Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Epistemological Issues, Knowledge Part 2 (Part 16)

This message is a continuation of the previous tape will benefit his patient. Epistemologically speaking, though, if advances in research correct certain ideas taught in medical school, or if the journal articles proved to be based on fraudulent research reports, we would say the doctor's belief was not, after all, justified, as he may have been justified to prescribe it, socially speaking, but epistemologically it wasn't justified because it wasn't based on good evidence, after all. So then, the human enterprise which we honor with the name knowledge or science in the broadest sense, pursues the goal of eliminating personal prejudice, unreasoning conjecture, and distorting bias in our beliefs. Accordingly, having a warrant for one's beliefs is essential to knowledge, and that explains why the issue of justification has always been a critical one throughout the history of the theory of knowledge. When and how are claims that we make well founded? How do we acquire or what is the source of reliable beliefs? On what basis is intellectual authority conferred upon our ideas? By what standard are our judgments to be evaluated? How do we know that we know? Philosophers have found it difficult to agree on a general description of what would count as good, adequate, or justifying evidence for beliefs. So in a little while we'll be looking at the history of rationalism, empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, and so forth. Philosophers haven't always agreed on what amounts to justifying evidence for beliefs, regardless of those disputes over how you warrant what you believe. Knowledge is to be taken as a true belief for which one has good evidence. For which one has good evidence. Of course, it's one thing to have good evidence for a belief that is to be in possession of good evidence. And it's another thing to realize that is to acknowledge to oneself or be able to give that evidence to others. Sometimes you can have things which you can't give to others. Did you know that it would be simplistic to take it as a universal truth that a person doesn't have something unless he realizes it it? Can you have cancer without realizing it? Can you have money without realizing it? Sure. Would it be true to say you can't hat something if you can't give it to others? No. Sometimes you have insecurity, don't you? And you can't give that insecurity to other people. Sometimes you have incentive, and you can't give that incentive to other people. Sometimes you have a good reputation. You can't give your good reputation to other people. Obviously, we have direct experiences, while we cannot give those direct experiences to Others, somebody might have a direct experience of the snows of Kilimanjaro, but I can't give that direct experience to you. And even some beliefs which we may not be able to give to others are something that we have. I may believe that the Republican candidate is the best man for office, but all I do will not allow me to give that belief to you. So this having and giving, having and realizing relationships shouldn't be over generalized or oversimplified. It's one thing to have good evidence for a belief and another thing to realize you have it or to be able to give it to other people. People often know more than they are able to say. This is going to be crucial to presuppositional apologetics. So I'd like you to get that sentence in your notes. People often know more than they are able to say. Sometimes this is because a person who is unquestionably in a position to know, like a medical doctor with a long, successful career, may be unable to formulate for himself or others the precise reason or evidence for believing something. And yet the judgment that is held by this medical doctor has arisen from his perception of relevant factors and not in some mystical fashion. That is to say, sometimes doctors can know what to do because of long experience. But when you say, now, how did you know that? They're not able to tell you quite. Sometimes we run into females who repeatedly have intuitions that prove to be confirmed about human character. You'll say, I don't think you should trust that person. Men especially tend to get real irritated about that. Well, why not? What's the evidence? We're saying, what's the reason? I just can't tell you. Does that mean that it's mystical? Not at all. That's not my theory of intuition. What it means is that women are sensitive to certain things. Let's. I don't know that it is this, but to give you an idea of the kind of thing it might be, sometimes they pick up something about body language that men don't. And yet they don't know that it's that specific feature or some argument about people who look that way or act that way. But they just, from their long experience of people in the human race, they've come not to trust people who do that sort of thing. And so sometimes you can have a reason for what you believe, even though you're not able to state that reason or to formulate it precisely and clearly. Then again, having evidence for some proposition is a matter of having a certain kind of Belief, a belief which, among other things, functions for the person to support. A further belief, that is, to have evidence for something, is to have a belief about X which functions to support another belief that you have. Yet not all of a person's beliefs are acknowledged to himself. Not all of our beliefs are inwardly assented or given conscious attention, because no one can mentally entertain all of his beliefs simultaneously. Try it. Right. I want you to take everything you believe and think about it right now. Think about all of them right now. It can't be done. Sometimes some of our beliefs are too painful to face. Sometimes some are too trivial, are too commonly assumed to even focus on. So to maintain that introspection invariably accompanies and every belief, or that self awareness is essential to believing a proposition, or that assenting is a logically necessary symptom of all belief, is really to erect artificial terminological rules which can serve only to screen off from ourselves the complexity of human nature and human behavior. And thus we may sometimes have evidence, beliefs supporting beliefs which we do not realize or are not able to give to others. To put this another way, we may sometimes know something without knowing that we know it. I don't want to make that normative, I don't want to make that paradigmatic, but I do want to make that possible. Sometimes we know something without knowing that we know it. All right, so these are the four key notions in epistemology that I think you should have some introduction to. Knowing, believing, truth and justification, or having evidence for something. Again, because apologetics is at the heart, because epistemology is at the heart of apologetics, and because there continue to be significant disagreements between men over these epistemological questions. The apologist must begin with a clear and firm understanding of his own position as a Christian on the nature of knowledge, belief, truth and justification. He must know his distinctive Christian convictions touching on the theory of knowledge. If you are muddled or mistaken about those basic epistemological issues when it comes time to defend the faith, you will not be clear and effective. In fact, you will likely resort to argumentative tactics that in fact don't comport with the system of truth that you're trying to vindicate. If you're not aware of the epistemology that you should have, then you don't know whether your defense of the faith comports with the faith that offended. So that's why we're going to need to now go even deeper into these philosophical and epistemological issues so that you might learn how beliefs affect. All right, we Understand that everybody has a philosophy of life, everybody develops a worldview. And we've seen something of the key issues within a worldview and the basic options that are available as to worldviews and that are out there. We've secondly looked specifically at epistemological issues which are crucial to the defense of the faith. We might understand what we mean when we speak of knowing something, believing something, having truth, having good evidence, and so forth. The real issue is now, what epistemology should you use? What approach to justifying beliefs should you use? And I want to take a lot shorter time than I had wished, but I would like to at least selectively go through the history of epistemology from the 16th century on to give you some idea of why the apostle Paul knew what he was talking about when he says, hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? You should also be familiar with the history of epistemology once again. So you know what some of the moves, possible strategies and options are for a person's theory of knowledge. And so we'll probably do better if I get away from my notes and just try to do this off the cuff. Let's begin with number one, continental rationalism. It's known as continental rationalism because the philosophers of this school of thought came from the continent of Europe. And there are three in particular that we think of here. Rene Descartes, who is a French Jesuit scholar, Benedict Spinoza, who is a Dutch Jewish scholar, And Leibniz, who is a German Protestant scholar. Now, the continental rationalist all maintained that there are certain clear and indisputable propositions that we know totally apart from experience. As Descartes said, there are clear and distinct ideas which all men have. They are innate to them, and they are necessarily true because all men have them naturally. And they are clear in the sense that they don't. They don't waver, they are not doubtful, they are indubitable propositions, clear and distinct. They're not confused with other things. There's no question about them being true, because we directly encounter their truth. When we encounter them, we clearly and distinctly perceive them to be true. And so they are necessary and they are universally true. And it's in terms of these clear and distinct ideas that we go on to prove or to evaluate everything else that we believe. Maybe we don't believe everything else with the same degree of clarity and distinctness. Not everything we believe has the same degree of indubitableness about it. But everything else we're going to believe must be casted against the this benchmark of the clear and distinct ideas. Here's the clear and distinct I think, therefore I am. That looks pretty unassailable, doesn't it? Until Bertrand Russell points out, well, actually, you're begging the question there. All you're saying is I'm having an experience and to have the experience I have to assume that I exist. But you haven't proved that you exist by having the experience and assuming that you're having the experience. There are other problems with these clear and distinct ideas. Spinoza worked out a virtual geometric system about reality from his clear and distinct ideas, his axioms that were supposed to be indubitable beginning. And when Spinoza was done, his view of reality was contrary to Descartes view of reality. Descartes was a dualist. He believed in mind and matter. Spinoza said mind and matter are the same thing, spoken of under different ways of thinking. Spinoza was in fact a monist, a pantheist. Nature and God, he said, are two different ways of speaking the same thing. So Descartes is a dualist, Spinoza is a monist. Leibniz was a pluralist. Leibniz believed that reality is made up of an infinite number of centers of self conscious energy. We laugh at that until we look at modern particle physics and we say, interesting. Now, not too much in general theory, unlike what many people want to say today, but he thought these were monads that had self consciousness, but at different levels of consciousness, rock monads, and not a whole lot of mental activity going on. There's some. But everything in this world is made up of different kinds of monads, but each monad is windowless, that is to say, it has no interaction with other monads. So it's a very bizarre theory. It'd be fun to look at if we could go through the history of philosophy and maybe I can recommend that you get my tape series on the history of philosophy for all of this that we're going to be looking at. But for this as well, I go into more detail now. What do we want to say about continental rationalism and about all rationalist schemes of epistemology? All rationalist schemes of the epistemology, say we begin with certain indubitable propositions, certain things that no one can doubt that are universally and necessarily true. And from that we can build up our knowledge of the world. Well, in the case of the continental rationalist, everybody had clear and distinct indubitable ideas at the beginning. And what they built up was a metaphysic that was dualistic on one hand, monistic on another, and atomistic on yet another. How clear and distinct, how indubitable does this rationalism look? Then, of course, there was a great deal of scorn heaped upon the rationalists because they were so cocksure that by using their minds and reflecting, they could get to the nature of reality, when in fact all they did is have irresolvable conflicts among themselves as to what reality is. So much for the indubitable starting point. See, the British empiricists, on the other hand, said, we don't begin with any kind of stuff in our mind to begin with. We don't have these clear and distinct ideas with which we began our reasoning and our learning about the world. In fact, John Locke said, when we start out, our mind is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet. There's nothing there. And then experience is, as it were, what writes upon the tablet of our mind. So that everything that we know and everything that is to be meaningful must be traced ultimately to that experience or those sensations that gave rise to the idea or ideas. And Locke, at that point in the development of British empiricism, said that we have the idea, for instance, of a substance. I am a substance. I am an enduring identity. There's something that gives identity to me over time, and this substance has qualities that are in it, if you will, like pins and a pin cushion. You have a substance, the pin cushion, and then various qualities. At one time, I was a certain height, and then that quality is taken out, and the substance now takes another. When I grow and got taller, I was once a certain weight, and now I'm heavier. I once had particular head of hair, and now I'm losing it or it's getting gray or what have you. So there is a substance that has enduring identity, but the qualities in that substance change. Well, what's the substance, then? And Locke said, I know not what it's an. I know not what it has to be that which receives the qualities and holds them together. Deadly, deadly mistake. Bishop Barclay came along. He too, wanted to be an empiricist. Everything that we know traces back to our experiences. Barclay said, however, we never have an experience of physical substance. You say, how can he say that? Well, because in order for us to experience something, it has to be what in the mind. Those that have no mind that's running don't have any experiences. And so even though you may think you can prove that there's physical substance out there by hitting this desk, he says, all you're doing there is, you're having what a sensation hitting the desk. Now, where's the sensation? It's in the mind. And so you never get beyond the ideas of the mind. Berkeley, the empiricist. This is one of the strangest versions of empiricism, of course, in history. But as an empiricist, he says, the only thing that's real are ideas, the activity of the mind, because that's where we have our phenomenal experiences. And so here you have somebody who is dismissed. Physical substance. There is no physical world that we can know because everything we know is based on our experience, all of our experiences within the mind, and therefore the only thing we know is mental things. David Hume comes along after that and he says, well, you mean an exception for spiritual substance. I'm not willing to make that exception. We don't know any spiritual substances either. What would be a spiritual substance? Well, God would be a spiritual substance. We have no sensation of God. But you know what? We also have no sensation of ourselves, do we not? Of ourselves as enduring substances? We don't. Hume said, the only thing you can know is your present experience, and your present experience is made up of discrete sensations. And therefore I never experience the I that has experiences Everyone with me here, according to Hume, what I am is nothing more but a bundle of perceptions. A bundle of perceptions. There's no person here that perceives something when he woke up this morning and took a shower and went to lunch and taught the class and so forth, I don't perceive that enduring I, the subject of the sentence, I'm getting up, I'm taking a shower, I'm eating my food. I never experienced the eye or the subject. I only experience the experience. And therefore, what am I? Hume said, at best, all these disjointed experiences bundled together. Of course, to be honest with you, he was cheating when he said that too. Because when he said, it's a bundle of experience, we don't experience any bundling of our experience. So here you have an empirical approach to knowledge. All of the things we know must trace back to some kind of observation or sensation. And what it has led to, in its most consistent and rigorous application, is skepticism. Hume said, I don't even know who the subject of knowledge is. Who is the knower that's having these experiences. Not only that, I don't experience any conditions, continuing identity in this desk. This desk is always changing. I'm not always watching it. I only have this experience, this experience, this experience. But on Hume's view of the world. There's no connection between our experiences, either in me or out there. And let's take this a step further. Hume said. When I see two events that are correlated with each other, I have no way of knowing that there's a necessary relationship between them. When you put vinegar and soda together and cork it, what happens? Shake it up, okay? Hydrogen gas is released, pressure is put against the cork, and eventually poof, Comes off. Right? Now, every time we've ever done that in the past, that's been the outcome. Vinegar, soda pop. Vinegar, soda pop. Vinegar, soda pop. Vinegar, soda pop. Now, do we know that there's a necessary connection between vinegar and soda and the popping of the cork off the whatever beaker was held there? Hume said, no, we don't know that. All we know is that in the past we have event A and event B. Event A, Event B. In order to say that vinegar and soda caused the cork to come out of the beaker, we'd have to know that that relationship is a necessary relationship. But it's only a necessary relationship if it will happen in the future as well as in the past. But we don't know if it's going to happen in the future. For all we know, tomorrow we put vinegar and soda together and nothing happens to the court. And so there's no continuity in physical objects that we observe. There's no continuity in the subject that's having the observations, and there's no continuity in history. Now, this is the strict application of empiricism, because we don't observe continuity, right? Even those of you who believe that the vinegar and soda will cause the cork to pop out tomorrow, you don't see a causal relationship. You don't see the causation. You see one event, you see another event, and you see the outcome, but you don't see the connection between them. Moreover, you don't see the connection between the various moments of the this desk. And you don't see the connection between the various moments of you as an experiencer of things. Everything is loose and discreet out there, according to Hume, and we only know the things we can observe. So we don't observe any unifying principles. So we don't know substance in the external world, we don't know substance in the internal world, and we don't know causation, conclusion. We don't know anything. All we do is have habits of mind. We cannot rationally justify the things that we believe. So continental rationalism says you begin with indubitable premises, and from them you can build up your view of the world. But that led to skepticism because after all, the different concepts, conclusions to which people come stand in logical contradiction to each other. British empiricism says, get away from these ideas in the mind with which you begin. Just go out and observe the world. Base everything on observation. With Hume, that leads to skepticism. We can't know anything because we don't observe the connections, the unifying principles between objects or the person that experiences the objects or the events of history. That doesn't do a whole lot for man's pride. At the time of the Enlightenment, you know, during the years of British empiricism and Continental rationalism, it was assumed that man's autonomous mind could do it all. It was sufficient to itself. Just give man enough time to be educated in the of sense clearly, and he could solve all problems. And lo and behold, his pride was humbled, his intellect was humbled, philosophically speaking. Immanuel Kant said that David Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers. And in reading Hume, he realized, this task of philosophy is a lot more difficult than I had thought. The rationalist are not reliable. The empiricists have thought of something valuable, not to rest on just these, you know, preconceived ideas in our mind. But they've been led to skepticism, too. So how can we save a knowledge of, let's say, causation? And Hume's answer, Excuse me. Kant's answer to Hume's skepticism is, on the one hand, in general principle, brilliant. In fact, his approach to the rationalist and empiricist is going to parallel Van Till's approach to apologetics. On the other hand, Kant's answer was a total failure because it could not rescue the objectivity of knowledge. Here's the way Kant answered the problem. How can we know that there's a causal connection between our experiences in the world? Kant said, because whenever sensation comes into us, into our mind, the mind imposes categories on that sensation to make it intelligible. Sensations would not of themselves amount to anything. We wouldn't know what to do with them or how to think about them if the mind did not form them for us. And so the mind does the work of making raw data sensible to us, intelligible to us. To be intelligible, it has to be amenable to reason. To be amenable to reason, it must be causal. And so here's the answer to Hume. Skepticism. The mind imposes the category of causation on everything. We always look for the cause of an event because our mind thinks that way. Now, when we think about Kant's strategy, did Kant go out and find a better, clear and distinct idea than Descartes in order to save causation? Was Kant really a rationalist here? No, he wasn't being rational. His form of proving something was not to out rationalize the rationalist. Well, was Kant really being empirical here? Was he saying, well, I've got an observation that you've overlooked Hume or Locke or anybody else, and based on my empirical research, I can demonstrate the principle of causality? No, he said, the principle of causality is the precondition of the intelligibility of my experience. It's the precondition of the intelligibility of my experience. And that's what's known as transcendental reasoning. Please turn the cassette over at this time. Transcendental reasoning argues about what must be true in order to make sense of our experience. What must be true in order to make sense of our experience. To say that you have convinced me of a certain controversial proposition, to make sense out of that, to be intelligible, that you have convinced me of a certain controversial proposition. I have already presupposed that you and I are separate minds. To utter that sentence already presupposes your identity is distinct from my identity. You follow that we're not talking about a clear and distinct idea, some indubitable starting point, and we're not talking about some observation. We're talking about what is necessary to make sense of the statement. What is presupposed when I say, you have convinced me of this controversial proposition, what is the precondition of the intelligibility of that proposition? Kant said, the precondition for the intelligibility of human experience is that events that have been related in the past with this kind of correlation will continue to be so in the future. It would not be an intelligible world unless we thought in terms of causation. Now, the reason why Kant's answer is inadequate is because, according to Kant, he finds the preconditions of intelligibility in the human mind. Right. That presupposes that the way my mind works is the same as the way your mind works. How could Kant know that? He couldn't. He hadn't given us, therefore, an objective answer to David Hume's skepticism. He offered nothing more but a psychologized answer to David Hume's skepticism. That is he psychologized causation. Causation is not in the objective world. It's part of my psychology. I've Got to think this way. He internalizes it and therefore doesn't really answer the problem. Because David Hume had said, I think in terms of causation, but it's just a psychological habit. Kant turned around and said, oh, it's a psychological habit, so there's the proof of causation. He hadn't proved anything. He just succumbed to the skepticism of Hume. And of course, Kant's been kicked all over the map since the time in which he proposed this, because all studies of different cultural, or the cultural differences between people in their concept formation have a tendency to do what? To completely splatter the notion that the way my mind thinks is the. The way all minds think. Many people argue concept formation, say, in an African culture of the 19th century, is not the same as concept formation in a British culture in the 20th century. We have different category schemes, different expectations. And so Kant has the general idea, right, we need to find the preconditions for intelligibility. But he doesn't have the preconditions of intelligibility because he goes not to God for the answer, but where? To man's mind. You see that autonomous obsession with man being at the center all over again, don't you? Descartes said, I don't know about God, but I do know that I exist. God comes in after, I'm sure. The empiricists say God can be proven. I mean, Locke thought God could be brought in on the basis of evidence. But the first evidence is that I'm having evidence. I'm having sensations or observations. Kant says the only way you can save knowledge is by looking for the preconditions of intelligibility, and they're found in man. What we'll see, particularly tomorrow when we get around to developing presuppositional, apologetical methods. As Van Till said, the preconditions of intelligibility are found in God and his revelation. In light of what God is and what he's revealed to us, then we can make sense of knowledge and science and logic and human freedom and personality. But outside of that framework, I don't think people have an answer to the problems of David Hume and the skepticism that results. Okay, so Kant's transcendentalism is something of a formal model or a hint of our approach to apologetics. But Kant himself didn't provide any such answer, anything that would be absolute. And so Hegel said, let me see if I can do better. Hegel offers a very complex rationalistic philosophy that attempts to make sense of the development of the human mind and the development of human history. And he says they in fact parallel each other. That the outworking of thinking is in fact the outworking of history as well. That the grand idea is evolving dialectically both within our minds and in the world of history. And one day the subject of knowing the mind going through that dialectic and the object of knowing nature that's going through that dialectic will in fact be one and there'll be no subject object distinction. Now I've got to be saying things that at least those of you who are amateurs and philosophers saying. What on earth is he talking about? Good for you. My evaluation of Hegel, I mean, I try to do some justice to him in my History of Philosophy course and explain it, and I've had some students have flattered me and said, you've come the closest to making sense of this guy, of anybody I've heard. That may be more flattery than I deserve, but. So I do try hard, though, to make this sensible. But the bottom line is Hegel's rational attempt to unify all of experience turns out to prevent pretentious nonsense. I think his whole attempt to discuss everything in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, though it has an insight that's helpful, that many times our way of conceptualizing things is only an approximation of the truth and needs correction. That's fine to say, but to say that that's the whole grand process of nature and of reasoning and they'll all be one one day calls for, I think, some real slipshod thinking on his part, which is well hidden behind an ornate vocabulary. Pretentious nonsense. When all was said and done, not many people were willing to go with Hegel who were analytically minded. But those who had a kind of sloganizing approach and a grandiose approach to find philosophy developed schools of Hegelian thought after Hegel and so forth. And it lives on even into the 20th century. But it's not really much of a challenge for modern epistemology. Well, in the 19th century, if you didn't follow Hegel, if you didn't want to affirm rationality on the grand scale, then your approach to philosophy tended to be non cognitive. And so you know, who competes with Hegel in the 19th century? Well, Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer hated the rationalism of Hegel. He said, man's intellect is not reliable, it distorts things. It is not big enough really to understand things. And we need to realize that the mind of man is in fact subject to other forces, particularly Will the world as will and idea. Schopenhauer wrote this book to demonstrate that what's at the real basis of reality is assertiveness. Assertiveness so that the mind of man, though we can't avoid using it, sadly the mind of man is really subject to non mental forces like our desires and other factors. Indeed, all of reality is a surge of will. The whole world is an expression of the will to be. And the way in which we come to know things then is not by rational techniques but by mystical intuition. Follow your heart, follow your intuitions, Schopenhauer said, and to follow your intuitions and escape the blind driving thrust of will in the world, then you must follow an intuition that leads to the destruction of your individuality. And so Schopenhauer is one of the first Western philosophers, philosophers to give a great endorsement to Hindu thought. Schopenhauer said we need to follow the East. Turn off your mind, float downstream, it is dying. He said, we do need to die. He said some people can die in artistic contemplation, in the moment of the perception of beauty. They just forget their individuality and there's no more striving, there's no, there's just the resting in the beauty of the moment. But he said ultimately we need to follow the mystics of old. Yow, this hurts, doesn't it? Here's this long history of rationalism and Schopenhauer turns it right back to the east and says, now let's go with the mystics and the intuition of Hinduism. Another version of non cognitivism in the 19th century century was the Romantic movement. The Romantics distrusted the Enlightenment, they distrusted the rationalists. They said, you know, the mind just distorts reality. You need to feel it, you know, turn off your mind and feel it baby, that's what you've got to do. Reality is bigger than your mind and you get in touch with it by kind of following the vibrations, you know, not that anybody called us this, but it's the sense that, you know, I just go out there and I try to turn off my rational mind and just absorb the experience of it all. That's the Romantic approach. We've got to be free, we've got to be creative. Don't be tied in with disciplined inquiry and rational requirements. What did one Romantic poet say? What's consistency but the hobgoblin of little minds? Who cares about consistency? Give me experience. And in the 19th century we have Soren Kierkegaard, the existentialist says you can't trust Hegel and those rationalists and so forth. You need to be an individual. You may notice in all rational schemes of philosophy, the individuals gobbled up in the universal. You are not just an instance of a general rational principle working its way out. In principle, you are an individual. You have reality in and of yourself. And the most important thing is that you assert yourself. The most important thing is that you exercise your free will and authenticate yourself and be loyal to your commitments. And so rationalism is dying in the 1970s, though you have the Hegelians over here. They're losing it to the non cognitivists like Schopenhauer. Go back to the east, the Romantics, turn off your mind and have the grand experience of things. And the voluntarist like Kierkegaard. And then of course, the greatest non cognitivist of all, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said, everything in this world is interpretation. We never have reality. Everything's text, nothing's real, and therefore man cannot know any absolute truth. And all philosophers are nothing but junky lawyers. He said, all they're doing is trying to argue for their point of view. There's like, you know, paid mouths for some point of view, but no one knows what they're talking about. And there aren't any objective values. There isn't any objective truth. There can't be objective truth because we can never get to reality. Everything's text instead. And so what you have to do is assert your own values. There are no objective values. At least Kierkegaard thought that there were values. He tried to be, I don't think, in the genuine orthodox sense, but a Christian. He wanted to affirm Christianity. Nietzsche said, if nobody knows anything, we're not going to be cognitivists, then you need to make up your own values. God's dead. You be God, you assert your own values. Live for yourself. The will to power is the only thing we know. Well, so much for epistemology, right? The 19th century has brought us to the same kind of desperate, despairing situation as the end of the Enlightenment. And after we take our afternoon break, we'll come back and I'll quickly look at the 20th century to point out that the major developments there don't give us a whole lot more help. The conclusion that I'm driving toward is, hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? When I talk to somebody about the truth of Christianity and we get beyond the details to the underlying philosophy of life that governs how you approach the details. Details. I just want to know, what school of thought are you going to use to try to oppose Christianity? Where are you going to turn? And like, you know the Ghostbusters, right? I guess people think there's a Ghostbusters out there. Philosophically, people just think there's somebody we can go to to get rid of the demons. And there isn't. Let's take a break. This recording is distributed by Covenant Media Foundation, a non profit educational organization. Unauthorized reproduction of this tape is strictly prohibited. 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