Greg Bahnsen VS R C Sproul Debate Part 4 Presuppositional Vs Classical Theology

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. So evidentialism would handle it one way and I frankly think cannot overcome the difficulty. A presuppositionalist doesn't have to handle it that way. The presuppositionalist, remember what, what is the strategy here? Presuppositionalist says let's look at your assumptions. Let's look at my assumptions and see which can make sense. Whatever we're discussing in this case, evil or instances of evil. And this is where Nelson's answer came in. I was kind of putting him on about listening to a tape because he's heard my tapes on the problem of evil, where I go into a great deal of depth logically and philosophically about the problem. But if I'm a Christian and somebody comes to me and says, you know, I am, let's say it's the war in Vietnam when I was in college that was really, you know, they can happen to be a God, allowing all this terrible stuff to happen over here in Vietnam. I would say, you think that's bad, eh? Oh God, it's terrible. All this murder and killing and rape and plunder and burning and destruction. It's just terrible. And I'd say I agree. In fact, I think it's so terrible you just can't say it's a matter of taste. It's not just that I'm kind of squeamish when I see these people dying on the 6 o' clock news. I have to say that is downright evil. I mean, evil playing for thieves, that's evil. Not just that isn't the way I'd like to do it. The end. Believers are going to say that's right. We're not talking about different strokes for different folks here. We're not saying that some people just don't happen to like it. We're saying that's wrong, dead wrong. You can't get around that. Now how do you Christians account for, how can you have an all powerful God when these things that are dead wrong are taking place? And I said, wait a minute, what do you mean dead wrong? I agree with you. Dead wrong. What does dead wrong mean in your universe, on your outlook on life, given your philosophy, given your worldview, what does it mean for something to be wrong contrary to the will of God? Well, for the believer, contrary to the will of God, we'll come to that in a minute. For the unbeliever, what's under what they value judgment. It's just what they existentially believe. What they. He says, well, I think it's wrong because it's painful. And I say, no, wait a minute, not all pain is wrong. You don't really do that. If I have to give my child painful rabies vaccination to save the child's life in nevertheless, it's a good thing to do, painful though it be. Oh, yeah, that's true. Well, then don't say it's wrong because it's painful. What's wrong about that? Why shouldn't we heal your Accelerate people in Vietnam? You begin to see the problem. The unbeliever is using a Christian outlook on life to say there's something absolutely wrong about that. And then he wants to turn around and say there's something wrong with the Christian outlook on life. See, I want to show that he's the one who has the contradiction, not me, because he assumes there's absolute good that's being violated in Vietnam or in the Turkish example, or whatever. He wants to say there's absolute good that's being violated, but he can't give any account of absolute good. And so I say, but I can. I'll tell you why you're so upset about that and why I am too. Because there is a God. He has made his will known and this is violating his will. And that gets to you. You know it's wrong because you're a child of God and he made you to know these things. You still are the image of God, to use the theological phrase. You still have feelings for what is right and wrong. And those feelings have been also laid out to us in the scripture. The scripture says we'll go and show what it is. And I say, I can account for that. But you can in your universe. That sound and fury signifying nothing. Big deal. People are dying. Some people get their thrills without being sad. So what? What's that to you? See, when he starts out, you want to get him to commit himself to this idea that he's absolutely wrong. Then the whole problem is that he can't fit for his absolutes. So the Christian can account for absolutes and the non Christian can't account for absolutes. And therefore, if there's a problem of evil, it's a problem for the unbeliever, not for the believer. That would be a presuppositional way of dealing with the difficulty. I want to show him what's wrong with his outlook on life and how it can't Account for anything and then showing the positive virtue of money. I'm saying the non Christians can't account for abstinence. Because he wants to educate himself above. Well, it may be that the selfish motivation for his rigidity and his morals. But I think the more important issue is let's say he has a sense of fairness. C.S. lewis used to have an example about getting on a bus and somebody gets up to give a woman a seat and then another person jumps into the place. I recall and everybody says that isn't fair. Wait a minute. He says what is that company, that sense of fairness in everybody that they think that it's wrong to do this? Well, the Christian has an account for that, but the unbeliever can't account for this. In the case of your boss, you'd want to know. Well, okay, he has these standards. Let's say for the most part they agree with biblical standards, although that won't be true. But even if for the most part they work, why does he hold to them? Given his view of the universe where we don't know that there's a God, why hold demi standards? Why not let people get away with whatever they want to get away with? Jumping in front of pregnant ladies on a bus, raping people, going to Vietnam and slaughtering. Who cares? If that's what gives you your thrill in life, who are you to say, isn't he rather arrogant? If there is no God, isn't he self righteous? Who is he to condemn anybody else when they're cheating or lying or whatever? But don't you see, we think he is somebody that to criticize because there is a God in heaven who holds those standards and he's only reflecting God's standards when he says these things. They do reflect God's standards in a lot of things. But there might be certain areas of his life where he doesn't want God's standards and consequently just rationalizes simple, there's not really a God because of this or that. Yeah, that's true that he does not buy God 100% he wants to. But here we're talking about just the idea of having absolute standards. How can we even have that idea of God? Well, somebody now who's real astute is going to stop saying wait a minute, you still haven't told us why he's evil. You've only shown us that the unbeliever doesn't have any platform to stand on in criticizing us for our theology because we can say wait a minute, you can't even say there's evil. You can't make sense of the premise that there is evil, but we can. And so then the end believer says, okay, I'm duly humbled, I'll be quiet about that. I won't be critical, but I will ask, why is there evil? Now if God is all powerful and if he is all good, why is there evil? I want you to hold on to your hats. The answer is for reasons that are perfectly sufficient to him. Now what if you are an unbeliever? I think you'd probably say, now wait a minute, that calls for a lot of faith that God is so good that you can trust him, that he had a good enough reason for allowing us evil. You understand that on a female level we all do that. We know, for instance, if you had a little child, a three year old child who had to go through the pain of rabies vaccinations to save his life, he may not understand why you're forcing him to lay on that table and have rejections in his stomach. But he may do it because he trusts his father enough that someday it will be evident that his father was doing it for his own good. Now if I say in a similar way if God is all good, if that's my presupposition, then I must also conclude that if there's evil, he has a good reason for it. Now notice here's my presupposition, God is all good and there is evil. And so I conclude there must be a reason because an all good God wouldn't allow evil without there being a sufficient reason. Somebody says, what is that reason? You say, wait a minute, wait a minute. I don't have to know what that reason is. I just have to have the faith that he is an all good God. Now have you undermined the fact that he's an all good God? No. And so as long as he is an all good God, if there is evil, it will follow that logically there is a sufficient reason for it. See, the unbeliever thinks that if I don't have that reason, there can't be a reason. That would be like me saying I don't understand why the electricity works in this room. And by the way, I don't. And I'm an electrician. I don't. You know, the best I can think of is like water running, you know, through the wires. But even that doesn't make sense of it. I don't get it why electricity works and therefore there isn't any electricity. I don't understand that can't be true. Nobody can hold to that. That what is is limited by what I can understand. If God hasn't chosen to tell us what the reason is, it is still an option for us to say I have faith, but there is a reason he hasn't told it. But since he's all good, I know the reason is morally sufficient. And until the unbeliever can prove that there is no such God, then there's no logical contradiction in my system. Now there may not be a logical problem, may not be a philosophical problem, but I will admit there is one problem within it. It's a psychological problem. It's a psychological problem as to how I can feel at ease about all this. Intellectually I can't fault it. The presuppositionalist is right. You can't even bring in the premise that goes evil, enlightening the principle. So there can't be a problem with evil for us. We have to be a Christian to acknowledge evil to begin with. If somebody says well, but still there's this contradiction, well there's no contradiction as long as you allow that an all good God could have a morally sufficient reason even though he hasn't told us what it is. And so there's no contradiction left. But there is a psychological uneasiness. Can we really trust this God? And that you see, is a matter of sin. That as a matter of fact goes all the way back to the died of leaving. That was Adam's original thought. God had one hypothesis about the fruit, Satan had another hypothesis and Adam and Eve had either trust God implicitly or they had to test both hypotheses. And they took the evidential approach. They decided we're going to look at the evidence for ourselves. We're going to test this. We're going to be neutral, we're going to be open minded, we're going to have common standards with Satan and we're going to test the fruit and see whether it happens this way or not. But God didn't want that. He wanted them to presuppose his goodness. And in the same way today he lays a challenge to us. You can either presuppose my goodness in faith or you can make the same mistake that Adam did. And that is to try to demand of me evidence where in fact you're the one who's on trial. After all, who is it that's guilty for the little girl in the outhouse and the wars in Vietnam and the backstabbing among our friends, not God, us who's on trial here? The Christian says, not God, us. We're the ones who have to give an answer, not God. And so you see, the unbeliever is arrogant when he thinks he can bring accusation against God, when in fact it's his judge that he's bringing an accusation against. It seems to me that the evidential approach, one is not sufficient to deal with the most difficult problems in the call of day. Secondly, that the presuppositional approach is and can resolve them and resolve them in a way that is true to the very heart of the Christian message. Where you have faith in God and acknowledge your place before him, or where you try to play the part of God yourself and put him on, try. And thirdly, the presuppositional approach, I think, is the one that Scripture commends to us. There'll be a number of reasons for that. First of them may seem just a little harsh because it speaks to somebody being a fool. But in the proverb we read that we are to not answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own conceits. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to find right now. But we. No, I was just quoting it to do it. However, it goes on to say, you are to answer a fool according to his folly. I'm sorry, don't answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be like unto him. And then answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be lies in his own conceits. The point of the proverb, there is. First of all, you have to answer the fool on the basis of his own outlook. Take his worldview and run with it. See how far it can be put. Do an internal critique of it. If he says, I don't believe in God, then you say, oh, if there's no God, then there are no absolutes. And if there are no absolutes and there is no ethic, then there isn't anything that is really absolute evil. I mean, absolute judgment about evil. See, answer a fool according to his falling, lest he be wise in his own, lest he think, oh, my philosophy is just fine. Shove his philosophy to its absurd end. And on the other hand, don't answer the fool according to his folly, because if you really do hold to his presuppositions and outlook, you're going to end up just like him. Okay, don't answer the fool according to his folly because you're going to end up being a fool yourself. I like to think of the analogy sometimes when someone who's not a Christian attacks God before they can deny existence. It's like a child having to sit on the father's knee and then denying their father's very existent. And that's essentially an unbeliever has to do. They have to sit on a Christian worldview and then deny the existence of that who is stagnant. Yes, Dr. Van Til is fond of using that analogy so that we'll understand the position of the unbeliever that as he tries to argue against the Christian faith, he has to be presupposing the Christian faith that there is such a thing as mathematics and history and sense perception and logic that is reliable. Apart from the proverb passage can be found. There's no word for is there? But rather than take the time to go ahead and find it, it wasn't a couple of the places I was looking at. I'm going to show you a few other passages. Let's turn to that one that I called the Magna carta Christian apologetics 1 Peter 3, 15. And maybe this verse itself shows us what method of defending the faith we should want to use. It says, but sanctify Christ is 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. In that passage it says, be ready to offer your defense. What is the precondition of that defense? What must you do first if you're going to offer a defense in faith? What does it say any better? You have to be ready. But how will you be ready? What is the requirement for being ready? Sanctify Christ as Lord in your heart. That word sanctify means to consecrate or to set aside. What Peter says is you should set aside Christ in your heart as Lord. Okay? Men think in their hearts. The heart is the internal reason, the internal part of man. It doesn't mean just the emotions in this particular place. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is it. For instance, okay, Peter says, in your internal life, in your mental life, in that internal self, make Christ Lord, set him aside as Lord, consecrate him as Lord, and your thought process is bow to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Set him into his kin. Verses 4 to 5 Paul says, we are to make every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. That every thought that we have, every argument we use, every piece of evidence that's brought out, every turn of logic that we're interested in, every thought must be made captive to the obedience of Christ. Not that we're going to Be neutral for a while. Notice and be like, we agree with the unbeliever on logic and facts and that sort of thing. And then we'll finally come to bow to Jesus Christ, to the obedience of Christ. And so we're always supposed to be presupposing what Christ says. Or can anybody say Jesus is Lord? But I kind of doubt what you say. You can't challenge the word of the Lord if you vow to the lordship of Jesus Christ, you need to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. You don't challenge anything who says. In fact, Jesus says it's the sign of a fool to build his life on the sand, to build a house on the sand instead of to build it on the rock. And then he says, what is the rock? My words are rock. Our lives are to be built on the rock foundation of Jesus Christ. We don't want to give up that foundation so we can stand on the sand with the fool while the floods of God's judgment are building up against us. No, we want to say, no, I'm going to stand on the rock. Jesus Christ is my Lord. I presuppose his word and I won't give it up, not even for a moment. It's interesting how Paul in Galatians, when he's dealing with the Judaizers, he says, and we did not give way, no, not even for a moment, to their theology. God doesn't want us to be neutral. Jesus says, you need a poor mere existence. There is no neutrality, there is no middle ground, and you can't serve two lords. And so you have to decide whether you're going to sanctify Christ as Lord in your heart, whether in your thought life, in your argumentation, in your mental existence. Jesus will be the Lord, not just Lord over my behavior and my body, but Lord over my mind and the way I reason, the way I think. So I think that not only is presuppositionalism the only effective apologetic in the face of the most severe arguments and challenges for the Christian faith, it is that approach to apologetics which comports best with the biblical witness itself when it tells us Christ is to be Lord in our hearts, that we aren't to be neutral, that every thought is to be made captive to him, that we aren't to be fools who build our lives on the sand rather than on the word of Jesus Christ. Moreover, as the proverb says, the methodology should do this. Show the fool his folly and show him that you want trapped by it as well. Interesting. To me. And with this I'll pretty much conclude and let you ask questions and carry the discussion any way you want. In 1 Corinthians, Paul tells us, verse 18. For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness. Remember how the proverb says, answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. But don't answer the fool according to his folly, lest ye be like unto him. Paul says, fools look at the word of the cross and evaluate it negatively. But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside. Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? That's the battle cry of presuppositional apologetics. Where is the debater of this age? Where is the one who can step forward and give us an intellectual, philosophical account of absolute good and absolute evil, of absolute logical standards, of the reliability of sensation, the reliability of memory, the fact that we can bring facts and laws together, we can make sense of this world intellectually and ethically? Where is the debater of this age? In fact, God makes foolish the wisdom of this world. So while the world may look at our presupposition and the preaching of the cross as foolish, we know that God is really making worldly wisdom foolish in the way that we just said, by answering a fool according to his folly, to show how ridiculous it is. But then showing him that you don't really answer according to his Father and you aren't a fool like him, you have an answer to evil and to whatever else the problem may be. Ben, you're talking about how to prove God's existence, right? Talking about how to give an answer to those who challenge the existence of God. What about those who don't challenge the existence of God? If we challenge the existence of Christ or the they say, well, I'm a Christian, I believe in God. Well, they may not say they're a Christian. They say that they believe in God. Well, how can they say they're Christians that don't believe in Christ? Oh, okay. They don't believe the claims in the Bible about Christ. Okay, now that is a. Yeah. Now, what we could do, of course tonight, is to take up every conceivable attack you've ever heard on the Christian faith. And we'd be here well past midnight answering them. But we could answer them. Don't get me wrong. What I want to do here is not answer the question specifically, but point out what method I've taught you. The method I've taught you says, first of all, don't think you have to be neutral and agree with this person on the standards and starting point of your argumentation. What you want to do is compare worldviews. You want to say, well, now, what's your outlook on life? If you believe that there's just a God, but Jesus isn't the Son of God, this, that, and the other. And you want to do an internal critique of it, show its inconsistencies, eventually showed that it can't make sense of anything. Now, maybe you don't know how to do that. We may have to have another session and I'll try to teach some of those methods for doing that. The goal is to do an internal critique and show the foolishness of that worldview, and then show that in terms of our worldview it makes sense, because that's what the Bible teaches. Now, why is that important? Well, here's a question about God. Is Jesus the Son of God? That's a question about God. How would we know? How would I know how to answer that question? Maybe I should go here to everybody in the condominium and take a poll, right? Maybe they can help me. How many of you think Jesus is God? Well, even if we got a favorable poll, somebody would say, well, who cares? Who's in a position to say? What human being could ever be in a position to have the authority to say that Jesus is or is not God? Obviously, the only answer we could have would have to turn from God. And therefore the presuppositional says it makes internal sense to turn to the Bible and let the Bible declare on that subject. And then somebody will say, but what if somebody doesn't think this is the Word of God? Well, now we switch gears and what's our methodology? Ask them about their worldview, do an internal critique of it, show that it can't account for anything, and then show why we must take this to be the Word of God because it claims to be the Word of God. That's why we claim it to be the Word of God. That's circular reasoning. Somebody's going to say, you can't accept it because it says so. And I say, well, what if it didn't say so? Then would you think it's the Word of God? What's the alternative? After all, what the unbeliever is doing is trying to criticize Us, just because of the consistency of the position. Really, if this book didn't claim to be the word of God, I think it'd be absurd for anybody to say it is. If it doesn't make that claim, why should I make that claim for it? Now it makes that claim, and it seems to me that there is no adequate reputation of it. And in terms of that claim, in terms of what this teaches me about the world, God, myself, history, logic, ethics, whatever, in terms of the worldview of this book, I can make sense of everything else. I can make sense of philosophy and math and science and argumentation and ethics. But without it, I can't. So what is the proof ultimately of the Christian faith? If I can give you this little phrase, it's the impossibility of the contrary. That's how we prove Christianity. We showed that anything other than Christianity turns out to be impossible. The proof that the Bible is the word of God and the Christian worldview is the truth is from the impossibility of the contrary. Now, let me conclude this by contrasting again evidentialism and presuppositionalism. The evidentialist approach. Say you ask the evidentialist, how do you know there is a God? What proof would you give me that there is a God? The evidentialist would try things like this. They'd say, well, every cause has an effect. The world is an effect, and therefore the world must have a cause. And that's what we call a God. It's a terrible argument. I won't get into why it's terrible. But the evidentialist would argue in that way. He'd say, well, look, there's all this order roundabout. If there's order, there's got to be somebody who gave order to the world. Just like if you find a watch, there has to be a watchmaker. So if there's order around about us, there must be a great watchmaker in this guy who made the world the way it is. Again, a bad argument, but gives you that sort of thing. On the other hand, the presuppositionalist would say the proof that there is a God, and then it is the Christian God. The proof of the Christian God is that without him you can't prove anything. The presuppositional approach is from the impossibility of the contrary. Take your worldview and you can't prove anything. Take my worldview and you sin. So what are the options? Not very probably Jesus rose from the dead. Very probably is God. Very probably the Bible is the word of God. But there's some evidence against it. So what do you think about it? No, you don't have any options. It's either foolishness or it's wisdom. It's either the truth of God's word or it's not. And so that's why I'm a presuppositionalist and I think it's very important. Now, does this mean. I said I wasn't going to say anything else. One more thing does come to mind, and I promise on the choir, does this mean that there isn't evidence for the Christian faith? Does this mean that the resurrection and the miracles and all the rest can't be used? No, it doesn't mean that. This means that can't be the crux of our apologetics. That means there's a limited place for bringing evidence to the unbeliever. But the most important problem, most important perspective on the unbeliever is what is his philosophy by which he evaluates the evidence. Let's say I could prove the resurrection, but the unbeliever thinks this is just a chance universe. Like I said a little while ago, he might say, oh, what a freak thing, somebody died and came to life again. Let's send it to Ripley's Believe it or Not. You see, if you don't change his philosophy by which he evaluates the facts, all that evidence will mean nothing. So I'm not saying don't use evidence. In fact, there's even a place for the argument for the resurrection and these evidences of the truth of the Bible that can be found in popular bookstores everywhere, there's a use for those evidences. But far more important is the philosophy of factuality, the philosophy of ethics, the philosophy of logic that lies behind that. If you don't correct the unbelievers philosophy, all that evidence will mean nothing. There's this thing I just wanted. This is like an example of MCRA more evident. So it's got that judge who's thinking, essentially, man gets deceived, so judge hasn't got a word. Now please understand that doesn't mean that there isn't evidence. And there's lots of value in that book. I've read that book. It's given ammunition to us. But the ammunition won't mean anything unless you have a gun with which to propel it. And presuppositionalism gives us the philosophy in terms of which the evidence can get its target to make sense. Oh, well, if you don't. The basic point was if you don't correct the unbeliever's philosophy, then all the fasts won't ruin anything. So the proof that the Christian God exists is that without him you can't prove anything. Sure. Every piece of scientific evidence, argumentation and proof that's available to us today, every bit of it, assumes that the way the world was yesterday is the way things are going to be tomorrow. That there's regularity in nature. So that if the sun rose yesterday in the east, it's going to rise in the east tomorrow and not vice versa. That if I get up in the middle of the night and stub my toe on Wednesday night, I better be careful when I get up in the middle of the night Thursday, because if I run into the same bread stand, it's going to stub my toe again. It's not going to be the most exciting thing on earth that ever happened to me. The second time it happens. The second time is going to be just as painful as the first time. We all assume regularity. We don't assume regularity. You can't know anything. Because you see, everything that we've ever learned up to this point could be made wrong 10 minutes from now. All of our words can mean different things. All of our reactions to the physical circumstances in life could mean different things. We couldn't understand anything. But now, if that's the case, who can make sense of the regularity of nature? Can the Christian? Yeah, because I believe in a God who makes this world operate the way it does and keeps things uniform. He controls everything according to the scriptures. But the unbeliever doesn't believe there is such a God. He believes this is a chance world. Well, this is a chance world. The space shuttle may very well turn into a buzzard for all I know. All of our scientific evidence in the world is out the window. If this is a chance world, nothing is going to be uniformly dependable. And so what I want to say is, without God, you can't prove anything because it's only in terms of our belief in God that you can use argumentation, logic, factual evidence, your senses, ethical principles, what have you. Even Einstein said there was a guy that designed the universe with a mortality. I don't know. I just think it does. The question I was going to ask you all that is that who said that Bible is God's word? Don't the Buddhists have book that says Buddha's word is the word or the Quran for the Muslims? Yes, that's true. There are false claims to being God's word. How do you only God Is. Okay, let's say we have five books out here on the shelf. Each one says this is God's word. How would we know? I mean, how would we be in a position to choose? Only God could say. Right? But how would God say it? I mean, if God wrote us a book to identify his book, then we'd want to know, is this book that identifies his book? His book? Right. That book could be a translation of his book. That doesn't settle anything. If we have various claims. What we have to do is an internal examination of each claim. Let's just take the Quran as an illustration. If the Quran is true, the Quran could not be the word of God. Why? Because the Quran teaches itself. It teaches that God is so different from the world, so removed from the world, so wholly other from the world that anything that we think any idea that we have has got to be untrue to God. God is so unchanging according to the Quran that God doesn't do anything. Because if God did anything, then he'd be different from the way he was a minute ago when he wasn't doing that. We don't believe it in that sense. Not at all. Let me finish about the Quran and we'll come back to what we believe. If that's true, then that means God couldn't have revealed the Quran because anything that is said in the Quran would be a human idea of God. He's so different from us that nothing can be truly said of him that way. And if he revealed the Quran, then there'd be a difference between God before and after he revealed the Quran. So all I'm saying is if you read the Quran, it tells you that it can't be the word of God because the God it's laying out for us can't reveal himself. Now we don't have that trouble with the Bible. The Bible says God is unchanging. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't ever do anything. That he has this static, ice block sense of unchanging God. God is unchanging means that his plan doesn't ever have to be altered. God's doing things all the time. He created the world. He sent his son, his answer first, and he eventually judged the world. He's changing in that sense, that he's doing things, but he's never changing his mind about things. He's never changing his plan or his intention. So he is constant. And we believe that just because he is sovereign over everything, he can even control the mind and the mouth of his prophets. To speak his very word. So our philosophy of life came from the Bible shows that the Bible could very well be the word of God against him. So this is a matter again. We can keep bringing up problem after problem after problem to be dealt with, but in each case the strategy is the same. An internal critique of the presuppositions and worldview of the person who is criticizing, and then a demonstration of the internal logic and strength of the Christian worldview. By contrast. And in that, you don't have to be neutral. You don't have to say, let's have the same starting point and method. You simply have to say, let's compare what the two positions allow for. Now, our position allows for logic, history, science, evidence, ethics, and yours doesn't allow for anything. Now, I realize you're not going to say that. You go sit down for a cup of coffee and you just play it out. Oh, wow, that's right, you know, I want to become a Christian. Very likely you're going to have to talk and talk and talk. But in the talking, I've laid out the map for as to how you want to steer the conversation and what you're going to try through. That's good, too. But part of the underlying thought of all that is that human beings are logical. Yeah, they are. But I'm not logical. They are to an extent. If you weren't, you wouldn't be trying to do right now. Yeah, well, see, that's it. It's all relative. If you could prove that, then why isn't everybody in the world agree like God wants us to, because their hearts are set against them and they're illogical. Well, I didn't mean to say that we are infallible in illogical, but I did know that we all use logic, we all use argumentation, we all move from premises to conclusion. That's all I was getting at. Everybody uses his head to say, well, now look, if it hurt to stub my toe last night, I want to try to avoid it tonight. Everybody's logical in essence. Everybody moves from premises to conclusions, but not everybody does it. Well, if that were true, I'd never have to teach a course in logic. We'd never need a course in logic. I don't mean we're infallible. All I mean is we all try to use our brains, we all try to reason, but not all of us do it. Well, and the unbeliever, if we wanted to go into more detail, and I've got a little syllabus on this that talks About a lot of the facets of the situation. The unbeliever doesn't want the reason. He doesn't want to conclude that there is a God. He is predisposed to try to reach any other conclusion but that. That's why we have to stop him in his tracks. Not with, well, very probably Jesus rose from the dead. They want to say, you can't reason at all. If we proceed down that way. We want to say there is no foundation for what we're doing, so it's all or nothing. Rather than tossing gains abstract philosophical terms of what we believe and vice versa, how do you, what answer do you get to someone who says, well, how can we believe in Adam? Is in other words the scientific verse. Scientific? Well, if somebody comes and sits down with a cup of coffee and hearing that's what the ring is today, I might very well begin with just some of the absurdities of evolution, just to get the conversation rolling, to do a little debris clearance so they won't think, well, boy, everything is scientific favors this other group. I might point out, for instance, that if you believe in evolution, you have to believe that inorganic matter became organic without any cause for it whatsoever, and that non intelligent organic matter became intelligent according to evolution without any cause. There's just these huge miraculous leaps from one thing to another, you know, that nothing brought about something and that that something which was unliving became living. And then this organic became, I mean, inorganic became organic. That the unintelligent became intelligent, that the unethical became ethical. And then we finally got man. Or that we're supposed to believe, as I said in our last study, that it just so happened as the primordial soup or amoebas were splitting, that things developed that you had a man and a woman. Wasn't that convenient that you should have one genital set like this and one genital set like this and now we can have a new way to reproduce and that those amoebas develop and develop. And so in the same generation just happened to have a man and a woman together. Evolution is absurd. It's not worth talking about scientifically, but it's the reigning dog. You don't have a big science, it's not religious. They're so religious, they have an undying absurd faith in evolution. So I might start with something like that. And I say, well, really, it's a question of whether the evolutionist worldview or the worldview taught in the Bible can make sense of the evidence. And the evolutionist approach says that everything is by chance and if that's true, then we can't trust science. And if we can't trust science, then we can't know anything about evolution. So if evolution's true, we couldn't know that evolution is true. Let me run that by you real fast. If evolution is true, then my mind is nothing more than the product of chance, random factors in the physical universe. But if my mind is nothing more but the chance functioning of random factors, why should I depend on what my mind felt in? I mean, it's like a weed, right? Weeds grow, you know, they can't do anything about it. I mean, it's not as though weeds choose to be this way or that they just grow. Well, I can't help the way I think. And if evolution is true, I'm just, you know, the product of time and chance and protoplasm. I can't help it. My mind, you know, makes me think these thoughts. Well, that's all my mind is. Then why should I trust it when my mind says evolution is true? So you see, if evolution is true, then I have no reason to think that evolution is true. Again, it's that internal critique, the illogical condition of the individual's division. And I would try to again hear the arguments in the direction of comparing their worldview to my worldview, their outlook on life to my outlook on life. Answer the pool according to his follies. So you won't be wise in front of these. But don't answer recording this call unless you dislike it. We don't satisfy. Oh, I just can't talk to those intellectual realms all the time. You don't have to. I need to have specific facts like radioactive carbon dating and the death river. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I don't think everybody can talk about radioactive carbon dating. I think everybody can talk about. Do you really believe that unlimited matter, vast living matter, all kind of stuff, no matter how that's supposed to be scientific. Everybody can be presuppositional because everybody can look at the flaws and the internal absurdity of that. But not everybody can understand cognitive 14 dating and all the scientific things and else. There's nothing wrong with that scientific stuff. I mean, I know plenty of it can use it and there's a place for it. But I think what you need, you don't want to be real technical and intellectual and so forth. You want the approach that I've been commanding tonight and you say, just look at that position and where does it lead you that this is true? If it's true that everything happens by chance. That means that my mind is now saying it happens by chance. And if it happens by chance, that's very fast. So if my mind were to teach me that evolution is true, I have no use in the belief that evolution is true. That may be a little too clever for you to get the first time around. But my point is everybody can think that out, whether you've had a course in science or logic or not. But I don't think everybody can understand the ins and outs of historical argumentation and scientific argument. So in terms of what Patty brought up a long time ago, can everybody do this? Everybody can do the presuppositional approach, but not everybody can do the evidential approach. One more question we're all getting. I know, let me just inject this. So you know, as far as using a presuppositional approach, just to simply say in law school, for example, sometimes people really assert something forcefully that's from a non Christian perspective. And you simply say on what basis? What absolute basis do you place them on or understand? And that's presuppositional approach. Just call them down saying on what basis are you making that statement? And then I won't take any time to give you example because, you know, that's really easy, isn't it? By what standard? That's the question over and over again. By what standard do you say that? Oh, by the standard of logic and science. Why trust logic and science in a chance world? This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonsen Institute. Duplication, sharing and distribution is encouraged. For more information about the life and Ministry of Dr. Greg L. Bonson, visit our website bonsoninstitute.com where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.