Dr Greg Bahnsen - Practical Apologetics: Islam (Part 5)

Religious in character. Because some people will tell you it's fairly easy to take the Christian worldview and in terms of it, whittle down atheistic or materialistic worldviews to show that they are internally inconsistent or cannot provide the preconditions of intelligibility or what have you. But there are different religions. And so I tried to explain that the various religions of the world can be divided into three categories. You have religions of transcendent mysticism like Hinduism, which is easily refuted in terms of its own story. That is, Hindus are their own worst enemies when they try to defend their faith. In fact, if they could defend their faith, they'd have to give up their worldview in order to do that. And then you have religions of eminent moralism, a number of religions that have their earthly authorities, and these always turn out to be moralistic religions telling you there's a code of behavior by which you need to live or the reason why you have trouble or suffering in this world because you're not living up to that. These religions don't live up to their own standards because it's one thing to tell people they're not living up to a code of behavior, and it's another thing to provide a way of escape from the guilt as well as the personal pollution and bondage of disobedience. And they don't provide that. And so again, they're inadequate, materially inadequate. Then I told you thirdly that there are religions of the world which are counterfeits of Christianity. That isn't to say that they are Christian. It's to say that they are modeled after or they ape. They try to imitate the Christian religion or they are dependent upon it in some historical or conceptual way. Mormonism is an example of polytheistic Christian counterfeits. We have a Unitarian example of counterfeit Christianity in Islam. And that's where we take up our lecture this afternoon. Most people who think that there's an alternative to the Christian approach to apologetics will seize upon Islam as their counterexample. Because one, Islam has a personal God. Secondly, Islam is monotheistic. And thirdly, Islam is. Has a religious book that they say is a revelation from their personal God. And in those respects, then it seems that Islam is an effective or at least deceptively persuasive counterfeit of Christianity. Please keep in mind that Islam dates from almost 600 years after the inception of Christianity. Muhammad was born Muhammad, who claims to be the prophet of Allah, the one living and true God. Allah was. Excuse me. Well, Allah was born too then, I guess. But Muhammad was born in 570 A.D. and he lived in the midst of polytheistic Arabs. And this seemed to distress his moralistic soul. When he was 15 years old, he married a wealthy woman. He began getting revelations from the spirit. He went to a cave and tried to get rid of these voices in his head. He was afraid that he was being afflicted by demons. He took it to be satanic. His wife convinced him that he should submit to these revelations. Eventually he dictated them, and in their dictated form, they became surahs, or what we would call chapters of the Koran. It was about the year 620, I believe, that Muhammad died. Muhammad presented a religion that clashed with his polytheistic culture. He said there is but one God, Allah. He had a very fatalistic view of the world. He said Allah controls everything. There is no free will. And he taught a moralistic understanding of how one gets right with Allah. During his life, when he tried to propagate this faith, he felt it would be good to win over the Jews and the Christians to his side. And so you will find many favorable things said about Judaism and even Christianity in the Koran. Particularly the Koran says that a previous revelation of Allah is found in the Pentateuch, the Law of Moses, as well as in the Psalms of David and the Gospel of Jesus. I think Muhammad will regret trying to make that commercial appeal to Jews and Christians because this will provide us all we need to refute his alleged revelation. But anyway, later, when Jews and Christians resisted him, he became very upset about that. And the Quran does contain endorsements of killing people who will not submit to the word of the Prophet of Allah. And so throughout its history, Islam has been characterized by a violent form of evangelism, what we call evangelism by the soul. A couple of years ago, when I debated a man who was probably the best known Islamic scholar on the west coast, he wanted to make it very clear that the Koran does not support violence and warfare. This has become something of an embarrassment to those who want to, in the 20th century, propagate Islam. And so you're going to see if you have any Muslim friends or you do an evangelism with Muslims that they will continually try to reinterpret or to mitigate the actual teaching of the Qur'. An. It is something of a social embarrassment these days. But for all of that, we still have to take into account the claim that the Koran is the revelation of the one and true God. What are we going to do with that before I tell you real quickly, because most people don't know what Islam is, except it's a social movement in our country. Islam stands for five doctrines. One, Allah is the true God, the one and only true God. Secondly, Allah has sent many prophets to guide men, including Moses, David and Jesus. But Muhammad is the last and the greatest of these prophets of God. Thirdly, they believe that of the four inspired books, the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Gospel of Jesus, and the Quran, obviously the Qur' an is the most important. But Muslims will tell you that Jews and Christians are still people of the book. They do have a verbal revelation from God, although they have corrupted it in the Qur', an, has come to correct these corruptions. Fourth, Islam is characterized by a belief in many intermediary deities or angels, demons. There's a great emphasis upon angiology. Fifth, they believe there's a final day of judgment coming. All men will be resurrected, will be sent to heaven or to hell, and this will be based upon their works. Heaven is described as a place of sensuous delight and gratification, primarily for the males. The descriptions of heaven in the Koran are somewhat humorous. If I were a female, I'm not sure I'd want to go. You're going to end up serving us guys for the rest of eternity in a lot of different ways. We might consider it a form of supernatural pimping, but hey, if that's what Allah said, that's what Allah said, okay? And although this is not considered one of the orthodox or central doctrines of Islam, it is pervasively. It's a doctrine that's found pervasively in Islamic theology. And that's the doctrine of kismet. You may have heard of that. Kismet is fate, the notion that there is really no free will and Allah controls everything that takes place, from the movement of the leaves on the tree down to every decision and every word that you will make or every word you will speak. Okay? There are five pillars to being a Muslim. Five pillars. I've given you their five basic doctrines, plus kismet. The five pillars are to recite Islam's creed. And Islam's creed is easy. It's not as though you have to memorize the larger catechism of the Westminster divines. Here it is. There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. That's it. Secondly, you must practice prayer five times a day, and that has to be prayer oriented toward Mecca, their capital. Thirdly, you must practice almsgiving as the highest form of good works. Fourthly, you must recognize and practice the month of fasting, Ramadan. That is not a form of noodles that you eat. That is, they have an interesting version of fasting. If I weren't short on time, I'd love to talk about some of these things. Just like their view of heaven being rather sensuous and pimpish, their view of fasting amounts to, you're not supposed to eat when the sun is up. Now, you can gorge yourself when the sun is down, mind you, but when the sun is up, then you fast. But it's always physical fasting. You can drink anything you want when the sun is up. Fifthly, for everyone who is able, a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your life is required. And then sixthly, I know we call these the five pillars, but the sixth pillar, it's always five plus one. Five doctrines plus one. Five pillars plus one. The sixth pillar is jihad, the practice of holy war. When a particular Amman, a particular holy man, has a revelation from Allah to the effect that his people must defend themselves or must purge the earth of the scourge of satanic people like Christians or the United States or whatever it may be, then the Amman can call for holy war. And a version, a particular version of holy war is putting a ban on an individual. Now, that has happened in your own lifetime. You know that Salman Rushdie lives in hiding. He wrote something called the Satanic Verses, in which allegedly the Islamic religion is either mutilated or insulted. And for that reason, he now has a ban on his head. Any godly Muslim that runs across him, not only may that it has permission to, but is under moral obligation to kill him. Again. That's one of those things where I have this debate with Dr. Ziddiqi, and he's trying to make Islam, you know, urbane and 20th century, and we really believe in peace and all that sort of thing. And then something like this happens, makes it so hard for these guys to debate. Okay, I only do that because I'm afraid that many of you are not aware of what the. What the actual character of the teaching of the Koran is. You mustn't be led astray by those who say, well, you Christians have your Bible, the Muslims have the Koran, and it's just like a Mexican standoff. You know what a Mexican standoff is? Neither one of you are going to be refute or destroy each other, because everything you say they can counter, everything they say you can counter, and that's it. But what did I teach you about doing worldview Apologetics, we don't simply look at bare or formal authority claims. It's like, I've got my Bible, I've got my God, his name is Jehovah, yea, for my team. And so somebody else says, well, but we've got our God, his name is Allah, yea, for our team. And now what do you do? No, we compare the actual content of our worldview to the actual content of the worldview presented by our Muslim friends. And so let's look at the Koran and find out something more about it. You need to be aware that the Koran claims to be a confirmation of the Old Testament law and the New Testament Gospel. Which is to say, as I already indicated earlier telegraphed to you, when Muhammad attempted to appeal to Jews and Christians by saying that what he was saying is nothing but a continuation, Moses, David and Jesus, he really gave himself a huge intellectual headache to deal with. Because if the Koran is the confirmation of previous revelation, and if that previous revelation teaches, as I have already told you in terms of talking to Mormons, if that previous revelation teaches that subsequent additional revelation must conform to what God has previously said, then all you need to do on the Qur' An's own basis to refute it is to show conflicts between what the Bible teaches and what the Quran teaches. And that is not difficult to do at all. Let me give you a few that are embarrassing. In Surah 19, what we call Chapter 19 of the Quran that deals with the virgin birth, we read Mary, described as the sister of Aaron. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is described as the sister of Aaron. Now you Old Testament scholars out there can figure out how that mistake was made. What is the name of the sister of Aaron? Miriam. Right. So Muhammad, living in a pervasively oral culture, confused Mary with Miriam. And so this comes as a revelation of this perfect God, Allah. Well, it's a huge historical embarrassment. In fact, it's interesting to me, when I have to write or debate on Muslim subjects, I always go back and check the latest Muslim scholars for the newest rendition of how they deal with that kind of embarrassment. According to the Koran, Jesus was not crucified. Come as a surprise. Jesus couldn't be crucified. He's a prophet of God. Actually what took place is that Judas was substituted for Jesus and people confused them. Yeah, right. Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, the Qur' an says that it would be absolutely wrong to worship Jesus or to call him the Son of God. God cannot have a son. And so what you have in the Qur' An Essentially is a denial of the deity of Jesus Christ. That's why I said that Islam is a unitarian religion. They denied the Trinity. They said there's only one person that is God and Jesus is not that one person. Jesus is just the prophet of God. And according to the Koran, anybody who says that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are each God is teaching polytheism, teaching three gods. Now of course that is not what teach, that's not what the Bible teaches. Because the Bible says there's but one God, the Shema of Israel, the confession of faith of Israel. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one. That's what makes the development of the worship of Jesus in the New Testament so fascinating. It's monotheists who said Jesus is God. They didn't give up their monotheism, but they somehow believed that this one who had appeared in the flesh was the very God that they worshiped. Nevertheless, the Quran presents it differently. According to it, what we are saying is that there are three gods and they utterly deny the deity of Jesus. All right, so let me put this all together. We just refuted the Quran, didn't we? And we didn't refute the Quran by saying yea for our team. Your team stinks. Needs deodorant. What we said is according to your teaching, Allah, the living and true God, has revealed himself already in the, in the law, in the Psalms and the Gospel. And what the Koran teaches conflicts with what we read in previous revelations. So the Koran cannot be a revelation of the living and true God. Now if you were a Muslim, how would you try to get out of that fix? What do the Mormons do? That's an old trick. In fact, it's boring. It's so old. It turns out that when they said they honored the law, the Psalms and the Gospel, what they really meant is the law, the Psalms, the Gospel as corrected by the Koran. Which is to say, it was rather deceptive to claim that this is that the Qur' an is continuous with these. Because you really must use the Quran to go back and change them in order to say that there's really continuity. So now the point is you have to ask, do you have any manuscript evidence for your revisions of God's previous revelation? Guess how many they have. You don't need any fingers to count. Zero. You know why? Because we effectively, we Christians, effectively have perverted the original revelation of God. There is no manuscript evidence they can appeal to. The only thing you can depend on now is the Quran to go back and Correct it. Kind of tidy and convenient, don't you think? No evidence of this claim. Remember what I said about the Mormons when they said you must use the Book of Mormon, the pearl of great price, to correct previous revelation as we now have it. And again I said, what is the manuscript evidence for that? It was the same number. It's called the empty set. In math. There is no evidence. I didn't write it down here. But what's the first thing you look for when you're arguing with somebody who has contrary considerations or some reasoning against the faith? You look for arbitrariness. Exactly. And that's precisely the problem here. It's utterly arbitrary to make that claim. But let me tell you a little bit more about their arbitrariness. There may be a psychological explanation to help you with this. This comes up often. It came up when I debated Dr. Zadiki. Muslims will say, well, we have a superior revelation because ours doesn't have any variance in it, that is any textual variance. Every copy of the Quran is identical with every other copy of the Qur'. An. Now that in itself is overblown advertisement. It's just not true. But nevertheless, on that claim, what they're saying is, but you Christians, you have this Bible that has all these different texts and there are all these different conflicts. Now they call them conflicts. Usually in scholarly circles they're called variants. Nevertheless. Oh, I don't know what the number is, but you know, two, three thousand variants, you know, between the text that we have of the Bible. And so then Muslims will present that to you. And if you've not done any reading and textual criticism, you may say, well, that, that is a little embarrassing. They've got this perfect textual tradition and we've got these variants which they call conflicts. When I debated Dr. Siddiqui, I invited him to present even one of those variants as a conflict, a doctrinal conflict. I said, name one doctrine of the Christian faith that is refuted or in which you have a contradiction presented in the textual traditions. Well then he just wanted to remind me of the large number of variants, which is, of course, he didn't want to take the invitation. There are no conflicts in our doctrinal, excuse me, in our textual traditions, they are only variant readings. Nevertheless, people say, what do I do about that? It does seem to be embarrassing. Well, you need to know that in the fourth or fifth caliphate, the caliphs were the leaders of the Muslims after Muhammad died. Died. And in the fourth or fifth, the caliphate, Oman, all versions of the Koran were Collected and variant readings were destroyed. That is to say they made a recension of their text. They gathered everything they could destroyed the variants. That is they chose a particular tradition to be the one that will be the perfect one. And they destroyed all the competition. And they did that by the way, upon pain of death. If anyone would not turn variants, that person would be killed. And so I think what you need to point out is, well of course we could do a recension of the Bible too. Everyone turn in their variant traditions and if you don't, we'll kill you and then we'll produce the miracle of the Bible with no variant readings. Actually though, it makes biblical study somewhat more complicated. I don't think it shakes anybody's faith or destroys the church in its life. But the fact that we have variants makes Bible study a little more difficult. But it is also a testimony to the historical, not reliability, but the authenticity of the Bible as a text. That is to say, we don't have the artificiality of having to go through and destroy any alternatives that come up. We know that when people copy things they make mistakes. And yet for all of that, God has done a wondrous job of preserving the biblical text. Okay, so when Muslims. Let me come back to my main point. When Muslims suggest that Christians really destroyed all the alternatives and that's why the Qur' An's necessary to correct the theology of the Bible, my guess is that's just a form of projection. You all know in psychology what projection is. We have a tendency as human beings to project on other people our own sins and foibles, weaknesses, inadequacies. And since the Muslims are guilty of this very procedure, it's not surprising I suppose that that's what they poised on us. But again, what is the evidence for it? None. Okay, second problem with the Qur', an, not only do we have these contradictions with previous revelation, but there are contradictions within the Qur' an as well. Here's the most important one. The Quran teaches that Allah that there is nothing in human experience that can be likened to Allah. Allah is so transcendent, so beyond the daily experience of human beings, that nothing in human experience can be likened to him. Well, I guess. Wait a minute, Wait, wait. I guess I couldn't say likened to him because him her distinctions come from human experience, don't they? But on the other hand, we don't want to say liken to it because personal and impersonal distinctions come from human experience too. Well, it's just very difficult to say this Isn't it? It's worse than that. If nothing in human experience can be likened to Allah, then nothing in human language can be said, which is a fair comparison. If that is true, what follows from that? Some of you have been listening to much literary criticism today. You're falling asleep. What follows from this is nothing in human language can be said then of Allah, because everything in human language being based upon human experience is going to be inadequate. Okay, and then what follows from that? If nothing in human language is adequate to speak of Allah, what is the Quran exactly? The Koran could not be what it claimed to be. If what the Quran says is true, that's pretty tidy self contradiction. That's why I want to go over it again. Qur' an says nothing in human experience can be likened to Allah. But then in that case no human language is adequate to speak of Allah because all human language is based upon human experience. In which case there can't be any revelation in human language of Allah. And yet that's what the Quran claims to be. So if the Quran is true, the Quran must be false. Kind of like the Barber of Seville. That's probably what you thought of right away, right? You know, the Barber of Seville shaves all and only those who don't shave themselves. So the question naturally is this is one of those paradoxes of self reference. Does the Barber of Seville shaved himself? What did I tell you? The Barber of Seville shaves only those who don't shave themselves. And he shaves all of the people who don't shave themselves. But if he doesn't shave himself, since he shaves all those who don't shave themselves, then he does shave himself. So if he doesn't, he does. But if he does shave himself, since he shaves only those who don't shave themselves, if he does shave himself, he doesn't shave himself. So if he does, he doesn't. And if he doesn't, he does. And so it is with the Koran. If it is true, it is false. If it is true what the Quran tells us about Allah, then the Quran could not be what it claims to be. For the sake of time, I'm going to skip the rest of the refutation. I think we said enough to see what a worldview comparison would look like. We're not just saying you've got your God named Allah, we have our God named Jehovah. And what can we say? We say, no, what is your worldview? Say? What is our worldview Say. And which will salvage rationality, which has interpretations, things of that nature. But there's also a material weakness. In fact, it's a very great weakness in Islam. And I chose in my debate, although what I just brought up I used as my final hammer blow against my opponent. But my presentation was primarily to this effect, partly because the college had decided to have a debate between all three peoples of the Book. So I had to debate simultaneously an Orthodox Jew and an Islamic scholar. And I won't do that again, not because it can't be done. It's just that it's too unwieldy. You want to corner these people, you not let them out. And so when you got two opponents, it becomes fairly difficult. But here's what I thought I would do. Since the Orthodox Jew grants the law of Moses and the Islamic scholar grants the law of Moses, I said, okay, well, then we'll just do our debate on the basis of the law of Moses. So I offered what is a Christian interpretation of such things as circumcision, animal sacrifice, the temple, so forth. And I just called on the Jew and the Muslim to give their alternative interpretations. Well, even though it was difficult to go two days with two different opponents going different ways, the interesting thing is neither one of them wanted to argue Old Testament theology with me. Now, that may surprise you. You say, well, maybe the Muslim wouldn't, because they just tip their hat to the Old Testament. They don't really follow it, so it might not be too surprising. But then again, since they claimed that Moses was inspired, they better have some explanation for these bloody rites and for this Shekinah, glory, and all that sort of thing. So when he refused to do that, in essence, he destroyed himself. But you'll think the Orthodox Jew, certainly he wanted to go to the Old Testament. It's at this point that a little P.S. maybe should be given. Don't be misled into thinking that Jews are people of the Old Testament. Yes, I realize there's the window dressing there. They will honor Moses. But the problem with the Jews today, even the Orthodox Jews, is the same problem Jesus had with the Jews when he walked on earth. They say they follow Moses, but instead they follow the traditions of the fathers. And if you. I told you I was on the Dennis Prager show a couple times where they have the Roman Catholic, the Jew, and the Protestant all there. And again, Jewish scholars appear on this program, and then this. This Jewish teacher that I debated at the college, and in every case it's the same. They are interested in debating the Talmud, which is commentary upon Moses. Actually, it's commentary upon commentary upon commentary upon on Moses really is, you know, it's like Rabbi so and so said, which must mean. And then if that is the interpretation, Rabbi so and so adds to that interpretation further elaboration. And it's really a wild system, the Talmud. But that's what Jews are committed to. They're committed to Talmudic interpretation, not to going directly to the Old Testament. And I had an interesting confirmation of that during this two day conference they had on the People of the Book at the college. We had a luncheon where we had to go and sit down with the students on the student council and the debate team and also the other people that we were debating have lunch. And so, you know, that's not the time to try to win points in the debate and all. We're just trying to be polite. And one of the young ladies at the table asked the Jewish scholar where I was eating about intermarriage between Orthodox Jews and those who are not Orthodox Jews, and particularly between Jews and Gentiles. So he went on to give an interesting answer as to why he doesn't support intermarriage. He talked about people who don't share a common outlook, don't usually get along, so it won't be a happy marriage. And he said, you know, it's like smokers and non smokers don't usually, you know, marry and so forth. And I thought that was all interesting. And here I'm thinking Dr. Bonson will be the kind and charitable Christian and I'll throw in my 2 cents worth. And I said, and I take it it's for more than prudential reasons. You don't believe that people should be unequally yoked. Right. He looked at me and he said, excuse me. I said, you know, don't be unequally yoked. He said, what are you referring to? Don't plow with an ox and an ass together. The law of Moses, remember? And I'm not kidding. There was the biggest look of bewilderment on this fellow's face. He thought for a minute and he said, I guess I always thought that was about agriculture. This is a Jewish scholar. I didn't do that on purpose. I didn't try to embarrass him. I was shocked. And I said, you know, that Godly Jew Paul said, don't be unequally yoked together. That's why Christians are not supposed to marry non Christians and so forth. And he was just bewildered by that. They are not interested in the law of Moses. They're not interested in The Old Testament, that's window dressing. That's pr. What they are really interested in is the Talmud. Okay, so keep that in mind. Nevertheless, the material inadequacy of Islam as well as alleged Orthodox Judaism is that it cannot deal with the theology of the Old Testament. Many times you'll use it as an apologetical technique, and it's fine as far as it goes. A reference to fulfilled prophecy. The Old Testament talks about certain things taking place, specifically about the Messiah and what will happen in the life of the Messiah, the character of the Messiah. And then we look at the New Testament and Jesus matches these things. And so there's an argument, and it is one of the evidences of the divine inspiration of Scripture. However, those who don't want to accept that evidence can easily say, well, these aren't really prophecies or it's just an attempt to write the life of Jesus to fit the. The preconceived ideas and things like that. However, Jews and Muslims cannot deal with the theology of the Old Testament, not just the prophecies of the Old Testament. They can't explain why there was a temple where there was a holy of holies, where there had to be blood sacrifice, the giving up of animal life as a substitute for sinners. Why is it that people that males had to be circumcised when they were born if they were going to be part of God's covenant? Covenant things of that nature are part of the Jewish and the Islamic worldview because they claim the inspiration of Moses. But then when all is said and done, they aren't willing to live by the theology of the Old Testament, much less to understand it. Okay, this has been added to the lectures essentially to show you that when people appeal to worldviews which are religious, you're not on any shakier ground than when you talk to people who say they're materialist, existentialist, atheist, whatever it may be. In the end, we compare worldviews and we're checking for arbitrariness inconsistencies in the worldview of the presentation. You're looking at the consequences of the worldview. And finally, does it provide the preconditions of intelligibility? Now, on your question cards, a couple of them have the same general question in mind. And I think this is the place to bring it up, because after all, Muslims reject the deity of Jesus. So one of your questions was, most of the people that I talk to or debate against have no problem with the belief in God. It is the belief that Jesus is The Son of God. How can I prove that? Or another one says, what about the man who knows there's a God but does not accept Jesus? Now, of course, I'd feel really good as your instructor if at the end of the week, you now know how to deal with that particular problem. The very setting up of this question betrays the difficulty, because when people say, oh, I'll accept that there's a God, but now I want to know about Jesus. Is he the Son of God or is Jesus divine? What they are doing essentially is dividing the Christian faith up into a series, series of different propositions, each one of which needs to be verified on its own. But I've taught you all week long. We deal with worldview as if I can put it crassly, as a package deal. Worldviews are not accepted. We don't accept Christianity book by book, line by line, claim by claim. We accept the Bible as God's revelation. That's where we start. We believe that men fell into sin. God has taken the initiative to approach man, to not just offer, but to sovereignly give salvation. He has given his word to accomplish that, and his Son and his Spirit. And this all hangs together. And we now, through the providence of God in history, have received something, a book called the Bible. The people may not like that. They may say, well, why begin with the Bible? We say, well, according to the Bible's own presentation, here's what happened in history, and we have this book now. That's where we're starting. And we would like to compare the worldview of the Bible to all the competitors, atheism, existentialism, Islam, Mormonism, whatever it may be. And so you don't need to defend the deity of Jesus Christ as a separate proposition, because what you're saying is, what I'm defending is the Christian worldview. That is what the Bible presents. And now it's just the question, does the Bible present Jesus as divine? Of course it does. Let me back up and start again. Somebody comes to you and says, well, I'm willing to say in some vague, generic sense, there's a God. That I'm not so sure Jesus is God. Then you need to do some analysis and say, well, of course there are all sorts of religious conflicts in the world. We can see that you have not just different religions, that is, people who have incorporated themselves with a unified point of view or somewhat unified point of view, and all of those. But you have all these different individuals who've come up with their own ideas of God and how they're supposed to live and so forth. So everyone has to grant there's a great deal of confusion. And not only is there confusion, there must be sin. Want to use another word, that's fine. The Christian word is sin. But if there is truth about religion and people have differing ideas, not everybody can be right. And those who are not right are in error, in sin, in rebellion, disobedience, whatever you want. Now if men are sinful, if they're in disobedience, and that's evident enough confusion over religion, then how will God correct that? How could God correct that? Somebody might say, well maybe God would have an opinion poll to decide how he should be and how men. Everybody's looking at me like, are you crazy? Of course opinion poll won't work because the whole problem is that men are in and of themselves unable to know what God is like. They have differing opinions and many of those men have got to be wrong. Maybe all of them are wrong. Now if God's going to correct the sin problem and the confused problem we have, it's going to have to be by his own self revelation. The only way salvation can come, a deliverance from this confusion and disobedience is by God taking the initiative. And therefore, if man knows God at all, it will only be on the basis of God's self revelation. We must know God as he reveals himself. Now I'm driving to a particular conclusion which if I would have started with may have seemed offensive, but I hope you'll understand it's a philosophical necessity. If we only know God as he reveals himself to those who are in sin, confusion, disobedience, disagreement and so forth, then we can only know God through his revelation in Scripture. Jesus says in Matthew 11:27, no man knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals him. Whoa, now, you don't want to say that at a cocktail party. Jesus, you're not going to be welcome if you're not willing to get along with Gautama and Muhammad and all the rest. I mean, you just can't come in here and say you're the only one who knows. This is an interesting thing. When people say I'm not sure what to make of the deity of Jesus, you have to tell them. Consider the alternative. Because the only Jesus we know, the Jesus that's revealed in the pages of Scripture, is a man who was either who he said he was, the soul revelation of God, the only way back to God, the Son of God, the Savior of men, or a lunatic. Because you know that if you went to a party, if Dr. Bonson went to a party and said, oh, by the way, I thought you'd all like to know that any of you who reject my words, my words are going to judge you on the final day. Excuse me. Well, what I mean by that is that I'm the judge of all mankind. In fact, I created the world. I created all of you. You're all answerable to me. The Jews didn't particularly like these claims of Jesus. In fact, you'll read in the Bible, you read John the eighth chapter, John the tenth chapter. When Jesus made claims to being the son of God, they knew what he was saying. Jesus wasn't saying, hey, we're all children of God, and I'm one of those children. They knew he was claiming to be the unique son of God. So the Bible says they took up stones to kill him and it didn't work. That's an amazing thing how one man walks out through a hostile crowd that wants to stone him to death. The only Jesus that we know is the one who says, if you know God, you know him only through me. He's the. I'm the only avenue back to God. And so you're going to have to accept Jesus on his own, say so on his authoritative claims, or you're going to have to say, this man is not worthy of my respect. CS Lewis had it right. You know, you can't have Jesus as a good teacher. That's excluded if you know what he taught because he was a megalomaniac, if he wasn't the son of God. So remember, we do not defend the Christian faith as a series of separate propositions. We defend the whole package. We're saying, men are in sin. God in his grace is pursued. Man has provided a revelation of himself. And what we are defending is the entire Bible. And there's no way around it. In the Bible, Jesus is presented as the very son of God, as God himself. And so in a sense, we want to throw it back on the unbeliever. We say, how can you say that there's a God? How do you know there's a God if you don't know it through Jesus? And if you're accepting the Bible, how can you accept the Bible and not accept the deity of Jesus? Because it's so plain on the pages of Scripture. The unbeliever is being. What's the first thing on our list? Arbitrary. Exactly. Now, you didn't see that immediately, but if you look at the way the question is posed, do A little analysis. You realize that what the unbeliever wants you to do is to approach things in a one by one fashion. And so I'm going to say something. Well, I think I'm going to say something in three minutes about the one by one myth. The one by one myth. You want to put that in your notes? The one by one myth is the idea that people accept beliefs on a one by one in a one by one fashion. That is that we come to our beliefs singularly. That is such a pervasive idea, both in common sense. People think that, and even in scholarly circles that it needs to be exploded. The beliefs that people hold are always connected to other beliefs by relations pertaining to linguistic meaning, logical order, evidential dependence, causal explanation, indexical conception and self conception. And I can't explain every one of those, but put it down in your notes this. The beliefs that we hold are always connected to other beliefs. So let's take somebody who says, I see a ladybug on the rose. That looks like the sort of thing you can accept or reject all by itself. Ralph, could you slow your clock down a little bit? Okay, just stop putting those things up there. Somebody asserts, I see a ladybug on a rose. That person is affirming and assuming not just one proposition, but a whole slew of propositions, a number of things simultaneously. Some of those things will be rather obvious, for instance, about the usage of English words. To say I see a ladybug on the rose assumes the meaning of certain English words also. It assumes something about one's personal identity. It assumes something about a perceptual event. It assumes something about the categories of bugs and flowers and physical relations and so forth. But there are other assumptions as well, contained in I see a ladybug on the rose. These are much more subtle things about one's linguistic competence, one's entomological competence, botanical competence, the normalcy of one's eyes, the normalcy of one's brain stem, theories of light refraction, shared grammar, shared semantics, the reality of the external world, the laws of logic. And I can't go on and on because Ralph won't let me. Nevertheless, the network, the network, hear me. Of all of these beliefs together encounters the tribunal of our sense experience. Now, when a conflict is detected between this network of beliefs and one sense experience, you realize that some kind of adjustment must be made in one's beliefs in order to restore consistency. But you cannot determine in advance which of those beliefs somebody will give up when a conflict arises real quickly. Before I get Cut off here. Don't you touch that thing. I say, I see a ladybug on the rose. One of my friends says, oh no, you're wrong about that. Now what is it that's different between me and the person who is contradicting me? The inclination is to think, well, he looked and he didn't see a ladybug on the rose. And that is one of the possibilities. But that's the simplistic one. There are other possibilities too. There may be that there's some difference of opinion as to what ladybugs are or how English words are used. There may be some problem with light refraction, as I indicated, some view about the laws of logic and things of that nature. Or if I'd like to make two or three very quick points about other things that you will hear contrary to the Christian worldview. And I'm going to make them quickly because I think after the illustrations we've had this week, it shouldn't be all that difficult to understand what's going on. And then I'd like to run through the cards that you've given me, make sure I give an answer to all of them. And then we're going to look at Bertrand Russell and you're going to tell me, by the way, when you read Bertrand Russell, did you find this guy really overwhelming? He's one of the most well regarded philosophers of the 20th century and this is what he wrote for why he couldn't be a Christian. It's pretty sad. Anyway, more on that later. One of the other objections that you'll hear against our Christian worldview is that it's impossible for us to know anything about the supernatural because the unbeliever will say everything that we know is based upon our natural experience. Or if you will, if you know anything, it's because you observe it, you hear it, taste it, smell it, touch it, whatever, that all that we can know is restricted to our senses. And on that basis there couldn't be any knowledge of the supernatural, because the supernatural is not something you taste, you see, you hear, you touch, whatever. Although that is perhaps one of the most pervasive philosophical prejudices against Christianity and against any transcendent religion. By now I trust you can tell that there's a philosophical self contradiction involved in anybody who asserts that. Because the person who was saying you can't know anything unless it's based on observation needs to tell you how they know that. Here's a premise. You can only know what is based on observation. Now how do you know that premise well, according to the theory of the unbeliever, it can only be known if known at all, by observation. But no one can by observation see what the limits of knowledge are, much less make any kind of universal declaration. Because nobody has observed everything. So not only has it, not only is it the case that nobody observes everything, the unbeliever can't observe anything about the nature of knowledge and its limits. Let's come back and see how this all comes together. I realize we're doing this three or four minutes, but that's all it takes. Once you learn how to do presuppositional thinking, the unbeliever says you can only know those things you observe. You say, well, how do you know that? If he says, well, not by observation, you say, well, then you don't know it on your own presuppositions. You couldn't know what you're stating to be your presupposition. A second form of rejection of the Christian worldview is found in those unbelievers who say, I can't ever accept Christianity because it's based on authority. Or it'll sometimes be said, you believe these things on faith. If we had time, I have an entire hour lecture on the different meanings of people saying you Christians believe things on faith. When you hear somebody say that, always say, what do you mean by that? Make sure you get that clear. But when all is said and done, it comes down to this. I think I won't go along with the Christian worldview because you have to accept the Bible or God's claims on faith, meaning on his own authority. You don't look dependent verification of what this alleged God has said in this alleged revelation called the Bible. You accept things on authority, you accept things by faith. And so Anthony Flew, a famous non Christian philosopher still alive today in his book entitled God and Philosophy, writes, an appeal to authority here cannot be allowed to be final and overriding. For what is in question precisely is the status and authority of all religious authorities. It is inherently impossible for either faith or authority to serve as themselves the ultimate credentials revelation. Okay, now if you had a professor who said something like that, I guarantee you those who are unbelievers, and probably most believers too, sadly in the class, would say, oh, that sounds so reasonable. Of course we can't accept the authority of the Bible on authority, because that's the very thing that we're debating. That's the question, does the Bible have authority? So you can't accept the Bible on authority. And even though it seems reasonable, consider the Alternative. Imagine just for argument's sake, Mr. Unbeliever, that there is a God who is the creator, who is sovereign, who is personal, and so forth. And this God comes to man with a revelation of himself. Now what is it that is less than God, that is part of the created order, part of man's thinking or reasoning that would have sufficient authority, universality to verify what God himself said? Well, upon analysis, nothing could do that. Because you see, you might come with a book. I'm not going to take any real ones, but let's say you have the Zucchini book of religion. Okay, you say this is the word of God. And how do you know that? Because it has the best zucchini recipes available. Somebody say, well, but I don't like zucchini, so obviously that's not the word of God. Somebody else says, oh well, I've got the book that is the, is the real revelation of God. Well, how do you know it's the revelation of God? Because it gives me permission to live with my girlfriend out of wedlock and that's exactly what I want to do. So I said, well, you're just judging these revelations based on what you like, on your preconceived ideas of what religion should be like or what God would say. And if you stop and think about it, if you're not brain dead by this time at the end of the week, you realize that every human proposal is going to be subject to the same criticism. And how do we know that this book that you're proposing is the word of God? And whatever the person says, because I think it's logical or because I like it, zucchini recipes or it allows me to live the way I want to live, whatever it is, from intellectual to moral, the next thing you're going to say is, oh, well, then you're saying that you know in advance what to expect from God. And since this book tells you what you want, then you're calling it divine. But who has the right? Is it the zucchini approach? The sexual license approach, the logical coherence approach? What is the mark that this book is a book from God if we do not accept that God alone can authorize his revelation? The alternative is to say we're left with the differing authorities, which is to say non authorities of men. And so the devastating moral critique of the professor who says we can't accept a book on its own say, so given what the alternative is, is to say we could never accept a book on the authority of God himself. But now If God is God. If God is God, just think about the concept of God. If God is God, whose authority or what authority could be higher or more authoritative than his? The answer is none. Do we have all the pieces of the puzzle now on the table when we put them together, there couldn't be any authority higher than God's. And human beings, whether they like zucchini sex or logic, human beings don't have the authority to determine what God might say in advance or what God would be like. So if somebody says, I cannot accept the Bible on its own ultimate authority, what he's basically saying is, I won't ever accept a revelation from God of any sort as any proposal made by human beings. It's not based on God's ultimate authority. It's just one more of the zucchini sex or logic options. In fact, God, if he is God, could only reveal himself with final authority. Now, I know you're not accustomed to thinking this way and people will not encourage you to think this way, but all I'm getting at is that when someone says, I want to accept the Bible on faith, meaning I want to accept its authority on its own authority, to say, so what they're getting at is I've got a different worldview, I have a different ultimate authority than you. By the way, Anthony Flew has a different ultimate authority. Every unbeliever has a different ultimate authority. And so if they want to accept our ultimate authority on our ultimate authority, say so. Okay, I hear your logic. You think that's circular. You think that's begging the question. What's the alternative? How do you accept your ultimate authority? And guess what? They're on the horns of the dilemma. Their ultimate authority will either be accepted on its own authority, which they've called begging the question, circular reasoning. If we have to rule that out, they have to rule that out. So they've refuted themselves where they are arbitrary or their ultimate authority is going to be verified by something other than their ultimate authority, which is just to say they're guilty of contradiction because their ultimate authority is not ultimate. A third kind of thing you'll hear from a philosophical angle against your Christian worldview is that Christians are tenacious in defending their beliefs, so much so that it appears that we won't allow anything, we won't allow anything to definitively falsify what we hold. So when someone brings up counter evidence or counter considerations to Christianity, we always find Christians defending the faith, defending the faith, defending the faith. Now, Anthony flew, in the mid-1950s, wrote an article about the meaninglessness of religious language. And the argument of that article has perhaps become the most, in our generation, the most popular or pervasive attack on not just Christianity but any religion. Because the point is, since you don't allow anything to contradict or to falsify your Christian faith, you're not making any claims at all. They're empty, they're vacuous, they're utterly meaningless. He tells the story of a man. Well, two men who are going through a forest, and they come across a patch in the forest that has some flowers, but has a lot of weeds and other sorts of things. And one of the explorers says, oh, look, a gardener tends this part of the forest. The other man says, oh, no, there's no gardener. No, you know, it's just some accident. There's some flowers here and so forth, but there's all this other stuff. And so they pitch camp and they wait overnight for the gardener to appear. The next morning, the gardener doesn't come. And so the skeptic says, see, there's no gardener. But what's the believer going to say at that point? The believer says, oh, well, the gardener didn't happen to come today, but he'll come. So they wait for a week, still no gardener. Now the believer says, yes, the gardener apparently comes subtly at night when we're asleep and tends this part of the forest. So they set up barbed wire, they electrify the barbed wire, they get hound dogs, never hear anything from the dogs at night, never any shrieks from people getting electrified going over the barbed wire, so forth. So finally the skeptic says, see, there you have it. There is no gardener that comes. The believer says, oh, yes, there's a gardener that comes, but he's invisible. He's invisible and intangible. And now the skeptic says, and this is the point of the parable, what's the difference between this eternally elusive, invisible, intangible gardener for which we never have any evidence and no gardener at all, and by this flew says, that's the problem with religious claims. People defend them to the hilt, and they empty them of all content or substance. And it. Well, his famous remark is, religious claims died the death of a thousand qualifications. And so basically, he looks at us as Christians, what we've been doing this whole week, coming up with defense after defense after defense. And he says, see, you just keep backing up, defending, doing this. Obviously, there's no substance to what you're saying, because you don't allow that anything would falsify it. And I Can't expect in the short amount of time I've had you to call for a great deal of philosophical subtlety from you. I'm just going to spoon feed you at this point. What you didn't see taking place here, and you would have to if you're going to be sharp, is that flu has actually moved from one kind of consideration, that is the nature of the person defending a belief, to the nature of the belief itself. It is true that a person who holds that there's elusive, non tangible, invisible gardener probably has so qualified his statement that nothing will ever be able to reject it even in theory. And so he's not making any claim at all. But that's not what Christians do. He's moved from Christians being tenacious about defending their views, therefore not willing to have themselves be falsified. He's moved from that to the premises we defend being unfalsifiable. But the premises that we defend as Christians can certainly be falsified. Paul says if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, our faith is vain. And so we have to grant in theory, if someone were to find the bones of Jesus, that would be it. Christianity would be over. It would be refuted. The fact that we believe that a claim, the fact that we have a claim or a belief that's historical in nature, that is in principle falsifiable doesn't mean that we're going to stand by and let it be falsified though. Because I'm committed to Jesus as the Son of God and I believe the Bible. When people bring up their counter evidences, I'm going to defend it. I'm going to defend it, I'm going to defend it. But there's a difference between me resisting false ability and the nature of my claims being unfalsifiable. Nod your heads if you you're with this, okay? And so over this generation and philosophy of religion, flu has been somewhat. People who want to find problems with Christianity will hold on to these things anyway. But Flew has been somewhat dismissed because in the end all he pointed out is that religious beliefs are held tenacious. That isn't to say that they're meaningless, it's just to say that believers tend to be real tough about giving up their beliefs. And lo and behold, guess what? Guess who else is tenacious about holding onto his presuppositions. Anthony Flew. Not just Anthony Flew, every unbeliever. In fact, it's impossible for people not to be tenacious when it comes to their ultimate authority and commitment in life. That's why it's called ultimate. And so if we were to follow Flew, okay, we're going to do our little critique of him. Now, if what Flew says is to be believed, anybody that's tenacious and holding on to an ultimate conviction is holding on to something meaningless, then Flew himself is meaningless in what he's saying. In fact, all human beings are meaningless in what they're saying and we can't know anything at all. So if Christianity is falsified based on his or made meaningless based on his approach, he's actually destroyed the possibility of knowing anything. That's a pretty high price to pay for rejecting Jesus, don't you think? And though I know this has sound philosophical and maybe dry and abstract or academic, this is just the other side or just an application of what Jesus said when he said, I'm the way, the truth and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by me. When you reject Jesus, you ultimately reject truth too. I realize no one comes out and says that. Unbelievers don't say, okay, I'm rejecting truth because I don't want Jesus. They think they can hold on to truth, knowledge, science, logic, morality, meaningfulness. They want to hold on to those things and reject Jesus. And in a sense, your job as an apologist is to show that when they reject Jesus, they reject all those other things. They can't have them. That leads me to one of the questions was given. This is I really. Well, all the questions I appreciate, so don't take this wrong, but this question shows a great deal of thought and I want to take a few minutes on it because it's so important. When you say that biblical theism is the only worldview that passes the four test you have shown us, or that you can prove the existence of God, how is that different from proving God's existence by unaided reason? Remember, up on the board today, it's blank because I expect you all to know them by now. Whenever someone offers an argument, you want to know if the argument will fly. So what's the checklist you're going to look for? Secondly, thirdly, fourthly. Oh, I love you. I wish I could take you home. That's right. Now somebody says. Now somebody says, but those four things, those tests that you have, isn't that the same as trying to prove the Bible by unaided reason? That is, haven't I gone to the unbeliever and suggested you be neutral? I'll be neutral. And here are these four tests that we all want to accept and we'll use these four tests to decide who's right and who's wrong. And I'm not sure if NER understood this. Maybe so. But you see, there's such a subtlety and depth to this I want you to appreciate. First of all, this is not the answer to the question directly, but you have to understand, as Christians, we do appeal to reason. Christians use reason to defend the faith. But there's a great difference between our view of reason and what non Christians view as reason. And here's the difference. To put it very simply, we see reason as a tool. God has given us tools. He's given us hands, right? And with these hands, we can play tennis and we can slice zucchini and do all sorts of really important and joyful things in this world. These are tools, we like to say, tools for dominion, right? But God has also given us other tools. And one of those tools is our intellectual ability, our thinking ability, what we call our reasoning. Just how. How well would you get along in this world if you couldn't reason? Okay, you're standing on the railroad tracks. You perceive a train coming towards you at 120 miles per hour, and you reason. Trains weighing as they do and going at that speed would make a person of my size and density a puddle. Today I'm not interested in being a puddle, and therefore I'd better move. Reasoning is a tool by which we get around in this world, hopefully don't get hit by trains and can do other more important things. But the unbeliever doesn't think reason is a tool. The unbeliever thinks reason is the ultimate authority, that reason stands on its own, if you will, and that all men live subject to the God of reason. Now, whenever things are presented in this way, Christians, if you don't stop and think about it, it's easy to fall into one of two errors. You can say, oh, I guess we're going to use reason. We have to make it our ultimate God and authority then, because that's what the unbeliever says. That's one mistake or the other is to say, well, since we don't see reason as they do, then we'll just say we don't use reason. You have your reason, we have our faith. That's not the answer. We do use reason. They try to use reason, but for them, reasons are ultimate authority. For us, it's subordinate to the authority of God. If any of you were here two years ago when the dialogue that I had with George Smith was passed out, the tape of that radio dialogue, you may remember this George Smith, this well known atheist, wrote, you know, the case against God and so forth, has all the arguments down, blah, blah, blah. He came in and he argued that he couldn't hold to Christianity or to any other belief in God because you have to do it on faith. And he believes in following reason. He says Christians actually say that where reason lets off or ends, then faith begins. And he says, I'm not willing to go with him past reason into faith. And my response to him in essence was, George, you're wrong. We don't believe that reason takes you so far than faith takes, takes over. We believe that without faith you can't reason at all. And he was devastated. I guess he'd never heard that kind of thing. But we believe in order to understand our faith is in order to use reason. And if you don't have faith, reason finally disintegrates. It runs into its own problems. Now the reason, the purpose for all of this is to tell you that the four things I put up here on the board are not independent, ultimate authority of reason considerations. They are in fact, and here's the subtlety, they are in fact a reflection of the Christian worldview. Because what I'm telling people is if you want to judge anything, you have to judge it by the Christian worldview because that's the ultimate authority. Or you know, God in his revelation, which we have now called the, the Christian worldview, that's our ultimate authority. One more time. The application of these four things is simply an application of the Christian worldview. It's not an independent authority, something separate from the Christian worldview. And I can make that, I think, pretty obvious to you, we reject arbitrariness. Why do we reject arbitrariness? Because we say only God has the authority to speak for himself. So when other people come around and they say, well, I think, I think, I think we say that's arbitrary, you're not God, you don't have the right to say that. But if you are an unbeliever and you were being consistent and they aren't, and that's why we can, you know, defend the faith of them. But if you were being a consistent, analytical, clear, conceptually clear unbeliever, you'd say, hey, everybody has the right to be arbitrary. There's no God, you can't say there's one truth, isn't that right? A consistent unbeliever should never have let me use the standard of arbitrariness against him. He should have said I have the right to be arbitrary. Now, what's going to happen when the unbeliever asserts the right to be arbitrary? He refutes himself, doesn't he? And so I'm applying my worldview to him. And if he's really keen about this, he's clever, he's going to say, oh, no, I'm not going to buy into that authority. No, no, no, no. I get the right to be arbitrary. And I say, fine. Now what's the consequence if you are arbitrary? And then he says, oh, wait a minute. Consequences, eh? You Christians believe that we live in a universe where causes and effects are connected to each other. You believe, therefore, that consequences are a way of judging the things that bring about those consequences. But in my worldview, I'm not going to buy into that. There is no order between anything, and therefore there are no consequences. Everything is random and by chance. You see, I was begging the question, and here I'm glad to do that. I'm proud of myself. When I use consequences as a standard, I'm thinking as a Christian thinks, Jesus said, you know, a tree by its fruit, you look at the consequences. But the unbeliever doesn't think there are consequences. Whatever happens is just random. This world's a crapshoot. Who knows what the dice are going to bring out? And so if he were consistent, the unbeliever would say, I'm not going to accept consequences as a standard. That's what Christians would do. And I don't want to be a Christian. Or what about inconsistencies? Why is it that I insist that we are not allowed to have inconsistencies in our worldview? Well, because I believe in a sovereign God who doesn't lie. As Paul says, our word to you is not yes and no. When God speaks, he doesn't contradict himself, and therefore we're not allowed to contradict ourselves when we reason. But if you were an unbeliever and you took seriously your unbelieving worldview, you'd say, hey, you can't use inconsistencies. That assumes that there's order. There's some absolute, abstract, universal system of thinking that reflects God, I guess, but I don't believe in God, so I don't believe in logic. What happens to the person who doesn't believe in logic? And you say, well, I guess you do, because since you don't believe in logic, contradictions are acceptable. And so I can contradict you and you can't rule that out. So over and over again, what you See is that what I put up here on the board is ultimately a reflection of a critical Christian view of thinking. No arbitrariness, no inconsistencies. Consider the consequences. And then finally, what are the preconditions of intelligibility? Somebody says, well, but you Christians, when you talk about, when you argue about the preconditions of intelligibility, are assuming your answer to the question to which we say, of course, if we didn't assume that God is the precondition of intelligibility while we're arguing with people about the precondition of intelligibility, then God would not in fact be the precondition of intelligibility, would he? We're not saying that God is the precondition of intelligibility everywhere, except when you talk about God and his authority, which is to say his being the precondition of intelligibility. Oh well then you're reasoning in a circle. We don't allow that. Well, by now this has become old happy. You say, well, when you're talking about ultimate authorities, what's the alternative? You either assume your ultimate authority is ultimate or it's not your ultimate authority. Of course we reason in a circle and so do you. By the way, when people argue in favor of logic, don't you think they assume the laws of logic while they're arguing about the laws of logic? Yeah, they do. When people try to demonstrate the reliability of the human eye, do you think they do that with their eyes closed? No, they use the human eye even while they're trying to demonstrate the usefulness of the human eye. Which is just to say they assume the very thing that's in question. That must always be the case. Now does Christianity provide the preconditions of intelligibility? Does God have self attesting authority? Well of course, on the Christian story he does. Our ultimate authority is the personal God speaking to us in His Word. What does God appeal to to show his authority? He says, you accept it because I said it perfectly consistent. And he says, and if you do not, your reasoning will be reduced to foolishness. First Corinthians 1, verse 20. Here's Paul's apologetic. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this world? Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? Bring the wisest, most academically competent, most intellectual unbeliever you want? And Paul says, God makes foolish the wisdom of this world because we have the preconditions of intelligibility, we can Explain in terms of our view of the world, man, God and so forth, why there's dignity to human life, why logic is necessary, why the scientific method is workable, so forth and so on, why there are moral absolutes. But the unbeliever, no matter what his options are, cannot provide the preconditions of intelligibility. Now, since that's true, when I put preconditions of intelligibility down on the checklist, a really sharp unbeliever ought to say, oh, I'm not falling for that. I know where that's going, because I don't have the preconditions of intelligibility and you Christians do. I'm not going to let you use that as a standard because then you'll be begging the question. Well, he's right. I am begging the question. But now alternative somebody says, I reject preconditions of intelligibility. What he's saying is, I don't care whether what I'm saying is making sense or anything. It doesn't have to be intelligent or intelligible. Okay, so I've taken longer on this than others because I want you to understand these four things that I put upon the board are merely a reflection of my Christian worldview. And you can use them because unbelievers don't want to be unreasonable, arbitrary, and so forth. But if they were consistent, they'd say, oh, well, we're not going to use those standards because we don't want to be Christians, Because time is short. I can't weasel another half hour out of the authorities who run this conference. I don't imagine so glad to go right to Bertrand Russell. Y' all read Bertrand Russell? And though I wish I had one more day after you heard this lecture, you could do it even better. When you read Bertrand Russell, what are the reasons why he cannot be a Christian? Let me list them for you. And. And rather than doing this Socratically dialoguing with you for the sake of time, I'm going to have to kind of summarize the critique. But I'm hoping you will compare what you had thought to what I'm saying to see how close you came to the way in which you could refute him. The four reasons why he could not be a Christian. He said, first of all, because the Roman Catholic Church is mistaken to say the existence of God can be proved by unaided reason. The Roman Catholic Church makes this can prove the existence of God by unaided reason. Bertrand Russell can disprove the arguments of The Roman Catholic Church. Therefore he says they're mistaken. That's the first reason. Secondly, he says serious defects in the character and teaching of Jesus show that he was not the best and wisest of men but actually morally inferior to to Buddha and to Socrates. Thirdly, he says people accept religion on emotional grounds, particularly on the foundation of fear, which is not worthy of self respecting human beings. And fourthly, he says the Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. These are the four reasons. One of them, master philosophers of the 20th century said he could not be a Christian Roman Catholic Church is wrong to say the existence of God can be proved by unaided reason. There are serious defects in the character and teaching of Jesus showing he's not the wisest of men. Thirdly, people accept religion on emotional grounds, particularly fear, which is not worthy of self respecting human beings. Fourthly, the Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. One by way of response, did anyone see any internal tensions in these reasons? What's outstanding about this litany of complaints against Christianity is the arbitrariness and inconsistency of them. Look at his second reason. He says there are serious defects in the character and teaching of Jesus showing he's not the wisest of men. Now that argument presupposes some absolute standard of moral wisdom by which you can grade Jesus against Buddha and Socrates and others as inferior or superior. Right? You can't talk about inferiority superiority if you don't have a standard of comparison. Likewise in the third reason he says people accept religion on the grounds of fear which is not worthy of self respecting human beings. That presupposes there's a fixed criterion for what is and is not worthy of of self respecting human beings. Then again, in the fourth reason, the complaint expressed would not make sense unless it's objectively wrong to be an enemy of moral progress. He says Christianity is an enemy of moral progress, therefore reject it. That means it's wrong to be an enemy of moral progress. In fact, the very notion of progress assumes an absolute standard by which you can grade advances and regression. Now then, if Russell had been reasoning and speaking in terms of the Christian worldview, his attempt to assess the moral wisdom of Jesus number two, human worthiness. Number three moral progress. Number four. Number four would be understandable, indeed would be expected because Christians have a universal, objective, absolute standard of morality in the revealed word of God. But obviously Russell was not speaking as a Christian here and so we have to ask him oh, pardone, Dr. Russell, what is the basis for your moral evaluation and your judgment in terms of what view of reality and knowledge did you assume that there's anything like an odd objective criterion by which you could reject Jesus and accuse Christians of being unworthy of moral dignity and moral progress? Russell was embarrassingly arbitrary in that regard. Did you notice in reading the article he simply took it for granted as an unargued philosophical bias that there was a moral standard to apply and that guess who could be the spokesman for that moral standard? Well, Russell himself. We could easily counter him by simply saying, you're being arbitrary. You've chosen the wrong standard of morality. And since you're being arbitrary, we have the right to be arbitrary, and so we'll use our standard of morality and you are refuted. But there's more. It gets worse. By assuming the prerogative to pass moral judgment, Russell evidenced that his own presuppositions failed to comport with each other. And offering a condemning value judgment against Christianity, Russell engaged in behavior which betrayed his professed beliefs. Elsewhere in his lecture, Russell professed that this was a chance world which shows no evidence of design. He said laws are nothing more than statistical averages of what has actually happened. He professed the physical world may have always existed, that human life and intelligence came about in the Darwinian evolutionary way. And he said our values and hopes are what our intelligence can create. Now this is simply to say that human values are subjective. They're fleeting, they're self created. In short, they're relative. Holding to this kind of view of moral values, Russell was utterly inconsistent then and acting as though he could assume an altogether different view of values by which he judges Jesus and Christians. And so one aspect of what he says in his article stands in blatant contradiction to what he does elsewhere in his article. If all values are created by our intelligence, then he has no right to use what he creates as a judgment against Jesus or Christian. The same kind of tension within his beliefs is evident when he says the laws of science, when he talks about the laws of science. On the one hand, these laws are merely descriptions of what has actually happened in the past. But on the other hand, Russell said the laws of science provide a basis for projecting what will happen in the future. Do you remember who I quoted earlier to demonstrate that on the basis of experience of the past, you can't project into the future future? His name was Bertrand Russell, from an article he wrote in 1967. So you can't have it both ways. He says laws are Only descriptions of the past and then he uses them to project into the future. But he himself says that's logically fallacious. What about this appeal to unaided reason? I realize we're running fast when I'm running out of time. Russell didn't agree with the Church of Rome about unaided reason being able to prove certain things. He just didn't think the Church of Rome could prove the existence of God by unaided reason. But actually Russell should have been a little more self critical. As a philosopher, he should have asked himself, can unaided reason prove anything? Not just can it prove the existence of God? If reason is not aided by supernatural revelation, then can we use the laws of science to project from past experience into the future? If reason is not aided by supernatural revelation, can we assume the abstract laws of logic are absolute and universal? All week long I've been hammering this in. No, you cannot. And therefore, if Russell had been critical of his own worldview, he would have realized it's not just that the Roman Catholic Church cannot prove God's existence by unaided reason. You can't prove anything by unaided reason. And since Russell was committed to using unaided reason, he couldn't have proved anything whether God exists or not. Are there some prejudicial conjectures and logical fallacies to be found here? Notice this sentence. Historically it's quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all. And if he did, we do not know anything about Him. Now one of the first things we started with this week how could an intelligent man make a remark like that? It's just remarkable. Perhaps the most obvious logical fallacy evident in the lecture came out in the way he readily shifts from an evaluation of Christian beliefs to a criticism of Christian believers. You've got always watch for that people in the name of Christ criticizing our beliefs will criticize believers. And he should have known better. He knows that a Christian is someone who believes certain things. Now if we don't live up to the things that we profess and say we believe, that's a defect in us. But that does not show necessarily any defect in what is being believed. So when he argues against the personal defects of Christians, he says we enforce narrows that make people unhappy. And when he argues against this on the supposed psychological genesis of our beliefs, it's emotion and fear that leads us this way. He's indulging in the fallacy of arguing ad hominem against the man rather than against the beliefs held by the man. If what Russell had to say in these matters was fair minded and accurate, the fact would remain that he's descended to the level arguing against a truth claim on the basis of the personal dislike or psychologizing of those who personally profess the claim. There are other defects in his line of reasoning too. Notice he presumed to know the motivation of people who become Christians. How did Russell know that? Russell know a lot of Christians. And does he have some kind of psychological occult power to see into their hearts and tell us what their motive was? Russell generalizes for 20, well, 19 centuries of believers of whom he's known not even 1% of 1%, and of those less than 1% of 1%, he can't read their hearts. Isn't that amazing how people reject our faith because they know what's going on inside our heads? Russell couldn't even show how he knows any anything about the world, much less something as arcane about the psychological motives of people, much less the psychological motives of people in the past that he never met. And this leaves us face to face with the final and devastating fallacy in his case against Christianity, his use of double standards in his reasoning. You see, Russell wished to fault Christians for the emotional factor in their faith commitments. And yet, if you read the article closely, you'll notice that Russell himself evidenced a similar emotional factor in his own personal anti Christian commitment. Indeed, Russell openly appealed to emotional feelings of courage, pride, freedom and self worth as the basis for his audience to refrain from being Christians. He says, here's why I hate you Christians. You believe in God out of fear. Then he turns around and he appeals to his audience and he says, now you all be free and you be courageous and you reject Christianity. Well, I mean, if one appeal to emotion is wrong, the other appeal to emotion is wrong. The man just lived by double standards. Similarly, he tried to take Christians to task for their wickedness, as though there could be wickedness in Russell's worldview. Isn't that amazing? Dr. Russell, on your worldview, what we're doing is not wicked because there is no wickedness. He said. Christians have been cruel. They're guilty of wars, inquisitions, etc. But he didn't pause for even a moment to reflect on the far surpassing cruelty and violence of non Christians throughout history. Remember earlier in the week when I taught you about arbitrariness? Why doesn't he talk about Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler or the Marquis de Sade or a whole cast of other butchers who were not known in history for their Christian profession? See, all that's conveniently swept under the carpet in Russell's hypocritical disdain for the moral errors of the Christian church. If he was really going to be honest about this and not engage in special pleading or double standards, he shouldn't have reject Christianity any more than he rejects non Christianity because of the moral faul faults of their adherents. Russell's essay why I Am Not a Christian reveals to us that even the intellectually elite of this world are refuted by their own errors in opposing the truth of the Christian faith. There is no credibility to a challenge to Christianity which evidences prejudicial conjecture, logical fallacies, unargued philosophical bias, behavior which betrays professed beliefs, and presuppositions which do not comport with each other. Why wasn't Bertrand Russell a Christian? Well, given his weak effort at criticism, I think we have to conclude that it was for less than intellectual reasons. Okay, I do thank you for your attention throughout this week. I know after lunch having to listen to philosophy can be intended to put you to sleep, but I hope that you got enough out of it that you can go home from this and do a more effective job of speaking for your Lord and showing why we as Christians have nothing to be intellectually ashamed of.