any true relativists. The only relativists I know in this world are hypocrites. I know that sounds very harsh, but after yesterday's lecture, I hope you understand why. Because it's easy to utter the words that everybody is allowed to believe whatever they want, create their own reality, and use all this New Age vocabulary and so forth. But the minute you bring up the sorts of things that allows, okay, well, then Hitler can create his own reality and racism can create its own reality and so forth, then the relativist doesn't want to allow everybody to have their own opinion. The third kind of arbitrariness, anybody Ignorant conjecture. I gave you two examples yesterday of common ignorant conjectures. Quickly, somebody remind me of what they are. Yeah, the text of scripture certainly has changed over all these generations, over hundreds of years. When people talk like that, they are giving away the fact that they have not looked into this or researched it, because if they had, they. They'd be very cautious in their criticism. I did not mean to suggest, I hope no one took me this way, that if anybody studies the textual issue, they're going to become a Christian and they're automatically going to believe in the authority and the truthfulness of God's word. That's not my point. What you'll usually run into, though, are people who say, well, surely we can't tell in any sure sense what Paul said or what Isaiah said. Well, we have very good reason to believe that we know what Paul and I said. We certainly have a lot more reason in their case than we do in the case of Plato or Aristotle. What's another form of ignorant conjecture that we saw yesterday? Yes, we don't even know that Jesus existed historically. It's just somebody had a very rich imagination made up this person, you know, to be the center of religion. Believe it or not, that kind of thing is said not so much by professors anymore. You'll usually hear that from your roommate or somebody else at the university. But there are people who still suggest we really don't have any historical evidence for Jesus, or we can't rely on the historical claims of the Bible and so forth. And then the fourth form of arbitrariness that we looked at, unargued bias. What's the difference between an unargued bias and a presupposition? Well, some presuppositions are unargued biases, but not all presuppositions are like that. In fact, in the second hour today, I'm going to use one of my presuppositions. As a Christian, I believe in the existence of the triune God of Scripture, but I'm not going to say that's unargued. In fact, I'm going to argue for the existence of God. And I don't say this with any arrogance, I'm going to prove, objectively prove the existence of God for you in the second hour. So please don't leave after the break. But not all presuppositions are unargued bias. However, when someone says, you can't trust the Bible because it reports miracles and we all know that miracles can't take place, you can pretty much count on it 99% of the time when someone talks like that, that's an unargued bias because you can say, well, now I need to hear what your argument is about the impossibility of miracles. First of all, well, now you use a refrigerator. You know that miracles don't take place. We live in a modern, enlightened age. That is a bias. That's just a prejudice. That is not an argument against Christianity. Or if you will, it's not a set of considerations that lead to the conclusion that Christianity is false. That's just another way of stating that Christianity is false. The person who says, I don't believe the Bible is true can say it another way, and I don't believe that miracles are possible. But obviously, if the God who was revealed in the Bible exists, miracles are no problem at all. So when you dismiss the Bible on the basis of its miracle claims, you are what we in logic call begging the question. Okay, these are forms of arbitrariness. What's the second thing on our checklist? What's that? Ah, very good. Inconsistencies. Yesterday I said, anybody who is allowed an inconsistency in an argument can prove anything. And I know you were very skeptical about that until I proved what, that Bill Clinton is George Bush? I proved it logically. I said, once you give me two premises that contradict each other from those two premises, I can prove anything. Now, I didn't point that out to you because that's what you usually see unbelievers doing, that they actually go and say, okay, now I've got these two inconsistent premises and I'm just going to run to any conclusion I want from them. But you're probably going to be somewhat in awe and wonder at how loosey goosey the reasoning of unbelievers can be. You're going to say, boy, they go this way, they go that way. What allows them to do that? And the answer is they have inconsistent premises. Sometimes it's veiled because they don't put P on the board and it is not the case. P. They don't always put it right out there explicitly. But veiled, usually verbally veiled, are two different approaches to things which cannot both be true. And since they hold to the inconsistency, that's why you can never predict where an unbeliever is going to come down. Okay, Quickly, what are the forms of inconsistency? Logical fallacies. I'll get you started here. And we didn't reduct you out. Absurdum. When you can reduce your opponent, when you can take his position and show that it implies something known to be false, in fact notoriously false, then you have reduced him to absurdity. Because whatever implies that which is false is itself false. Thirdly, the actions speak louder than words. Criticism. Okay, Jesus said to look not only at what people say, but what people do. He says that's what God's going to do. He's going to listen not simply to the profession, but he's going to also look at the way we live. I said, unbelievers never live up to their assumptions. They. They'll say one thing and they'll live contrary to it. Then the last form of inconsistency, presuppositional tensions. And that's where we pick up the lecture today. When we talk to unbelievers about their views, especially when we talk to unbelievers about their general approach to life or reality or the nature of man, or how we know what we know or how we should live our lives, we have to be especially sensitive to hear and to discern what their controlling assumptions are about the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge, the nature of right and wrong conduct. And the reason why you have to be especially sensitive is because unbelievers, well, believers too for that matter, most people do not come out and say, by the way, my presuppositions are, you know, then they wave this flag and they say, I am a naturalist, you know, or I am a materialist or I am an existentialist and so forth. If you want to be effective in defending the faith, you're going to be. You're going to have to be able to listen to people and categorize what they are saying. Say, okay, I know that represents this school of thought, okay? And you're going to have to do that in a way that not only they have not done, but they may not be able to do. If I have a next door neighbor who says, I've never studied any philosophy, my approach to life is grab for all the gusto you can get. You only go around once. Now, if I were to say, oh, well, as a matter of fact, that is what we call hedonism, and if you would like to be precise, it's not qualitative hedonism of the epicurean sort of. It is quantitative hedonism, your neighbor would probably say, I don't want to talk to you anymore. I don't care what hedonism is. Just pass the beer, you know. So when you talk to people, they may not know, you know, what the vocabulary is. They may not know that they're representing a particular school of thought. But you need to know that, not to show off. Honestly, when I'm. When I'm witnessing to people and so forth, I don't try to make a point. I don't usually even tell them that I have a PhD and philosophy, that can be intimidating too. But if I'm witnessing to people and they say something, I know something that perhaps they don't. And because I know that school of thought and hopefully how to refute it, I'm just waiting for them to take a few more steps so that I can go ahead and do that. Listen very sensitively and ask yourself what is being assumed about the nature of reality? Is reality of one sort or of two sorts? Of is reality mind and matter are only matter? Or is reality made up of an infinite set of bits of matter? Is reality controlled so that there is no free will? Or is there, in some sense, freedom in this world? Ask not only about the nature of reality, but ask also what is the assumption about how we know these things? Do we know things just by the use of our senses? Do we know things by reflection and logical comparison? Do we know things on the basis of memory, intuition, revelation? What is this person thinking? Or what most likely is this person conceived to be the source of knowledge about? We only go around once in life. Ask what is this person assuming about human nature and the place of man in the universe and how man should live his life? What's right and wrong in human relations? I'm saying be very sensitive then to the presuppositions that people have about reality, knowledge and behavior. Now, here's my point. When you listen to the arguments of unbelievers, you will find, in fact, the more you do this, I think you'll be amazed that you find it all the time. But you'll begin to see if you start pushing some of these examples, that the presuppositions of unbelievers are always inconsistent. They will not work well together, or as we like to say, in a sophisticated way. They don't comport with each other. They will not walk down the street together. Although not everybody clearly and specifically thinks through the matters of reality, knowledge and behavior, they don't identify their underlying principles. And although not everyone will be able to openly and explicitly state his operating assumptions. Nevertheless, everybody utilizes some basic perspective about reality, about knowledge and conduct. And if you listen to what the critics of the Christian faith say and seek to identify what is being taken for granted by the critic, you will be able to point out eventually, at the appropriate point in your discussion or dialogue, that the critic has a worldview that's intentional because his presuppositions don't comport with each other. So let's look at some examples. I'll begin. Ethics is usually the easiest place to be in teaching people philosophy, because most people think ethically, somewhat anyway. And then we'll move on to more abstract illustrations in epistemology, the theory of knowledge, and also metaphysics, the theory of reality. So first of all, attention within one's ethical perspective. Remember the neighbor I mentioned just a minute ago who says you only go around once in life, grab for all the gusto you can get. He believes that pleasure is the leading value in life. He also believes there's no accountability for our conduct after this life. Okay, so live for pleasure, grab for all the gust that you can get. And don't worry about an afterlife where you'll answer to God, because you're only going to go around once. Anyway, after this life, the game's up. It's all over. On the other hand, this same neighbor, I bet you dollars the donuts, expresses indignation over certain things in this world. Now, I don't know your neighbor, so I don't know what his particular indignation will be, but let me give you some examples. I live in Southern California and I know a lot of people that are very indignant about police brutality. The same people who say, pass the beer, live for all the pleasure you can get, get upset with police brutality. You don't need a PhD to see there's something wrong here. You can't have it both ways. Because you see those who are allegedly guilty of police brutality, or maybe those who are truly guilty of police brutality could say, hey, that's what gave us pleasure. So we are just doing what you do. You go for the beer, we reach for the nightsticks. That's all there is to it. Your neighbor may object to oppression, the invasion of a weaker nation by some tyrant. We heard a lot of self righteous indignation about that when Saddam Hussein was a little more powerful than he is These days. Your neighbors may object to light sentences being handed down to rapists or to those who peddle drugs. You may hear indignation over bribes being taken by government officials or over racial hatred and racial discrimination, it doesn't make any difference when a person says pleasure is the highest value and then somewhere else in the conversation condemns something as immoral. His presuppositions are inconsistent. He doesn't have comportion in his worldview. He's not walking down the street hand in hand with all his views. He's going two different ways at once. Let me give you an illustration of tension within a person's view of how we know what we know. Imagine now that you have a friend who is critical of your Christian faith. He says, you know, you're just superstitious and gullible for believing those things. According to this friend, you shouldn't believe anything that's not verified or at least verifiable by observation. That is, if you can't test something by your senses, you can see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, so forth. If you can't verify something by observation, then you don't know it. He'll tell you, seeing is believing. I don't believe anything unless I can see it or have some other sensory contact with it. And the problem with Christians, you'll be told, is that they believe things simply on the alleged authority of God speaking in the Bible. You didn't see this to be true. You can't verify it. Not even in principle can you verify it. And yet you believe it. What a bunch of ignorant gulls. I know better than that. Seeing is believing. Well, you see, again, you got to play the role of the little boy who eventually is going to point out that the king has no clothes. And you say, well, could you explain to me how you came to know that we can only know the things that we observe? Those of you who are chuckling are beating me to the punchline. But that's good. What's he going to do now? You're going to say, well, this is the amazing thing. I'm going to give you the first form of embarrassing, arbitrary. So often I hear people say I read a book on the subject, or worse. I have a professor at school, you know, who explained that to us. Of course, you are all stupid ninnies for believing this book called the Bible. But I read another book or I listened to another lecture or whatever it is, and so I know now that you can only believe the things that you see. Now, what question are you going to ask? You say, now wait a minute. Whatever the lecturer was saying or the author of the book was writing, did you see the truth of that? Now, be very careful. I've done this Enough times that I understand how the English language misleads people. We use metaphorically the verb to see. Talking about I come to understand something. Oh, I see your point. That's not what you're asking. You want to know have you had some sense experience of the truth, that all knowledge is limited to observation? You see the tension right away. The person has this presupposition about knowledge, but then he lives contrary to it, or he has another presupposition which is in tension with it. You cannot live by that philosophy of life, regardless of how a person comes to believe. That is, whatever the psychological process was by which he came to the conviction that you can only know what you observe. The fact is, he did not observe that. You know why? Because no one has observed a universal negative. In fact, no one has observed a universal positive either, because no one has universal vision. Have I lost you there? How much have you seen in this world? Well, you haven't seen all of it, so. Yeah, but give me time. Well, but actually, in a limited lifetime you're not going to see everything. Give me a computer. Let me put together what all these other people have seen too. Even that will be short of the mark. In fact, any of you who know set theory and self referential paradoxes know you can never see everything because you can never see the seeing of everything. Finally, moreover, the sort of thing we're talking about isn't seeable anyway. Even if you could see everything, one of the things you do not see are abstract entities, nor do you see propositional truths. Again you might say, but I see propositions, Dr. Bonson, because they're written down on a page. Well, the failure here is to recognize that propositions are not sentences. Sentences can be written on a page and you can write the same proposition in an English sentence, in a Greek sentence, in a Chinese sentence, so forth. But the propositional truth that is common to all of those sentences, no one can see. You can't write it and you can't utter it. You can only give some instantiation of it in English, in Chinese, and so forth. Again, you can tune out for about a minute and a half here if you don't want to get into this. But for some of you, it's this very repudiation of abstract entities in philosophy that has led to the crisis in translation theory today. Because what you'll be told, if you follow modern linguistics, is you cannot translate the, the intention. Now that is spelled with an S, not a T at the end. Intention, the meaning of a sentence, cannot be translated you can only take the behavioral characteristics of this sentence, let's say in German, and ask now what would reproduce that behavior in English? Okay? You have a behavioral approach to translation. Because people have given up the whole notion of that there is meaning. And then this leads ultimately to literary deconstruction and so forth. And I'll talk about in a few minutes. You cannot observe everything, nor can you observe the truth. That knowledge is restricted to observation. So when a person has that as his theory of knowledge, you can find inconsistencies very readily. Let me give you a third example. Inconsistency in one's view of reality or his metaphysical presuppositions. You have a professor at the university who teaches a behavioristic view of man. Behaviorism is a subdivision of determinism. Determinism is the view that every event is the theoretically predictable consequence of antecedent factors. Every event is enthusiastic theory, predictable if you knew those things which cause it. There is no free will. Now, as applied to human behavior, behaviorism is the view that every human action is the theoretically predictable consequence of antecedent factors, conditioned responses and heredity and genes and things like that. So you have a professor who teaches a behavioristic view of man, telling us that everything in human behavior is determined by factors preceding it, like our stimulus, response, conditioning. Everything in human behavior is predictable. If we only knew all those factors. Ultimately, you'll be told by the behaviorist. And in principle, human free will is an illusion. All of us think and do what we've been conditioned to think and do. Given the variables of our environment and our heredity. Now imagine further that when it comes time for you to take the final exam in this wonderful psychology course, you decide that you don't have time to study. And you'll just simply borrow from your neighbor. To put it euphemistically, you cheat on the exam, professor catches you, he's indignant. He insists upon imposing some kind of a strict penalty. You say you're going to flunk the course. Wouldn't it be great if someone really had the guts to do this? Cheat on the exam, get caught, and then throw it right back in the professor's face. Because when he says you need to be punished for this, he's exposing an open conflict within his views of human nature. By punishing you, he assumes you were free to choose how to approach taking the exam. And you took the low road, you cheater. You. Instead of studying and doing your own work, you could have studied hard, prepared. But you didn't. You more efficiently wrote upon the efforts of others. But of course, if you could not help doing what you did, given my previous conditioning and the gene pool from which I was born, it would be senseless to punish you for doing what was very predictable. If we just knew all the factors. And yet, that's precisely what the professor is trying to do. He's trying to tell you human nature is predictable. There's no free will. And then he wants to punish you as though you really could have chosen to do other than you did. Another kind of tension. Let's look at the way people consider knowledge and how they consider reality and see tension between their metaphysic and their epistemology. If you will, imagine there's a colleague at work who graduated from college and fancies himself intellectual about matters of religion. According to him, there is no God and there are no spiritual events or spiritual forces whatsoever. All there is to reality is the physical world. Moreover, the same person who is a materialist tells you that it would be impossible to affirm the Christian outlook on life because there are logical contradictions within Christianity. We say that God is one, yet three, that God is loving and all powerful, and nevertheless there's evil in the world. And he considers these things logically contradictory. Now, for the moment, please forget that yesterday I told you that upon analysis, no Christian doctrine is logically contradictory. As far as the Christian and the non Christian. Pardon me, as far as the non Christian is concerned, there is a logical contradiction here. So before you get to showing him that there isn't really a logical contradiction, I want you to point out to the person that given his presuppositions about the nature of reality, he has no right now in the area of theory of knowledge to appeal against Christianity and as being illogical, I wonder if you can see why that is. Can you see that his view of reality does not comport with his view of how we know what we know? A man cannot simultaneously and consistently be committed to the laws of logic which are supposed to be violated by Christian dogma, and to the view that reality is solely physical in nature, and the reason is that the laws of logic are not physical in nature. Isn't that right? I explained this to you already. Laws are not particulars. A particular would be like this microphone, this podium, that table, this shoe, whatever it may be. You can experience particulars, you can see them, touch them, smell them, so forth. But you cannot taste, cannot kick, you cannot hear or see a generalization. Laws are abstract in nature. The laws of logic are abstract in nature. And so when the person says Christianity is illogical and the only thing that exists is matter. He's contradicted himself because he's assumed that the laws of logic are real. And he's also assumed that reality, reality is limited to what is physical. So in your checklist of problems, in what the unbeliever says about Christianity, we see arbitrariness, we see inconsistencies of different sorts. And because I'm running out of time, I'm going to run on now to the next thing on your checklist. You want to ask what are the consequences of this argument or consideration? Jesus said, you judge a tree by its fruit, regardless of what the tree or what people say about the tree. You know, whether it's a banana tree by whether it brings forth bananas rather than peaches. And so one of the things we can do as Christians is ask what has the unbelieving approach to the world spawned? What has been brought about by the unbelieving approach to life? And I'm going to give you what I think are some interesting considerations every department of the university and also in our culture. But before I do this, I want to give just a simple understanding of this particular problem. And I can illustrate it, I think, by referring to the indignation I feel toward the news media, for instance, when they report on a David Koresh. Okay, here's a man acting in a way which, and I'm not going to presume that he was guilty to begin with or any of that, but here's a man who, from our secular perspective, is doing things that are evil and wrong. Maybe he was only defending himself, so forth and so on, but except for the moment, the perspective of the news media, that this man was very wicked. Now, what is always going to be accompanying the report of the misdeeds of a David Koresh? We're going to be reminded he was a fundamentalist. By the way, most fundamentalists don't want to own him as their own. But the news media can't draw those kinds of distinctions. So more generally, think of somebody who does something really wicked. You know, you have a Jim Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, what have you. And then we're going to be reminded they're religious people. So there you have it, right? What is the implied judgment? This is what religion spawns. Now, here's my indignation. I mean, it would be nice if distinctions were drawn and a little bit fairer reporting were to be found there. But if they want to play the game that way, I just want them to play it both directions. We recently in California have two cases of mass murder, very tragic situations. And I was waiting for, of course, this neutral, objective, you know, world of newscasting to remind us, oh, by the way, these people didn't believe in the living and true God, didn't trust Jesus as their savior. What do you expect? Now, when unbelievers act in abhorrent ways, we are never told about their religious beliefs. It's only when fundamentalists or professing fundamentalists do bad things that that becomes a relevant thing to report to us. Well, I would like to return the favor. Now, I would like to say, let's consider what unbelief brings about. It would be great if all of you picked up the book by Paul Johnson entitled Simply Intellectuals. What an enjoyable book. Not really. I mean, it's full of garbage. But I enjoyed almost every page of it because I understood how Paul Johnson was needling. These people are always down on religious hypocrisy. So what he did is he took a series of illustrations. Jean. Well, Rousseau and Sartre and Bertrand Russell and. And others, and he pointed out just how they lived their lives. They said one thing and then they lived this way. And it's just full of the most amazing hypocrisy. And not just hypocrisy. Downright meanness of spirit, selfishness, brutality. And he just puts it out there. See, you respect these people as though they're supposed to show us how to live our lives. These are the intellectual giants. By the way, he was fair enough to pick people. In general, I would disagree with one of his choices, but in general, he picked people which are highly regarded in the academic community. And he said, and this is the way they live their lives. Now, that is a fair consideration in a world that wants to know the consequences of religion. So let's look at some of the consequences real quickly here. First, in the university community, in the Sociology department, what has the rejection of Christianity spawned? Well, lots of things, of course, but I'm going to overgeneralize here and say, for the most part, cultural relativism. Cultural relativism. Margaret Mead taught all of us that it's different strokes for different folks. And of course, the argument for this was just remarkable. Logically, the argument went like this. People live different ways, therefore people ought to live different ways. No, you won't find that written out just that plainly and simply on any page in Margaret Mead. But that is the argument it boils down to. I found out that unmarried Samoan girls don't have the sexual mores. Of unmarried American girls. There you have it. Ethics is relative. Proven. I liken that to a math teacher who has the homework collected in junior high and finds different answers on these different pages and says, lo and behold, math is relative. There are different answers being given. Apparently you create your own mathematical reality. Well, the sad thing is, when you go to the university and study in the sociology class, people will be very solemn about this and take it seriously. And you ought to be giggling about it. You ought to say, you know, I think the king has no clothes. Okay, well, but let's accept cultural relativism for a moment. If everything is culturally relative, then it was completely wrong of Martin Luther King Jr. To lead a reform effort in this world that is presumed to have been racist. Because in a culture that is racist, those who try to reform it are violating the norms of their culture. You'll be taught cultural relativism and in the same sociology class be told that that what the warlords are doing in Somalia is horrible. Well, hey, when in Somalia, do like the Somalians, right again. You can see through this. It only takes. What did it take me two minutes? And that is at the heart of the sociology department of our universities, but the departments of law. Many years ago, Plato wrote his republic. One of the spokesmen in it, Thrasymachus argued that might makes right, or if you will, justice is what is in the interest of the stronger. What we call justice is just the euphemism for who gets his way or what group of people in society get their way in a culture. And therefore law is simply the positive declaration of the stronger in society. Justice is defined by law, and law is determined by the strongest individual or group of individuals in a culture. Well, now, vast majority of law departments, by the way, legal theory is widely disdained by budding lawyers. I know a number of lawyers and a number of law students, and they say when they have to study legal theory, everybody considers that the rump end of the curriculum. Who cares? If I was given the opportunity to teach, that's exactly what I'd want to teach. Legal theory. What is the foundation of law? What's the nature of law? How is it to be applied? What is the true nature of justice, and so forth. Lawyers don't care about that anymore. And yet you'll still hear arguments from lawyers about how people haven't been treated rightly. They'll argue that our culture has wronged other portions of our society or individuals. And rather than saying, well, the mightier got their way, they'll appeal to what is the rightier way to live? And yet they believe that might makes right in their legal theory. There's tension within the sociology department, the departments of law, the law schools, obviously the political science departments. It's getting to the point where I think we ought to begin sneering when political scientists think that they're giving us a science. But let's ask this question. We don't want a Christian political theory. Okay? What do we want? Well, we want free elections. Why? Well, because people just have to be free, right? It'd be unfair to have people have some political order imposed on them. They should only have imposed on them what they freely choose. To which the answer is, who says why should people have the right to choose their political order? When people say free elections are a necessity for fairness or just society, they are appealing to something beyond might, aren't they? To some form of law or right, some notion of fairness that goes beyond considerations of power in a culture. In the psychology department, you'll be told in most psych departments anymore that man does not have any occult dimension to his life. There is no spiritual dimension to man. Man is made up of material tissue. And in fact, what we call the mind of man was supposed to be studied by psychology originally. His psyche is really just brain tissue. Now, if you haven't thought about this, I would encourage you, and I can't do it right now because I don't have the time. There is a difference between brain and mind, though in common parlance we use the two interchangeably. Brain tissue is made up of, well, and you've seen brains, right? Ooey, gooey stuff. Now, whatever brains are made up of brains follow the laws of biology and physics. Now, if psychology says man is reduced not to a person that freely uses his mind, but to brain tissue, then the real question is, if the psychologist is to be believed, why should any of us trust the results of the biological and physical reactions in this gray tissue up here in the cranium? Why trust that? Why should we have debates over what is true or what is just or what is beautiful, what is self consciousness? If man is nothing more than brain tissue, if man is nothing more than brain tissue, ultimately, then of course, there is no dignity to man. In the economics department, we talk about, well, actually in economics anymore. I begin to think Gary north could tell you more exactly. But it seems to me economics has become a division of political science. But that in itself is a reflection of a certain view of economics, right? It's no longer a study of the way things Work economics. It's a study of how property is manipulated and who should own it and things like that. What is the justification of private property? Is there any justification of private property? If you're not a Christian in the physics department, what's the justification for believing in the regularity of the universe? In the next lecture, I'm going to be talking more about that in those wonderful new departments for environmental studies. Why is it that human beings should not abuse animals? Why should we be held responsible for the environment? The biology department. We'll talk about the absurdities of the evolutionary theory sometime this week. But biology studies life. What is the essence of life? Try getting an answer to that in the biology department. Why does man have any special dignity? When you study in the biology department, if you raise that question, more likely than not, I would bet you the biology Prof. Will say, well, they studied that in psychology, whereas you get to psychology, and they'll say, well, man's nothing but a biological creature, so go back to the biology department. So you'll get tired of going back and forth and they'll finally say, well, go talk to poli psi. They'll tell you why man's rights should be, you know, guaranteed and why he's dignified. We've already seen there's problems in the poli sci department. Well, but if all these other departments have trouble, certainly, certainly the math department doesn't have. I'm sorry, we're getting down to seconds, I'm being told here. So now I'm going to summarize the rest of this in seconds. Ask your math professor why the laws of math are applicable to the world in which we live, to the physical environment round about us. In fact, ask what is it we're studying in the math department? People will say numbers and their relationships. Are numbers physical? Are relationships physical? Well, then I guess the whole math department is committed to some kind of metaphysics that goes beyond what the biologists feel, physicists and poli sci people believe. And so, with that whirlwind tour of the university and my wanting my paycheck, I think I will stop at this point and see if you have any questions. And maybe we'll finish next hour. Okay. In our checklist, the things we're looking for when unbelievers urge things against Christianity, we've come to point number three. Considering the consequences of unbelief. And I've been looking at the consequences in the university environment, the various departments of the university, and little problems, well, actually big problems in every one of those particular departments. I'm going to cover a couple of more and then look at culture in general outside the university, in the history department of our universities, those departments that refuse to take a Christian approach to life and to how we understand things. The real issue is, is there meaning in history at all? And if history is meaningless, that is, if we cannot find a basis for meaning, why should it be studied? What is it that makes certain events important in history and other events not worth mentioning? You probably notice when you read a history book, it doesn't state everything that was going on, like during the revolutionary period. We don't read a whole lot about the number of toilets that were available during the revolutionary period. You say, well, that's because that's not relevant, Dr. Bonson. Ah, but how do you know what is and is not relevant if you don't understand what the meaning of history is or what kind of causality, what brings about certain events in history? What is the nature of historical causality in our history departments today that do not have a philosophy of life, don't have a clue on this matter. In the literature departments of our major universities, the leading critical theory these days, if it can dare be called a theory, is deconstructionism. And the deconstructionist, if nothing else, can be credited for saying we'll have no semblance of a Christian understanding of life, literature, of meaning at all, and that no semblance of meaning comes down to, there can be no objective meaning for any text of literature. So that every reading of a text in Shakespeare, in Hemingway, whoever it may be, every reading that is given to that, every interpretation that's given, given to a text, every reading of a text is a misreading because a text cannot have inherent meaning if it has a set, unchanging inherent meaning, then that would assume something about the nature of the world that deconstructionists don't want to believe. In fact, deconstructionists come right out and tell you it is a semblance of a Christian view of life that you can read an authority and determine his or her meaning. Every reading of a text is a misreading. So that just destroys literary criticism, doesn't it? So we have the destruction of the poli sci department, the psych department, the physics department, the biology department, the literature department, the Sociology department, on and on and on the list could go, and I really do have more notes, but I'm out of time. And on top of all of that, the modern university, not only is there a cancer growing in every department intellectually, because the Christian philosophy of life does not inform the approach to biology or literature or history, what have you. But the university as a whole has no center, it has no unity. Originally the university was called the Uni versity because there was first diversity. We're going to study history, literature, biology, philosophy, whatever it may be. There's a diversity of departments, a diversity of areas of life that are going to be explored. But there's a unity to the way in which we explore them. And so the world was seen as a uni verse and thus the universitee the study of how all of life coheres. And what is the unity that originally informed education. It was the Christian worldview because we believe in God, his creation, man and his place in the universe. How we know what we know, how we should live our lives. Then we can go out with this common perspective and then now specialize in terms of understanding what God has done in the area of, say, music or beauty or literature or history, philosophy, biology, physics, physics, on and on and on. There was a unity to the curriculum. But I guarantee you, unbelievers will say right out, there is no unity to the modern university. It's become a multiversity. And what you hear in one department will conflict with what you hear in another department in terms of their underlying assumptions. Okay, I've really gone through this quickly, but I hope I've given enough illustrations that you, you get my point. Start looking at the consequences of rejecting the Christian worldview. When people offer you an argument against Christianity, they offer you an argument in favor of some other perspective on life. You have the right to say, and what does this bring about? What does this understanding produce? Look at the fruit that's being produced and ask, is this anything people would want to eat? How many people are satisfied with the modern university and its inability to have foundations in any one department just doesn't exist. Well, let's get outside of school setting and real quickly ask about the culture that has been spawned by the non Christian or the unbelieving worldview. I'm going to look at artistic, political, economic, intellectual and family culture, each of these very briefly. Sorry for the machine gun approach, but I'm not really giving extensive argumentation. I'm basically illustrating, illustrating, illustrating. So I'm not wearing you down, I hope. Although it gets tiring listening to people speak like that. Bear with me a minute or two more. First of all, artistic culture. Stop and do an analysis of what the unbelieving world is creating in the area of art these days. Consider musical composition. In most areas of modern musical composition, you will find a defiance of order, harmony and resolution. And when it's pointed out that people don't want to listen to that kind of music and they don't come to concerts to listen to that anymore, people will then be disdainful of the masses. And what we have really created in our culture are various pockets of musical elitist. And that's true in what might be called the more classical domain. It's also true, by the way, in the rock and roll domain. You'll have people who say it doesn't matter to us that we're not writing music that communicates with people. The mass is like, what do they know? They're really quite stupid. In the area of visual art, painting, photography, we have art artists who present things which purposely offend in the name of personal liberation, or in some cases in the name of social liberation. They say we have the right to offend, to do what we want. So you'll see a crucifix that's been submerged in urine in a jar or something. And that's supposed to be an artistic sort of thing. You'll see homoerotic art being portrayed, huge graphic photography and so forth. And if that's deemed offensive, the artist will tell us, yes, but that's the road to liberation. Well, on that basis, why not the Marquis de Sade? Why not that kind of what we call sadomasochistic behavior in the name of liberation? Why not the titillation of snuff films? Who doesn't know what a snuff film is? A snuff film is one that depicts the murder or mutilation of somebody, usually in the midst of sexual acts. And the film is supposed. I mean, part of the artistic. Isn't that incredible? Part of the artistic uniqueness of this is just that it's not simply an artificial depiction of what it would be like for somebody to die, engaged in these kind of perverse sexual acts. But actually having somebody die, why not? Given the modern approach to art that we have in our culture, what is the boundary between decency and indecency, between beauty and ugliness, between art and. And non art, for that matter. In our culture, no one can tell anymore. Boy, isn't that a great consequence of an unbelieving approach to the world? Look at political culture. I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to notice that we are inundated with self serving politicians in our day who are interested primarily in pay raises which they try to hide. From us engaging in pork barrel legislation, giving their own re election the highest priority. We no longer have wise statesmen who are concerned for the good of the corporate body. But then on the non Christian worldview, why not? Why shouldn't politicians be selfish, self serving hypocritical creeps as they usually are? We see double standards all over our political culture. You realize that the Congress that passes the laws by which the rest of the country is to live does not usually bind itself to the rules it imposes on others. It's incredible to me. I'm sure that less than 5% of the population knows that Congress passes laws about equal opportunity and exempts itself from equal opportunity legislation. Congress passes laws about Social Security taxation and exempts itself from Social Security. Congress passes laws about environmental protection and exempts itself and its properties from environmental protection. But why not? Why should anybody have to be consistent? In the non Christian approach to the world, There are no objective limits to state authority anymore. The state intervenes whenever people think the state should intervene. There are, there is no limit to it. And that of course gives rise to unprincipled statism violations of jurisdiction. The United States goes down to Panama to pick up a dictator and to haul him back, deciding it wants to try this person. Now I'm not at all sympathetic to Noriega, don't get me wrong. But there are questions of international law and justice involved here. But our country no longer respects them. We have a growing state. We have a state that's doing more and more things. And yet we also have at the very same time, in this glorious non Christian world, growing criminal activity. Isn't that amazing? The state exists to protect us from crime. And at the very time that the state is doing more and more, getting bigger and bigger, asking for more and more taxes, it's doing even worse job in limiting crime. Crime is growing at the same time that the state is growing. This is one of the consequences of the non Christian worldview. Look at our economic culture. We come to a day in our culture where we have fiat money and therefore the manipulation of value. What is the value of these things that we hold in our hands called dollar bills and so forth? The value of these things is now determined by political whim. How many dollars will we put out there, float out there? It's a manipulation of value. And who gets hurt by the manipulation of economic value? The people who are most in need of economic help. Those who are most in need of economic stability. Who gets hurt by inflation? The aged and the poor. We host Shop unions and minimum wage laws which exclude those who need gainful employment from entering into the workplace and competing for the jobs that are available. How does minimum wage do that? Well, there are people who would be willing to work for $3.50 an hour to sweep your floor, but the government says you must pay four and a quarter no matter who it is. But you don't believe four and a quarter is what it's worth to have your floor swept by this person and so he can't get a job. Those people are most in need of entering into the workplace and competing at the low end of the spectrum to begin rising up. Cannot enter the workplace then because of minimum wage laws. Mandatory union protection does the same thing. People cannot compet compete for the jobs that are available. We have legalized theft through taxation. We have legalized theft through inflation because of the decisions made by politicians in our own personal lives. Debt has become a way of life. You'll find a hard time, you'll find it hard to locate people who do not have massive debt. Debt, I'm even forgetting that they're paying on their home. Massive debt as a way of life never known previously. We have an unprincipled use of the system here economically. The savings and loan scandal 72 billion and growing rising unemployment for people that are untrained and poorly educated with little self discipline. The work that is done in this country is uncompetitive and of apathetic quality. Look at the intellectual culture that's been spawned by unbelief. I've already mentioned the hypocrisy of leading intellectuals. Read Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals. It's just incredible. The alleged integrity, sensitivity, egalitarianism and altruism of these men is exposed by the way they lived their lives. Rousseau fathered children all over the place and never provided for them. It's bad enough that he fornicated wildly, but for all of his concern for children and education, he didn't even take care of the own children that he fathered. That kind of hypocrisy among the intellectuals is incredible. We have cutthroat competition in the worlds of science, medicine and industry that leads to fake and tampered with lab reports, artificial studies being done in order to gain research grants or a place in the market or to win some scientific prize that has money attached to it. Our school system in America is littered with unmotivated teachers with schools that produce increasingly lower scores, high dropout rates, intense social problems with violence, drugs, sex. I mean, this is not hard to do. What do you think the consequences of the unbelieving approach to life? Pretty impressive, huh? Look at family culture or sexual culture, the world of personal freedom, selfishness and hedonism. In America, more than half of the marriages that take place in our culture today end in divorce. More than half. What does that say about our view of marriage in general? Sexual infidelity, though it is promoted and glamorized in the movies and all the rest, brings with it in our culture personal anguish, pain, despair. Most children in our culture will now experience at some time in their life a broken home, either a home in which they grew up or that they established. Broken homes lead to instability, lead to personal bitterness. We have an increase in child molestation and abuse in this wonderful new world of freedom that the unbeliever has created. We have a million, more than a million unborn babies that are killed every year. And yet we have the hypocritical audacity to condemn Hitler for the Holocaust, where maybe 6 million Jews were killed. We've killed far more than that of helpless unborn babies. We live in a world of promiscuous and perverse sexual lifestyles. And what's it brought about? An uncontrolled AIDS epidemic. Well, I could go on and on, I really could, but by now I hope you get the point. When the news brings to our attention that somebody who had a religious profession or upbringing went out and killed people or engaged in embezzlement or something like that, I'm not trying to say that should be hidden. I believe in free disclosure and all that, but it really galls me when unbelievers suggest it's religion that creates these problems in our culture. Look all around you and let's start having a full disclosure as well as a free disclosure. Every time we find people that are guilty of these crimes against humanity and compassion and justice and all the rest, let's remind people, well, that's what unbelief produces. After all, it is fair for you to consider when someone raises objections or other lines of consideration against Christianity, it is perfectly fair for you to ask what would be the consequences if what this person is arguing were true? If this is to be accepted, then what would it lead to? What has led to? That's another way of doing a check on whether the argument will fly. Let me give you a minute to kind of recover from that machine gun blast there. The fourth thing in our checklist will be asking what are the preconditions of intelligibility for what this person is Saying, now, I realize that's not the language you use out on the basketball court, but you can understand what I'm getting at. The preconditions of intelligibility is a way of summarizing very neatly, asking what sorts of things would have to be true in order for what this person is saying to make sense. What would have to be true about reality? What would have to be true about the way in which we know things? What would have to be true about ethics and human behavior in order for what this person is saying to make sense at all? And when you ask about the preconditions of intelligibility, what you will be driving at, interestingly, is that unless Christianity were true, this person wouldn't even be able to make sense out of what he or she is saying. Yesterday we looked at a small illustration of that. People will say miracles are impossible. You say, okay, why are they impossible? Because this universe operates in a law like uniform fashion, and say, well, what would have to be true in order to make sense of saying that the universe operates in a uniform law like fashion? And in a minute, when I get into my proof of God's existence, I'll be doing this more detail, but for right now, what I told you is you would have to have a Christian understanding of the universe, a sovereign God who controls all things in a rational and predictable way, in order to say that this universe is just that kind of kind of entity. Therefore, it turns out that those who argue against miracles because everything happens in a law like predictable way, could only make sense of, could only make intelligible those claims if Christianity were first true. The truth of Christianity is the precondition of a uniform universe. And, and a uniform universe is what is necessary to argue against the possibility of miracles. And therefore, in this line of criticism, which I think is the most effective and the most sophisticated in apologetics, you're basically saying you would have to be sitting on your heavenly Father's lap before you would be able to slap your Father's face. The precondition of intelligibility for your argument is that Christianity be true. And yet your argument is calculated to show that Christianity is false. So you could only be successful if you were already unsuccessful. Okay, when I debated the atheists at the University of California, Irvine, remember, I said, obviously, debate. He wants to debate, he wants things to be logical. He wants to look at the arguments we have and decide who has the best arguments. I said, that's fine. Debate presupposes the laws of logic. But what would have to be true for the laws of logic to make sense. What is the. Here's the language that you now understand. What are the preconditions of the intelligibility of the laws of logic? The answer is only if Christianity is true could these abstract, universal and absolute laws make sense. And we're not talking about how they work here. I'm not dealing with what makes it mechanically possible. I'm talking about what makes it intellectually sensible. If you tell me that nothing exists except matter in motion and then tell me the laws of logic are neither matter nor motion, then you can't have the laws of logic, objective reality that checks the way you reason. And so what I said basically, I didn't necessarily use this language, but I can summarize it for you. You all understand it. Now. I basically said when you came to this debate, the preconditions of the intelligibility of you debating are that you accept the Christian worldview. And yet, ironically, you came here to debate against the Christian worldview. So in order for you to generate your argument, you would first have to be wrong in what you're trying to prove to get anywhere in proving it. Now, that is not ordinarily what you are taught when you study apologetics. That's not usually the way you think. And that's one of the reasons I'm so glad you came to this conference, because that's the most powerful form of refutation, asking what are the preconditions of intelligibility? And showing, and this is what I'm going to be doing here in just a moment, showing that the proof of God's existence, very simply. You want to get this in your notes? Trust me. The proof of God's existence, very simply, is that without him you couldn't prove any. Anything. The proof of God's existence is that without him you couldn't prove anything. To put it very simply, God is the precondition of the intelligibility of all lines of proof. Trying to prove things assumes a certain view of the universe, of how men know how what they know and how they should live their lives. And only the Christian worldview can make sense out of those assumptions. Proof itself requires the existence of God to be intelligent. Now, you will probably be a little dismayed to hear that and say, but Dr. Bonson, I know lots of people who prove things who, who say they don't believe in God's existence. I said, that's right. In fact, very interestingly, after I debated Dr. Stein at the University of California, it's a long story, and I know my time is short and Jane's going to tell me that. So I'm going to be very careful here. I won't tell you how we got into it. We began writing to one another after the debate. So I challenged him and pushed him further about what his unbelieving worldview could not account for and so forth. And he tried to give answers. And, well, I'm not saying this because it was just me. I think holes were blown in his arguments. He finally said, okay, I haven't given you adequate answers. But his answer back to me was, either can you? And I said, that's fine. Give me the questions back and I'll answer them and try to give a Christian approach to these sorts of things. Now, in the process of this correspondence and dialogue with Dr. Stein, I explained to him that unless he had a Christian view of the universe, he wouldn't be able to balance his checkbook. He wouldn't be able to drive a car that you cannot make sense out of balancing your checkbook if you're not a Christian. Please put on your thinking caps. You're going to get time out, out a little bit later here. But for right now, think hard. Why would that be? Well, because balancing your checkbook assumes what? First of all, the laws of mathematics. By the way, the laws of mathematics are arbitrary. You can define them the way you want. Then, of course, you don't have to worry about balancing your checkbook. When the bank says, hey, you're out of money, you say, no, I'm not. I've got different laws of mathematics. I'm on the new math, math that says, I've got all the money I want. Okay, you know very well you can't do that. Balancing the checkbook assumes the objectivity, universality and abstract nature of the laws of mathematics. But of course, on Dr. Stein's worldview, there are no universal, abstract and absolute laws of logic, morality, or anything or math. And so here I'm pushing him again. You've already, in a sense, you now know the argument. It's just going to be, what illustration do you want to take? You're going to hear it over and over and over again. But Dr. Stein wrote back and he thought, you know, he was being really smart, I guess he said, well, you may say that I can't balance my checkbook, but I do it all the time. But you see, he doesn't understand the argument at all. And I wrote back and I said, I did not say that. You do not balance your Checkbook. I said you cannot make sense out of balancing your checkbook. Because it's my conviction that you do know this God and therefore you do know that the laws of morality, logic, math, et cetera are absolute. And therefore you can be successful in balancing your checkbook. But you could not be successful, and you couldn't even make sense out of balancing your checkbook if you really believed what you say you do about reality, knowledge and human behavior. So again, don't think that the argument for God's existence is that unbelievers are blithering idiots. They must walk around being illogical and immoral all the time. That's not my point. People are logical. Not completely, but, you know, for the most part, they try to be logical. They do have some kind of morality they live up to, or try to. But the point is, if you're not a Christian Christian, you can't make sense out of that. Or as Dr. Van Til used to put it, we're not saying that unbelievers don't count. They know how to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so forth, and 2 times 2 is 4 and all the rest. We're not saying unbelievers don't count. We're saying they can't account for counting. Yes, they do it, but they can't make sense out of it. I believe that unbelievers make moral judgments and sometimes they're correct, at least formally, outwardly, in their moral judgment. Child molestation is wrong. It's ugly, it's perverse, it's abominable, it's wrong. But when an unbeliever tells me that child molestation is wrong, I have the right to say, can you account for the wrongness of child molestation? I agree with your judgment. You've said the correct thing. But on your worldview, that doesn't make any sense at all. Likewise, unbelievers can do problems in math balancing their checkbook, but they can't make sense out of it. All of this kind of discussion that I've gotten into, looking at what makes intelligible or makes sense out of what the unbeliever knows and does, is a consideration of the preconditions of intelligibility. Now, this ends the lecture that I had hoped that to finish yesterday. Good planning, Dr. Bonson. Anyway, I hope that you will keep this close to you every night before you fall asleep. You will read these things and say, tomorrow I will remember better to consider the arbitrariness, the inconsistencies, the consequences and the Preconditions of the unbelievers argument. That's how we do apologetics effectively. You want to point out that unbelievers are arbitrary. They have no right to say what they're asserting, or they're inconsistent, they're contradicting themselves in one way or another, or the consequences of their arguments are utterly absurd and unwanted, or that the preconditions of their saying these things are such that they would have to affirm Christianity in order to argue against Christianity. Okay, so let's take a mental recess here. We'll all count to five. Clear the register. And now what I'd like to do is illustrate my fourth point by giving you an argument for God's existence. Now, in light of the time that's been indicated that we have, I'll probably. Now I think I can be pretty certain, since this is a uniform universe and knowing past experience, I'll not be able to finish this lecture right now. However, fortunately, this lecture breaks into two parts and hopefully I can get the first part out before you. Essentially, what I'm going to present to you right now is what I give often. It's not the only thing that I do. But when I go to a secular university and some Christian club has asked me to come and to present an argument proving God's existence, that's what I want to do for you. I want to show you, give you an illustration of apologetical argument. It's specifically an illustration of noting that Christianity is the precondition of intelligibility for unbelieving thought and argumentation. However, when you go to a secular university and what's been plastered all over campus are posters that this guy's going to come in and prove the existence of God. Hopefully you can understand that there's a lot of preparatory work that has to be done before you actually get to the argument proper. There are a lot of things that have to be understood about the nature of argumentation, theism versus atheism and so forth. And so those preparatory remarks are what I'll try to cover right now, before we take a break and have dinner and so forth. And then when we come back together tomorrow, I will give you the argument proper, if you will, the consideration that if only if Christianity were true, could we make sense out of our argumentation, our scientific endeavors, and so forth? Time magazine, April 7, 1980, published these. In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anyone could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers. Now I read that because I would imagine that surprises you. But it's true. We've gone a long time in the 20th century in academic circles and in philosophical circles in particular, with the whole idea of theism and Christianity being dismissed and pooh poohed as human. Nobody who's really intelligent can do that. And yet the fact is, there's a great deal of attention being given to arguments for the existence of God these days. And as Time magazine puts it so flippantly, God is making a comeback, as it were. I tell you that because that may surprise you. That's why I've invited you to come to this lecture. Because I think that it's not just a matter of God making a comeback. He's always been here and no one could have argued without him. The crucial question of God's existence points one way or another to the greatest of all illusions. Freud said that the existence of God is the greatest of all illusions. And I think that he's right. One way or another, the question of God's existence is the greatest of all illusions. Because if there is no God, then believers in God hold to imaginary friend. It's a great illusion, like a child who never grew up. But if God does exist, then atheists are living like a child who denies his parents existence. Atheists are guilty of the greatest of all illusions. And so the question before us today is who is living in the world of fantasy? Who is guilty of insanity here? The reason I've come to give this lecture is because I believe in God's existence. And I believe that the existence of God is objectively true. And on top of that I believe it is objectively provable. I've come to prove the existence of God to you today. I don't pretend that this is the only way it can be done. We. We don't have time to cover all the ways God's existence might be proven. But I'll give you one important one. The question of the truth of God's existence has nothing to do with the psychology and the character of those who argue one way or another. We must understand that when we ask about the principle provability of God's existence, we are not talking about the psychology or the character of those who are Christians or those who are atheists. If I happen to have learned algebra from a child molester, is the algebra that I learned invalidated? Obviously not. It may be that those who believe in God have all sorts of terrible things on their morgue record. So if anyone wants to bring those things Up. I have to point out that's logically irrelevant. The question here is the truth of what they believe or the falsity of what they believe, not the character of these people. Moreover, the psychology of those who believe has nothing to do with whether God really exists or not. If Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone out of ins. Out of an insane hatred of his postman father, you follow that. Somebody says, well, I'll tell you why. He invented the telephone. Because he hated his father and his father was a postman. He wanted to put the postal service out of business. If that were true, or if Alexander Graham Bell invented the post. Excuse me, the post office, the telephone with the sordid aim of getting rich and being selfish, would that invalidate the truth of his discoveries and the invention of the telephone? Not at all. Maybe he did hate his father. Maybe he was a guilty, selfish pig. It makes no difference. The telephone was a valid invention. Likewise, the question of God's example existence. The truth of God's existence has nothing to do with the psychology or the character of those who believe in God or those who reject him. To put it very simply, we must all eschew here what is known as the genetic fallacy in logic, that is trying to refute something because of its subjective origin rather than on the merits of the case itself. We must all eschew more broad, broadly ad hominem arguments, arguments against the man rather than against what he believes and the reasons he offers for it. People will tell you the only reason Dr. Bonson or others like him believe in God is because they're projecting God as a father figure. Well, of course, the first thing that can be said is the biblical God is not the type of God we would project. If I were interested in creating a God that would comfort me, I would not create the biblical God. People who say that just don't understand enough about what the Bible says about God and how uncomfortable it is for all of us, even those who believe in him. We did not project the existence of God. Here are some common charges made against theism. People will say theism originates in fear. It originates in wishful thinking. As Freud said, our heavenly Father is just a substitute for our lost earthly father. People will tell you that belief in God grows out of an infantile dependency. They'll tell you that belief in God distracts from a pleasurable life in this world. Yo that belief in God is nothing but a ploy of hypocritical preachers who want to control their audiences and fleece them for their money. That belief in God is a tool for suppressing the manliness of men and their independence. Or really, belief in God is just an agency for oppressing the minorities, the poor and women. I mean, I've actually heard people, people say that, that women's liberation calls for atheism. That's just the ploy of men to keep women in their place. But now it's interesting, all such considerations, all of these charges, you must recognize, are reversible and by the way, are equally subjective and not important. Ultimately, all these charges I brought up are reversible charges. How about if I argue this atheism is false because atheism originates in fear of judgment. Atheism originates in wishful thinking about one's personal independence. So atheism is wrong. Or what have I said? Freud had a bad relation with his biological father and so he took sublimated vengeance on his heavenly father. Since he hated his earthly father, he took it out on his heavenly father, saying, you don't exist. There's a psychological explanation of atheism. Or I might argue atheism is wrong because it prevents living life to its fullest. Those who are atheists are full of angst, a generalized brooding, fear of life and confusion over the meaning of life. Atheism, spirit, misery, confusion. Look at the dissipation of the licentious lifestyle of atheists. Look at the brutality of the French Revolution, what have you. Atheism, you see, prevents enjoying life to its fullest. Or atheism is just a tool for justifying statism. Tyrants don't want there to be a God that they'll have to answer to. And so atheists are just saying there is no God so that we can have a status, tyrannical political order. Atheism is a tool for justifying oppression or pragmatic intolerance. After all, Marx and Lenin, both as Communists, said that their atheism was crucial to their political theory. Now, what I'm getting at here, very simply, is that every snide reference made by atheists to the Inquisition can be matched by the theist with a reference to the French Revolution or Cambodia or what have you. For every snide reference of the atheist to puritan strictures or the witch trials of Salem, the theists can match it with reference to the Gulags of communism of the Marquis de Sade. For every snide reference to the hypocrisy of a Jim Baker or a Jimmy Swaggart, the theist can match it with reference to the debauchery the arrogance and the hypocrisy of atheist intellectuals like Shelley and Byron and Marx and Hemingway and Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre. Let's remember then, we're not talking about psychology here and we're not talking about the character of believers in God or unbelievers. And I grant that as we get around to arguing for God's existence, that the existence of God is a very personal question. It's a personal question in the sense that it touches us all deeply and concerns us all in vital ways especially and the most important aspects of human experience, like the enigmas of who we are as men, personal identity, the enigmas of suffering and evil in this world, love and death. But when I say that the existence of God is a very personal question, I do not mean that it's personal in the sense that it depends on personal feelings. Now some people personally prefer vanilla to chocolate ice cream. Some people prefer Bach to Bon Jovi. Those are personal issues too. So when I say the existence of God is a personal issue, understand that I mean it's an important issue to the important, I mean to the personal issues of life. But it is not personal in the sense that it's just a matter of taste. The lecture that I want to offer you proving the existence of God is not addressed to that personal mindset which William James called tender minded. That is people who are swayed more by personal and subjective factors when they make their philosophical conclusions. People who will look at the utility of that position or the happiness it will bring, or the comfort or the need satisfaction factor and what conclusion they will conclude come to. I am appealing to those who believe in God because not such faith comforts them, but rather such faith is unavoidable as an intellectual necessity. If God is a delusion, it's no comfort to believe in him. Anybody comforted by thinking there's a tooth fairy out there somewhere. The fact that you know there's no tooth fairy is not comforting. Moreover, the lecture that I'm going to offer you and the proof that I'm going to give you will not convince, in fact, will not even attempt to convince those who refuse to believe in God because that would hamper their desires and make them unhappy in this world. The existence of an all knowing God was disgusting to Jean Paul Sartre. He said he couldn't stand the idea of God looking at him all the time. And so in his autobiography he says one day he collared the Holy Spirit in the basement and threw him out. I'm not going to try to appeal to people on that basis. It has no relevance whether you like it or dislike it. I'm going to be arguing not about personal desires, not about personal psychology, not about personal character. I'm going to be appealing to the objective truth of God's existence as an unavoidable precondition for the intelligibility of us proving anything at all. Thank you.