Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Checklist for Reasoning Part 1 (Part 23)

This message was delivered by Dr. Greg L. Bonson, Scholar in Residence at the Southern California center for Christian Studies in Irvine, California. All right, as we get underway again, we want to continue our explication of a presuppositional theory of apologetics. And now what I think is the most helpful part of the theoretical presentation is our lecture for this hour, a Checklist for Arguing with Unbelievers. We've talked about what the theory is and what it's based on, the greatness of divine wisdom and how it stands in terms of Kuyper and Warfield and proofs for God's existence and evidence for Christianity. You know, all is said and done. What we want to know is, how do we do this? And tomorrow's lectures, for the most part, are given over to the practice of presuppositional apologetics. And that's really where a lot of the desire for illustrations and so forth that you very naturally and properly have is going to be satisfied. But before we get to the specific illustrations, there'll be some specifics. But before we get to a complete giving of ourselves to that, we need to kind of stand back and say, now what is the procedure for defending the faith that we've been talking about? What is, if you will, a checklist step by step, for what we do when we're defending the faith, when all is said and done? These grand theoretical things that you've been talking about, Dr. Bonson, have got to be formed into a procedure, and we'd like to see what that is. And so I'll try to offer it to you. You're going to be looking for four things whenever you have a discussion with an unbeliever. When you get into an apologetical encounter or dispute with an unbeliever, there are four things in particular you're going to be looking for, and I'm going to speak of each one at some length. First of all, you'll be looking for prejudicial. Learn to talk here. Prejudicial conjectures. Put it very simply. You want to be on the lookout for arbitrariness in what the unbeliever is arguing. One of the two great intellectual sins that men commit, no matter what field of study you're in, is arbitrariness. The other one is inconsistency. No one is allowed to be arbitrary if you're trying to present a rational basis for what you believe. And no one is being rational in presenting a basis for what they believe. If they contradict themselves, if they're inconsistent, and so Arbitrariness is something you need to be on the lookout for, believe it or not. I don't know if I could justify this statistic, but subjectively, it seems to me probably 80% of your work in apologetics is taken care of. If you'll just be on the lookout for people saying anything they want to say, 80% of what the unbeliever ends up doing turns out to be totally unfounded giving of his own opinion to which you should say, so what? So that's your opinion. Now, why do you believe that? It distresses me to see Christians get into apologetical debates with unbelievers. And when they're going back and forth, the unbeliever is pressing the Christian for a reason for this and a reason for that. And when the Christian gives answers back, the unbeliever, you know, parries them off with this or that opinion and we just say, oh, what do we do now? Well, you should press the unbeliever for some reason, for the way in which he's responding to the evidence. He cannot, she cannot, may not be. If you're going to be rational, arbitrary, believe me, this is the biggest problem in witnessing to people is that they think they have the right to just believe whatever they want. When it comes to religion, they can just be arbitrary. But if you want to get into an apologetical dispute, as I indicated in our earliest lectures, that assumes that people are seeking to be rational in seeking the objective truth, they're seeking to be rational as they seek the object of truth. And it's not a sign of rationality to be arbitrary, just to believe anything you wish. And a version of arbitrariness is found in the conjectures which are completely arbitrary or unfounded or prejudicial. As I've said up on the board, on the part of the unbeliever, one sometimes finds unbelievers, both educated and uneducated, who take offense against Christianity before they're familiar with what they're talking about. And in the place of honest research and assessment of the available evidence concerning some aspect of the Bible, many unbelievers simply substitute personal conjecture for what seems likely to them. The place of argumentation and reasoning. For instance, since the Bible was supposed to be written so many years ago, it just seems likely to many unbelievers that we cannot trust the text of the Bible which we have in our hands today. Surely they'll say scribes have altered and supplemented the original text so that we can't be sure that what we have in Front of us is actually what Moses or Jeremiah or John or Paul said. For all we know, what we read in our Bibles came from the pen of some kind of monk in the Dark Ages. I've actually had people say that we don't know if that's what the original said. Some monk in the Middle Ages may have said that. Now that kind of ignorant criticism seems intellectually sophisticated to many unbelievers. After all, in our natural human experience, often messages get garbled or distorted or augmented in the process of being passed from one person to another, right? We've all lived in nice big families where a message goes from one hand to another and by the time you get it, it. It's not really in its pure form. So we say, since we've seen that happen in our natural experience, we should just take for granted that that's got to be true about the Bible as well. To unbelievers who reason this way, we mustn't tire of pointing out that they are relying upon conjecture and not upon research in what they are saying. Now, it may seem likely that the biblical text would no longer be reliable, no longer be authentic after all these years. But the likelihood, that judgment of likelihood is an evaluation that rests upon presuppositions that are arbitrary, presuppositions that are nothing more but prejudice. Let's see if we can see the prejudice in this line of reasoning. If you're sitting there thinking, well, yeah, what do you say to that? That seems so reasonable? Then you should be asking the unbeliever, what's the basis for your saying that? The first prejudice is the assumption that the biblical text is no different from any other written document which we find in our natural human experience throughout history. Notice how I sucked you into this. I said we all know what it's like to live in a home where a message is passed from one person to another and it doesn't turn out to be accurate, it's distorted by the time a person finally gets it, what is it? I mean, I didn't put a red flag out there to say, watch out now. And this is what the unbeliever is going to do to you. Not by malice, although sometimes. But the unbeliever doesn't realize he or she is doing this too. You notice what the prejudice is there? The prejudice is this book is like what any other book. This message passed down through the ages is like any other message passed down through the ages. But what if it happens to be a unique message? What if it happens to have a unique authority. What if it happens to have the absolute, personal, all providential, all controlling, all knowing God behind it? You see, if that is true, then you can't treat it like any other kind of message, can you? To assume that in my experience, all other messages tend to be corrupted when they're passed from one person to another. Therefore it's true of this book as well. Let's just say this book is like no other book. I mean, is exactly like the other books. Rather than being a unique book. In my experience, if the Bible is, as it claims to be, the inspired word of Almighty God, then the history of its textual transmission may very well be quite different from other human documents, since God would have ordained that its text be preserved with greater integrity than that of ordinary books. Okay, so that's the first indication of prejudice, and that was unargued, right? The unbeliever didn't come in and say, now the book is not as it claims to be, a unique book under the providential care of God. The second indication of prejudice is that the unbeliever does not offer any concrete evidence that some medieval monk tampered with the text before us. Today, when unbelievers say things like that, the remark is simply and arbitrarily advanced as a hypothesis to be endorsed for its likelihood given your assumptions and prejudices, rather than endorsed because of its empirical credentials. If we want to play that way, of course we could with equal arbitrariness, conjecture the words which came down to us as Paul's were actually written not years later than Paul, but were written years before the time of Paul. Arbitrary and a sickle friend to the scholar, cut loose from any demand for evidence, we could believe any number of conflicting things. The point here is the unbeliever has thought he or she could just say, well, it just seems like common sense to me, and arbitrarily say that thirdly, as an indication of prejudice. In this criticism, we see that the unbeliever has not taken account of the actual evidence which is publicly available regarding the text of Scripture. My second criticism was they didn't think they needed evidence at all. My third criticism or indication of prejudice is that there is a great deal of evidence there and they haven't bothered to even look at it. If the critic had taken time to look into the subject, he or she would not have offered the outlandish evaluation of the biblical text as being unreliable. This fact came home to me with great strength or force after I took an advanced course in graduate school. On the philosophy of Plato. In this course, we were required to do textual criticism of the literary corpus of Plato's works. So let me just. I know you're not fascinated by Plato necessarily, but let me use this as an illustration for you. Our earliest known manuscript, our earliest extant manuscript of a work by Plato dates from right before 900 AD. It's the manuscript known as Oxford B. And it was found in a patmos Monastery by E.B. clark. Now, you have to remember that Plato is thought to have written these manuscripts roughly 350 years before Christ. And the first copy we have of These manuscripts, written 350 years before Christ, dates from 900 or just before 900 AD. And so there you have a gap between the original writing and the earliest document we have as a copy of 1200 Years. By contrast, the earliest fragments of the New Testament date less than 50 years after the original writing. The earliest fragments, the bulk of our important extant manuscripts, date from 200 to 300 years after the original composition. And the text of the New Testament, which we have, is remarkably uniform and well established. And the reliability of the Old Testament text has been demonstrated to the surprise of scholars by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, I'm not going to get into a lot of detail here, but it's a fascinating field if you want to pursue it more. Some estimates given by scholars who have studied painstakingly the different manuscripts of the New Testament and the testimony that we have from literary evidence leads them to conclude that the text of the New Testament has been established with certainty in about 98% of the cases of the words and lines of the New Testament. Now then we have a person who says, how can you be sure what the Bible says? Maybe some medieval monk wrote all this stuff. Well, we know that a medieval monk didn't make any of this stuff up. Or in those outlandish cases where we have a medieval monk altering the text in some fabulous way that's not in our current Bibles, just because we have so much manuscript evidence that shows that that doesn't belong there. The overall authenticity and accuracy of the biblical text is well known to scholars. Frederick Kenyon concluded, let me give you a quote. The A Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true word of God handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries. And those kinds of assessments from competent scholars could be easily multiplied. And so when somebody says, well, you can't be sure that you've really got the test text of the New Testament. You need to point out to them that they're engaging in prejudice. They're not reasoning here, they're just being arbitrary. They're being arbitrary because in the first place, they've assumed without argument that the Bible is not what it claims to be, a unique text, divinely inspired and providentially preserved. They have not bothered to look at the evidence they're not offering. This is complete, completely spun out of their imagination. And thirdly, the evidence that we do have would not lead to the conclusion or the radical skepticism that they are proposing. Many times unbelievers are just so hostile to the Christian faith that they're willing to propose anything for argument's sake, even though they haven't got a shred of evidence to support it. I've even heard some people mouth the radical opinion we don't have any literary historical basis for believing that Jesus of Nazareth actually ever lived. We don't. What is the New Testament, for crying out loud, if it's not literary evidence of the life of Jesus? Well, but of course, at that point the unbeliever wants to say, but I don't want to accept the New Testament. Oh yeah, that's the very thing that we're arguing about, right? And so the unbeliever is begging the question, showing his or her prejudice as much as I'm showing my pre commitment to the New Testament. People sometimes think they can just openly dismiss the Bible as a source of historical information which is, as a matter of fact, contrary to the general practice even of unbelieving historians of the ancient world. Unbelieving historians have learned better than to just ignore completely. Now, I'm not talking about people being willing to accept every jot and tittle of the Bible. What I'm saying is the general attitude of scholarship is not to say the Bible gives us no evidence. There are some people, and they are very, very few, who will say, well, the New Testament is there and it does talk about a man, Jesus of Nazareth. But it may well be that there was no such person, Jesus of Nazareth. This was just made up later as a way of accounting for the origin of the Christian church. Well, after all, the Romans made up a story of Romulus and Remus to account for the founding of the city of Rome. Why can't we just put the Bible in the same category? Well, how about this? There's an 800 year gap between the founding of Rome and the first stories of Romulus and Remus. If I have the numbers right, and there is no such gap in terms of the life of Jesus and the founding of the church. Jesus is said to have been born about 30 to 33 years before the founding of the church. You don't have an analogy there at all. If there was no Jesus of Nazareth and the church, as we know, came about in the 30s or 40s of the first century, how do you account for the fact that no one stood up and said, what do you mean Jesus of Nazareth? There's no Jesus anywhere. You guys are making this up. The presence of hostile critics of Christianity in the days of the founding of the church makes preposterous the claim that the Church came about and just made up a story about Jesus to account for its founding. Moreover, there's the evidence of secular historians like the Roman historian Tacitus, who refers to one whose name was Christus, who he says suffered the extreme penalty at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate. Christus suffered at the hands of Pontius Pilate. That's a Roman historian who says that. Granted, he doesn't give us a lot of information. I'm not trying to, you know, do a complete life of Jesus from this, but to say that Christians just made this up is ignorant prejudicial conjecture. There was a time when critics of the Old Testament ridiculed the Old Testament for mentioning a tribe of people known as the Hittites. At that time, the Hittites were not known outside the Bible. The Bible was the only literary source, the only basis for believing in the Hittites. And since it was the only one, those who were critical of the Bible were quick to say, obviously this was made up until carchemish was discovered by archaeologists in the year 1871. And now in the last 100 plus years, the Hittites have come to be the best known and studied ancient people outside of the Jews. It's just incredible. Archaeology has over and over again proved to be the enemy of the biblical critics because what it unearths is their own prejudices. Over and over again. What it confirms is the accuracy of the historical particulars of the Bible. H.M. orlinsky wrote more and more the older view that the biblical data were suspect and even likely to be false unless corroborated by extra biblical facts is giving way to one which holds that by and large, the biblical accounts are more likely to be true than false. Now, I'm not talking about an attitude that matches what we would say. I mean, this more likely true than false is certainly not Christian commitment is it. But on the other hand, when an unbeliever says, ah, well, historians don't take the Bible seriously, I'm saying you haven't read the historians, have you? Even they are saying it's more likely to be true than it is false. Think about an unsympathetic umpire like Time magazine in an article written in 1976 entitled How True is the Bible? The article says, after more than two centuries of facing the heaviest scientific guns that could be brought to bear, the Bible has survived and is perhaps better for the siege. Even on the critics own terms, historical fact, the scriptures seem more acceptable now than they did when the rationalists began the attack. End of quote. Now all I'm getting at here, very simply is that when you're defending the faith and unbelievers start throwing out these opinions, you need to capture them in and they're being opinionated. When they start just spinning out from the web of their imagination what common sense would seem to say, you need to say, you know, you're just spitting that out of your imagination. You haven't really studied this, have you? You may not say it in the tone of voice that's cutting as I am right now, but you say you really don't know what you're talking about. The biblical text is not something to be embarrassed about. Historical facts, archaeological confirmation, not something to be embarrassed about. Contrast two things here. I am not saying we have evidence for every bit of the biblical text. We have evidence from archaeology or history for every claim made in the Bible. That's not the point. The point is when someone says, well, we can be real flippant and not regard the biblical text or not take the history that's recounted in the Bible seriously and say, well, that's just not what scholars have learned. And so where is this coming from if it's not really based on scholarship? That's coming from prejudicial conjecture. It's arbitrariness. It's an opinion which may be desirable to the unbeliever, may be useful for preserving the unbelievers autonomy and hatred of the Bible. But it isn't argumentation, it isn't reasoning. And you need to, as I said, probably 80% of the time that you're doing apologetics, just keep pointing that out. When I debated Edward Tabish at UC Davis, he spent a good deal of his time in his positive presentations in the debate ridiculing the Christian doctrine of hell. He found it preposterous that God would have a barbecue pit for those who would not pray in the right way. He comes from a Jewish background. I think that's a reference to not praying in Jesus name and so on and on and on he went. And of course many of the people in the audience loved that. You know, that tied right in with their heart attitude too. They wanted to ridicule the notion of hell. Who wants to believe in hell? That's not very popular. Now this isn't a public debate, mind you, before roughly 1100 university students. Now what do I as an apologist do when someone has stood up there and has just made mincemeat emotionally out of my commitment to the Christian worldview and the doctrine of hell? Well, between you and me, all I had to do is point out this is nothing more but prejudice. There wasn't any argument here. What I said is about all my opponent has demonstrated to us tonight is that he doesn't like the Christian God. But what I want to know as a philosopher is what is the possible relevance of his not liking the Christian God? Are we supposed to move from the premise Mr. Tavish doesn't like the Christian God to the conclusion the Christian God doesn't exist? If we are, then the mediating premise is what? What you don't like doesn't exist, I said, and what rational man believes that? What rational man believes that because you don't like something, it doesn't exist? You know, the child who doesn't like broccoli, you know, all of a sudden the broccoli doesn't exist. You see that looked so intelligent, so sophisticated, so sharp tongued to the audience. And yet all I had to do is say this is nothing more but prejudice. This is not an argument, this is just spinning out your own desires and feelings and opinions. Big deal. So it's your opinion that God wouldn't have hell. And so if we say God has a hell waiting for people like you, you don't want to believe it. But we're here to debate whether it's true or false. Now do we have anything to say about that? So the first step in presuppositional apologetics, just to belabor the obvious, is to call down the arbitrariness of the unbeliever. When the unbeliever says, well, it's my opinion that they say okay, and now what's the reason for that opinion? And when they give not reasons but causes, that is, well, I don't desire to answer up to God, they won't say it that way. And they say I don't want there to Be a doctrine of hell, you say? Well, okay, I can see how that causes you to believe there's no doctrine of hell. But now we're trying to be rational, we're trying to be reasonable men. What's your reason for saying the Bible is wrong in that teaching? Watch out for arbitrary prejudicial conjecture. No one can trust the text of the Bible. Oh, really? Do you know the state of the evidence? We don't even know if Jesus existed. Oh, really? You need to puncture that kind of skepticism because it's not based on anything, not anything that has to do with evidence and reasoning. The second thing that you need to look for in this checklist in terms of your apologetical strategy or procedure is unargued philosophical bias. Unargued philosophical bias and the difference between number one and number two, although I don't care if you lump them together. But the difference I'm intending to show you here is that number one is just simple arbitrariness, ignorance masquerading as a reason for things. Number two is a little more sophisticated here. There are underlying philosophical presuppositions that are very important in terms of the way the unbeliever is reasoning. And yet the unbeliever hasn't argued for them. He or she's just taking them for granted. Now, I've taught you in our course so far that everybody has a philosophical bias, if you want to put it that way. Everybody has certain beliefs that they grant a privileged position in the web of all the other things that they believe. Everybody's got their presuppositions. Okay, you can't get away from that. My argument here under number two is not against having philosophical bias. Everyone has it. My argument has to do with the unargued nature of that philosophical bias. It's when the unbeliever brings his or her autonomy to bear in the argument, but is not recognizing that they're already begging the question by assuming as philosophical baggage an unargued point of view. Philosophically, we need to, as presuppositionalists, expose the philosophical pre commitments of the critic, which are taken for granted rather than openly acknowledged in some way argued for and supported. Consider this. Even if enough external corroborating evidence were available from textual criticism, archaeology and related sciences to authenticate all of the ordinary data which we find in the literature of Scripture, all of the linguistic facts, all the cultural facts, all the chronological facts, and so forth, there would still remain important features, indeed the most important features of the biblical narrative, over which Conscientious unbelievers are going to intellectually stumble. See, we read in the Bible not only of Hittites and military battles and migrations and marriages, but we also read in the Bible of healings and floating axe heads and fiery chariots and water turned to wine and a virgin birth and resurrections. When unbelievers read of miraculous events in the Bible, their first inclination is to say that such things cannot happen, and thus they disbelieve the written report of them. We all know that people can't walk on water. They'll say, that story must be fabricated. And before we jump into this too quickly, let's recognize that we all are familiar with that line of reason. Don't you engage in it? When you're checking out at the counter at the supermarket and you look at the tabloid headlines again, the one I love, I really saw this one day. Woman gives birth to her own father. I didn't bother to go and examine the evidential credentials of that story. I just laughed and went on, right. And the unbeliever, in a sense, is doing the same thing. When you present a book that talks about floating axe heads and resurrections and a virgin birth, the unbeliever says, we know those sorts of things don't happen. Put it away. The implicit argument is that such things are impossible, so they couldn't have occurred. And that's why unbelievers dismiss in advance a book that relates miraculous events. The possibility of miraculous events is advanced, and in light of that unspoken premise, the unbeliever cast a doubtful eye upon the biblical narrative. Jesus didn't rise from the dead because we all know the dead do not rise. Unbelievers easily assume that people who live in the enlightened, scientific 20th century just couldn't accept superstitious myths and fairy tales from the Bible. Don't you use a computer? Don't you use a refrigerator? And you know better having these scientific wonders than to believe in miracles, to conduct their thinking in a fully rational manner. However, unbelievers who doubt the biblical narrative of miracles ought to pause to recognize and scrutinize their controlling premise. Please turn the cassette over at this time. And when you are engaged in apologetics, especially in a dialogical situation, you know, over a nice informal cup of coffee, and the person says, well, I mean, I use a refrigerator and a computer. I know better than to believe in miracles. I know how the world works. Miracles just aren't possible. What you, as a Christian apologist need to do is, is to point out the unargued philosophical bias that's involved in that remark, not so much to ridicule it or to put it down, but just to say, well, now you're aware, of course, that when you say that, your reasoning has behind it this philosophical assumption, we know miracles are impossible. And then what do you want to ask? We know that. We know that we know that miracles are impossible. Maybe you can explain that to me. You know, play the part of Columbo here. Could you just explain one thing to me? I don't understand this part of what you're saying that you know that miracles aren't impossible. I understand that you might believe they're impossible. How do you know that? How do you know that miracles are impossible? Unbelievers feel they know that such events cannot take place because they've got a scientific outlook. They're convinced that nature operates in a predictable law like fashion. And so the unbeliever will say, miracles would run counter to the regularities of our ordinary experience. Our experience wouldn't be completely predictable. They protest, if there were miracles. To which the astute apologist ought to reply, isn't that the point? If miracles were not extraordinary, they wouldn't be miracles. Don't you say subtly, the unbeliever has tried to suck you into his worldview when he says, the reason I can't believe in miracles is because they're extraordinary. But the whole point is they're extraordinary. That's why they're called miracles. The unbeliever's bias against extraordinary events needs to be challenged then. As for its rational foundations, does the unbeliever know that all nature operates in a law like fashion? Does the unbeliever know that? Does the unbeliever know that there can be no exceptions to that? Well, one of the things you can point out, again not trying to win the argument in one sentence, this is not everything, but one thing you can point out is that's an awful lot to know. If you know that all nature operates in a law like fashion, you know a lot, a lot more than I do. And maybe you're claiming a lot more than you really think you, I mean, upon reflection, should be claiming. Can an unbeliever who holds to the finite nature of thinking and also the corridability of observation really make a universal statement about what can and cannot take place? No. Within his own worldview, he's not allowed to make that kind of a claim. So what justification could the unbeliever have for his view that all Nature operates in a law like fashion. Now I know somebody who could justify that claim. Somebody who's in touch with God could justify that claim. If God controlled the world in a completely law like fashion, completely predictable, deterministic fashion, and told us that that's what he's doing, then we could have that as a premise. Right? But then again, that's not going to be very helpful. Because if there is a God who does that, then the unbeliever can't dismiss God on the basis of the miracle claims of the Bible. Unbelievers just easily assume that people who live in the scientific 20th century can't accept superstitious myths and fairy tales from the Bible. But what the unbeliever is doing here is importing unargued philosophical baggage. What determines the limits of possibility? Well, one's worldview, one's view of reality. And so when the unbeliever says the Bible is not going to lead me to the metaphysic that says God exists because it has miracles in it or claims of miracles in it, what the unbeliever saying is, my metaphysic is such that I'm not going to allow you to, to lead me to your metaphysic. My view of reality is such that I won't allow there to be any evidence for your view of reality that there is a God who could perform miracles. Obviously, if God exists, the possibility of miracles cannot be dismissed in advance. An all powerful creator, a governor of the world, could certainly do things that are out of the ordinary and contrary to the regularities of human experience. If God exists, Jesus could certainly have been raised from the dead. To reject the Bible because of its account of miracles is just to beg the question philosophically. And I want to remind you the problem here is not that critics of Christianity have philosophical presuppositions. It's that they never argue for those presuppositions or acknowledge them and the effect of those presuppositions in their thinking. And those presuppositions are hostile to, they're antithetical to the Christian worldview. And that's why you as a Christian apologist need to not only spend time calling down the arbitrariness of the opinions spun out by the unbeliever, but you need to spend a good deal of the remainder of your time saying but what you've just said assumes a certain philosophical point of view and that's really what's separating us. And so you're going to point out that the unbeliever is resting on a philosophical foundation when he or she argues the way they do, and that's why they're reasoning in the manner that they do. Thirdly, you're going to look for dialectical tension in that philosophy of the unbeliever. I've already explained to you what dialectical tension refers to, and so I'm going to use it as a summary expression here. But I'm quite conscious that that's not part of your normal lingo. Okay? And you don't need to be telling the unbeliever quote unquote, there's a dialectical tension in your point of view. Right. But you do want to pick up on it. You do want to point out the inconsistencies here. I'll put in parentheses the incoherence of this worldview, this philosophical bias that the unbeliever has not bothered to argue for. Step one, look for arbitrariness, opinions that don't have any basis. Step two, look for underlying philosophical presuppositions that have not been argued, that have just been taken for granted. Step three, show the incoherence of that philosophical bias that is there. Look for the dialectical tensions. At the end of yesterday's lecture, I gave you a list of such dialectical tensions. Just actually, if you just memorize that set of illustrations, I would think in 99 point something of the cases you're going to have all you need because they come up over and over and over again. I'm going to take as my illustration at this point in my lecture the philosophy of Epicure. And the reason I'm going to use Epicurus is because I think he's the patron saint of 20th century America. Epicurus was born in the year 341 BC. He was a materialistic atomist in his theory of reality. According to Epicurus, reality is made up of atoms, Physical material atoms. Sound familiar? I'd say most unbelievers take it for granted reality is made up of physical atoms today. And he was a qualitative hedonist in his ethical philosophy of living. That is, when it comes to how we live our lives. Epicurus said you should live for pleasure. Sound familiar? And Epicurus was actually more sophisticated than Aristippus, who was also a hedonist about this general time. Aristippus said people should live for as much pleasure as they can possibly get. And so the quantity of pleasure is the thing that really counts. Epicurus was more sophisticated. He said you should actually live for the higher quality pleasures. And so despite the party animal Connotation of being an epicurean today. Epicurus actually taught a little bit of wine, bread and cheese and conversation with your friends is the highest pleasure in life. That way you don't end up with social diseases and a hangover. So he's trying to be very reasonable and in his approach to pleasure. And I think that fits in with our 20th century as well. There are people who give themselves over to just any kind of debauchery. But most Americans like to think that we pursue our pleasures in a very sophisticated, rational way. That's why we have safe sex at our parties. Epicurus held that the philosophical method. He held that philosophical method should begin with the plain facts of sense perception and shape all opinions in terms of it, augmented by the demand for non contradiction. And that too strikes me as pretty pervasively the outlook of people today. If you're going to engage in philosophical method, what you need to do is begin with the plain facts of experience and then try to organize those facts of experience into opinions which will honor the law of non contradiction. Begin with what you've experienced, you know that for sure, and then be very consistent and logical and organize that into conclusions about what you'd say philosophically. According to him, following Democritus earlier, according to Epicurus, there is no such thing as spiritual reality. There is no spiritual reality because reality is composed of an infinite number of qualitatively identical and self propelling atoms whose arrangement and whose ceaseless motion explain the qualities of things and their behavior. Why is it this desk appears this way? Well, because it's made up of these atoms that are falling through space, that are always active, they're in motion and their particular configuration gives the touch and feel that, that the desk has its color and all the rest. Not bad for a guy who lived 300 years before Christ, seeing as that's pretty much what most people think today as well. Everything is made up of atoms in motion, and it's the combinations of the atoms, the molecular structure and so forth that accounts for the qualities of things, the way we perceive them. According to Epicurus, everything that exists, even the gods and the human soul, if they're to be explained, must be explained materially and naturalistically. If there are gods, they're really nothing more but refined atoms of some sort. If there is a human soul or mind, it's really nothing more but a refined version of the brain itself, the gray stuff in our cranium. That too fits in with the modern world, it seems to me, because all religion, all ethical motions and so forth are explained ultimately by some material factor and factors. According to Epicurus, there was nothing to fear in death. After all, there is no afterlife because when the body dies, that's it, there are no gods. So what's there to be afraid of? And if there's nothing to be afraid of, then you should live now for happiness or pleasure. Why then don't you live for, well, being a party animal? Epicurus said, because you don't in the end get a lot of pleasure out of that. You get a lot of pleasure for three or four hours on Friday night, but then you've got Saturday and Sunday where you're feeling real sick to your stomach and maybe you have some disease that is with you for the rest of your life or whatever. So he believed in living for pleasure. And the only moderation he put on it was for the sake of what? Equanimity in your pleasure. It wasn't because he thought there was gods or an afterlife. This was a popular philosophy in that day when Paul went to Athens, you notice the two schools of philosophy that were dominant that he encountered were the Stoics and the Epicureans. And as I've already told you, tongue in cheek, Epicurus is, as I see it, the patron saint of 20th century America. We're all, I mean not each, but we're all in the generalized sense, Epicureans today. That Epicurean philosophy of atomism, observational epistemology, live for pleasure, hedonistic ethic. That Epicurean philosophical bias is going to come into the argument of many unbelievers. Not all, but many. I have to generalize here, and it will come in in an unargued fashion. It'll just be taken for granted. Everything's atoms. Whatever we know, we know by observation that is formed and curbed by the law of non contradiction. And the way we should live is to live for pleasure. This is a popular philosophy, but if you do apologetics in the way that I'm teaching you, you're going to go after it and show that it's not at all a cogent philosophy. Upon cross examination, the unbeliever has taken for granted things which are incoherent. Let's take the premise that all knowledge is perceptual in nature. Many of the people you talk to are just going to assume if you know something it's because you have perceptions to back it up. But of course, the premise that all knowledge is perceptual in nature is not one that is known on the basis of perception. Is it? And so here you have a philosophy that refutes itself. Don't expect the unbeliever to come out with the banners flying saying, it's under this philosophy that I'm working and I'm thinking and reasoning. I believe all knowledge is perceptual. The non Christian is just going to take that as unargued philosophical bias. It's your job to point out the bias and then, as we put up here, thirdly point out the dialectical tension, their incoherence in that. Moreover, what Epicurus said about reality could not possibly have been known by means of perception. Stop thinking about that. Epicurus could not possibly have perceived imperceptibly small bits of matter. Now, we'll talk about the 20th century in just a moment. But in his day and age, before electron microscopes and so forth, how could Epicurus have said reality is made up of bits of matter that are imperceptible? He's just told us everything we know is based on what perception. And then he turns right around and gives us a metaphysic that commits him to something that he has not perceived. Now, about the 20th century, we still don't perceive the things that we talk about. It's more sophisticated than Epicurus. And yes, we do have microscopes that we call electron microscopes. They aren't really microscopes that show electrons. Most people don't know that, but we get traces of electrons, shadows of electrons, we think. But you know, in our day and age, we talk about subatomic particles, right? We talk about the weak and the strong force within the atom. Has anybody perceived those things? So here we have people who are committed to a perceptual approach to knowledge, and they'll turn right around and talk about things that they don't perceive. You need to point out the dialectical tension there. You need to point out the inconsistency, the incoherence. In that philosophy of life, Epicurus universalized about the behavior of these imperceptible atoms. But of course he couldn't perceive all the atoms. So how could he possibly justify his conclusion that this is the character of atoms? They always act this way. Most of the unbelievers you talk to are going to have the same problem. They're going to say the world always operates this way. And you say you've seen all the world can do at all times. I mean, all you can say is, as far as you know, in your experience, you've never seen a man rise from the dead. But that has nothing to do with whether people in their experience have seen a man rise from the dead. The point is, only your philosophy is incoherent. On the one hand, you say you can only know what you observe, and then you use as an operating premise, we know that all of the world operates in this way. Moreover, the naturalistic and the atomistic theory of reality advanced by Epicurus could not credibly explain man having free will, because man is nothing more. But what a mechanical combination of atoms falling through space. And so Epicurus, knowing that he was really up against an embarrassing problem here, offered a theory to account for man's free will. It was the theory that there must have been a swerve in the fall of these atoms, so that some atoms start bumping into other atoms, and that creates creativity and change, unpredictability. And that's supposed to account for man's free will? Well, what do you want to say about that philosophical hypothesis of a swerve in the fall of the atoms? Or in our day and age, a more sophisticated version is, well, the atoms operate in a certain way in the human mind, so that people make decisions, but what they're doing is predictable according to the laws of physics, biology and chemistry, right? Yes. But nevertheless, in some special cases, atoms act in a certain way. That gives us the illusion of having free will. But you see, this deprives man of purposeful choice, doesn't it? Epicurus thought he was accounting for free will, but he didn't account for free will at all. He only accounted for what, why? It appeared that we make choices. And the accounts that physicists or biologists offer us today does not really grant free will to man. It only grants that man appears to have free will. Since we don't know all those factors and it's unpredictable, then things don't always happen in a uniform fashion. But free will is more than a departure from uniformity, It's a purposeful departure from uniformity. And so it turns out, Epicurus can't really give ethical advice. You tell people, live for pleasure, but if you tell people to do things in a certain way, that assumes what? That they have the freedom to make that choice. Let me give you a modern illustration. I've already used it, but it bears repeating. Jean Paul Sartre tells us the worst thing you could possibly do is deny your freedom. Live as though someone else can tell you what to do. Live under the control of a teacher, a priest, a policeman, your parents, whatever it may be. Jean Paul Sartre tells you you're living in bad faith if you will not authentically affirm your freedom and do what you think you ought to do. To which we ought to say back to Jean Paul, we're not being free and authentic people if we listen to you tell us to free and authentic people because you tell us it's bad for us to live as though we're not free. But who are you to tell us what's bad if I'm really free? So Epicurus tries to have an ethic in a worldview where no ethic makes sense. Besides, if the thinking that I'm going through according to Epicurus, is nothing more but atoms falling through space, if I can't help thinking the way I do, except for whatever creative, arbitrary swerves there are in the atoms, why should I bother with philosophical investigation and debate at all? I mean, how can Epicurus account for any kind of argument if in fact we never freely engage in reasoning? We just end up saying what the atoms falling through space lead us to say? Given the problems in Epicurus theory of knowledge, how did he know there was no afterlife? It just seems like this rational, popular, sophisticated philosophical opinion proves to reduce to nothing more but subjective choices on the part of Epicurus, and choices which prove to be incoherent at that. And this leads then to the fourth step in presuppositional apologetics as a general strategy, And that is pointing to the failure of the unbeliever to provide the preconditions of intelligibility. That's a mouthful. If I were to use that as the opening line in our course, you would rightly say, how do you expect us to understand that? But I can understand. I mean, I can expect you to understand it now because we've been talking about it for a number of hours. This is just shorthand. We're talking about what would be the necessary truth, the underlying preconditioning truth about man and how we know what we know and how we should live our lives, that can make sense out of our reasoning, our science, our moral judgments, human freedom, human dignity. And what you want to point out, ultimately to the unbeliever who continues to argue against the Christian worldview, is that my worldview is to be preferred to yours because yours does not provide the preconditions of intelligibility for reasoning and for science and morality and human freedom and human dignity. It is possible, of course, that before you get to the fourth level here, the Holy Spirit's brought conviction and the unbeliever is willing to become a Christian. I don't want to Give the impression, I think people have somehow falsely gotten this idea that presuppositionalists are always insisting that we finally get to the philosophical level of comparing these worldviews. Please let us show that you fail to provide the presence conditions of intelligibility. It isn't always necessary to do that, but it is in principle what your apologetic must come down to. You know why? Because the unbeliever should point out we too have a philosophy of life. We too have a worldview. We too have our privileged beliefs that we don't allow any kind of evidence to disrupt. And so when all is said and done, if he interprets all the evidence in light of his presupposition, and I interpret all the evidence in light of my presupposition, we're going to have to finally argue those presuppositions. And this is one of the distinctive things about the apologetic that's been taught by Cornelius Van Til. Gordon Clark is sometimes called a presuppositionalist by people, and I'm not jealous for the term so much. If people want to say that and then they give some general abstract definition that includes Clark and Van Till, well, then so be it. I don't think it's helpful, though. I think it's more confusing than it is enlightening to put them together in this way. Because Gordon Clark says that our ultimate assumptions or premises are axioms that are not subject to proof. And that's why Clark, at the end of his career, openly endorsed Feedism as our approach to apologetics. He openly said, we have faith in this set of axioms, the other guy has faith in that set of axioms. And there really isn't any argument between the two of them. In the end, it depends on the work of the Holy Spirit changing the other guy's heart so that he'll change his axiom. Axioms. I've already explained to you the mistake that is made there where Clark moves from reasons for Christian faith to causes of Christian faith and doesn't really answer the question, how then can you resolve the conflict between axioms? He says you can't, that it's just a Feedistic choice. And then you're consistent, you live within your worldview and you try to knock down what the others say. In fact, Clark says you knock it down by showing they can't know anything. Not anything, not anything based on empirical observational thinking or approaches. And as a ventilian, and I hope being true to the Bible, I don't agree with him that all empirical methodology fails to provide knowledge for us that we can't know anything except what's in the Bible. But I agree with the premise taught by Van Till, that apart from what the Bible teaches, you couldn't know anything in principle based on your empirical methodology. But now back to Clark. His view of a presupposition then is an axiom which is not provable. It's something that you feed istically choose and then you try to be consistent with in all of your reasoning. Van Til's approach to a presupposition is that it is a precondition of intelligibility and therefore it can be argued for indirectly. You can reduce your opponent to absurdity. You can do an internal critique of the unbelievers philosophy to show that on that philosophy he couldn't know anything at all. And beyond that, that his reasoning, his appeal to history and science and other things has all along been assuming your philosophy as a way of arguing against your philosophy. And so what we mean by presuppositions is quite different. While I'm on the subject, I might point out that Francis Schaeffer had another use of the word presupposition that differs from Van Til and Clark both. And you can see this. When Francis Schaeffer has his discussion in Death in the City, he has a chapter, the Universe, and two chairs. And according to Schaeffer we can imagine that you have a believer and an unbeliever sitting in a chair in this room and they're going to discuss with each other what they can know and what reality is. And the unbeliever does all of his scientific analysis of the paint on the walls and on and on and on. And according to Schaeffer, the unbeliever then lays out all the truth that he has learned about the world based on his material analysis of the room, the chair, whatever it may be. The Shaffer says that's all fine as far as it goes, but it's only half the orange. It's only half the orange. Now let me as a Christian supplement what you have said. You see, Schaeffer did not look upon Christian presuppositions as the precondition for all intelligibility. Because if they were the precondition for intelligibility, the unbeliever wouldn't have half the orange at all. He'd have nothing at all. Schaeffer should have said, you're not being true to your own presuppositions. Schaeffer said we must ask men to consider the hypotheses. The worldview presented by Christianity. That is to say, uniformity of natural causes in an open system where God can enter the system and compare that to the philosophy of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, and then ask which of those two hypotheses fits the facts as we know them of the natural world and the mannishness of man. Now, in that kind of remark, you can see that Schaeffer is not dealing with presuppositions as the ultimate commitment by which we approach science and evaluation. He's actually treating a presupposition as a hypothesis subject to testing. And so if he's talking about something that can be tested, then he's not talking about his ultimate presupposition, because whatever he uses to test it is his ultimate presupposition. So it may be very easy. This message is continued on the next tape.