Dr Greg Bahnsen - Reasoning with Unbelievers: How Should We Reason? (Part 2)

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Proverbs says, isn't that great? You know what the fool's interested in? He wants to vindicate his own thinking. He wants to come back to his own heart. Like a dog returns to his vomit. Proverbs says, so the fool wants to find out his own heart. The unbeliever is not objective. He is not engaging in this because he's so intellectual. He's trying to escape God. He knows God in his heart of hearts. You need to unmask that and you need to be aware that what he is doing to keep you from unmasking it is not knowledgeable and is not wise. It is foolishness. He is exchanging the truth of God for a lie. He is avoiding or trying to avoid the unavoidable. He is, as we often say, throwing buckets of water on an unquenchable fire that is within him. Thirdly, the Bible says that the unbeliever delights not in understanding. He delights not in understanding. You may think he may say that this man is interested in getting things right, that the truth is all he cares about. But he doesn't delight in the truth. And in fact he is serving the creature rather than the Creator. Because he can't think of himself as fundamentally wrong. He flaunts perverse thinking and ends up challenging the self testing word of God. Fourthly, for these reasons, the unbeliever is basically ignorant. I know you wander into the university to sit down at the table with the philosopher. You don't start out by saying, basically you're an ignorant man. He's going to tell you, I've done more reading than you. He probably has. But he is an ignorant man. We'll see why his darkened, futile mind actually hates knowledge and can gain it only in a way that is hypocritical. The knowledge that the local university professor has is a knowledge he could not have gained if the world is what he said it is. It's a knowledge that he could not have gained if knowledge is what he says it is. What I'm saying is that he's engaged in saying one thing and doing another. He says the world is like this, that knowledge is based on logic and facts and things like that. And then he goes out and he lives by faith, his own faith. He does not live up to his own conviction about reality. Therefore, fifthly, to the extent that he actually knows anything and they know a Lot of details to be sure. Unbelievers, even intellectual unbelievers, to the extent they actually know anything, it's due to their unacknowledged dependence upon the suppressed truth of God within them. Know this about your opponent. He has the truth and everything that he knows is dependent upon that truth he's suppressing. And so one of the best ways to get down to the bottom of the matter is to take what he does know and, and show that he couldn't know it if what you're saying weren't true. That's so crucial. I'm going to say it again and maybe again and again. Well, why don't you get it this time and I won't have to repeat it. One of the best ways to deal with unbelievers is to take what they genuinely know and show that they couldn't know it unless what you're telling them weren't true. Well, you see, the idea here is not to go and say, look, you're ignorant, I know everything so much. The idea is to say if what you say is true, you couldn't know what you know. You can only know this because of what I'm telling you about the world and man and God. That is, the unbeliever is double minded. He's hypocritical. He espouses one thing and then he turns right around and he opposes himself. He uses a Christian understanding of the world to gain the knowledge that he has. And then he professes with his mouth something else. Isn't that the nature of his unbelief? He doesn't give God the glory, he uses God's property and then he says, it's mine. He uses the mind God gave him and he says, I did it myself. The unbeliever is basically a hypocrite. Sixthly, the unbeliever's ignorance is a culpable ignorance because he has no excuse for that rebellion. It's one thing for us to objectively describe him as saying one thing, doing another, and that's what accounts for his academic success. The other thing, to bring in dimension that he's guilty for doing that. It's not like, well, we're all human, so that's what we fall into. We have no excuse for doing that. And when you press him to show whether he can defend his point of view, given his view of the world, you need to leave him without excuse. You need to point out to him you're grinding an axe against God and that's why you act like this, you're not doing this because you've thought through things on the basis of what you yourself say. You're a hypocrite. The moral dimension, his unbelief, does not stem from a lack of factual evidence, but from his refusal to submit to the authoritative word of God from the very beginning of his thinking. So this morning, if I might summarize, before we take a break for lunch, what we have concluded is that we as Christians must reason with people. We must love God with our intellects and give him our best efforts. We must, as the early Christians did, defend the faith once we're all delivered to the saints and defend it with our minds and defend it in a way that says not just it's one of many or the most probably true, but the only one that is true. And we must be able to do that to any man who asks us for a reason that is in us on any point that he wants to challenge. To do that, you need to understand the heart of the apologetical task. Then you can branch out for the details later. You need to know what every apologetical encounter involves. To do that, notice some of the pitfalls that Christians have often run into in their reasoning. First of all, they are intellectually lazy. Secondly, they do not account for the moral dimension of their encounter with the unbeliever. Thirdly, their style is rude, it's arrogant, it's unconcerned. Fourthly, they don't understand where they're trying to take the unbeliever because they've not thought through the nature of faith. That faith is not a matter of saying, hey, this fits into the way the world thinks anyway, so believe it. Faith is a matter of saying the word of God teaches this. You trust him against hope if need be. And finally, Christian reasoning is weak because we fall into sacred secular ideas where science stands over against the faith we don't understand. No, it's one religion, one faith commitment against another religion, another faith commitment. And then finally, what do we know about our opponent? We're going to go into the ring with him and box with him. We better know what his moves are, we better know the nature of his opposition. And the Bible gives us the best insight to the nature of the unbelievers opposition when it says he's the image of God, but he suppresses the truth and unrighteousness. He doesn't really love knowledge. He wants to escape from God and so that he results in ignorance in his thinking. If he were true to his own point of view and the way that he has come to know things about the world is because he's really been depending upon the truth that we're trying to get him to believe. He wants to suppress it, we want to unmask it. We call upon him to change his mind, then to be honest and admit that he depends upon God for everything. We want him to know that his ignorance is a culpable ignorance. He doesn't have an excuse for it. It doesn't come from a lack of factual evidence. It comes from a refusal to submit to the authority of God. He is a covenant breaker. We try to make him a covenant keeper, and we cannot do that if in the process we ourselves break covenant with God.

The lesson in apologetics that we're receiving today is vital and important and also contrary to the Spirit, not only of the world, but the Spirit of the church and the age in which we live. We live in a time when seems the most important thing is results.

Closer.

To Americanity, I'd say, than Christianity. Does it work like we say in Brooklyn? What Dr. Bonson is trying to teach us is that something may appear to work, it may appear to bring help, but actually it's just keeping the illness further from the present. And sooner or later, the diseased method of apologetics that we've been practicing bring the Church to an impotent and a crippled state so that we actually find ourselves with tremendous numbers of people professing to be Christians and no power whatsoever to stand against the hostile world. These are more than academic exercises that we're engaged in this morning. This is the life and death of the Church in our next generation or two. So we need to take these things to heart and apply ourselves very diligently so that Dr. Bonson doesn't have to waste words and repeat himself more than he needs to. We should really listen. We need to be weapons of in the hands of God to bring people to know Jesus Christ faithfully. That means we trust the Lord to bless our efforts. And as time goes on, we can ask that God would multiply according to his will. As Moses said to the Israelites, may God multiply you thousands of times over.

Fine.

But be faithful. Love the Lord your God. That's number one number. Our break for lunch will be this side first. And the people who came in late, they got first when they were over here. Now they get first again. So those who listened to me when I said, move over. See, obedience pays. That's faith.

As we begin our afternoon services, I'm going to be speaking to you on how now we should put into effect those general principles that we have been learning. Earlier this morning, someone suggested to me that this morning's session wasn't that hard to follow, but that maybe it was in the afternoon that I was going to kick this thing into more difficult academic mode. I don't think that's generally true, but there may be a little bit of truth to it, that it would be a little more rigorous, a little more philosophical as we continue here. But it will not be anything you cannot follow. So don't get discouraged, don't tune out. I'm going to begin our first 45 minute period together by looking at principles of argumentation, how to apply the approach that we're talking about. And then in our next session I'm going to look at specific problems, how they come to expression, I mean, how our principles will come to expression in answering particular problems. However, I cannot talk about every problem in Christian apologetics. And so I am personally, from a teaching or pedagogical standpoint, not of the mind, that we should teach just how to answer this problem, how to answer that problem and so forth, because eventually we're going to miss something. We can't teach everything. It would be better if I taught you how to come up with an answer for the problem. So the ones I can't cover you're able to go out and do yourself, can ask the question, when is it that a person has learned a foreign language? I want to learn Hebrew. When have I really learned Hebrew? Well, I haven't learned Hebrew when the only thing I can do is pair it with someone else who knows Hebrew says, and you know, it's good that I know what they're getting at, but I can't make up any sentences of my own. I can only repeat the sentences I've heard, right? But when I'm able then to converse in Hebrew, when I can come up, I can extend what I have learned in the classroom beyond what I hear my instructor say, then I have understood. And that's going to be true you too. If I spend the afternoon just saying, well, there's this problem is that problem. You might be able to parrot what Dr. Bonson says on those problems. That might or might not be good in any particular case. But the point is you will not have learned if you're not able to go and make up your own sentences, if not able to go beyond that and say, okay, now when this new problem comes, what are the principles that were used over here? I can use them here and extend them here. And so. So now the principles, then the illustrations. First thing I want to say in terms of methodology is that we must reason with unbelievers, understanding that it is a question of ultimate authority, ultimate commitment, that what we are involved in is a question of ultimate commitment. John Calvin once wrote, contentious disputes arise from the fact that many think less honorably than they ought of the greatness of divine wisdom, and are carried away by profane audacity. Calvin was commenting when he said this upon a verse long taken to be the charter of Christian apologetics. However, it may surprise you to know that Calvin was not speaking and was not directing his words here at the profane audacity of the unbeliever who challenges the existence of God or veracity of his word. Calvin was rather directing those words at Christian apologists who fall short of recognizing and submitting to the superiority of God's wisdom as revealed in the pages of Scripture. Assuming for themselves an attitude of intellectual self sufficiency and independence, they come to a kind of pride, Calvin said, and they will launch into battle with antagonistic unbelievers who, by the way, are marked by the same intellectual independence and pride. They will launch into this with an audacity which is profane, an audacity which is not befitting those who live under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And the sorry result, as Calvin knew, was nothing but the kind of contentious disputes which should be shunned by a servant of the Lord. Turn in your Bibles to second Timothy 2:23, 262 Timothy 2:23 but foolish and ignorant questions refuse, knowing that they gender strife. And the Lord's servant must not strive, but be gentle towards all apt to teach, forbearing in meekness, correcting them that oppose themselves, if peradventure God may give them repentance unto the knowledge of the truth, and they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him unto his will. The Lord's servant must not strive, but be gentle toward all. When we encounter the unbeliever with the same intellectual pride that he is manifesting in his unbelief, all you're going to end up with is strife. My guess is if you've done much evangelism at all, you know that that's what happens. You've seen things just end up being a matter of contention between people, and they go their separate ways. First Peter 3:15 lays down the personal prerequisite for offering a reasoned defense of the Christian faith. When it begins with these words set apart Christ as Lord in your hearts Set apart Christ as Lord in your hearts. Being prepared to give an answer to any man who asks you. Notice that most apologists who expound that text just go right to the give the reason for the hope that is in you. But Peter says, first, set Christ apart as Lord in your heart. Then you can give an answer. If you don't begin by understanding, this is a matter of ultimate commitment. Who is the Lord over your thinking and over your life? You will never be a successful apologist. For you see, Christ must be the ultimate authority over our reasoning and our argumentation. Not just at the end of the argument, but at the very beginning. Beginning of the argument Many apologists want us to recognize some authority other than Christ at the beginning, so that eventually we can get to the place where people say, okay, now Christ is Lord at the end. Peter says, you begin with Christ as Lord at the beginning, and then you'll be able to conclude that he's Lord at the end. He understood the Proverbs. Proverbs 1:7 says that the beginning of knowledge is reverence for the Lord, fear for the Lord. If we are to cast down reasonings and every high thing exalted against the knowledge of God, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10:5, Then we must, as he says there, bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. All my reasoning must be captivated. It must be subjected to the obedience of Christ from the very beginning. I honor his lordship so that I honor him, and I can then cast down reasonings that are held up against Him. An ultimate commitment to Christ covers the whole range of human activity, including my intellectual activity. So if the apologist is to rid himself of profane audacity, his faith must be in the greatness of divine wisdom and championed by a means of procedure which itself honors that divine wisdom. Colossians 2:3. In Christ are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge deposited. No exception is made. All the treasures are deposited in Him. You talk to somebody who studies natural science. You talk to someone who works in literature. You talk to someone who studies history or physics, whatever it is. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are deposited in Christ. This means the apologist must presuppose the truth of God's word from start to finish. In his apologetic witness. We do not go to the unbeliever and say, okay, you put aside your ultimate commitments, I'll put aside my ultimate commitments, and we'll just together as free men without any ultimate commitment. Start studying the world to see what conclusions we come to you. Lay aside your prejudices, I'll lay aside mine. We'll just be open minded about it. It's impossible to do that. And even if it were possible to do that, it would be immoral to do that. Set apart Christ as Lord in your hearts, being ready to give an answer. It doesn't say set Christ on the shelf that you might be able to give an answer. It says set him apart as Lord, Consecrate him in your thinking, in your heart as Lord. Be committed to submitting to him from start to finish. For the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. It's only to be expected that in matters of ultimate commitment, the intended conclusion of your line of reasoning will also be the presupposed standard that governs the manner of your reasoning up to that conclusion. If it isn't, then that's not your ultimate commitment, is it? Let me illustrate this. I say my ultimate commitment as a Christian is to the lordship of Jesus Christ. In order to establish that, I'm going to put my ultimate commitment aside, I'm going to try to prove that if you use an approach to knowledge that says you have to trust your senses, whatever comes in through your eyes and ears and you can touch and taste and that sort of thing, that's what gives you the truth in the end. If I try to prove the lordship of Christ by using that what we call empirical approach, trust your senses. What I'm saying is, Jesus, I trust you a lot, but I trust my senses more because it's my senses that lead me to accept your lordship. The other way around would be for us to say you cannot trust your senses if you do not first trust Jesus as Lord, that if you don't have him as your ultimate standard, then you cannot use your senses, they are not reliable. So it's a question of ultimate commitment. Does Jesus verify our senses? Do our senses verify Jesus? Apologetics will be a question and of ultimate commitment. If the apologist treats the starting point of knowledge as something other than reverence for God, then unconditional submission to the unsurpassed greatness of God's wisdom at the end of his argument doesn't really make sense. There would always be something greater than God's wisdom by which God's wisdom was verified. And that will always turn out to be the supposed wisdom of the individual who's doing the arguing. And in that case, the Word of God has become subordinate to man's thinking. As a final standard. CS Lewis once put it very well when he Wrote the ancient man approached God or even the gods. As the accused person approaches his judge, for the modern man, the roles are reversed. He is the judge. God is in the dock. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench. God is in the dock at the end of the quote. But he was right for modern man. Actually for ancient man too. Ultimately, the real important thing is that God will be admitted to the universe of your thinking in your life after he's passed your standards. Man will be at the bench. God will be waiting in the dock for your judgment. Now, does that sound like a biblical portrayal of the real way things are?

No.

The Bible says that God is at the bench and we are in the doctrine that he is not the one accused. We are the ones accused, that we are guilty and he is our judge and not vice versa. The second thing then, once we recognize that this is a question of ultimate commitment, is that we must be self conscious about this and consistent with it throughout all of our arguing. Another way of putting that self consciousness is to be aware of the need to be consistent with what we've just said. If it's a matter of ultimate commitment, then let's remember that in the process of arguing, our method has got to keep up with that. We've got to keep in mind what is the commitment he has, what's the commitment I have? And how are we going to resolve the conflict between them? Just look at the Spirit of St. Paul. Romans 9:20. Rather, who are you, man, to reply against God? Romans 3:4. Let God be deemed true. Though every man is a liar, created men, especially as rebels against God, are in no moral or intellectual position to challenge their sovereign Creator and Lord. Any thoughtless approach to defending the faith that forgets that fact is in the danger of transgressing God's clear command found in Deuteronomy 6:16. You shall not put the Lord your God to test. Don't you dare try to come behind the bench and put God in the dock and test him. Remember Job, how Job dared to question God? Job demanded answers from God. In Job 40, verses 1 and 8, these famous words the Lord said to Job, will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who argues with God answer him. Would you condemn me to justify yourself? You see, God engages in apologetics with Job and he doesn't forget that it's a question of ultimate commitment. He says to Jehovah, will the one who contends with God correct God? Would you correct God, Job. Would you justify yourself in correcting me? And God says, job, you got it all wrong. Job realized that too. You know what he did? He put his hand over his mouth. He said, I spoke too soon. He certainly did. God is not in the dock. We are in the dock. And those with whom we argue, those unbelievers who take exception to the Christian faith, they are in the dock when we are arguing with them. And so we must work out a method of argumentation that elaborates that fact and is consistent with that fact that lives up to our ultimate principles in a coherent and an effective way. We must not say one thing in our theology, Jesus is ultimate Lord and then act another way in an unapologetic as though he's not the Lord. When I'm reasoning with people, we must become self conscious of the lordship of Jesus Christ. Then in our reasoning you say, okay, I've got it. Ultimate authority. Ultimate authority. Ultimate authority versus ultimate authority. Yeah, faith commitment versus faith commitment. But Dr. Watson, how do you resolve that? I mean, are we just going to end up in two different towers, mutually loathing one another? I've got my religion, you've got yours. There's nothing we can say to one another?

No.

So now we press it. Now that we understand the nature of it, we argue from the impossibility of the contrary. The only self conscious way to argue with the unbeliever so that we see that it's a matter of ultimate commitment and that he must give up his ultimate commitment, is to argue that there's an intellectual challenge in the gospel such that it is impossible that Christianity not be true. It is impossible that the unbeliever be correct. That is a big claim. What we are going to argue is you have no ground to stand on at all. That you bring out your big guns to shoot against the Christian position we are going to demonstrate. You have no place to put your guns. You have no foundation for your reasoning at all. I'm not going to say your reasoning is all right as far as it goes. Let me add something to it. You'll become a Christian. I'm going to say you could not reason at all if your position were correct. If what you say about the world and if what you say about man and if what you say about knowledge were correct, no one could know anything at all. We couldn't even be carrying on this debate. I'll give you an illustration of this. Those of you who've heard my debate with Dr. Gordon Stein, or if you do, pick it up and listen to it. I basically went to the debate and after laying down some introductory matters, argued that it makes no sense to debate with one another unless there are laws of logic by which we can sort out people's reasoning. Debate requires laws of logic. And therefore, by showing up at the debate, Dr. Stein had conceded the point to me already. How's that? Well, because on his view of the world, there could be no laws of logic. On his view of the world, this is a material plane. There's nothing but physical objects. There couldn't be a law at all because laws are not physical. Have you ever noticed that? You can go to the store and buy a dozen eggs. You can't go buy a dozen laws. Laws are not like that. And so if you're a materialist, Dr. Stein, you can't have any kind of law, much less can you have a law of logic that is universally true. Because you, thinking that we know things through our senses only, have not sensed all the different kinds of reasoning and situations that exist in the world. You can't tell me what's universally true, so you can't give me a law of logic. Not your view of the universe, therefore, does not allow for laws, much less for universal laws. And then the next step, unchanging universal laws. Because you, as a physicalist, as a materialist, and as someone who trusts his senses only for giving him the truth, don't know what is changing and unchanging. You don't know the future. You don't even know everything from the past. You don't know every situation there has been, and you don't have any position for laws anyway. Conclusion. Dr. Stein, you can't grant that there are laws of logic. I just want you to be true to your own religion and your religion. There can't be logic. But we came here to debate. Debate requires logic. Therefore, if you came here to debate, you were implicitly conceding the Christian position. That's what I'm getting at. You argue on the impossibility of the contrary. I do not want to leave him even a dime's width to stand on. I want to take the rug out from under him and say you couldn't reason at all if what you say is true. That's the intellectual challenge of the gospel. God's revelation is more than the best foundation for Christian reasoning. It is the only foundation for any reasoning whatsoever. Therefore, although the world in its own wisdom sees the word of Christ as foolish, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 1, 1825, the foolishness of God is wiser than men. I want you to know you can pull the rug out from under the people who are calling you a fool. You can say, well, it may be foolish, but it's wiser than what you got because you ain't got nothing. Christians need not sit then in some kind of isolated philosophical tower just despising non Christian thinking. And they are despising us in return. No. We take every thought captive to Christ, and in so doing, Paul says we can cast down every lofty thing exalted against the knowledge of God. Bring on the Gordon Steins of this world, bring on your atheists, bring on your materialists, bring on your scientists. It makes no difference. We can cast down their reasoning. You can. Paul wrote that to you, after all, not the PhD candidates. We must challenge the unbeliever to give a cogent and credible account of how he could know anything whatsoever, given his presuppositions about reality and about how man comes to know the truth. Paul put it this way. In First Corinthians 1:20, if I were to choose only one verse, and that would be precarious, I know, but if I could only use one verse to expound what I'm saying today, it would be 1 Corinthians 1:20. Paul says, where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? That's the theme of our apologetic Bring them on. Where are they? Where's the disputer? Who will stand up for the worldly philosophy of our day? God will make it foolish, so bring him on. That's fine with us. We want to show not only to our unbelieving friends, that there is no eternal hope of salvation apart from Christ. We want to show them as well, that they have no present intellectual hope outside of Christ. Stop thinking. It's just a matter of, well, once you're dead and you have to face God, you have no hope if you're not in Christ. We need to say, if you're not in Christ, you have no hope right now. You cannot even reason right now. Born for Jesus Christ. It is foolish for you to build your house on the ruinous sands of human opinion. It's amazing to me. We teach our children that from Matthew the seventh chapter, the wise men built his house upon the rock, and the foolish man built it upon the sand. And then Jesus tells us what the rock is. He says, my word. And yet we go out doing apologetics, building on the sand. It doesn't make any sense does it. We become fools. So we need to show those with whom we're reasoning that they have become vain in their reasoning. By professing themselves to be wise, they have become fools. So Paul says in Romans 1:21,22, the unbeliever will attempt to enlist logic. He will attempt to enlist science. He will attempt to enlist morality. In his debate against the truth of Christianity, we will answer him. If I can put it in the most general terms, we will answer him that only the truth of Christianity can rescue the meaningfulness of logic, the reliability of science, and the absoluteness of morality. We will challenge him to see that only the worldview presented to us in God's word will give the preconditions necessary for the unbeliever to use his logic, to use his science, or to use his morality. That's the kind of defense we're talking about. That's the kind of defense that drives people to Christ on their knees, not just in hopes that they might escape hell's fire, but in hopes that they might understand the light of God. Today too, from beginning to end, man's reasoning about anything whatsoever, even his reasoning about his reasoning, is not coherent. It is unintelligible unless the truth of the Christian Scriptures is being presupposed. So we want to argue that any position that is contrary to the Christian one, any position that stands over against Christianity, must be seen as impossible. It cannot justify its beliefs. It cannot offer a worldview whose various elements comport with each other. In short, what I'm saying is we reason for Christianity from the impossibility of the contrary. Now, there are people, of course, who won't do that. There are people who operate their intellectual lives as though there were no God. Psalm 14, One speaks of them. The fool says, in his heart there is no God. Now, in the heart, let's understand that biblical expression in the heart does not mean in his emotional life. That's the way we sometimes think of it. We contrast head and heart. You know it in your head, you don't feel it in your heart. The Hebrews didn't do it that way. The heart was the center of reasoning and thinking. The fool says, in his thinking. The fool says, in that out of which are the issues of life. The fool says, in his heart there is no God. And in so doing he despises wisdom and instruction. And he hates knowledge, because Proverbs says that the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord. And so In Proverbs, the 26th chapter, we read that we should Answer a fool according to his folly. If the fool gives you a point of view which is contrary to the word of God, then answer him in terms of that folly. I give you a little minor illustration here. Someone comes to you that you want to evangelize and says, well, I can't believe these things in the Bible because, well, they talk about things that go beyond our senses. They talk about miracles. They talk about things that are beyond this world. The Scriptures can't be trusted because we can only know. We can only know the things that our senses teach us. We can only know things if we can see them, smell them, taste them, touch them, hear them. Now, you should say to this person, not just, well, you're a fool then, and I know better than that, so goodbye. You should say, oh, well, let's think about that for a minute. Maybe you would allow me to think through your position, and when we're done, you would think through my position. But let's start with yours. And what you're going to do is you're going to answer the fool according to his folly. You say, fine, we can only know the things that our senses teach us. It is your view that only the senses are a source of knowledge. That's right. Well, do you know that that's true? Do you know that only your senses are a source of knowledge? Oh, yes, I do. Well, could you please tell me at what point you tasted, smelled, heard or touched the truth that only the senses are a source of knowledge? You see, when he says all knowledge is based upon sensation, you have to say, did you have a sensation to that effect that all knowledge is based upon sensation, you say to the fool, I want to take. I want to take you seriously. If you say this is the case, where does it lead? Well, if all knowledge is dependent upon sensation, and I don't ever have a sensation of what all knowledge is based on, then it turns out that if all knowledge is based on sensation, I can't know that all knowledge is based on sensation. So we would be left with skepticism and we couldn't know anything for sure at all. Proverbs says, don't answer the fool according to his folly, lest you be like unto him. The two proverbs, side by side, they're not contradictory. Two parts of the same procedure. Proverbs says, having answered the fool according to his folly, then don't answer him according to his folly. Say, now think things through from my skin. You see, as I see it, God created this world and he created me and he created you. He made us the way we are. He made our bodies, he made our minds. He has made us this way so that we can serve Him. He has given us tools, intellectual tools like sensation, that enable us to know his created order and therefore use it to glorify Him. And therefore, given my view of God and man in the world, of course our senses are to be trusted and they are a source of knowledge because God made us so. But I only believe that because God made us so. As it turns out, my friend, you know a lot about the digestive tract of a lion. I know you did your doctoral dissertation on that. I know that you have a great deal of information about what we can see and what we can touch, what we can hear about when it comes to the digestive tract lines. But don't you see? You couldn't know any of that if God hadn't made you in the world. When you say only sensation is the source of knowledge, you destroy all knowledge. When you start where I am as a Christian, I can make sense of your accomplishments in the scientific realm. And so what you are doing is you're first asking him to think through his foolishness on its own terms, and then not to think it through on his terms. Don't answer him according to his folly, lest you be like unto him. Proverbs. If you use his ultimate commitments, you'll end up in the same place he is intellectually. So we have two things we do in apologetics. We stand on the position of our opponent and show where it leads. This leads to that which leads to something further which destroys all knowledge. And then we invite him. Think through my position. Okay, for argument's sake, I've gone with you down your road. For argument's sake, go with me down mine. And then in the end, what does he have? He has a clear cut choice. He can either then renounce all reason and say, that's right, we don't know anything at all, and I'd rather not know anything. I have a double negative. I'd rather know nothing than to have to know God. Now your attitude should not be, well, fine, we'll just leave it at that. I mean, obviously you want to pray for a desperate person like that, but intellectually, in terms of the debate, you have to say, fine, as long as you know the terms. As long as you know it's a choice between Christ and nothing, so you reason from the impossibility of the contrary. I'm going to put these three things together. I want to kind of recapitulate what I'm teaching you Christian apologetics is the defense of a religious posture. It's a defense of our faith in Christ as the ultimate Lord. It thus pertains to our ultimate commitment in life. Apologetics will entail intellectual reasoning in order to justify our beliefs. And in doing so it will touch upon questions of what is our theory of knowledge? How do we know what we do? What's the final standard of truth? This should make clear to us that the defense of the faith is unavoidably a matter of one's presuppositions. What ultimately are you standing on? What's your foundation? Because the believer and the unbeliever both operate in terms of certain presuppositions, a certain foundation. Because each of them has their conflicting worldviews, they will aim to develop their thinking in a way that is consistent with their worldview. They will try to work out their ultimate commitments to the very end. The Christian needs to be just as self conscious about his approach as the unbeliever is trying to be. We can't do that if our reasoning and argumentation assume things that are contrary to the conclusion we want to reach. We can't reason that Christ isn't Lord over our sensation, Lord over our logic, Lord over our ethic, so that we can ultimately prove that Jesus is Lord over our logic, Lord over our sessions, Lord over our ethics. We must be self conscious and consistent in developing our reasoning. And therefore the authority of Christ in His Word rather than my own self sufficiency intellectually must be my final commitment. I must show that if one does not take Jesus as his final standard, then he destroys knowledge and morality altogether. What I'm going to argue is that Christianity is true because the contrary is impossible from beginning to end. In my method and my conclusion as a defender of the faith, I want to reason in a way so that in all things Christ is given the preeminence. That's what Colossians 1:18 tells us we must do. I think we have just enough time that I can add a little bit to this and then we'll come back for another session where then I'll tell you the actual procedure to use and try to give you a little lead in on how to do this with people. Let's stand back and see what we've learned today. Apologists must have the proper attitude. We're not arguing. I mean, we are arguing. We are not quarrelsome, pardon me, we are not contentious. We must show humility. Not only humility to our opponent, but humility before Christ, who is our ultimate standard, not our reasoning. We must have the proper starting point. God's word. Every line of reasoning has its starting point. No one reasons, well, I believe this because of that, and I believe that because of this further thing. And I believe this further thing because yet another thing. And on and on and on and on. Eventually somebody comes to the place where they say, finally, I believe that because of this. And that's the bottom line. That's the ultimate standard. If we didn't have an ultimate starting place, we wouldn't have any reasoning at all. All reasoning has some kind of starting point that justifies itself. If it doesn't justify itself, then you're assuming there's something more ultimate than that ultimate point that justifies it. But then you have the question of that more ultimate. Does it justify itself at some point? All reasoning must justify its initial premises on their own authority. The apologist must not only have the proper attitude and the proper starting point, he must have the proper method. He must work on the unbelievers, unacknowledged presuppositions, and being firmly grounded in his own presuppositions, aimed to cast down every high reasoning exalted against the knowledge of God and to make sure that his own thinking has been made captive to the obedience of Christ. And finally, the apologist must have the proper goal. The goal must be to secure the unbeliever's unconditional surrender unconditionally. Jesus doesn't negotiate with sinners. He doesn't say, you know, I'll take from you whatever you'll give me. You've probably seen some evangelistic methods that insult the Savior that way. Just give Jesus a chance. It's ridiculous. Jesus doesn't plead with people. Give me a chance, he says, I'm going to offer you an opportunity. I'll give you a deal. You can't refuse. And you'd better not. We need to ask the unbeliever to show unconditional surrender of his thinking to Jesus Christ. We need to ask him to have the faith of Abraham, who, against hope, believed in hope according to the word of God as an ultimate authority. If we don't do that, we have compromised our own fidelity to Jesus Christ. And so the apologist should have the proper attitude, the proper starting point, the proper method, and the proper goal. You get all these things down, it's a lot to learn in one day. But if you get all these things down, I want to assure you there isn't anybody you can meet who you won't be able to deal with apologetically. If you have any doubt about that, come back for the next session. I'll put this to work in some practical cases and I'll try to show you. Count on it works. Thanks.

We're going to take a 15 minute break. Just one thing, Dr. Bonson bothered me that you said today that we had to glorify God in balancing our checkbook. I have failed miserably for the last 17 years and that someday maybe I'll learn to balance the checkbook. Never looks right when I'm through with it. The people have things ready. It's your turn to go first on this side. Okay, we'll reconvene at 3:10. Boy, those West Sable guys, they got away with it, huh? All right, we'll get you this side.

First.

Proportion with this segment. It will run from 30 to 45 minutes. At the end of this session we will take a five minute break and when we reconvene, I guess about half of the people we can expect to chicken out, all those from Maasai's congregation, I'm sure those who remain who really want to find out in the couple of concrete life examples, how do you do this in the college room? How do you do this with the person next to you at work? Those who remain, we're going to have some fun. It will be in the spirit of fun but also earnestness that we might sharpen ourselves to be tools for God's kingdom. All right, so that should bring us right about schedule. Just what we said. Maybe a little earlier. We all back.

Great.

Dr. B.

Do you know the frustration that I know and having read some text that gives the general principles for doing something like fixing a carburetor and then just leaves you to go out there and find the carburetor and put together what it says over here in theory and how it applies. I hate that you buy a bicycle for one of your children for Christmas. You think you're going to save 20 bucks by assembling it yourself? Forget it. Maybe you're better than I am at that. I need somebody to say, hey, this bolt goes on this screw here. Show me. Put my hands on it so we can learn to do it. It's not enough to know the general theory of carburetors or bikes assembly. So I don't want to leave you with that frustration because my guess is that I hope most of you are with me and the conclusions that I'm drawing. If your hearts are in the same place, mine is before God and Trying to submit to the scriptures, you're saying, that's right. That's what we need to do. That's what we need to accomplish. That's the way we need to proceed. And then what do you do? You need a step up, don't you? You need to put your hands on some subjects. I would not want to teach apologetics in a way, as I already told you, where you just might go, parrot my answers to this problem and that problem and the next. But we still have to have this problem, that problem, the next to now show you how the nuts and bolts go together of what I've been talking about. So that's what we're going to try to accomplish in this 45 minutes. I'm going to stop looking at the general principles, and I'm going to try to become very, very concrete in order to do that. However, no, I'm not going to give you more preparatory principles. But before we get down to the actual interchange between the believer and the unbeliever, you need to know the setup. You need to know some of the context within which that happens. You need to know some of the ground rules for arguing with people. And so the first thing that I'd like to point out to you is that not every witnessing situation is an apologetical situation. There are people who often write or call me because they know that I've done work in apologetics, and they'll say, Dr. Bonson, my aunt Susie says such and such and such and such and such. What can I say to him in a case like that? I often find myself giving pastoral evangelistic advice. It's not an intellectual matter at all. You see, in some cases, it's the absence of their interest in the truth rather than their argument against the truth. And so please do not read me as giving you the be all of evangelism. There are some people who say, I don't want to talk to you. I want another beer, watch the football game. Apologetics is not calculated to deal with that problem, okay? So don't expect what we're talking about today. Okay, now I finally got it. I got the universal argument that everyone has got to bow down to some people you're going to find don't care. You'll say, hey, is it a Bud Light? If it isn't, I'm not interested. So I know that there are limits to what I'm talking about. Second thing I want you to be aware of, I do not believe in prefab apologetics. I will not mention any names, but you're probably most of you are aware that there was one evangelistic organization who many years ago put out a style of evangelism that was very easy for people to memorize. We had four laws and that just all you have to do is go out there and just pump these four laws at people and so forth. And you know, God works through even our foolishness. And so I'm glad for the conversions that came from that. But I'll be very honest with you, I was never impressed with that. Because unless you think people are nothing more but assembly line products, you can't take an assembly line approach to them. You can't say, there's just one way of putting it that's going to suit everybody. As a Calvinist, I believe that. I believe that I must be responsible before God to understand the person I'm talking to. For some people, I began by talking about the law of God and they're breaking the law of God and they're just deserts before. But for some people, I talk about how God has blessed them and they've been ungrateful. There are different approaches, different methods you use with different people given the circumstances and the personality of the person. Now that's just as true in apologetics. Do not hear anything in this session as prefab apologetics. Okay, I go home and memorize this now. I got it. Okay. What I'm saying is not for every situation in evangelism. Some people are not interested in arguing and what I'm saying is not intended to be memorized as the prefab approach to argumentation. Three more things. We're going to get to the bottom line real soon. But first of all, you need to know in general that when you reason with people, sometimes all they need is evidence. I'm going to use this as an illustration. Someone comes to me. Dr. Ponson, I really respect what I see in you Christians. The message sounds wonderful. It's almost too good to be true. A fairy tale come true. There's only one problem. As I read the Bible, I see in the Old Testament this list of kings, and I see over here this list of kings, and they don't match up. And I know that I'm not supposed to believe things that aren't true. And I don't see how these contradictory things can be the case. And so I desperately would like to believe it. But what do you say about that when someone does that? Please don't say, well, we need to start looking at your theory of knowledge. We need to know what your ultimate standards Are when he says, I've got this one little problem to be tied up here. Answer his question now. Maybe you don't know how to reconcile the king was to the Old Testament. I use that because my guess is most of you don't. There are books on the subject. There are places you can look in other books, short discussions that will help you do that. My point is, where evidence is what the person needs, by all means use it. Moreover, use evidence when you run up against the person who will say, and this is often in our day, people who will say things like, you can't trust the Bible at all. It was written hundreds of years after the fact. I still remember when I was in seminary, I was doing youth work in a church that is apostate. I was there as a missionary. Sad situation to be a missionary in a church, huh? But anyway, I was doing this youth work at the request of one of the professors at the seminary. And as we started talking about matters that got increasingly more serious for what this youth group was used to, they were accustomed to the idea that they should talk about burning down buildings and having fun. And I was coming and talking about. About how they were going to burn in hell if they didn't stop having so much fun. I still remember this one evening, this one fella telling me he was the intellectual of the group. Well, the problem is you can't trust the Bible because the Bible was written at least 300 years, 400 years, probably after the events spoken of. You can't even trust it as a book. I mean, he was just so confident about that. Now I'm in seminary, right, and I'm studying textual criticism. I mean, that's one of the things that I had to learn about. And it was just such a clash. I mean, even the scholars who are not Christians know better than to say stupid things like that. It's just not true. In fact, I can do even one better. When I went on to graduate school at usc, I had one whole course, if you can imagine that, one whole semester in nothing but Plato. Not the Greeks, not Plato and Aristotle, just Plato. And that was just scratching the surface. There's a lot to study there. One of the things we studied was the textual criticism of the Platonic dialects. And, you know, you really come to appreciate the Bible when you do look at the evidence like that. Does anyone here have any doubt that we know what Plato said? Maybe you have minor doubts. Anything that would lead you to say, when I say Plato said the following, I can say, show it to you in The Euthyphro or the Republic or so forth, you say, oh, no, written 300, 400 years. Let me tell you something. The earliest manuscripts, the earliest reliable manuscripts we have on Plato come from seven to 800 years after he wrote. The earliest, the earliest fragments we have of the New Testament come from maybe 30 years after they were written. So when someone comes and just says these remarkable things like, you can't trust the Bible. No rational person who would trust that as a book. You do need to know some evidences because you need to do some debris clearing in their minds. You need to humble them a bit to say, wait a minute, I don't think you know the facts here. There are even unbelieving scholars who will grant we have better evidence for the New Testament than for any other book of antiquity. Okay? So evidences are important. And where that's all the person that you're talking to, that's all he wants. That's all he needs. Give it to him, by all means. But let's say the person comes and says, Look, Dr. Bonson, I've got two or three problems I'd just like you to kind of tie up. And then I want to become a Christian. And then you do that and you find out after that, he says, well, maybe a couple more. Some of you have had this experience, right? Sends you back to the book. You say, I'll look up an answer for you two, three times. And he says, oh, there's this one other thing. Eventually you say, wait a minute, it's time for us to stop now and say, what is your theory of knowledge? And just how do you know what you know? Because I don't think this is a matter of just tying up loose ends or clearing some debris out of your thinking. I think there's kind of stubbornness and opposition, and I want to challenge you as to how you know anything about evidences in the first place. So my point is, don't avoid evidence, use it. That's not what I've specialized in in this seminar today. You can go to the books. Anybody can. It's very easy to get hold of this stuff. However, it's specialized. You know, you read about the argument for Christ's resurrection. It's not going to help you answer the King list question of the Old Testament. So my suggestion to you is stick to the main approach to argumentation and go do the specialization work when you have to use evidence, when you have. When it's necessary. Secondly seems so obvious. Prohibit arbitrariness. Prohibit arbitrariness. Repeatedly, I'll have people say, well, the argument like this, I said this, she said that, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then we got to this place and she just said this, that, and the other. Now how do I answer that? I say, well, did you demand that she prove her point? Did you ask for evidence for that or consistency? No, she said she didn't have any evidence for it. That was just what she believed. I said, well, then, you see, you don't have any problem apologetically. What you need to do is now embarrass her. You need to say, okay, now speak up. Let the world know you believe this just because you believe it. Let people know that it's arbitrariness over against Christian commitment that we're talking about. You cannot argue with arbitrariness. And don't try. You can only embarrass arbitrators. You can say, well, that's not very intellectual. Just say, we can believe whatever we want. We can believe whatever we want. Then we can't believe whatever we want. Because if we can believe whatever we want, then we can believe contradictions. And the contradiction of we can believe whatever we want is that you can't believe just anything you want. And therefore if you can't believe anything you want, you can't. Was that too fast? You see what I'm getting at? Arbitrariness destroys itself. It's not reputable. What you need to say to the person who says, well, I just believe it. You say, well, in that case, I just believe about Christ. So now you follow me? No, I want a reason. Oh, wait a minute. Why should I give you a reason when you won't give me a reason? If it's just arbitrariness, I suggest you come with me arbitrarily. You know what the person will do is no, I'm not going to go with you. I mean, I'm not so sure what you're saying is right. Say, fine. That's why we need to get back into the debate. When you start giving me this arbitrary cop out, then I'm going to run it right into the ground with you. I'm going to say if arbitrariness is acceptable, arbitrarily agree with me. After all, it's just arbitrary. The point is we need to shame people who do that. What they're doing is saying, I want you to argue, but I refuse to. I'll believe whatever I want. You say, no, that's not the name of the game in debate. In debate you must show reasons for what you believe. You must demonstrate cogency. Prohibit arbitrariness. Don't allow people to cop out. Thirdly, demand consistency. This is the key to everything in a debate. When your opponent says something, make sure he's honest about it. Honesty, integrity in holding to a position means you're not going to give up that position arbitrarily. In a sense, this is an extension of the previous point. If someone says, all we can know is what our senses give us, when you say, okay, let's be consistent, then do you know that all we know is what our senses tell us? And he says, oh, in that case, no. But that's the one exception he said, then you lose the debate, friend. You don't really mean all that we know is based on sensation. You mean all that you want to know is based on sensation. That's a different matter. Now it's just back to a matter of arbitrary choosing. When you're going to apply that standard, when you're not going to apply that standard. It's kind of like the person who says, everybody is going to have to drive according to the speed limit from now on. And I'm going to go tell them, and I'm in a hurry, so excuse me, but I'm going to break the speed limit while I go to tell them that that's hypocrisy. We see it in moral domain. Very easy. You need to expose hypocrisy in the intellectual domain too. When people lay down a position, expose them for not living up to it. So now that you've said it, live by it, stick to them. And again, although I'm going to give you now the three steps of the specific argument you want to be developing, if you just knew that much, that would be probably 15% more of all you need in apologetics. Take the 75 or 80 that I gave you this morning. Add this to it, you're almost there. You can do this. Just let people hang themselves. And they will. If you believe the Bible, they will let them talk and say, fine, answer the fool according to his folly. Let's be consistent with it, see where it leads. Okay, you have somebody who is radically anti Christian and they're really up in arms about racial problems, or they're really up in arms about our involvement in Nicaragua. They're really up in arms about some political problem. Great, you say, then you're really committed, you're a really moral person. They want to say, on the one hand, everyone can do whatever they like. When I was in College and I do this all the time. We talk to people who believe it's all right to go to bed with people you're not married to. It's sexual revolution, everyone. Now God is demonstrating through AIDS and other problems that maybe that wasn't the most enlightened attitude to have after all. But even before that, you could say to people, well, if you believe that, then you believe you know, you can determine what's right and wrong for yourself. Correct. Right. And what I want to know is why you're down there picketing our involvement in Nicaragua or Vietnam or whatever it may be. If people can determine what's right and wrong for themselves so the President of the United States can determine who we want to go kick around the world who we don't want to force them to be consistent. Be a relativist, be an honest relativist. Don't let them arbitrarily be a relativist here, but not there, because you know what they do. Sinners will always make exceptions for what they want. They will always exclude what you want. And so what we're saying here is, let's have integrity when we debate, give the evidence when it's needed, prohibit your opponent to be arbitrary, demand consistency. And with those ground rules, here's the three steps that you're going to reproduce in just about any apologetical debate that you finally then get to the nuts and bolts. My argument. These are not my words, but my argument. First, you are ignorant. Can't be arbitrary. It will do you no good. Just say, well, I don't have to prove that. I mean, I just think they're ignorant. No, I'm going to show you how you can demonstrate he's ignorant. The second point in your argument, but you still know God. I want to demonstrate that you know the truth of what I'm telling you. You're ignorant, but you still know God. So you must change your whole mindset. I use the word mindset there to get the point. You need to change your whole approach to life and reality and knowledge. You don't need to change just your belief in whether Christ rose from the dead. You need to change your whole life outlook on how you think your whole mindset. Okay? The Bible, I think, supports this threefold approach. I'm going to give you very quickly how it does. So first, 1 Timothy 6, 20 warns us against the opposition of knowledge falsely, so called. What's Paul telling us? He's telling us that that which opposes the gospel is knowledge falsely, so called. It's not really knowledge Pretends to be, but it doesn't deserve the name knowledge. Why not? Well, what is knowledge? What is it to know something? What are the conditions under which someone can say I know that this is the case? Well, in the first place, if you know something, you believe it. You can't know things you don't believe. If you don't believe it, you don't know it either. Now I'm not talking about what you profess, but what I'm getting at is if you know something, you also believe it. However, I'm out of room here. You're not able call all beliefs knowledgeable. Because people believe false things, don't they? The fact that I believe something doesn't make it true. Therefore the fact that I believe something doesn't mean that I know it. Therefore our beliefs must be true beliefs. But even that's not enough because there are people who have true beliefs without any reason for it at all. We wouldn't say they're knowledgeable. There are people who say, you know, I am. I just believe I'm going to win the lottery. Proves that they do win the lottery. Do we then go say, I guess you knew that you would win the lottery? No, it's just an arbitrary guess, one that happened accidentally to turn out be right. What if you ask me what time is it, Dr. Bonson? I look at my watch and I say, well, it's 3:30. And then after our meeting, I look at my watch and it still says 3:30. And I say, oh, I guess it's my watch, it's not working. But it so happens that you ask right when it was 3:30. So did I know that it was 3:30? No, I believed it and it was true. But what I took to be evidence was not good evidence at all because I assumed that my watch was working when it wasn't. Therefore knowledge must be not only a matter of belief and a matter of truth. It must be something that is justified. To know something is to have justification for a belief that is in fact true. Now back to Paul. Paul says those who oppose the Christian faith are opposing it with knowledge falsely so called. They don't really know what they're talking about. What are they lacking? Well, you know, they're lacking the truth. I mean, that's assumed in this apologetical exchange. The point is they're lacking justification for what they believe. They're lacking justification, so you must demand justification. If they cannot justify what they are saying, then you're really ignorant in there. You really don't know what you're talking about because you don't have a basis, you don't have a justification for holding that belief. Now remember that the justification that you're demanding is a justification that's going to be pushed back all the way to the ultimate standard. If someone comes to you and says, I can't, you know, believe in Christianity because there are historical inaccuracies in the Bible, you say, well, how do you know there are historical inaccuracies in the Bible? Well, because it says things that I've never seen with my own senses. You say, oh, well, whether that's the case or not, how do you know you should trust your senses? Well, because there's just no other way to proceed. You have to trust your senses. I say, oh, in other words, you don't have a justification for trusting your senses. Well, but everybody does it. There are a lot of things everybody does that are not right. Majority vote doesn't count very much in theory of knowledge. What else is there? Well, you can take a view of the world that accounts for the fact that our senses are reliable most of the time, but they're not reliable sometimes. And that's the way God made the world and so forth. I mean, there is another approach. Well, what's your approach? That's what I'm going to know. What's your justification? I'll tell you what mine is in a minute. What's yours? And when he says, well, I guess I haven't gotten one, you say, oh, arbitrariness. Huh? Arbitrariness is not allowed in philosophy. When you get arbitrary, you don't win debates because if you're arbitrary, we don't even need to debate because you can believe in any you want anyway. So don't even bother to come tell me that you can't believe the Bible because there are these problems, historical problems in the Bible. You could just as easily have saved time by saying, I don't believe the Bible because I don't believe the Bible. So when the unbeliever attacks the faith, you need to point out you don't know what you're talking about because you cannot justify the things you're saying. You are ignorant. You lack justification. And in fact, Romans 1:20 supports that. Paul says that unbelievers are without excuse for their position. Without excuse. Another way of saying they have no justification for it. They have no leg to stand. Stand on. In 1 Corinthians 1:20, Paul says that God has made the wisdom of this world foolish. Romans 1:21, that professing to be wise, they became fools. So the first thing you're going to do in an apologetical exchange is show that they are not justified in their position. Ultimately, they are ignorant. Secondly, if you want to say, but you still know God in your heart of hearts, you know God, and that's how you are able to learn things through your senses. That's how you're able to make moral applications, whether I agree with the particulars of yours or not. That's how you're able to use logic and believe in human significance and so forth, because you do know God in your heart of hearts. My biblical support for that is Romans 1, 18:21, where Paul says that unbelievers suppress the truth in unrighteousness, that knowing God, they refuse to acknowledge. So remember that we're trying to demonstrate not only that you're ignorant, but all along you've known God because you're not really ignorant. You're not totally ignorant. You may do a real good job on the digestive tract of lines, or how to balance a checkbook or whatever it may be. There are things you do know, but there's only one way in which you could know that, and that's if you first of all knew God in your heart of hearts. In second Timothy 2:25, Paul says that unbelievers oppose themselves. They know one thing in their heart of hearts, and with their mouths they say another. What they say with their mouth opposes themselves, opposes the knowledge they have in their heart of hearts. And then thirdly, we want to point out that what we're calling on them to do then is not just to change their mind about those little detailed problems in the Bible they brought up. We're asking them to change their whole outlook. They need to change their ultimate authorities. Romans 1:25, Paul says that unbelievers worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator. In the end, that's what I want to tell people. Your problem is the reason why you're in this problem. You're ignorant and yet you still know God, is that you're worshiping the creature rather than the Creator. You have the wrong ultimate standard. People who say, I follow sensation and only sensation are following something created, aren't they? Well, what we want to say is stop worshiping sensation. First of all, worship the God who made you worship with eyes and ears and a mind, and then you'll be able to use your eyes, ears and mind in a way that don't fall into these problems. In Acts 17, you'll see that this is what Paul did when he debated with the Athenian philosophers. Paul went to the capital, the intellectual capital of the ancient world, to Athens. And there he was hauled before the Areopagus, the council that examines teachers who bring new things. He has to present a defense of his faith. And just real quickly, I want to show you these three steps, and then I'll illustrate them for our day. Paul says, first of all, you're ignorant. Verses 22 and 23 of Acts 17. You men of Athens, in all things I perceive that you are very superstitious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God. Isn't that amazing? You know to worship it, but you say you don't know this God. You're superstitious. You worship the unknown. What therefore you worship in ignorance. This I set forth to you. Paul says you are ignorant. Verse 27. God has determined the bounds of habitation for all men in order that they should seek God, if aptly, they might grope after him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. Paul says, at best, you are groping after God. He is not far from you. You have no excuse for this, but you're just groping after God. And then verse 30, the times of ignorance. Therefore God overlooked the times of what ignorance. And so here's the first theme. Paul says, you're ignorant, you're superstitious, you don't know what you're talking about. You even admit that what you do in ignorance I declare. What you don't know, I can tell you about. Secondly, he says, even though you're ignorant, you still know God. Verses 27 and 28. God has set the bounds of habitation, that they should seek God, if aptly they might grope afterwards him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move, and have our being as certain. Even of your own poets have said. Paul there says, God is the very environment in which we live. He's not far from any of us. You know this God. And I know that you know this God, because even your own poets say things that formerly turn out to be true, as ignorant as they are. This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute. Duplication, sharing and distribution is encouraged. For more information about the life and Ministry of Dr. Greg L. Bonson, visit our BonsonInstitute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.