Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Apologetics 2nd Century to Present (Part 6)

Which is a continuation of the previous tape, the Jew. Let me tell you a little bit about these letter of diagnetics, or to diagnosis, pardon me, attempted to expose the folly and the immorality which are fostered by pagan idolatry. And then the letter went on to emphasize the moral effects of the Gospel on the mind and the heart of believers. Similarly, Aristides, in his apology to the Emperor Hadrian, argued for the truth of Christianity because of the moral effects that Christianity has had on those who have become Christians, and a style that had become customary, patient, attempted to prove that the Mosaic revelation was more ancient than the Greek writers. And that's why it's more acceptable. It says the same thing, basically, but we beat them to the punch. And his apologies, his first and second apologies. Justin Martyr said that the philosophers were enlightened by the divine Logos and thus were Christians. Without realizing it, Aristides confronted the problem of a plurality of religious options by arguing from comparative studies that Christianity is the least superstitious of the options that are out there. You see what's going on in all of this. So Justin is saying you have the Logos, and the Logos has inspired the philosophers and the writers of the Bible. And then you have Justin Martyr arguing, or, excuse me, Aristides arguing that we all know what superstition is and we don't want it. And what I want to show is that on your own standards, we're the least superstitious of the religions of the world. Athenagoras argued on philosophical grounds that there cannot be a plurality of gods. And he wrote, as I said, on the resurrection of the dead. Justin's dialogue with Trypho the Jew, argued for the deity of Christ from the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. And then another church, Father Theophilus, appealed in his Ad Atolicum to the subjective testimony of the heart as the basis for believing Christianity to be true. Now, in all of these approaches in the second century, if we can stand back from the forest and just look at the pattern, or stand back from the trees and just look at the pattern of the forest, we see that there's an assumed epistemological continuity with the intellectual perspective and the interpretation of experience that's found in unbelieving thought, it's assumed that we approach experience the same way unbelievers do, and our theory of knowledge is basically the same as that of unbelievers. So we say yes to the unbeliever and his approach to the world, but no to him in terms of the conclusions he draws the second century apologists. Again, I'm way up in the helicopter of the forest here, but essentially what they're saying is, you're all right as far as you go, but you haven't come to the right conclusion with what you're doing. And for that reason, without the antithesis that we find in the preaching and the apologetic of the APostle Paul, the second century apologists didn't prove to be very effective. And where they did get people to be willing to affirm Christianity was not a Christianity that was doctrinally healthy because people hadn't been called to a completely different world in life view, they'd been called to see that Christianity is just, if you will, bumping up one notch on your own worldview. None of these apologists, none of them showed Christianity to be the definitive truth of God. Let me explain to you why in the first place, no argument was forthcoming that the truth of the gospel, the truth of the gospel, was the necessary condition for the changed lives of Christians. You argue Christianity is true because look at how these lives have been changed. Yeah, but if people believe Christianity to be true, their lives are changed even if what they believe happens to be false. No argument was there that since they had changed lives, what they were saying had to be true. The argument only shows that they must have really believed it to be true because their lives changed. By arguing that the Greek philosophers had plagiarized Moses and had been inspired by the Logos, the apologists assumed the veracity of the philosopher's perspective. Now, what kind of, you know, worldview conflict are you advancing when you say, oh, yeah, you got it right, but we knew that before you did. That's assuming an epistemological continuity with your opponent. It's not saying there's light and darkness, it's just we had the light first. And of course, that had certain, certain adverse effects on the argument for Christianity in the second century. If you agree with the philosophers and their presuppositions, it will appear to be arbitrary selectivity. When you refrain from agreeing with the philosophers in their conclusion, you're going to go and say, oh yeah, you philosophers, you've really got it right. I like your presuppositions. I want to approach things that way. Then people are going to say, well, if you respect the philosophers so much, how can you not respect what they did with those presuppositions? How can you not come to the same conclusions that they've come to? Besides, the educated pagan would say, if you appeal to the philosophers to validate certain of the truths of the faith, but not other claims that are made by the Christian faith, then that only shows that the better teachings of Christianity, the validated ones, are also taught by the philosophers. But if the better teachings of Christianity are also taught by the philosophers, then we don't need Christianity. God's revelation is superfluous. All we need is the philosophers. Where Christianity is questionable, the unbeliever doesn't want to follow it. Where Christianity agrees with the philosophers, the unbeliever need not follow it. You see, what you've basically done is committed intellectual Harry Carry, because your very approach and the standards you use gives everything to your opponent. He needs to. Well then I don't need you. Moreover, when the Christian message is placed upon the foundation of pagan thought, the Christian message comes to be naturalized and distorted. For instance, given the Greek view of faith, where anything is said to be possible in history, the resurrection of Christ turns out to be a mere oddity of irrational historical eventuation. You know, once you grant the unbeliever his view of history and you prove that Christ rose from the dead, he says, oh yeah, strange things happen in history. I love the way Dr. Van Till used to say tongue in cheek. Send it to Ripley's Believe it or not. Amazing. We live in an odd world, so odd things happen. We don't want to turn the resurrection into just another odd. Appeals to fact, to factuality, are ultimately futile unless the apologist recognizes and avoids the unbelievers presupposed philosophy of fact. We're not just disputing the facts with unbelievers. We're disputing their approach to the facts, their very philosophy of fact as well. What about the argument from fulfilled prophecy? Some people are upset when it appears that I'm opposing that because the Bible appeals to fulfilled prophecy. I don't have any difficulty with that as long as you read it in context. The Bible appeals to fulfilled prophecy. Not to those who say God doesn't exist, but to those who are supposed to be Christians or to those who say they respect the Old Testament prophets. So if somebody tells me, well, I respect the Bible, I think it is the word of God, then I would go to the Bible and try to prove my point. But you don't appeal to an atheist that prophecy has been fulfilled because the atheist doesn't believe there's a God who could prophesy. And when it appears that something has come through later, the atheist will always, unless the spirit of God has changed his heart and humbled him, will always go back and say that prophecy didn't mean what you thought it did. You're reading that into the prophecy. From an unbelieving perspective, the arguments from prophecy all appear to rely on a tendentious reading of the Old Testament. You Christians go back and you find in the Old Testament what you want and then an intelligent atheist, not all of them are, but a well read intelligent atheist is actually going to take the person who believes in fulfilled prophecy and go and show how the Bible says that certain things are a fulfillment of prophecy. That on the surface reading don't appear to be a fulfillment of prophecy at all. Out of Egypt I have called my son. Matthew says that fulfills the word of Hosea. But you know, when you read Hosea, at least on First Blood, it doesn't appear to be saying anything about Jesus and his parents running down to Egypt. Okay, so now we either going to have to say the New Testament writers tended to overstate their case and they twisted the Old Testament for illustrative purposes, or we're going to have to say we have a more complicated view of biblical revelation and God's work in history whereby that proves to actually have been a prophecy as well as a statement of what God did historically in bringing the Jews, his people, his sons out of Egypt. Now the unbeliever is not willing to go to the more complicated and subtle understanding of revelation and God's providence and history, is he? I mean if he were, we wouldn't be arguing. And so what's he left with? He has to believe that the Old Testament is being distorted by the New Testament writer. I don't know many Christians who don't just completely dissolve under that kind of acid bound of criticism. They say, oh, you believe in fulfilled prophecy. Let me show you what fulfilled prophecy means for you. You take one of these difficult examples and the Christian doesn't know really what to do with this. And the atheist says that's my view of all of them. They're all like that. You know, you take these words and you make them fit the situation. That is to say you're reading back into the Old Testament the very thing you think the Old Testament is proving. What about the evaluation of pagan religions that we find in the second century apologists? They argued that the pagans were guilty of immorality and superstition and therefore one should become a Christian and not fall into those excesses. Hopefully you can see that there is a real begging of the question in that apologetic, isn't there? From a non biblical perspective, Christianity appears to be immoral and superstitious. Remember Jesus and the Resurrection. So from a non Christian standpoint, if you want to say you want to get rid of what seems immoral and superstitious, the unbeliever says, well, then, I want to get rid of you. Why then should an educated pagan have felt compelled to believe the Christian apologist in the second century? Why would they have thought there is no intellectual ground upon which to stand except that of Christ and His Word? Why would they think the objective truth of the Christian declaration has been publicly demonstrated so that we're all without excuse for failing to submit to the Lord Jesus Christ? Sadly, I have to conclude that at the end of the second century, the fate of apologetics was rather deplorable. What Christians offered in defense of their faith, while not being every line, you know, bogus, and nevertheless for the most part, proved to be just so much grist for the unbelieving thinkers thinking the mills of his critical intellect. To put it very simply, when Paul said in First Corinthians 1, where's the debater of this age? Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? That intellectual challenge was not clearly sounded in the second century. How about the third century apologists? The third century apologists, especially those of Alexandria, continued to assimilate the arguments from Platonic and Stoic philosophers, even as the Jewish debaters had done previously. Clement of Alexandria argued that the best aspirations and insights at work throughout pagan history, for instance in the mystery cults and in the Hellenistic philosophers, had all been fulfilled in their apex Christianity. Isn't that wonderful? It's like the mystery cult and the Hellenistic philosophers were all, you know, building up. And what Christianity is, is the final fulfillment of all those things. Makes one think of our explanation of covenant theology, right? Having the Old Testament, all these things God gives by way of anticipation and the seed is growing and flowering, and finally we get to fulfillment and fruition in Christ. Well, little did you know that he's also the fulfillment of the mystery cults and the pagan philosophers. Having studied philosophy under the father of Neoplatonism, Origen argued against the criticisms of Celsus by saying that the Bible agrees with profound philosophy and that the Christians inability to prove historical assertions from Scripture is no defect. Because get this, the Greeks can't prove their history either. Like we're all in the same sinking boat. So don't, you know, rail upon me for having a sinking boat. The necessity of the Christian message and the uniqueness of the Christian message were to a very great extent hidden in the apologies of the Alexandrians of the third century, but the Latin apologists were not much better. Marcus Minutius in his Octavius, proclaimed that the philosophers of old were unconsciously Christians. He's also known as Spirit Felix, by the way. The Cap philosophers of old were unwitting Christians. And he said Christians today are unwitting philosophers. It's only in Tertullian, in the third century that we begin to see some return from the Babylonian captivity of Christian apologetics. That isn't to say I like everything in Tertullian, but at least you begin to see somebody who wants to swim against the tide. Tertullian refused to integrate Jerusalem with Athens. You know, he's saying the statement, what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? Wake up and smell the coffee. All of a sudden somebody saying something, yeah, why should we. Who are endorsing the point of view of Jerusalem? Why should we care what Athens has to say? Why should we endorse the outlook of Jerusalem based on the foundation of Athens? The difficulty, of course, is that Tertullian went a bit further and used, I think, the counterproductive recommendations that people should endorse Christian teaching because it is absurd. What he was thinking here is now you look at what Christianity says that's so absurd that it could only have come from God. Nobody would make this up. Okay, it seems to me we should be arguing in favor of Christian teaching in spite of its apparent absurdity. And we might point out we wouldn't have made this sort of thing up. But it really is a bit shaky to say, isn't this absurd? Must be true. Rather, we should take the teaching of Athens, the philosophical perspective of the world, and unmask it for its presuppositional absurdity. We don't want it to stand as an erroneous option over against the faith. Also in the third century, Cyprian wrote, repeating second century arguments for the faith, but adding to the evidences the spectacle of Catholic unity. I mean, living at this side and of Christian history, it's kind of hard to believe that anybody would do that. But Cyprian said the faith must be true because look at the unity among God's people. Well, obviously that argument rests on assumptions that might seem to disprove the truth of Christianity after the arrival of the Protestant Reformation. Right. In fact, we still have in our day, many people who say Christianity is true. Why are there so many denominations? Look at the 4th and 5th centuries. We really could put an end to our discussion of the early Church. But I Don't think we will have been doing justice to our history if we don't pay attention to the example of Augustine. So now, looking at the 4th and 5th centuries, we don't really find any new grand religious synthesis, any kind of global vision constructed from the materials of Stoic and Platonic philosophy, but reshaped by the Gospel. The overriding problem of the previous age in the Church had been the relationship between Christianity and classical culture, but now the problem was that of Christianity seeing amazing success. We had the heroic martyrs, advances in doctrinal formulation, the conversion of Constantine and so forth. And so the challenge of classical culture was no longer there, and Christianity was more an accepted intellectual and social option for people. Now, with the antagonism of the Roman Empire pretty much subsiding, apologists became much more open to an idea of synthesis with the world because it now looks like the world's friendly to us. Typical of this era was the case against the pagans by Anabias. Anabias evidently was much more familiar with Stoic thought than he was with Christian theology because he subscribed to the what's known as the tabula rasa theory of the human mind. You know, the mind is blank at birth and sensation writes upon it. And he argued that even though all intellectual options are uncertain, we should believe the one which offers more hope than the others. Nobody knows for sure. So why don't you choose for Jesus? Because he seems the most hopeful. But if nobody knows for sure, how can you say that Jesus is more hopeful than the other option? Christianity becomes on this basis nothing more but an eschatological insurance policy. Right? No one knows for sure. So why don't you hedge your bets and follow Jesus? Arnabaeus admitted that he had no solution to the problem of evil. He did not clearly deny the existence of pagan gods, and in the end left us with an apologetic that was far more suited to deism than to Christianity. Christianity. Lactation made extensive use of Plato and Cicero and Lucretius. In his apologetic, he said, from the confidence of Greek reasoning and philosophy, the existence and providence of God could be proven. But then he turned around and pleaded the limitations of philosophy and went on to accept the deity of Christ on the grounds of inspired prophecy. Yes, but yes, Plato and Aristotle or the Stoics were right and we know there is a God. But they have the wrong view of God because prophecy shows that Jesus is the son of God. On the Platonic or Stoic view of God, God can't have a son. And so here you have A Christian who wants to run with pagan philosophy to show certain parts of Christianity and then he wants to say oh, but the philosophers are wrong so that he can prove other parts of Christianity. The world is not impressed with that kind of double mindedness. We find an instructive contrast between the attitudes of Ambrose and Eusebius during this time in church history. Ambrose said, and I quote, it is good that faith should go before reason. Lest we seem to exact a reason from our Lord God as from a man. There's some hope in that. It's not appropriate that we submit or make the Lord submit to our reasoning and exact from our Lord God a reason to believe him as though he was just another man. Eusebius on the other hand said that faith that. Well, he said knowledge needs to prepare the way for faith. And so he wrote the Preparation of the Gospel. The title tells you everything really. And then he wrote the Proof of the Gospel. Eusebius is significant for apologetical history for a couple of reasons. He's the forerunner of Augustine and that's in significance and that for two reasons. In the first place, he pioneered the apologetic of world history. The apologetic of world history says Christianity is true because of its amazing success in the world. And then Eusebius, like the early Augustine, platonized the Bible almost as much as he baptized Greek speculation with Christian terminology. The domination of Greek philosophical assumptions in 4th and 5th century apologetics could hardly be better testified to than than the title of Theodoret's work. The Truth of the Gospels Proved from Greek Philosophy. That's the title now. The Truth of the Gospels or the Proof of the Truth? I'll get it. The Truth of the Gospels Proved from Greek Philosophy. Theodore felt able to incorporate the highest insights of Neoplatonic speculation into his Christian philosophy. And yet he argued simultaneously that Christians alone live up to the best insights of the pagans. He said, you pagans have it right, but we do it better than you do. The same problem with arbitrary selectivity afflicted the early thinking of Augustine. Early in his life, Augustine felt that unaided human reason is capable of establishing God's existence and to do so by indubitable arguments. Augustine was confident, he said, that if Socrates and Plato had been alive in his day, they would certainly have been Christians. Augustine argued from the moral miracle and the superlative success of the Church that the Christian faith must be true in the City of God. He expounds the common argument that the growth of the Church and the death of the martyrs would be incredible except upon the assumption that Christ historically rose from the dead, of course, to the extent that Augustine proved the existence of God in Platonic fashion, so that Plato would have been happy, he would have to have rejected the Incarnation because Plato had no room for God in any unique way coming into history. You know, what comes into history, according to Plato, is the soul of every individual. In that case, we're all incarnations of God and Jesus has no unique place in our thinking or experience. When Augustine turned to the evidential apologetic of world history, I think he encountered great difficulties also, as I told you, with Eusebius. He found evidence for the truth of Christianity and its beneficial effects, the effects that it brought to the empire as well as the success of the Church. But now, in Augustine's day, now that the course of history and the conditions in Satan's Church had been attributed to God in order to serve as evidence for him, what must the apologists do when the Roman Empire is falling apart? And so Augustine felt compelled to turn around and argue in the City of God that this state of affairs was not the responsibility of the Christians. That is to say, he felt obligated to vindicate the Christian faith and its God from culpability for the sack of Rome in the year 410. Augustine had wanted to prove the truth of Christianity from the hard evidence of history and then to the hard facts. His opponents forced him to go, landing him right in the midst of the problem of theodicy. How can you justify the ways of God if the Roman Empire is falling apart like this? Later, Salvion completed the turning of the apologetic of world history on its head and argued that the course of events evidences the judgment of God rather than his beneficence. Isn't that wonderful? Eusebius says, you see how good things are going, that proves God. Salvin says, see how bad things are going, that proves God, because that's his judgment. From Eusebius to Salvian. It's not the simple facts of history that are taken to prove the Christianity, because facts of conflicting character, facts of both weal and woe, are appealed to in order to prove the same conclusion. Things are going well, that proves that there's a God. Things are going bad, that proves that there's a God. Unbelievers recognize immediately that the facts are not proving this, but the facts are being interpreted by your conclusion. Please turn the cassette over at this time. Unbelievers recognize immediately that the facts are not proved this, but the facts are being interpreted by your conclusion. By the way, those of you who might be familiar with my course on Calvin's institutes will know that I talk about that how Calvin does the same thing. He's trying to make this point positively. Calvin says that when things go well for people, they should be led to repentance because God is being gracious. They know they're sinful and they don't deserve how well things are going. And when things are going poorly for them, they ought to be fearful of the judgment of God, because if it's this bad now, it's going to be infinitely worse on the day of judgment. You look at that and you say, now how can both kinds of things prove the same conclusion? Only because Calvin was a presuppositionalist. He said that his Christian approach to the world helped him interpret everything in the world. But we're not talking about people who self consciously, like Calvin, took a Christian worldview. We're talking about people who said the facts by themselves prove our conclusion. And then it turns out they're willing to use facts of conflicting character to prove the very same thing. How about Augustine's early argument for the credibility of Christ's resurrection and his consideration that the martyrs would not have given up their lives if Christ hadn't risen from the dead? You find that popularly advanced by evidentialists in our day. They'll say the fact that the early Christians were willing to die for their claim about the resurrection proves that Christ rose from the dead. You know, I don't mind people saying that if they're talking in Christian circles, because I think it's hard to believe that martyrs would die for a lie. But you see, outside of Christian circles, unbelievers are going to say, what makes you think they died for a lie? They died for something that is false, but they thought it was true. Okay, so once you say the Christian thought that he rose from the dead and that's why they were willing to die, the argument from martyrdom doesn't show anything about the truthfulness of the historical claim. Moreover, some Christians might even have been willing to die. The unbeliever would say some might have been willing to sacrifice their lives not for the false story that Jesus rose from the dead, but for the broad ideal that Jesus represented. They may have been willing to face up to the Roman Empire and say, we will not back down because Jesus was a wonderful person and we agree with his ideals. And if you're going to kill us for making this claim, then we'd rather be killed than to give in to you. Sometimes people will die for things they know to be false because they think it nevertheless has some value that goes beyond, you know, the claim that is false. It's an ideal for life. They may have died because they wanted to disrupt the Roman Empire for all we know. And so how should we interpret these facts about the resurrection of Jesus Christ? The believer has one interpretation, the unbeliever has another interpretation. So on Augustine's early approach, there really was no way to resurrect this and there wasn't any strong apologetic for the Christian faith. However, I'm glad to acknowledge that in the later writings of Augustine we do see a movement toward a clearer understanding as Augustine comes to say that it's by faith alone that the Christian accepts the existence of the triune God and that the Bible must be accepted on its way own terms. And that all of history and all of human experience must be interpreted in the light of God's revelation in order for it to be intelligible. In his retractions, that's the title of the pamphlet. In his retractions, Augustine expressed the conviction that there is no teacher who teaches man knowledge except God. And in his later life, Augustine advanced the point of view for which you should remember him. Just in terms of a thumbnail sketch of the history of thought and apologetics, Augustine advanced the famous motto I believe in order to understand. It's that insight that Calvin and later Van Till will pick up on and develop in a marvelous way according to Augustine and his retractions and later in his life. The idea that I use my reasoning as a foundation for faith gives way to the contrary view that if I don't have Christian faith, there is no foundation for reasoning. All of life must be interpreted in the light of Christian faith or human experience becomes unintelligible. I believe in order to understand rather than demanding that I understand so that there might be a foundation for my believing. Alright, I drugged you. Through some of the dusty details of 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th century apologetics, we don't have time to, even with that minor detail, look at the remaining centuries of the Christian church. So I'm going to jump ahead now and talk about the conflict between Augustine and Aquinas. And that conflict is already represented for you up here on the slate board. Augustine said I believe in order to understand, so that faith is foundational to human reasoning. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages, argued the very opposite. He said that reason provides a fundament, a porch or an initial step for faith, and that all men use, using their natural reason, the natural man, all men using their natural reason as it applies to the realm of nature, can come to common and reliable conclusions of a limited nature about God existing. So that reason provides a foundation for faith. But then Aquinas realized that there were certain things that the Christian faith teaches that you couldn't prove on the basis of reason alone. You couldn't prove the Trinity, for instance, on the basis of reason alone. Nor could you prove, prove that the world's going to have an end and Jesus will be the final judge of all men. So what he said is, reason provides a foundation for faith. But even those articles of faith that go beyond reason are not unreasonable. I said that two ways. Reason provides a positive foundation for faith. But those articles of faith that go beyond reason are not unreasonable, reasonable. That's not to say that they're proven by reason. It's to show that they are not disproven by reason. But in the end, reason then is the final standard, isn't it? We believe what reason teaches us as natural men, as we look at the natural world, and then everything that goes beyond that, based on revelation, we still say is not unreasonable. So this is the great contrast in the history of Christian philosophy, really, between the Thomistic and the Augustinian approach, the relationship of faith and reason. What I've taught you all day today in our course, of course, is in the Augustinian strain, isn't it? I've argued that it's faith that gives us a basis for reasoning. And without that faith, reasoning becomes absurd. How does the natural man, applying his natural reason to the realm of nature, come to the conclusion, the minimal conclusion, that there is a God? Aquinas offered five ways in which that could be seen. Most people today who evaluate his five ways believe that they really break down into three arguments. One of them has some variation, different ways of putting it. They amount to the cosmological argument for God's existence. The cosmological argument, an argument from. Well, I'll just take one variation from motion. Since we're all familiar with motion in this world, and we know that things that move have to be moved by something else, then there must be a mover for the entire world, and that's what we call God. So we can reason from cause and effect and the fact of motion and this world back to a first cause for the world as a whole. He also had an argument from the order in which we. The order that we find in the world, called the teleological argument. If we find design in our experience, there must be a designer for what we have found. And that's what we call God. And then finally there's the argument that he offers from criteria, the criteriological argument that in our experience we assess things as being greater and lesser, you know, better and worse. And for all of that gradation, there must be a greatest or a final criterion by which we're evaluating the lower degrees of better and worse. And that's what we call God. I'm only hesitating long enough here to talk about Aquinas, because he has been a giant in the history of apologetics. I mean, after Aquinas, everybody writes this way. Everybody, you know, drools over these arguments, tries to reconstruct them and make them credible and so forth. And even in our day, philosophers of religion continue to talk about proofs and arguments for God's existence, beginning with things of this nature. Let me explain to you. Time isn't great here, but it doesn't take a long time to show why the world's not impressed at all with these arguments. In the first place, is the fact that we see events being caused in this world proves that there is a cause for the world as a whole. That's philosophical fallacy, a logical fallacy. To say what's true of the parts of something is true of the whole. All the parts of your car may have have as a quality the inability to run the car, but the engine as a whole, the car as a whole can run. All the parts of a Lego statue weigh less than an ounce, but the statue as a whole doesn't necessarily weigh less than an ounce. So the fact that everything in our experience is in motion or shows that it came from something else and was caused doesn't prove that the whole shooting match has a cause. Besides, even if it does prove that, it doesn't prove that there's one cause. You see, everybody who follows the cosmological argument argues from there is a cause for each thing that happens to the conclusion there's one cause for everything happening. And that's a logical mistake as well. That doesn't follow at all. Kant pointed out that what Aquinas and others is looking at is their natural experience. They say, in my natural experience, there's always a cause for the events that I encounter. But they draw a conclusion about something that goes beyond their natural experience through an alleged supernatural cause. Well, that is philosophically illegitimate. And Kant is exactly right. You can't argue from premises that deal with one domain to a conclusion that goes beyond that domain altogether. And so the cosmological argument has not been Real persuasive with unbelievers who don't want to be brought to the faith. There have been people who are impressed with the cosmological argument, but I would maintain there are always people who are inclined to want to believe and they're looking for some reason. Anyway, what about the teleological argument from design? There must be a designer, isn't that right? Well, okay, but do we see design in this world? You see, by calling it design, you've already assumed what a personal understanding of whatever order is out there. Maybe the order that we find out there is just an accidental order. You know, I'm teaching this course in the city of Brooklyn. My last name is Bonson. Brooklyn begins with B. Bonson begins with B. Isn't that amazing? Look at the order in this world that must have been designed. Well, for other reasons. I think it was designed, but I wouldn't say that from the B of Brooklyn and the B, there's design here, there's a kind of order, but we wouldn't look at that as a designed order. And so unbelievers who should be impressed with the design that we see in the world, Paul tells us in Romans 1, it's there, but unbelievers are not going to go from order per se to a designer. It just doesn't follow. And so Thomas Aquinas should be remembered for two things. First of all, his opposite to the Augustinian epistemology, reason now is the foundation for faith. And secondly, for arguments that appeal to the autonomous man, arguments for the existence of God, and, I believe, failed arguments for the existence of God. In my brief survey, I want to jump ahead now to the 17th century or the 18th century and look at David Hume and the evidentialist. David Hume was a Scottish skeptic who argued against the Christian faith, but he argued also against any rational foundation for science and ethics. Hume believed we couldn't really know about ourselves as an enduring personality that has experiences that we couldn't know about an external world, we couldn't know about causal relations in an external world. And he said we couldn't know rationally about any foundations for the absolutes of ethics. Ethics, according to him, is nothing more but the expression of a person's likes and dislikes. And what we call scientific inference is just an expression of our habits of thought rather than what is actually the case out in the world. Vacuum was quite a skeptic. Now, what's ironic is that in the same general age as Hume, we have in the Christian church, among Roman Catholics and evangelicals, but primarily among Protestant apologists, the development of the appeal to historical and scientific evidences for the Christian faith. And so you have Protestants and to a certain degree, Roman Catholics going to people saying, now if you follow this empirical epistemology of locked, then you'd have to come to Christian conviction. In fact, Locke himself argued for the reasonableness of Christianity based on his empirical philosophy. Then you have the work of Paley, you know, the watchmaker argument and so forth, and the work of Bishop Butler, who said that if you study nature, there's an analogy there that prepares you for what God supernaturally does in the gospel. The sad thing is, as Christians are attempting to develop these evidential arguments from empirical epistemology, we all want to follow the rage of the day, the locking and fat of empiricism. David Hume comes along and destroys all of it, Locke included. He shows well there is no foundation for Christianity or science or ethics. So now we have this terrible problem of skeptic to deal with. And then we come to Immanuel Kant in a dialectical approach to things, because Kant says Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers, showed that he could not presume the legitimacy of the causal principle, and so forth. But if science was going to be preserved and if there was going to be room for faith, for Christian faith, we'd have to have a completely different approach to the way in which we think and see the world. And according to Kant, that approach calls for us to divide things between how we think things are, how they appear to us, how they are phenomenally experienced, and how things are in and of themselves. Which is to say, I accept the skepticism of Hume. None of us know about ultimate reality or even the reality of individual things in this world. We only know the world as it appears. But according to Kant, it must appear to us in a certain way, because the human mind imposes categories like causation on experience. It's kind of hard to believe that any philosopher would think Kant and Dunn are wonderful job here. He didn't answer Hume. He capitulated to Hume because the science that he saved is now psychologized science. I must psychologically think in terms of causation. But whether the world out there, things in themselves show causal relations, no one can know. And the faith that Kant left room for is not a faith that can declare the truth of God entering into human history and the providence of God and the holy character of God. It's a Christianity or a religion that says no one knows for sure. So I can be A mystic. And in the end, Kant's Christianity was a moralistic Christianity. God is brought in to back up the demands of the categorical imperative. If people believe in God, they're more likely to live by the categorical imperative. But that's the only God we know. Well, what's the outcome of that? Kantian thinking? And Christians say, look at that. Kant saved science and made room for faith, even though the faith has been distorted and science has been distorted. And so what comes out of this Kantian stream is the development Christian theology of liberalism and ultimately neo orthodoxy. And so we endorse Kant and we end up with no Christ. The only Danish philosopher that we'll mention, apart from Dr. Bonson, historian Kierkegaard. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard saw what the Hegelians in particular were doing, trying to make use of autonomous philosophy to vindicate, quote, unquote, Christianity, where in fact Christianity simply became, if you will, a stylized and pious way of expressing Hegelian philosophy. And he was repulsed by that. He hated the rationalism of Hegel and he hated the fact that Christianity was being made a universal system that really just expresses the autonomous thinking of this man Hegel. So Kierkegaard, in his opposition to this, develops what later comes to be known as an existential approach. Rather than looking at broad general categories, the universal approach or the essences, he emphasizes the existence of the concrete historical person. And then why is it that he's a Christian? Kierkegaard says it's not because rational philosophy proves it. In fact, if rational philosophy proved it, it would make it worth. Kierkegaard says he's a Christian because he's made a passionate choice, a leap of faith to be a follower of Christ. Christianity is a matter of commitment, not a matter of rationality, not a matter of reasoning and intellect. And that has appealed to a number of people, continues to appeal to a number of people even in the 20th century. The idea that I've just decided to follow Jesus, and in fact it is a mark of piety and sainthood that I won't get involved in these intellectual squabbles. I'm going to believe against the philosophers to follow Jesus. There's only one problem. Well, there's really a lot of problems, but the major problem is that there was another person who was just as willing to be anti rational as Kierkegaard. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche. And in the 19th century, Nietzsche was under the skin, a brother with Kierkegaard and his rejection of the philosophers and so forth. But Nietzsche's affirmation of life was an affirmation of life because he said God is dead. Thus spake Zarathustra, there is no God, and therefore all values must be by my choosing. And so here you have the mystery of a Kierkegaard that's supposed to be defending the Christian faith and commitment, but it equally defends nihilism, the Nietzschean view that there is no God, there are no objective values, and it's only what man chooses to believe accounts. Nietzsche was so nihilistic that he actually held that the falsity of a proposition has no objection to it. I'm quoting him, or merely quoting him. The falsity of a proposition is no objection because he said, the only thing the propositions are good for is affirming what we want in life. And so if a false proposition proves to be life affirming, if it proves to be helpful in a pragmatic way in gaining what we want, who cares that it's false? It's not like I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this. He openly declared this. He says, why should this proposition falsely be held against it? What I want to know is, is it powerful? Is it pragmatic? Is it useful? And then we step into the 20th century. Do you understand a little bit about the age in which you live? Just having heard this much, I might want to encourage you to pick up my History of Philosophy series that we have on tape that will take you from the earliest days of philosophy through the 19th and 20th centuries. Because I believe that the study of history of philosophy is an apologetic in itself. I can't get into that now, but let me simply say at the end of this survey that Kierkegaard's mysticism didn't prove to be helpful to the Church if it also opens the door to the point of view of nihilism, where the falsity of a proposition is just as acceptable as the truth of a proposition, provided they give us what we want and accomplish pragmatically our ends. Where's the Christian Church been through all of this? Sadly, the Christian Church has been, for the most part, in a Babylonian captivity to the world. The exception that I find is in the Institutes of the Christian Religion by Calvin, which has a very refreshing and, I think, much more faithful approach to how we know the Bible to be true and how we approach the unbeliever with the intellectual challenge of the Gospel. And then, as I've already indicated in the development of a Calvinistic philosophy in the writings of Cornelius van till, in the 20th century. Overall evaluation of the history of apologetics. Yes, but can you remember that? Yes, but the Church, those who have represented the point of view of the Church, those who have tried to defend the faith, have repeatedly in the history of the Christian church wanted to say yes to the world, but come to my conclusions and stuff. They have not wanted to press the antithesis and press that if you do not know Christ, then you are lost intellectually as well as eternally. We have wanted to be friends with the world for a while so that we can then take the world's approach and turn it, but contrary to the world, to Christian conclusions. And that's been the double mindedness and the inconsistency, the schizophrenia of Christian apologetics through the centuries. Tomorrow, when we start up again, I'll attempt to go back to the Bible and develop a theory of knowledge and approach to apologetics that we hope by God's grace, and we'll pray to this end is faithful to him so that we might have more powerful stuff than what we've seen on the board this afternoon. Thanks a lot. This recording is distributed by Covenant Media Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization. Unauthorized reproduction of this tape is strictly prohibited. A free catalog of the foundation's tapes and articles is available by calling 1-800-53938.