Greg Bahnsen R C Sproul Debate Part Three

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonsen Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

We decided we'd make a little bit of a change tonight. In the last couple Bible studies, we've been looking at interpersonal relations. And last time we talked about the modern view of sexuality and its effect on our society. But tonight we're going to change views and talk a little more philosophically about the defense of the Christian faith. That's basically what the word apologetics means. Apologetics is the defense of the faith. That's a little misleading, I realize, because in terms of English usage, to apologize is not really to defend yourself, but to say, I'm sorry for being wrong. But in the Greek world, an apology was an answer given to an accusation played against you. Any of you who may have had a beginning class in philosophy, remember the apology. It's one of the dialogues written by Plato and describes the last days of Socrates and the defense that he offered in the court in Athens against the charge that he corrupted the use of Athens was propagating for gods or strange gods. So from the Greek apologetics is to give it the fix to give an answer for an accusation. In First Peter, chapter three, verse 15, we find what amounts to the Magna Carta of Christian apologetics. It's the biblical reason why we're so interested in apologetics. Here. Peter says, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence. It's interesting to me that this is not a suggestion. It's not even a description of what everybody's going to be interested in. It's a commandment. Peter says, you are to be ready to answer accusations made against the Christian faith. You should be prepared to give an account of the hope that is in you. When somebody hears that you're a Christian, you have this hope of eternal life. This hope is based upon a transcendent, personal eternal God. When people hear this testimony and they challenge it, you must be prepared to respond to that, to give a defense. And so tonight the question is, how do we do that? How do we fulfill this commandment? How do we give an answer to anybody who should ask us for a reason or an explanation of defense of the hope that is in us? Turns out that if I'm going to be over simple and generalize, there's two basic approaches to the defense of the faith that are Current in evangelical circles that are conservative Bible believing Christian circles, very broadly speaking, I would say we have what could be called the evidentialist approach to the defense of the Christian faith, evidential apologetics. On the other hand, you have what will be called presuppositional apologetics. All of this means nothing to you form of labels, but I want to lay out a little groundwork so you see the categories. Evidential apologetics is one method of defending the faith. Presuppositional apologetics is another method of defending the faith. And both have their adherence. And I want to make it very clear both schools of thought can enlist in their support men who are very godly, men who are well read, who have good minds, good hearts, and are really intending to serve the Lord. It's really a question of what is the best methodology and a methodology that most comports with all the other teaching of Scripture as to how we should conduct our lives and how we should think against God's people mostly. So it's not a question of who really is a Christian and who's not. This is a discussion within Christian circles. And the reason I'm so sensitive about that and want to stress it is that often when Christians start debating what method they should use in defending the faith, we treat each other more like the enemy than those who are outside the faith. We end up trying to debate one argument with one another rather than dealing with those who need the gospel and who are outside the church altogether. While I have a definite opinion as to which of these two is the most biblical and most successful approach to defending the faith, nevertheless, I begin with healthy respect for both sides, both opinions. What do we mean by evidential apologetics if I want to present Christian evidence as a way of defending the faith? First of all, I want to say to my opponent, to the unbeliever who is challenging the faith, well, let's both of us try to rid ourselves of all of our assumptions as much as we possibly can. Let's both be just as neutral and as open minded as we possibly can. Let's not have any free commitments, let's not be leaning this way or that. Let's just be totally indifferent, open minded or neutral. Now, if we both approach this subject with an open mind, and we're going to be useful in our opening point, we have to agree also on certain standards of argumentation that will be used. What will it take to convince you to say that we have justification for this or that claim? What sort of warrant is going to be accepted when we debate Matters of food and religion. So I talked to the unbeliever and it turns out that we can agree now that believer or unbeliever can agree that our starting point and our standard will be, let's say, the laws of logic. You can't contradict yourself, you must be consistent argumentation. We will accept that what we learn through our senses is basically reliable. When we see things or touch things, smell things, that that's the kind of evidence we're looking for. Those sorts of. So we start by being neutral and then we talk to each other when we come to a common starting point and use a common standard of evidence. And then we approach the facts as open minded, agreed upon in our standards, open minded explorers who are going to find out what the facts actually tell us. Now one of the facts, in fact the primary fact for those who hold to evidential apologetics that is significant from defending the faith, is that the Bible records miracles. Yet God demonstrates the truth of his messengers, the truth of what the apostles and the prophets said by mighty works, mighty wonders that were done. Here's the classic Old Testament illustration. Elijah meets the priests of BAAL are now carved. And Elijah invites them to have fire come down from heaven at the direction of their elect God and to consume the sacrifices from laid on the altar. And they go into all these shenanigans and they moan and they run and they chant and they try to get their God to do this. And the Elijah sitting over there engaged in what's called holy mockery, making fun of them, what's wrong with your God? On vacation, will be fallen asleep, this sort of thing. And they finally are frustrated, you know, they cut themselves, they tried to, you know, pacify the guns, they can't get anything. So then Elijah recall has buckets of water poured on him. You know, he's going to make this as difficult as he possibly can and with one simple flare, whack fire from heaven. And that you see that miracle is a way of demonstrating that Elijah serves the living and true God and the priests of BAAL are false in their religion. Or if you want to take a New Testament account, you have miracles of the apostles, Peter killing the lame man to rise up and walk. Or and this brings us really to the primary illustration of the miracle that verifies allegedly the truth of the Christian message. We have the resurrection of Jesus Christ. God is given the resurrection as a sign, as a wonder that is meant to verify the message that was preached by Jesus and the apostles. Now you and I being objective about this Neutral, agreeing on the laws of evidence and logic, sensation, whatever it may be. Let's go to the facts of history and see what we are to make of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The argument I'm not going to take a lot of time to get into, but the argument basically says, how did the Christian church arise here? These 12 men, actually 11 with the death of Judas, dejected men, their master has been martyred by the Roman high command. How is it the Christian church comes into existence out of that situation? Someone says, well, if the master rose from the dead, then that would be a way of accounting for that Christian church, and it could have begun in that way. In fact, that is the claim that was made. Now, if we examine these documents that make up the New Testament, they are found to be basically reliable documents. They're old, they're well attested, and they're found to be good historical sources. The evidence here indicates that for whatever else you want to say about the situation, three days after Jesus was killed, the tomb was empty in which he was laid. Now, how do we account for that empty tomb? Now, here are all these theories. One theory says the disciples stole the body and the defender of the Christian faces. Now, is that really very credible with all these Roman soldiers? You have 11 disciples. They were really to believe they overcame the soldiers and that they could still preach credibly, let the resurrection be believed. Or the theory that Jesus never really died, he just swooned upon the cross. It appeared to people that he died and in the cool of the grave he revived. And three days later he pushed the stone away from the door in this injured state and all the rest, and then presented himself to the world as the Lord of Glory. Well, the defender of the. That just isn't very reasonable. No reasonable man all the time believe that. Okay, then there's this theory and there's that theory. Well, we eliminate all the theories and what do we have left? Well, the only thing we have left is we have to look after the empty tomb on the assumption that Jesus rose from the dead. All right? Now if that's true, then there is a grand miracle that verifies everything that Jesus himself taught that proves that he is the Son of God. And if he is the Son of God, and that means everything he said is true, and if what he said is that whatever his apostles should teach is true also, then we have verified the Christian message. Now, that is basically that very condensed thumbnail sketch of evidential apologetics. We want to be neutral, we want to agree on our standards. And starting point with the unbeliever when we want to go to the facts and try to show that very probably something like the Resurrection took place and that if that's the case, then we can move out from that miracle to the verification of the rest of the Bible. Okay, now, the presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics is the second category that I laid out for you a moment or two ago. Presuppositional apologetics says, no, we do not attempt to be nostrum. In fact, it is impossible. No man is neutral, and we're just playing at a game if we think that we are. We all have our pre commitments, we all have our assumptions, and try as we will, we cannot strip away all of those inclinations and those commitments that we have, our assumptions. Presuppositions are something that are always going to be there because the presuppositions that you have will determine what you think are the proper standards of all and logic anyway. Moreover, not only is it impossible, as a matter of fact, it is wrong as a matter of principle to try to be neutral. For Jesus says, you can't serve two masters. You either are going to be committed to him or not. You can't serve the master of my intellectual sufficiency, if you will, the standards of unbelieving philosophy and science and historiography or what have you, and the master Jesus Christ, you can't really be neutral. And so the Christian should try to defend the faith by holding onto his presuppositions. And instead of asking the unbeliever, well, what can we agree on as a starting point in our standards, the Christian wants to say, let's look at your presuppositions and my presuppositions and see which of these presuppositions is going to allow for any kind of thinking, any kind of historical investigation, any kind of ethics, whatever the subject may be, which of these world views that we have is going to allow for any intelligibility in our lives at all. So what I do is I talk to the young believer and I want to find out what his outlook on life is. What's his view of the world, what's his view of man, his view of logic, his view of evidence, his view of free will and history, and whatever the subject that seems relevant to our conversation might be, I want to get his background. How is it that man has this unique dignity, that we're supposed to have an ethic? How is it that we can use laws of logic or that we can understand the facts of history. Now, if he has a view of the world, for instance, let's say he doesn't think there's a creator, he doesn't think there's a God who controls every event of history according to his preordained plan, and that whatever happens just happens by chance. If we live in a random chance universe, how is it there could be any connection between the facts of intelligible gifts? How is it that this chance soup in my head called a brain can look through the chance eyeballs that I have at this chance world around me and find any intelligible laws, any connections that make sense? Why think that my memory is reliable? Why think that we have to use ethical standards of honesty and consistency? And we argue and on and on and on. And it turns out that the presuppositional says, your presuppositions actually wipe out rationality, make the knowledge of any fact unknowable, not just the knowledge of the resurrection. But you can't know anything. You can't know the nose on your face. You can't even know the most basic standards of life, living, thought, what have you. And on the other hand, the Christian then lays out his world. We believe that God has made the world be such and such a God. He made man in the following way, that history proceeds in his fashion. But there are miracles, of course, in the Bible that verify the message of God on and on and on. And in terms of that world, in terms of that outlook on life, in terms of that philosophy, we can make sense of logic and history and ethics and all the rest. And so what we want to do is to present the intellectual challenge of the gospel in the following form. That it's either Christianity or nothing, that the world is sounding fury, signifying nothing if you're not a Christian, or everything can make sense and have its place and be interpreted and have intelligibility about it. And so let's examine the goals of the two systems of apologetics. One system says we're going to begin as open minded, neutral people and come to the facts together and conclude that very probably this miracle took place. Very probably that means that the rest of the Bible is true. Whereas the presuppositional approach doesn't want to end up by saying, well, very probably there's a God, and very probably Jesus was his son, and very probably he rose from the dead, and therefore very probably the Bible is the word of God and can be trusted. The precept of Israel wants to say, there's no doubt whatsoever, but that The Bible is the word of God, and anybody who says otherwise doesn't have a foundation on which to stand, even to make his criticism stick. So we're trying to pull the rug out from under the unbeliever altogether. Now these then are the two basic approaches to apologetics that are found today. And unless I miss my mark, I think probably the easiest one to follow is the evidential approach. That kind of catches people's fancy. It seems like it's intellectually respectable. We're going to be open minded, that sort of thing. And it's very popular in evangelical circles. You walk into any Christian bookstore in Southern California and you go to the section dealing with the defense of the Christian faith apologetics, you're going to find what I've just said is the evidential approach. Most of the books there are going to promote that sort of thing because we can all argue about the resurrection and try to give evidence for our faith that sounds real good and something that everybody's supposed to be able to do, whereas this other approach know says no. We're supposed to stick to our assumptions in our preset religion. We're not settled for just probability. Let's go all the way and say it's Christianity or nothing. And it seems like a tougher system. We're asking for more, we're pushing harder. It doesn't seem to be as fair minded or whatever our preconception of intellectual honesty is. Go ahead.

Does that mean that we are all to be able to do what you're talking about or someone that you call. What it does to your life and what it is to you?

I'm really glad that he asked that question because it's crucial. When you catch this, Peter does not say, and some of you are going to be equipped to defend the faith. He doesn't say, christ is assured to me various gifts in the church, which of course is true. I'm not denying that. But Peter's not saying there are some people called to be people who will drive to daily vacation Bible school, bring little children with them, and other people will be given the gift of saying, Jesus changed my heart. It means a lot to me. We give this war personal testimony and that other people are going to be able to do something like defend this intellectually too. No, he says that we are all to be ready to present a defense for the hope that is in us. There's no qualification at all. Even if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed and do not fear their intimidation. Do not be troubled but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Always being ready to make a defense to everyone who ask you to give an account for the hope that is in you. So if you have the hope in you, you have to be willing to defend that hope. Anybody who can suffer.

I'm not the type that I could have to intellectually talk to somebody. Well, talk that kind of thing.

Well, I got a surprise. I think you can.

Maybe I can. But I mean, I don't think that we necessarily have to be that with everybody. But I mean, I know, I feel the same way. I. I tend to be more put back. Well, we're more emotional and I share what, you know, Christ has done to me, what he is in my life and I don't know if I can sit there and talk.

Let's have a dialogue. Okay, I'm the devil is ask. Let's go through this. You tell me now what does it mean to be a Christian brief? No, no, I want everybody to open their mouth. We're not going to have a good discussion when I said that.

What you want me to tell you.

Just briefly pretend I'm an unbelieving friend and we've met in a college classroom.

I wouldn't necessarily start sharing with you.

The opportunity just arose. Okay.

Well, I think depending on what we were talking about, if I could.

Great.

Name Christ in conversation. Maybe she was going through something in her life, you know, and then I could relate to him in a way that. Well, this is what happened in my life.

Yeah.

This is how I got to where it was in my life.

Patty, I. I'd love to believe that myself. It'd be a great emotional crush if I could just believe Jesus lived and died. Rose again and caring for me in the way that you setting. And I'm glad that it makes you feel better that after all, whistling in the dark is a nice approach psychologically. But I'm interested in the truth. The fact that it makes you feel good doesn't mean that it's going to work for me. Now what do you say?

I probably would sit there and, you know, upset. I mean, I mean that's my problem. I can't. I mean I have never done that.

I won't do that. We won't listen to. I can't do that because we're going to show you tonight you can't. Okay. That's fair. Okay. In a sense that's what we're going to try to answer tonight. I'm going to show you. I'm not. I'm Obviously not going to lay out a whole seminary course in apologetics in one hour discussion, but I'm going to show you tonight that each and every one of us can fulfill this commandment. And I think if I can go back to your original question, what you're struggling with is, well, I can't do it the way Dr. Bonson does it. I mean, I can't bring this philosophical stuff in and all this logic and whatever terms may be used. That's true, you can, but nobody expects you to either. The way you defend the faith is going to be in terms of your own vocabulary, your own way of thinking. The way you talk to people has got to be natural. You can't try to imitate somebody else's third. But I think everybody has to do it. But if somebody says, what do you mean by faith? Just a kind of a leap in the dark, just a whistling. Don't back down from this, you may.

Feel, but I just feel like I'm not even scared.

Well, then you came to the right place, because that's what we're going to do. We're going to prepare you all for the seven places. Let's take a look at these two approaches and ask ourselves a few questions. Which of them works? Which of them is pleasing to the Lord? Which of them is biblical? I'm going to give you a problem. I'm going to play the devil's advocate here again for all of you, I'm going to throw out what I consider to be the thorniest problem in Christian apologetics, the most difficult thing that's brought up in the classroom. When I was Studying for my PhD in philosophy, if I were to uphold the unbelieving philosophical candidates studied with me and asked them, what is the number one problem in believing the theology set forth in the Bible? What would it be? I am sure that high on the list, the number one issue would be what is called the problem of evil. What I want to do is I'm going to lay out the problem of evil. I'm going to play the part of an unbeliever, and I want you to consider how you would answer the problem of being. Then I'm going to take a look at the two different philosophical schools of apologetic evidentialism and presuppositionalism and show you how they would handle it. And then we're going to try to resolve the difficulty for you and in the process tell you which one reads most biblical, at least as I perceive it. Okay, so here's the problem. Let me try to get this out here. If I understand that you Christians would tell me, I'm happy telling you tonight. The God that you worship and who you say you love with all your parts is a God who is all powerful. And he's a God who plans the end from the beginning. That everything that happens in history doesn't happen by chance, but happens by the will of God. That God is the one who has made history perceive the way that it does, that he is all powerful and that he is sovereign, that he has a plan that he's pursuing in charisma. On the other hand, you tell me that this God is all loving, that he's a benevolent God, that as benevolent he wishes good to take place, that he's not evil. He doesn't want tragedy and injustice and sin. In fact, it's contrary to his will. Therefore, if God is all powerful, he can do whatever he wants to do. And if God is all loving, what he wants to do is bring about maximum happiness for people and not tragedy and discomfort and pain. And so if there is injustice, tragedy or pain in this world at all, then either Rob doesn't want it, but isn't powerful enough to eliminate it, or God is powerful enough to eliminate it, but isn't loving enough to want to do so. How can you reconcile having an all powerful God, an all loving God with the existence of evil round about us? We stop to think about the wars that have taken place. You think about the homicides that have been committed. You think about the small children who had been molested and killed. You think about the gratuitous evil of mankind around the goddess. I remember the story related by Dostoevsky and the brothers Kharmazak, where one of the brothers who priest is being interrogated by another brother who finds it very difficult to hold to the Christian faith. And he wants to illustrate the exquisite evil that's possible in the hearts in the activities of men. And he relates an incident having to do with people who had a child that wouldn't stop crying. And so what they did is they took the child out in the outhouse and left the child there in the first Russia, freezing winter weather. And the child of course is terrible, terrible pain because of low exposed conditions. And the child, it turns out nest her pants and was really screaming and screaming and screaming. This is a two and a half year old infant we're talking about now. And so the parents came and they actually spread the ax in the child's mouth punisher and beat the child and left her out in the fold. And now the one dweller come also says if you were to construct the world in which your will would be done, could you have the will to ordain and allow that kind of evil treatment of even that one child once in history, would you have the heart to do that? Anoint your brother has to stop and thinking distance. Now you all know stories that are equally as broadcast. The torture. You think of the way people are treated in prison in Iran. You think of the treatment that is given to prisoners of war anywhere in this world day. You think of the painful and mean things that we do even in polite and civilized society to one another. Then one has to wonder whether God doesn't care enough to eliminate this or whether God is not powerful enough to eliminate this. Is it really logically possible that you have an all powerful God? An all loving God and the pain and the evil and the tragedy that you see around that proceeded to me it's the most difficult problem. So it just doesn't make sense. I'm wondering if any of you Christians can convince me that you can still believe in an all powerful all loving God in the face of these situations. Well, a couple of things is first, because a person has power by God doesn't necessarily mean his son use it or he may use it when he sees fits with the king. Secondly, I guess it depends on our concept of love. When God created Adam and Eve, he designed them to have a loving fellowship with him. In fact the Bible from Deuteronomy and in Matthew and the New Testament the commandments are always the same that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind in my own soul. However, what happened was and I can't explain this, but Lucifer for one decided to rebel against God. Lucifer being a angel of light, was he powerful enough to prevent that? Because he was using the example, the part that people will dispute myself eventually will do and then God will vindicate it. I'm not having anything to do with it. And then the right way we'll be set up. Give me a second where it's made. Now why, why would he have to teach that? He's not, he's not teaching, he's on trouble, but basically proving the evil destroy itself. God's not evil. Proving evil has its own way. Evil says we can do what we want because that's what Satan says and that's what's bringing about all universal evil on the earth is because each person says I can do what I want. And how could each person know that if there wasn't like one figure behind all evil, all people couldn't know it, just like we couldn't know of God unless it was real. So evil has their leader, we have ours and see the choices to be made. But, well, the choice has already been told us that many will choose evil. And that's why the course of the earth is taking direction. It is. Why is that allowed? Because, wait, the sin of death, all men die. So what is the, what is the penalty? All men pay the same. Why did God allow me to sin? He gave freedom of choice. To create anything without freedom of choice would be to create robots. In fact, does love us enough to give us that freedom? Well, I'm not sure philosophically that you couldn't make men who are free that will do the right thing. In terms of what you Christians teach in your theology, supposedly after the new heavens and the new earth have been introduced in the eternal state, we're all going to have free will. We're not going to be robots. But nobody's going to sin in heaven and have to be cast into hell. That's true because we have have had the example of what happens when we do stuff. So why didn't God start that way? Why do we have to end up that way? Why, why do we have to go through all the tragedy with the poor girl and the outcast and the charisma tree? Why couldn't God just make history and plan out a history bias? He has the power to do anything, remember? Why couldn't he just bring that situation that we're going to have at the end of history, at the very beginning of history? Because there would be someone that would say again that why do we have to follow that? We'll see. Now we know. Wouldn't that be unrighteous for somebody to question the Lord like that? Satan did, he raised in heaven the first time. So you see. So where did that sin, if he was to like stop it at that point, there would be no proof that he was correct. Why would he need proof if he made perfect people like they're going to be at the end of history. He made people part of what he says. He made people with free choice. Yeah, the people at the end of history are going to have free choice too, right? You don't think we'll go to heaven, that we're going to be robots? We get to heaven because of our choice. That may be, but when we get to heaven, we're not going to lose our free will of it. Are we ever going to Use that free will in such a way as to sin and be cast out of heaven. When we go to heaven, we don't have the humanly body that's plagued us now. We don't have Satan's temptation. Well, aren't we all going to be resurrected someday and have a human body again that might then tempt us and cast out of God through Christ. Through Christ, our heavenly form? Yes. Well, we're going to have. If it's possible to have a physical body that isn't going to be tempted to sin, why didn't God make us with those bodies to begin with? He could have. He had the power to do it. Why didn't he do it? God did with Adam and Eve. Okay, well, how did they say that? Well, there was only one commandment given us that was that they were not to eat of your forbidden fruit. Well, they were also to be fruitful and multiply. Yeah, well, they. God gave them sex organs and you know, and the ability to. God sent to create man for worship, for men to worship God. And so I know it's your theology, you Christians tell me. And so since he created man for man to worship him, I, I guess I feel he needed to give that. Give man a free choice so that that worship would be worshipped in the purest sense and not just a robot. I agree. Free choice is essential. That makes sense to me, even as an unbeliever. But now, according to what you been saying, but at the end of history, when we all go to be with Jesus Christ and live in his kingdom forever, we're still going to have free choice. And we're never going to use our free choice in an evil way because we will have the knowledge then of what happens when we use it in an evil way because we will have seen what happened. Evil is him. Why couldn't God have created me with that knowledge to begin with? He has the power. Because then they'd have the knowledge of evil. And that would have been. That was what happened after they ate in the tree, not before. So they didn't have the knowledge in heaven. We're going to have that know knowledge because we have seen what happened over the course of history. Well, how can God keep us if we have this knowledge of evil? That's a dam. Well, it also says the thoughts of the old earth will not come to our minds after. So we won't have a knowledge of evil. We won't be able to render. Well, all we'll have is a knowledge of what God has thought and man's job would be to think God's thoughts after him. Well, why didn't he just think his thoughts after him at the beginning then? We did. From whence come Satan? What's among us then? Satan. Well, where did Satan come from? Satan's rebellion, but also our own rebellion.

How about if we give up in 15?

Oh, that's what the unbeliever can't supply you with. I'll ask, I'll ask you a question. On what basis, sir, are you talking about the needle? You're presupposing there's a moral good, a moral evil. You're talking about evil and I'd like to know where from a non Christian perspective we live in a universe where man is. Francis Schaeffer said it's nothing more than an abnormal reward upon the smooth face of the silent meaningless universe. It's just what he said. The non Christian see the universe in a meaningless type of way. How can you talk about good and evil? Where do you get your moral absolutes? I hear a lot of talk about moral absolutes, but I don't know what the basis is. As Christians we believe that there is a moral absolute. So we can look at the girl in the outhouse and say that is evil. As a non Christian, you cannot look at the girl in the outhouse and say that's evil. On no basis can you do that. Seems to me even listening to some tapes, I mean really, on what basis are you talking about? Let me try to, let me try to explicate here, lay out in a little more detail what was going on in this exchange between Nelson and myself. The point where we came up there. Why would God allow her to see anything? Yeah, well, that's what we did. We're going to come to that eventually. What I want to do now, the second step in my pedagogical technique here is to take the two basic schools of apologetics and show you how they would deal with the problem of evil. An evidentialist would say this is really a problem. However, God has given us evidence that he exists and the Bible is true. And if you'll listen to the evidence, hopefully you'll believe that that evidence was strong enough to overwhelm or counterbalance the evidence against the Christian faith that comes from the problem of Egypt. So now look, let's go through this argument for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We go through that and we say very probably Jesus rose from the dead. And that means very probably he's gone. And very probably true and very probably the Bible is The word of God. And so we do have some evidence over here that the Bible is true. Now what you have presented as an unbeliever is some difficulty with that because we have evil and frankly we don't know why God allowed evil. He hasn't given us an answer. He's only asked us to trust him. And so if you think the evidence I've given you for the resurrection is strong enough, then hopefully you can entrust yourself to him and say, I don't have to have an answer to the problem of evil because there's this positive evidence and I'm willing on the basis of faith to let God have his way. Now that's not my making up of the evidentialist says, that's my very quick and over simple summary of what I've read over and over and over again. As evidentialists try to deal with the problem of evil, essentially it'll say, yes, that's tough, but we have some positive evidence too. And when you put them all together, hopefully you'll think that there's a favorable balance for Christianity over against us. What's the problem with that one? I don't think that it's totally glorifying to God to say, well, there's some evidence for you and there's some evidence against you. And then as far as I'm concerned, well, we'll sit that in favor of God. Now I realize that's not what evidentialist. I'm role playing here in a way that's unfair to them. But nevertheless it comes down to that. Moreover, philosophically that does not even counterbalance the problem of evil because the philosopher who's using the problem of evil doesn't say evil seems to be some evidence against God. But there are these miracles that are some evidence for God. And I think there's more evil than there are miracles. Well, obviously there's more evil than there are miracles. You stop to think about it, but that's not the point. The unbeliever says all of the claims in the world about miracles will not stack up to even one ounce of positive evidence if the system of thought is contradictory. Okay, let's say that I come to you and I say, you know what my philosophy of life is? My philosophy of life is men insist that he has not faced manifest. That is not philosophy of life. And somebody says, now wait a minute, wait a minute, there's something wrong with that. It's contradictory. You're holding premises that cannot both be true because they conflict with each other. And I defend myself in a single end with it. Look around you. Don't you see men? Isn't there positive evidence that men exist? And on the other hand, if you look in other places where there are no men, is it not true as well that men do not exist? There seems to be some evidence then in favor of my contradictory thesis. Now, would anybody accept that philosophy of life on that kind of defense, they'd say no. Claimantly or don't you understand that this contradiction cannot be overcome by evidence? There can't be evidence for a contradictory thesis. We're not talking about there being a little bit of evidence or not enough evidence or just barely enough evidence or overwhelming evidence. There can't be any evidence for a contradiction. In the same way, when the unbelieving philosopher says, you believe a contradiction, we believe God's all loving, he's all powerful, and yet evil's here. You should be loving enough to want to eliminate it and powerful enough to do so. And yet it's here that's a contradiction. And you can't go and say, but we have evidence that there really is just this kind of God. Because the issue here is one of contradiction, not a matter of, well, there's all these negative vibes over here and all these positive vibes over here, and you decide which one has the most gripping power over. Because the positive evidence doesn't mean a thing. Light of the contradiction in the Christian system, what about the evidence in the Book of Revelations which seems to indicate someday God will use his power? Well, maybe he will someday overcome it. The question is, why did he ever allow it? He should be good enough not to want it, and he should be powerful enough to have what he wants. So why was there ever evil there?

You say because there is a little bit of negative evidence that has shaped in.

No, I'm saying that the claim of the ingenuity philosopher is that the problem of evil is not a little bit of negative evidence. The problem of evil shows that there's an inherent contradiction in the Christian claim, and therefore there can't be any evidence in favor of it. And when you say, well, the resurrection is evident, you say it's not evidence for this theory because you can't have evidence for a contradictory theory. Resurrection may prove that three things happen in history. You must end it. To Ripley's Believe it or not. Maybe it'll end up on that's incredible. But nevertheless, it cannot be evidence for the truth of Christianity because Christianity has an inherent contradiction. I'm trying to make you see that the problem of evil is not a matter of balancing the positive evidence and the negative evidence. The problem of evil says this is not negative evidence. This is a refutation. It's not just. Well, doesn't this make you wonder a little bit? No. It's saying you can't believe that at all. Not at all. Not. Not just a little or just enough or a little bit more than that. You can't believe a contradiction at all any more than you can believe. I believe that many kids, but I believe that it's not the case many kids. What you're saying, just to clarify something, what you're saying is the problem of evil is contradictory. If we don't properly deal with the problem of evil. I'm saying that that is the claim of the unbeliever that the problem of evil shows Christianity the be contradictory. Okay.

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