Okay, we're going to open up in 2 Corinthians chapter 10. We're going to look at a couple verses there, verses 3 to 5. 2 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 3 says, Although we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God, to the pulling down of strongholds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Let's pray. Holy God and our Heavenly Father, what a joy we have to come and learn from Your Word. Lord, I do pray that today's study would be beneficial and helpful to help us teach, help us learn how to defend the faith and how we can do this in a way that is honoring and glorifying to you. I pray that you will help me to speak clearly and simply, Lord, in a way that brings this topic down and makes it real and helpful to all of us. And I pray that Christ would be glorified in the midst of this. In his name we pray, amen. All right, well, it's good to be here. Today we're going to do a topical study on biblical apologetics. And I just want to start out just by putting it into context, what is apologetics and how it comes into the picture of what we're doing. The most important thing to understand about apologetics is that it always comes in context of the gospel. The Gospel enters into our experience narrowly as the good news of reconciliation with the Holy God through union with his only begotten Son in his incarnation, life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. Then the broader Gospel includes much information about Christian doctrine, the Christian life, and so forth, so as ultimately to encompass the whole counsel of God. As we know, Anyone who's tried to share the gospel, we all know that the facts of the gospel are often rejected. We know from 2 Corinthians 4 and verses 3 and 4 that the gospel comes to those whose minds are blinded. This doesn't mean that they don't have minds, nor does it mean that their minds don't work quite well in coming up with objections to the gospel. Apologetics, therefore, goes hand in hand with the gospel in order to defend it against all objections. In Paul's word, apologetics casts down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. Apologetics calls us to give a reason for the hope that we have in the gospel. 1 Peter 3.15, the biblical idea of giving a reason may not be what we naturally think, And we must be very careful that our apologetics or approach to apologetics is consistent with our theology. As we hold the highest view of God as absolute sovereign and of Scripture as inerrant and infallible, we have to be careful not to embark on an apologetic that undermines those beliefs. That is, to affirm with one breath or out of one sigh of our mouth that the God in which we believe is absolute, the ground of all being and knowledge. And then, on the other hand, to offer arguments that undermine that belief is kind of to be an example of what James referred to as a spring, sometimes clear and sometimes salty water. And this is no good, my brothers. So apologetics in our biblical understanding of it involves worldviews in collision. Like when Todd and I were just talking to that Muslim couple, that was two worldviews in collision. Like they have their view, and we have our view. And in presenting the gospel, they come back with objections. They say, no, I don't believe that. I read the Koran and the New Testament, and I find the New Testament confusing, right? That little girl said. So what is a worldview? A worldview is a system of beliefs that flows from a set of fundamental commitments or presuppositions, and which provides an all-encompassing framework for understanding ourselves and our place in the world around us. A person's worldview is how he looks at the world, not with his physical eyes, but with his mind. A person's worldview represents his most fundamental beliefs, and assumptions about the world that includes ideas of who and what we are, how we got here, wherever here is, why we're here, where we're going, and what things may happen to us when we get there. It encompasses all aspects of our thinking about what is real, what is true, what is good, and what is right. Few people think through these issues in any great depth. Nevertheless, most people have some opinion on almost every question or every topic, whether they've studied it or not. They draw inferences from their worldview and then seek to be consistent. So absolutely everyone has inconsistencies among the many beliefs that they hold because we fail to examine ourselves and to compare our beliefs with each other. A worldview is grounded on presuppositions. What is a presupposition? A presupposition is a belief which is presupposed. That is, accepted without proof as fundamental. Presuppositions include such things as the ultimate nature of reality, how we come to know things, what is true, what is right and what is wrong, and so forth. I'm sorry, I can't speak Spanish. I'm sorry, I can't speak Spanish. I'll explain it to you later, okay? Can you understand what I'm saying? No, only Spanish. Only Spanish? Yes. Okay. I read it here. You read it? Yes. Good. Okay, so a worldview is based upon its presuppositions, like a building is based on its foundations. As a building may soar high above its foundations and it can never escape them, a person's beliefs about ultimate reality control what things they think can and cannot be real and known. If a person thinks, for instance, that ultimate reality is material, that is, the only things that are real are things which are like things and and how could he believe the truth of the gospel that there's a God who is spirit because his presupposition is that there is no such thing as spiritual things so that the idea true idea of God is is excluded right from the beginning for him he says he can't believe in non-material things so he can't believe in God and of course he can't prove that reality is only material but he accepts that as a as a presupposition in his worldview. One philosopher likened our belief system to a web of connected beliefs, because naturally our beliefs are related to one another. The laws of logic are like the strands of the web which connect one belief to another, and these force us, or encourage us anyway, to be consistent among our beliefs. I don't wanna, I'm sure you're gonna get to it, I don't wanna ask questions and then you can get to it later. But I think to flush a little bit of that out a little bit, a couple things that you said, if it's okay. The one was the connection between our apologetic and our theology, and how they both have to be, coincide, or they have to be in line with each other, inconsistent. So the, I think it would help if, people understood what you meant by that. In other words, if I'm not mistaken, we would not, in apologetics, which is the defense of the truth, we don't have to defend the truth outside of our theology, which is basically what you're saying, right? That we would have to be consistent with what we believe. And then we don't need to have to go to some other argument like that. Can somebody be able to mute their phone, please? Sorry. Because I think that's an important point. Yeah, I will talk about that more later. OK, sure. Yeah, I mean, the idea is really important because I'm going to compare presuppositional with evidential apologetics at least a little bit and show, or at least try to show, how what we view as the nature of God and the nature of scripture constrains us to a presuppositional apologetic because of the nature of God and the nature of the authority of scripture. I mean, in principle, if you find yourself in a war or in a battle, some of you don't take your sword and throw it on the ground, right? You don't say like, okay, now I'm gonna wage war with you on your terms and say, I don't need the sword of God. And then start arguing from like fundamental principles of the world Like that's not scriptural, right? And that's not, you can't defend God or the Bible or the gospel that way. Because it's contrary to the nature of God and the nature of scripture. So ultimately, I hope, I do cover this later and hopefully more as we go. So hopefully, if not, we can talk about it more at the end. Okay, so I was saying that one philosopher likened our belief system to a web of connected beliefs. Naturally, our beliefs are related to one another, and the laws of logic connect our beliefs, like we can deduce one belief from another, or show that two beliefs are consistent or inconsistent with each other. And so, like, as in a complex web, if you can imagine a web, right, with a center, and some of the threads of the web are more important than others. Like you can take one that's far out here and take it off and it doesn't change anything. But if you take out one of the ones that are more central, it affects all the rest of it. And so our belief system is like that. We have beliefs that are connected to each other. And yet some of our beliefs are more fundamental and more foundational and others are more superficial and more less important, less central as it were. So the idea that And we have this worldview of ours, which has some presuppositions, which are extremely critical to the whole system. When we're confronted about one of those, it's very difficult for us to try to change it because it affects so much of our worldview. Like if someone tried to convince you, whatever, that Christopher Columbus was or something that doesn't really matter, okay, and it doesn't really matter, but then when someone tries to convince you that God is, you know, one person and not three persons, then that changes every single thing in the way you think about things. So those, you will certainly resist those changes that affect your belief system at a more fundamental level. I just want to give a classic example of a collision of these two worldviews took place in what's called the Copernican Revolution. In ancient times, Aristotle taught that the Earth was the center of the universe and that everything revolved around the Earth. And that belief was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church and became a fundamental doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Now, around the year 1500, a man named Copernicus published a paper which set forth the basic understanding of a heliocentric model, that is, one which says that the sun is the center and that things revolve around the sun. That was around 1500, but that idea didn't catch on at the time, because the church was so determined, corrupt, They were so adamant about their belief that the Earth is the center and everything revolves around the Earth, that they just couldn't, that idea couldn't really break through. But around 100 years later, a man named Galileo constructed the first telescope, which was powerful enough to observe the moons orbiting around the planet Jupiter. So what he did was he looked through the telescope and he showed that this, here's something, these little moons orbiting around Jupiter, they're not orbiting around the Earth. So that disproved the idea that everything orbits around the Earth. And this new information that not everything revolves around the Earth came into immediate conflict with the established worldview that the Earth is the center of everything. So Galileo's discoveries contradicted the authority, the authoritative position of the Roman Catholic Church, which though was not ultimately derived from Scripture, nevertheless appeared to them to be so fundamental that they really resisted that change. Around 1600, around the time of the Reformation, the Inquisition put that question to a group of theologians and they concluded that, quote, a proposition that the earth moves and is not at the center of the universe is foolish and absurd in philosophy and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture. And Galileo was commanded to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine. Galileo complained to his friend Kepler, another astronomer, he said, my dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an ass, and do not want to either look at the planets, the moon, or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times." Galileo was persecuted by the church for his discovery and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. When he died in 1642, he was refused burial in the church grounds. It wasn't until the year 1757 that the geocentric view was officially rejected, and the church formally recognized, yeah, the earth does revolve around the sun, more than 150 years later. So this fundamental change of belief is a perfect example of the conflict that arises when two worldviews come into conflict. There's a collision which forces a reevaluation of one or more beliefs. And it's painful, and it may even cause upheaval, pushback, and even violence, because the change of a fundamental proposition threatens the worldview as a whole. I mean, we think of the pushback that Paul and the other apostles experienced in the propagation of the gospel, both Jews and Gentiles, because the gospel overturns the natural worldviews of men. Paul said, from the Jews, five times I received 40 stripes minus one. Excuse me, 2 Corinthians 11, and in 2 Timothy 4, he says, Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm. May the Lord repay him according to his works. You must also beware of him, for he has greatly resisted our words. So this Copernican revolution is also a good metaphor for the change from a man-centered viewpoint to a God-centered viewpoint. From our infancy, we all naturally reckon ourselves as the center of the universe. We fancy that we get to decide what is true. We decide what's right and wrong, whatever we believe, whatever we choose, and whatever we think is good. That's what we think is good. God said, when I install light bulbs, all I do is hold it up to the thing, and the whole world revolves around me. Kathleen and I, we don't struggle with thinking that we're the center of the universe in our home ever, because our dogs are already up. There you go. Lucky enough. Nice. Yeah, love, love, love. We keep us humble. So this is a good model or a good metaphor for presuppositional apologetics, because, like Galileo, we point out the problems with the geocentric, or the man-centered view, and explain how the heliocentric, or the God-centered, the triune God-centered view, resolves all the problems that we have, every single one. But even though the natural man may hear the argument, and even get a glimpse of how this solves his problems, yet still the natural man resists this change with all his might, because it's too fundamental. It overturns everything in his thinking. You can't just say, oh, I'll become a Christian and accept Christ and continue on. Everything has to change in the gospel. But this pain of the renovation makes it impossible for the natural man to voluntarily desire to do this. So what is the biblical worldview? Here's where we see why we need to have a presuppositional apologetic. The foundational belief of the biblical worldview is dated in the name itself, that is the Bible, a.k.a. the Scriptures, the writings, which are themselves the very Word of God. All Scripture is God-breathed, as it says in 2 Timothy 3.16. This is the words of the scripture, the condensation, if you want to, in human language, of the very breath of God. It's those very scriptures which confront us from the outset. In Genesis 1-1, with the words, in the beginning, God. Here we're presented with the eternal God as existing in the beginning. Scripture doesn't give us an argument for the existence of God. Nothing of the kind. Scripture simply states God's existence as a matter of fact. In the beginning, God. We have here two mutually supporting, mutually involving presuppositions. The infinite eternal God and the Holy Scriptures. Logically, God is more fundamental than the Scriptures, but without the Scriptures we could not know God. The Scriptures are God breathed, the breath of God, And they reveal God as triune, one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And these truths are the ultimate reality and are interwoven into every aspect of our experience. And yet, our blindness is such that we could never discover the glory of God or this nature of God apart from a written revelation. The Holy Spirit is the author of scripture, And the Son is the Logos, the Word of God, the Revelation of God, who came forth from the Father. God attests to the Scriptures, and the Scriptures attest to God. We talk about the self-attesting Scriptures and the self-attesting God, because nothing else is adequate to testify of the nature of God. and God Himself and the Scriptures, which are holy and divine themselves. These two presuppositions in the Christian worldview are distinct and yet involve each other. The authority of Scripture is God's authority. It's His Word which He speaks. And He says, I have spoken it, and that is the end of the matter, right? When God says, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it, I will also do it." Isaiah 4611. And he also says, "...so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth. It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." Isaiah 5511. Ultimately, this is the same Word which was in the beginning with God, John 1, 2, and which is eternally God. This is the One who is in the bosom of the Father and who was sent and came to reveal the Father. We have this duality, which is yet a unity. The New Testament can be confusing, right? Because we have things which are too high for us and too lofty, If we deny them, then we deny everything. So there's the fundamental of the presuppositional apologetic. We have this duality. Jesus said, like, let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. And yet there's one God, right? But we believe in God the Father, and we believe in God the Son, because he and the Father are one. That's what he said. I and the Father are one. And so yeah, this is hard, but yet if we deny it, then we deny all rationality, all everything. So we presuppose this triune God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures. So then now we talk about the non-Christian worldview. And it may seem as if there should be as many non-Christian worldviews as there are non-Christian Right? There are such radically different alternatives as atheism and Islam, which on first, second, and third glances seem like poor opposites. Nevertheless, they are all alike, in that they all deny the triune God of Scripture. They deny the revelation of God in Christ. And while Islam may speak much of God, it's not the triune God of the Bible of which they speak, but a unipersonal God Hopefully we'll get to examine the Islamic idea of God in a later study to see that it's not even a coherent idea. The idea of an eternal, unipersonal God is really actually impossible. So we'll hopefully get a chance to look at that a little later. But the main point of this is to argue that every non-biblical worldview is united in the sense that they all deny some central aspect of the biblical worldview. And given that there's a unity, the biblical worldview is a system which is very compact and very tight and consistent. So when you deny any aspect of the Christian worldview, you're really denying the whole thing. You can't pick and choose, like say, I like the Muslims too, like say, I'm okay with the virgin birth, The death of Christ and the resurrection, like, nope. But you can't just say, you can't just pick and choose like that, because they're all part of a single unified whole. All of it hangs together. Or hangs separately, as I say. So there are many examples of non-Christian worldviews, of course, and in a sense, everyone's worldview is unique to some extent. but they are all alike in that they deny the ultimate truths of the gospel. They're all basically the same wolf, but dressed up different kinds of sheep. As it were, the scientific worldview depends on the validity of observation and induction. It's obviously important for the establishment of scientific principles that experiments be repeatable. I dropped this pen like five times, four or five times it drops, and one time it flies off into space, then what kind of principle, we don't have any consistency. And so if we're going to try to define a law, a scientific law that says that gravitational force here, then it has to be repeatable. But if you think about it, what's the ground of this idea of repeatability? Science scientific method depends on things being repeatable. When you do the same experiment, two, three, four times, you get the same results each time. But with that belief, that belief is not part of the naturalistic worldview. They think, like, the universe, big banged up out of nothing, right? One time there was nothing, next thing you know, there's this universe, and it's an uncaused universe. It just sort of happens. Why shouldn't other things just happen? Why shouldn't this pencil just disappear, or a new pencil appear? Things can happen, right, in that atheistic universe that are not rational. So for them to believe that, yeah, every time I drop this, it'll do the exact same thing, it's a gratuitous assumption for them, because this assumption actually grounded in the providence of God, and in the nature of God's goodness, and His sovereign control over all things. When you reject that, you reject the sovereign God who is good and kind and who works all things according to the counsel of the will. You have no more right to accept this principle of repeatability. So the science, you can understand, we can understand anyway, the scientific world, you depend upon the Christian world, do you? And yet science rejects Christ and God from the beginning. They say, oh, we only believe what we can show and prove. Presuppositional point of they're already they're already believing in God or depending upon him for the activity of the scientific endeavor So that's science and the other there's other non-christian worldviews which are defined by their own writings like we have the Buddhists and the Hindus and the Quran and the Book of Mormon and the New World translation of the Joe's witnesses and all that other stuff they have her own book, great price on all those books. And all of these have some pretended authority, like they pretend to come from God and then so they have their own authority and the Muslims will stake their existence on the Quran as being the word of God and so forth. And yet when you examine each one of those and you dig down into the nature of that, you can see that, you can understand that there's deep flaws that they reject the essential of the gospel, which is the ground of all reason and reality. So they have a pretended authority. So the goal of the apologists is to undermine their authority and show how they're actually depending upon the Christian worldview, even though they deny that. So hopefully that will become clear as I go ahead. The question of authority of non-Christian worldviews is always important to consider. And we should always be asking the question of people, like, how do you know? Or what makes you think so? Because they'll offer some idea, and they'll say it with authority, right? Like, God doesn't exist, right? And you say, how do you know? What makes you think that? Or I think that Jesus was just a man, a prophet, and not God. How do you know that? Why do you think that? And what's your authority for believing that? So we, as apologists in the gospel, we're always digging down and discovering why people think what they do and what the ground of it is. The scripture says that, or implies that each non-Christian worldview has a false authority which is based on deception. First Chronicles 16, 26 says that all the gods of the people are idols that the Lord made to heaven. The gods of all the other books are idols. All the gods of the people are idols, and that includes the gods of the Hindus, the Muslims, the Mormons, and the JWs. A thorough investigation of all those worldviews will bear out the fact that their ideas of God are really just man-made, worthless idols. And also, not the books of Hindu and Buddhism, but the Koran and other books dependent upon the Bible, especially the Jehovah's Witness, they just have a different translation of the Bible. So you can see the Koran is some kind of a book which refers to the Bible and gives some credibility to it, but then really denies the key doctrines of the gospel. So all those, each of course is worthy of a study on its own. Now I want to talk about the key ideas of autonomy and neutrality. Autonomy is the idea of being a law to oneself. And in Romans 2.14 it says, when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves. which is the idea of being a law to oneself is to be like self-determining. There's obviously some truth to the idea that men really choose what to do as they wish, and yet that's not really the same as autonomy. The idea of autonomy began in the Garden of Eden at the fall when Adam and Eve first believed the lie that Satan told them. And he said, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Genesis 3, 5. The underlying thought here is that Adam and Eve believed that they would be like God and therefore independent of God in the knowledge of good and evil. If they were like God in this, then they would not be dependent on God to tell them what's right and wrong. Well, as we know, that's a false understanding of reality. There is no knowledge independent of God They reached out their hands to grab what they thought was self-governance, and yet it turned out to be bondage. The idea of getting out from under God's sovereign control and His interpretation of events is what we fallen creatures naturally want for ourselves. Adam and Eve wanted to become autonomous, self-governing creatures, but instead they became bound over to condemnation and subjugated to the rule of Satan. This struggle, this persistent struggle against God is expressed in the words of Psalm 2-3 where it says, let us break their bonds in pieces and cast away their cords from us. Everyone wants to naturally break free from the bonds and cords of God, from the obligations which we have in our relationship with him. And the way that men do this is, as Romans 1-18 says, by holding the truth in unrighteousness. Man naturally holds the truth of God down, suppresses it, as one would try to keep a beach ball under the water. You press it down and you have to hold it there, and it's trying to pop out, but that's what men do with the knowledge of God. They take that knowledge which is in creation and in themselves, and they suppress it so that they don't have to think about it. They don't want to think about God, They take the knowledge of God's existence, his eternal power in Godhead, and put it out of their minds as best as they can, because those thoughts of God as being holy and demanding are inconsistent with their idea that they are autonomous and a law to themselves. So coming back again to Romans 2, the Gentile does think, he believes he is autonomous, Gentile the sinner, a law to himself, and so he does everything possible to suppress the knowledge of God in order that he can live in a way that seems good to him. However, verse 15 reveals the fly in the natural man's ointment, his conscience. In Romans 2.15 it says, which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another. There is no escape from the constant interference of the conscience, which acts independently of the person. You can't control your conscience, or you can't tell it what you think is right or wrong. Conscience acts. It doesn't wait for you to do something. It acts independently of you. And there's no escape from it. The conscience is always judging us and criticizing us. criticizing what we do and what we think and we end up in this warfare in ourselves where our thoughts are excusing and accusing us and our conscience is telling us that we're guilty sinners. In response to this, men become masters of self-justification, distraction, delusion, and in the use of chemical weapons like drugs and alcohol for the war that they have raging on the inside, Thus in Romans chapters 1 and 2, the natural concept of autonomy is explained as something which is developed in the awareness of God or in the presence of God. Like you can't escape the knowledge of God. It's all around you, it's in you, it's within you. And yet the natural man must escape it. He can't tolerate the holiness of God, right? Even the angels in God's presence must cover, shield their eyes and their feet because God's holiness is so overwhelming, and the natural man, guilty, has absolutely to put that knowledge out of his mind at all costs, because it condemns him, and it brings him into bondage and terror. So, the conscience, of course, even though it does condemn us, it is defiled, and it can be seared as with a hot iron, as we say. The men, through their lives, naturally try to put the conscience down. They tear the conscience up. They just try to destroy it with drugs and alcohol and everything else. And eventually, some men do actually succeed in searing their conscience. And so they don't feel it anymore. The light on the dashboard doesn't go out anymore. The check engine light is out. So they think they've arrived at freedom, but now they're in the worst possible kind of bondage. Okay, so second, neutrality. Men are guilty, and this is where I think the rubber really meets the road. Men are guilty in Adam, and naturally alienated from God, and enmity against him. In terms of the covenant, Adam broke the covenant, and we with him are all fallen under the curse of the covenant. All men are born under condemnation, John 3, 18, and are by nature children of wrath. So this is obviously not a neutral condition before God. However, while many men would admit that they're sinners before God and certainly not neutral in a moral or legal sense, it's really quite another matter to get someone to admit that he is biased in his judgment. Most people naturally think of themselves as objective and able to render a neutral judgment on questions, but if they're like the people who believe that the earth is the center of the universe, Not that their observations are necessarily invalid, it's just that they're from a biased viewpoint, which they confuse with the objective viewpoint, because of the sense that they're autonomous creatures, and they think they have a right to make judgments of any kind about what's right and wrong, what's real and what's not real. It's the very profession of having an objective viewpoint, which is the error, as it says in Romans, that those who profess themselves to be wise are those who become fools. When you say, like, I know, and you don't know, really, as you ought to know, and you think, I have this opinion, and I'm sure it's right, then, as the Scripture says, there's a way that seems right to a man, but in the end, it leads to death. Because we are all finite creatures and sinful, so we're alienated and opposed to God, Theologically, all truth is one, and all truth is in God, and the unbeliever is steadfastly opposed to God. So therefore, they don't have an unbiased attitude towards truth, because all truth is ultimately of or pertaining to the triune God. And if you're opposed to enmity against this God, then you don't have a neutral attitude towards the truth. But they interpret truth in a different way. For them, truth is not the same as it is for us. For us, truth is in Christ. It's not just a matter of facts written on a page, but it's a person. It's a whole, it's a mystery in a way, because we can't, what does it mean to say, I am the truth? But in him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And to say, yes, I like knowledge, but I don't like Christ is saying, something that makes no sense, right? You can't say, I'm interested in truth and knowledge, but I don't like Christ. It makes no sense. So Jesus said, I am the truth in John 14.6. And he called the Holy Spirit the spirit of truth in John 14.17 and 15.26 and so forth. And he also said, thy word is truth, John 17.17. So the unbeliever's attitude toward truth in general is biased. So he can't claim neutrality, even though he may think he's neutral. Also, the scripture says that each unregenerate person's understanding is darkened, and each one naturally walks according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air. So this is not neutrality, but bondage. And each person evaluates the truth claims that come in the context of his own worldview. Certainly no one can claim that his worldview is comprehensive. We're all finite. And neither perfectly correct in every detail, because we all have confusions and limitations and false beliefs of all kinds. So everyone sees himself as unbiased, almost everyone. as a neutral observer and able to render impartial judgments of truth, fact, the real situation is quite different. At best, the fallen man's viewpoint is subjective, and at worst, completely misled about every single thing. So here comes to the interpretation of evidence. Evidence requires interpretation, right? And interpretation requires a framework of of ideas in which to interpret it. And since everyone has a worldview, everyone is able to offer some idea about the interpretation of all kinds of evidence. But it's just this that the natural man believes himself quite capable of doing because it's consistent with his belief in his autonomous judgment and neutrality. He thinks he can make a correct and adequate judgment about the nature of God and reality about man. For instance, when I'm talking about evolution, when confronted with the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, that is, evolutionists believe that there's a change from one species to another and that there must be intermediate species that are between ape and human. There must be a series of, but the fossil record has no such thing. species one and species two. So you would think like by pointing out the fact that the fossil record has no transitional forms that they would say, huh, I guess evolution is not true. But no, what did they do? Stephen Gould bonded to this criticism with the theory of punctuated equilibrium. That is, yeah, there's no transitional forms in the fossil record because evolution doesn't work that way. Evolution works by things go along smoothly and then boom, punctuated, a change, a radical change, and a new species comes into being. This is like the fossil record says, there's no transition. Okay, well, we don't need them. We'll just make a new theory, right? And they say, we're not changing our mind about the theory. We're just modifying this. We're not going to say, okay, God created things. We're going to say, well, it's a different kind of evolution now. So that's the way presuppositions work and a commitment to them. You can point out that someone Look how serious a flaw that is, no transitional forms, and yet they can work around it. So it's in the presentation of evidence that classical evidentialist apologetics makes its defense of the faith. An evidentialist apologist would come upon a person who says, I don't believe that God exists. They immediately begin trying to prove that God does exist. And this puts the person in the very role in which they're most comfortable, autonomous and neutral arbiter of the truth. You set the person up as judge, now you get to judge whether God exists or not. But the question is, it's not a matter of a lack of evidence, it's a matter of incorrect interpretation of the evidence. When someone says, I don't believe in God, you don't say, well, you're giving me more information about God. how God exists, and this, and how God exists. Because they'll just misinterpret that information as well. That's what they do best, right? That's what the natural man is good at. So let's say someone came to you, this is only to the men, but let's say, have you stopped beating your wife? Everyone's heard this question, but what do you say? Is it okay to say yes or no to that question? If you say, have you stopped beating your wife, You say yes, then you say, you're admitting that you did beat your wife, right? And if you say no, then please talk to either Pastor Mark or me after the study. But in general, this is called a loaded question. It's a question that comes with a hidden presupposition. The correct way to respond is to offer evidence. Have you stopped beating your wife? No, look. There's no bruises, you know, because that makes you seem even guilty, right? You say, offering evidence. Everyone can say, oh, yeah, sure, the bruises appeal. But just by offering evidence that you didn't beat your wife, it makes you think, like, you probably did beat her, right? But the correct way to deal with this is just to deny the presupposition and the question. Say, I've never beaten my wife. I never would. And that's what unbelievers do when they come and they say, like, God doesn't exist. They're not offering a valid objection because they do believe that God exists. That's the thing about it. That's the amazing thing about it. So when they deny some biblical truth, the approach isn't to present evidence to them in favor of it, because that just gives them the opportunity to reject it more. But what our approach is, is to deal with their presuppositions. They say, I don't believe that God exists. And you say, why? Well, because that's not the other thing. And then you go downwards. You don't start at the top and deal with the objection directly. You deal with the underlying presupposition of it. So here, this section here is about Mark's earlier question. The absoluteness of God. How much time do we have? Not much. Okay. Okay, I'm almost done. So anyway, the absoluteness of God, underlying the presuppositional apologetic is the idea that God is absolute, which is only fully and correctly expressed and understood in Reformed theology. That God is the truth and that there's no aspect of human experience which is not wholly dependent on God. And Scripture says, He upholds all things by the word of His power, that in Him we live and move and have our being. And He works all things according to the word of His power. What? He upholds all things according to the word of His power. And He works all things according to the counsel of His own will. And Christ lights every man. When we think about all these things, we get a sense of the pervasiveness of God. David wrote that Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid Thine hand upon me." God's knowledge, God's presence, pervades every aspect of our experience. So in order, if you're going to try to prove God or give evidence for God, you're already presupposing that God when you do that. So the absoluteness of God constrains our approach to apologetics. It's not possible to prove the existence of the absolute God. the triune God. Because imagine if you say, like, you start from this world, which is fallen, and you use this world, and you prove the existence of God, now you've proven the existence of a God who created this world, you know, where children, where terrible things happen, right? And then you've proven a God, basically, that is a monster, right? Scripture teaches God created the world, which was very good in every way, and it's fallen down. But when you try to prove God from this world, you're proving not the God of the Bible, but a different God altogether, one who would create a world which has fallen directly. And that is absolutely unacceptable, right? Look at the cosmological argument. You're proving not the God of the Bible at all. So, we can't have a neutral approach. approach someone and expect that they are a neutral arbiter of the truth and present them with evidence and that they can make a natural clear-headed acceptance of the belief. Yes, of course this gospel is true, right? No, they always come to the other conclusion. The presuppositional approach takes the full revelation of God into account and affirms, one, the unbeliever has the knowledge of God but has suppressed it, and two, the unbeliever has a conscience which is like the trumpet of God, which speaks to the inner man of right and wrong and of future judgment. But men drown out the sound and cover their ears, as did Stephen's ears in Acts 7. Stephen said, You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in hearts and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost. And then they cried with a loud voice and stopped their ears, right, they don't want to hear it. And they ran upon him and said, So here's our traditional method in action. 2 Timothy 2.24. In meekness, instructing those who had opposed themselves, God, for adventure, will give them repentance in the knowledge of the truth. This is worldview warfare. The problem with the unbeliever... Could you please mute? Can you guys give me your phone, please? The problem, I believe, is that he does not have enough evidence. The evidence is flawed. Who is that? OK. Jesus said to the following, when he was talking about the In the parable of Lazarus, he said, if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded that one rose from the dead. So when their presuppositions were that they rejected Moses and the prophets, they wouldn't be persuaded even if one rose from the dead. How can that be so difficult for us? For the unbeliever who objects to some essential fact of the gospel, the approach is not to offer more evidence for him to misinterpret, but to engage in the following two-step process presented in Proverbs 26, 4, and 5, which we will apply in reverse order. One, answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Two, answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Hello? Can you please turn your phone on mute? Hello? So by the word, according to his following, we can understand that we should answer the fool according to his worldview. That is, to answer a fool according to his father, we adopt the unbeliever's worldview for the sake of argument and show him how the presuppositions of his worldview are inconsistent with the conclusion that he wants to draw. We ask the question, how do you know? And what makes you think so? Until we have an understanding of why he believes what he believes and by what authority he asserts it as true. For instance, if the fool says in his heart, there is no God, And we assume for the sake of argument that there is no God, as we understand God, and examine this person's claim in the light of their worldview. To assert that there is no God as a presupposition necessarily leads to a belief in relativism, nihilism, a belief in ultimate nothingness, meaningless, and vanity. So the counter-assertion of the apologist is twofold. One, to assert that within the unbeliever's worldview, There is no ultimate meaning at all. And so saying there is no God is equivalent to saying blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or there is a God who sovereignly creates all things. Because if there is no God, then nothing makes any sense anyway. It's all just sound and fury and nothing. So from that point of view, you say there is no God, then your words are just gibberish. Sorry. And two, that it must be made clear that the unbeliever is not living in accordance with his denial of God. Though he has no explanation for the regularity of nature, the principles of rationality, right and wrong, ethics, ideas like truth and love and beauty, in his world you cannot at all give any account for those things. And yet he's certainly happy, he accepts those things, and he lives in accordance with them. He sits on the chair, and he thinks the chair will uphold him, instead he's gonna fall through the chair. In an atheistic worldview, nothing makes sense. So for him to say, yeah, I believe in love and truth, but I deny God is to say nonsense, nonsense. So what we do- To say that we believe in love and truth is to assert that there is a God. It is, absolutely. Yet you can't say that there's no God in it. And yet I want to also believe in those other things, which you have to believe, you can't say, You can't say, I don't believe in truth, because you just made a statement of truth, right? If there is no truth, then what you just said isn't true. It's funny how God has arranged the universe in such a way that by denying any aspect of the gospel, you ultimately deny all rationality, all human experience. It's amazing. That's why presupposition is so powerful. So what we're doing is showing the unbeliever that by denying whatever aspect of the gospel he denies, to speak metaphorically, he's like pulling the rug out from under his own feet. He's standing on a rug and he says something and he pulls the rug out from under his own feet and boom, down he goes on the ground. Not just made it. So what we're doing, we're fulfilling the words of 2 Timothy 2.25. pointing out to the unbeliever how they are opposing themselves by showing them that their presuppositions are false and need to be rejected. We do this in all meekness, knowing that it's only by grace that we were granted repentance of the life. So we answer the person according to his own flawed worldview, according to his own folly, so that he'd be not wise in his own conceit. Step two, answer not a fool according to his folly. I'm surprised someone doesn't come and say, here's a contradiction in the Bible. Answer him according to his folly. Answer him not according to his folly. That's our apologetic. Now we're going to answer him not according to his folly. We understand in this case that we're to answer him in accordance with the biblical worldview. To not answer a fool is to answer him with the framework of the biblical worldview. Here we embark on a demonstration of how the presuppositions of the biblical worldview do lead to a viable understanding and how that understanding integrates with the overall worldview and the explanatory power of the glory of God in the gospel. To continue on with the fool who says in his heart there is no God, when we've just shown the impossibility of his worldview, we're now able to assert the claim that the biblical worldview of the triune God, as revealed in the scriptures, is the only worldview which makes sense of the full range of human experience. The biblical worldview is so vast, of course, and the full presentation of it and explication of it can never be made in any short amount of time. And that there's nothing like the biblical worldview, which is the revelation of the glory of God in Christ, crucified, died, buried, and resurrected, gives meaning to all of human history. The revelation of God in Christ is like a diamond in the midst of the ages. We're told by the prophets and prefigured by types and shadows. And apart from this central reality, our lives as well as everything else would be, in the words of Shakespeare, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. So ultimately the presuppositional method hinges on the realization that every non-biblical worldview must borrow from the biblical worldview to facilitate the human, rational human experience. And yet those borrowed beliefs are always at odds with the fundamental principles of unbelieving systems. The unbelievers that cobble together a worldview which has some things which are unbiblical and some things which are necessarily from the biblical worldview, and they try to live this way. And so our goal as a presuppositional apologist is to go talk to them and understand their foundations of their worldview and show them that that's inconsistent with what they believe, inconsistent with the things that they borrowed from the biblical worldview, and to have a fully valid or viable understanding of life and our place in the world, we have to... The scripture is the only possible way, and that's our apologetic. We show that they have... First, we wipe away their ideas, take them with our presupposition, and use it to crash their world. Like Paul said, the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty. They are mighty. Through God, to the pulling down of strongholds. You guys have probably played Jenga, right? When you pile up these blocks, It's easy to take a block off the top without doing anything, but take one from the bottom and the whole thing will fall. And that's what we're doing. We're pulling down their stronghold by pulling out their unbiblical presupposition and showing how it's a vain imagination. We cast down their imagination and every high thing that exalts itself is the knowledge of God. And we use the Word of God. So this is our sword. This is the sword of the Spirit. We don't take the sword of the Spirit. Put it down, right? When we're going to engage with someone, we use the power of God, the scriptures are the power of God. And then examine their worldview and show how they need a Copernican revolution. They're like those who think that everything revolves around them, but they see planets that come and have these weird retrograde motions. That makes no sense. When we look at it from the sun, everything's sensible and normal. So that's our apologetic is to show that from a worldview with the sun, God is the center of our worldview, then everything makes sense. And if you deny that, nothing makes sense. This is our method, and it is powerful. In Titus 1, it talks about stopping the mouths of those who subvert houses and whatnot. Presuppositional apologies. You can shut people's mouths if you don't like another word. I am nothing. I was talking to a Muslim one time, and I was explaining something to him about light and how he rejects God because he thinks God is incomprehensible. But then he believes in light, which is also incomprehensible. And he went like this. He hung his head. And I was like, wow. I mean, that's not me, right? That's just God's word. It brings the conviction. He's still a Muslim, I'm sure, but it stopped his mouth. And so that's the beauty. But our goal is not normally to stop people's mouths, but to persuade them of the gospel. but not by offering more evidence, but by tearing down their stronghold that they've built up, which is against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ in them. So anyway, this is an introduction to presuppositional apologetics. It's a deep subject, and it goes broad, and it's super beneficial, because the more you study it, the more you understand how much we depend on God, everything, every thought, aspect of our lives, not just our lives, but every subject you can think of, God, try you, God is there. So you can have a conversation with someone about any topic and use it with the precept of self-apologetics to turn the conversation to the gospel. And Christ is the center of all things, the Lordship of Christ. That's where every aspect of our lives, every belief, every thought, every action. So, amen. I think I went a little over, right? So I don't know if we have any time for questions or comments or anything, if anyone has any. Yes, ma'am. I just wanted to say something. When you were talking about the fossils, there's no transition in the fossils. Couldn't you use, if you're talking to someone that's from the First Appalachian, couldn't you use Genesis 1? Because in Genesis 1, I believe it's nine times, what it says after their own time. And then today, when you read in Genesis 6, he says the same thing. I forget what verse it was, but he said all of them that went in after their own time. Oh yeah, the two by two, yeah. Yeah, absolutely you can use that. Because there's no, when we see an evolution in the species, there'll be variation within a species, but no change from one species to another. And that's what the fossil record also doesn't show, like intermediate species, or intermediate between two species, just like one species, and then the next one. And that's why they had to make up this crazy idea about punctuated equilibrium, just moving along, moving along, all of a sudden, jumps to a new species, like, okay, just make it up as you go along. even how they feel is all coming from the fact that God exists and their connection to God. So when they deny God and even the God of the Bible, you can't allow them to have that ground because they're proving God by their very existence and how they relate to the world. So to answer a full according to his folly, I like how you said it, then you allow them and let it play out like with the Muslim. Okay, let's say God does forgive you because of what that woman told us. And then you can argue according to her folly is what you're doing there. But then you turn it around and you don't argue according to her folly, because then you're gonna show how that she's not believing in the truth. the true God. It's not an argument in itself. I've seen people use presuppositional apologetics. I believe in evangelism in a wrong way. You know, to know everything, to know anything, you have to know everything in that argument, which is fine and a good argument. It's not, you have to realize that you have to use, it's a framework that you use through the scripture. It's not, because you can make pre-substantial apologetics an argument in itself, if that makes sense. Well, you can. One example, Carl Sagan, he tried to borrow from a liturgy and say that the universe is, was, and always shall ever be. trying to be smart, we would say that about God. And then you could challenge that by saying, the only way that you could know that to be true is you would have had to have been there from the beginning and observed that the universe always was. And you'll have to also be there to the very end to know that it always will be. And so that you can't say, Yeah, how do you know a good question? How do you know? That's a well. Were you there? But so they can say that about God, but yeah, the Bible presupposes God's existence. You know what? We're trying to bring it to a good and bad system anyway. What do you mean by that? In other words, get him to the wrong race. So if you do all of your arguments, you'll be able to get him to that conclusion. Always aim at the gospel, that's my approach anyway. And the two approaches I said, like answer a fool according to his folly, is like to tear down the system. But the other one, answer a fool not what it is following is basically like a presentation of the, it is back to the presentation of the gospel. So how I do it anyway, start with the gospel until someone says something that I don't believe that, or that's not right, or you're wrong about that. Boom, you enter apologetics mode, examine their presupposition, show how that their ideas are inconsistent or whatever, and then back to the presentation of the gospel, which is going not according, but according to the biblical worldview, to answer the question, which is really the gospel, right? Like Christ is the answer. What's the question? Right? Yeah, it is good. Everything that you think, everything that you do, everything that you say, everything that you feel is based on your presupposition. And you have to, even in debating, not just an unbeliever, maybe even somebody you may disagree with, you have to see, to understand that person's argument, you have to understand what their presupposition is. And so what's the question behind the question, you know? And that gives you such an advantage, right? Like people say, you know, if there's a man on an island and he never has a Bible and never has, you know, never seen anything about God when he dies, does he go to heaven or hell? And people are saying that presupposing that that man deserves God's favor, because they're saying that he should go to heaven. He's never seen the Bible, he's never knew anything about God, and he's just a poor, innocent man. So they're presupposing he's innocent, they're presupposing that God could save him, and all those presuppositions are embedded in that question, that it's really a question they're asking. They're trying to show that Christianity makes no sense because God is unkind or unjust to condemn an innocent person. They presuppose he's innocent, but how do you know he's innocent? He's not innocent. None of us are innocent. So yeah, tremendous power in presuppositional apologetics. And you can really crush arguments. So that's why the idea of meekness is so important. You can go in arrogant. crush someone's argument, but you're not going to win. Right. Unless you be like it. Right. You don't want to turn into a friend. You don't want to end up being a liar in front of an audience. You don't want to become a victim. You are determined on how to answer. Now, that's the thing. My experience of this business has had to be shattered for, I mean, by any means. Definitely. You have to be shattered because you can't come to Christ with your natural presupposition. But I think I'm autonomous. Christ says he's Lord. You can't have both, right? I can't be Lord. Anything else? Anybody online have anything? Not only, if he wasn't there, he couldn't have served, but he can't say that authoritatively. But then, you know, the evolutionists or whoever, they claim that they rely on logic and reason, and we go by blind faith. But then you ask them, what makes more sense, logically, reasonably, rationally? That matter came from mind. So they say the universe always was. That's a material view of the universe. Non-living matter was always here. In all of its architecture and design. But then you can see that there's living things too. What do you think really came first? Non-living matter? from that living mind, or a living mind from that non-living mind. It comes up with some foolish ideas, but then most people believe that has to do with it. And that's blind faith. That is blind faith. Yeah, that is blind faith. That it's often blind. But believing that you are capable to be, at least in the years of auto-religiousness. And then people tend to believe it. Actually, it is true, but where is the evidence? And they always change the years. It grows by billions of years every year. And they state it as a fact. They don't say maybe, they say it is like a fact. Get it? It grows by billions of years every year. You know, the age of the universe. They've been trying to calculate how long it took with all the complexities. The amount of trees in the Amazon grew, you know, just the same way. Over 100, what is it, 100,000 trees? More than 400,000 trees in the Amazon. So now, next year, you know, more than 450,000. So that's always going to be, you know, I can't speak for that. The power of the presuppositional method or approach is to show that the scientific method depends upon the existence of God. So they can, whatever they say, like science is this, science is that, say, yeah, but the scientific endeavor itself must take place within a theistic context. Because the principle of induction, right? Like you say, like, 20 black crows or black crow, black crow, black crow. You think, OK, all crows are black. And that's the principle which we depend upon for science, right? You do the same experiment in your job, and you get the same result. But that's a theistic assumption. Because on the naturalistic assumption, you can't say that things are going to continue as they were. Because why would you believe that? Or how could you? In scripture, we know that God is sovereign. not as good. And he controls all things. So we have a good rational, a rational reason to believe in induction and repeatability. But they don't have any such belief or any such reason to believe it. Anyway, let's pray. and it said, there is no God. And he was saying it. There is no God. There is no God. The little boy went up to him and said, the Bible says, the school says, and it's harder, that there is no God. What's that make you when you went so far as to paint it up on a sign and laughing out your mouth? That's not me. He was a little boy. Holy God, thank you so much for your grace. And thank you for allowing us, Lord, to know you. What joy it is to know you. This is eternal life that we can know you. And Lord, we were opposed, but you granted us such grace and such mercy in Christ that we have our worldview formed in Christ. And we have an understanding of things which is amazing to us and how different it is from the worldly understanding. Lord, we thank you and we praise you that we are absolutely dependent upon you. You uphold us and care for us and bless us as your people, your children. And Lord, we give you all the glory. You are so great and so kind and so merciful to us. And we do thank you and pray that tomorrow's service would go go well or that the installation would be smooth, you'd be lifted up and glorified. We pray in Christ's name for His sake. Amen.