Alright, we're ready to start part two. So, some of you may have noticed that if you're reading from the trilogy, that your instructor got the books out of order when he wrote the syllabus. So this week we are talking about He is There and He is Not Silent, which is organized as the third in the trilogy. And next week we'll cover Escape from Reason. That's something that will have to be fixed later but I don't think it will cause too much hardship for us to consider them in a different order. So this one just had four chapters but it covers some important ground. The first chapter he's talking about what he calls the metaphysical necessity. So he's dealing with what topics? The metaphysical necessity, the moral necessity, and what's the third one? The epistemological necessity. So the necessity of God's being there and not being silent is important in these three respects, what he calls metaphysics, which is being or existence, what I would call ontology, in the area of morals or ethics, and thirdly, in the area of epistemology or knowledge. And so he's developing what for him is a pretty typical rational kind of argument as he goes through these areas and seeks to consider what the possibilities are And keep coming back to the same conclusion, which is what? Well, there's a couple things. He does say over and over again, he's there. He's not silent, just like the title. The title of the book. Yep. Eli? Well, I was going to say that the only option that is consistent with what we see in reality is the Christian concept of God. What scripture reveals about God and about the created world, right? So, this gives us an idea of how Schaeffer is developing his apologetical methodology. He's driving us back towards what we can perceive, so to speak, and saying that the only thing that's consistent with that and the only thing that we can make sense of is that there is the God of the Bible who exists in what kind of form? He's personal. There we go. I knew you could get it. It came to me like Alive. Yes, just like that, huh? Yeah. Interestingly, you know, he'll give a dog his due, I suppose. In referring to Sartre, he says that he got this much right that the basic philosophical question is that something is there versus nothing. And also that he makes this observation that no finite point has meaning except in relation to an infinite reference point. And of course, those both fit if we approach it from a Christian worldview. Now, part of what became popular, especially in the late 19th century, was some combination of behaviorism or determinism. And here we think of guys like B.F. Skinner and Francis Crick. For Skinner, what was it? Oh, he took off on the You know, it's behavior therapy. So condition, response, those kinds of things. And then what about Crick? He said he could take any person and just give them to him. He'll make them anything you want them to be. In other words, blind behaviorists. So as you used the Latin expression a couple of weeks ago in a response to me, tabula rasa. blank slate just waiting to be written upon. Crick, on the other hand, says that basically man is just a machine. Everything is coded into his DNA. It's funny that you can make such a discovery of something so complex and really incomprehensible and yet attribute that to chance and then conclude essentially that man is nothing. but that demonstrates the blindness of the fallen heart. So, guys like these will say that man is not personal. And we could go on to say that man has no free will and no moral responsibility. Have any of you heard of a guy named Will Provine? He's dead now, isn't he? Yes. He has the answers, unfortunately, a little too late. But he was one of those determinists who would say that man's responses are completely a product of his environment, what happens to him. So man does not have free will and you're left really with that kind of idea if you go down one of these roads. Schaefer on the other hand talks about the nobility of man. And the dilemma is that he has fallen, but that he is still great. And here's where I add, the narcissist heartily agrees that he is still great, because no one could possibly be greater than himself. In fact, he's so great, he's God, and Eli is choking to death in our class. Man has become completely autonomous. And I add parenthetically, as we think through these things, We should be thinking about this idea of what are the predominant thought forms of our age. I would say it's mostly just an extension of where Schaeffer was 50 years ago, but I would also quickly add that I think things are much worse today. So here's the twofold dilemma as Schaeffer describes it, man is finite yet he's personal and he is noble yet he is cruel. that philosophy and religion, as he learned very early on, have the same basic questions about these three areas. And then he goes on to differentiate between two kinds of philosophy, what I'll call capital P philosophy, the study of philosophy as a discipline, and little p philosophy, which is what we've been calling these last few semesters, worldview, your presuppositions, And in that respect, he says, every man is a philosopher, whether he realizes it or not. And we could also add that every religion is a philosophy. But again, the question is, what is the one that is correct? This is part of Schaeffer's critique. And I have to include this because, after all, We are seminary students. Our theological seminaries hardly ever relate their theology to philosophy, and specifically the current philosophy. Thus, students go out from the theological seminaries not knowing how to relate Christianity to the surrounding worldview. It is not that they do not know the answers. My observation is that most students graduating from our theological seminaries, that should say, do not know the questions. So by this point in time, what are we, about four semesters down the line, if we go back to the beginning of worldview class, continuing to question and wrestle with these kinds of issues. Schaefer goes through what I think is kind of a deductive process, sort of a process of elimination. Not many possible answers in the three areas of thought. And he starts with these two broad areas, that there's either no logical answer, and everything is chaos, or there's some logical answer that can be communicated. And where we are today is in the first category, that there is no logical answer. Now I have to throw in the question of where does Darwin and Darwinian thinking come into this? Darwin is all materialism. It's... There's no... I mean, it has been seized upon by, you know, communism, it's secular humanism. There's no practicality in believing in a soul or afterlife. It's all here and now and it's... Yeah, it's this and nothing. Everything's random. It's all a product of random mutation. getting the right genes or not getting the right genes. Trial and error. Random. And then survival of the fittest. Right? True. That's supposedly the big idea in Darwin's thought that with mutations it will separate those who are more fit and less fit and the ones who are more fit will survive and the ones that are less fit will die out. That means Ebola is the fittest or something like a virus. It drives you to some strange conclusions, doesn't it? It certainly doesn't put you in a place where you can talk about the nobility of man, does it? No. No. Say that again? I was going to say, not personal. Yeah. Couldn't be personal. And what he'll say is that personality is really just complexity, the impersonal plus complexity, I think is how he puts it, which basically means that it's nothing. So he says there are not many basic answers to any of the great questions of life. If we begin with less than personality, we must finally reduce personality to the impersonal. The word personality is only the impersonal plus complexity. Then to have an adequate answer of a personal beginning, we need two things, a personal infinite God, and we need a personal unity and diversity in God. And Christianity gives us this in the Trinity. And what's interesting is how he seems to be driving us toward the conclusion that the Trinity is kind of a necessity that for us to be here, because God had to have personality within the Godhead before he created man as personal. He says, without the high order of personal unity and diversity as given in the Trinity, there are no answers. And that becomes a recurring theme for him. Without the Trinity, he says, we would have had a God who needed to create in order to love and communicate. What does he mean by that? He can't talk to himself because there are no others. I think that's a pretty good way to put it. We use the expression all the time, talking to ourselves, but can you really talk to yourself? Don't you have to be two persons to talk to yourself? You may be thinking out loud, maybe that's a more accurate way to put it, but if you're just one person, then you can't really talk to yourself. So it's an interesting way of thinking about it. He says the triune God is all sufficient. He's no way dependent upon his creation. He does not need the universe or anything else. And he wouldn't be God if that were the case. Christianity is true to what is there. And he's of the opinion that when evangelicalism catches that, that we could have a revolution from that. because so much of Christianity is trying to move away from what is true objectively. He'll tell us that the full answer has to come from revelation. And here I think we're seeing the interplay between what we would call natural revelation and biblical revelation or divine revelation, that we need both. He seems to be taking an approach where he's starting with natural revelation and what we can know even as fallen people in order to drive us to the written revelation. He says, the infinite personal God, the God who is Trinity has spoken. He is there and he is not silent. We have the answer to existence. And so he addresses that question of existence very emphatically. Chapter 2 goes on to talk about the moral necessity. The question I guess that I had after that first chapter was, so it kind of seems like he's saying that prior to the Incarnation, it wasn't really possible to have a rational view of God, that because people didn't understand God's training nature, that therefore nobody really could have had a a coherent understanding of God, I guess. Really? God in spirit is not? Well, they didn't... I'm not aware of anybody viewing God in a multiple personality fashion. The question we have is whether those who were before the Incarnation of Christ would have had an apprehension of the Trinitarian nature of God. What thoughts do you have? Evidentially, it didn't communicate well to God's first people because none of them were Trinitarians the concept never even occurred to them didn't it I? Really yeah, it's in the it's in the scripture but it didn't occur to them and revelation Randy go standing I I think it did occur to them in scripture that a spirit that would be revealed, and so on, and an interpersonality within Godhead. Again, it did take the revelation of the New Testament to fulfill that, or to open that up. That's a deal breaking between Jews and Christians now. Well, that may be the case, but the question is whether Scripture reveals to us in the Old Testament and through the Old Covenant, something about the Trinitarian nature of God, even if it was not as fully revealed as it is in the New Testament and the New Covenant. It's kind of like Schaeffer said that God reveals truth to us, not exhaustively, but truly. We were getting that in the Old Testament. Right, I mean it's there in our image. It's right there. But you don't find in all the Mishnah, you don't find in the Talmuds, the Babylonian, Palestinian, you don't find any of the Talmudic writers commenting on a trinity. It doesn't exist. And it's a deal breaker for Christians who still say that the Holy Spirit is The force of God, the Kodesh Ruach, is the force, but it is not a person. All right, hold that thought. Kate? But God still says in the very beginning, let us create man in our image. So there is the Trinity in the very beginning. Who's he talking to? There's nobody yet for him to talk to, is there? Man hasn't been created yet. So there's, and we see that already in those early chapters of Genesis. There are parts where God is speaking, where it's clearly an inter-Trinitarian conversation. It's not God speaking to man, obviously he can't speak to man until after man is created, as in the passage that Kate's referring to. So we get those hints early on. Where else do we, where do we see that? Don't we see that even earlier in scripture? The very first few verses. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And then we have the spirit who's hovering over the face of the waters. And what happens is another reading. like a hen brooding her nest. And then what comes next? Then God said. And then what do we have from the New Testament that gives us an indication of what God's word refers to? Well, He was made flesh. In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God and the word was God. So we see a fuller explanation of it in John's gospel. But would it be safe to assume that he's making something up and that this would be somehow strange to the ears of the Jew who knows his scripture? Right. But here you have Moses, the great statesman and theologian. Moses, there's no evidence that he was a Trinitarian. Well, that's an interesting question. Didn't he write Genesis? He did. He's the writer of it. But there's no evidence that he believed in a trinity. My question was not whether you can find references to the trinity in the Old Testament. But it's a mystery, I think, that was revealed after the incarnation of Christ. So, I don't know, it just seems like a weird argument to me to say that all of the centuries of Jews had an irrational view of God because they believed in a God who did not have a diversity in his character. So, I don't know, just a weird argument. Okay, I still believe that. They still believe in monotheism. And of course, so are we. But we believe in a pluralistic monotheism. Trinitarian monotheism. Trinitarian monotheism. OK. Well, I don't think we're going to settle this argument in the next 30 seconds, unfortunately. So I'm going to have to table it so that we can continue to move ahead here. I love a good discussion as much as the next guy, but I am constrained in the time here. As soon as I hear Mark's footsteps, I know my class is over. So that's my short-term constraint. So let's look a little closer. Chapter two talks about the moral necessity. With an impersonal beginning, he says, morals really do not exist as morals. Everything is finally equal in the area of morals. We cannot talk about what is really right and what is really wrong. And that man has a feeling of moral motions, but this is out of line with what is really there. Now that was a little perplexing kind of a statement to me. Maybe what he's saying is that just because you have moral motions doesn't mean you have a basis for moral motions. And your moral motions are not necessarily going to be in agreement with the moral reality that is there. I would put it like this. What I've always found is that everybody has some kind of a moral hot button, no matter how much of a relativist they may claim to be. It might be environmentalism. It might be conservationism. It could be some kind of social justice, some kind of race issue. There are probably a dozen different moral hot buttons that individuals may have. And I would say that those things are what are pointing to the Bible's description that the law of God is written on the hearts of man. Even fallen man has an understanding that there is a difference between right and wrong. So, have that kind of idea in mind if you're talking to somebody who claims that there are no moral absolutes. I bet if you ask a couple of diagnostic questions, you can find out pretty quick what animates them from a standpoint of morality. Yeah, somebody who's had his bike stolen, for example. It might be some very little thing. Okay? If there's no standard, then right and wrong are never more than connotation words. And he didn't explicitly say this, so I'm just kind of filling in that blank there. We have to see that there can only be preferences and not absolutes if there's no such thing as right and wrong. He uses the example of Hinduism where they say that there's no difference between cruelty and non-cruelty. And I find this kind of an interesting way of putting it. Because maybe it's a way of stating it a little differently without using the words right and wrong, which might kind of get somebody riled up right off the bat. So think about that. He describes what he calls statistical ethics. that's based on some measure of what society prefers at each moment. He refers to Marshall McLuhan saying, there might be a day coming where in an instant, because of technology, we can find out exactly what people want right now. I think we have arrived at that point, haven't we? Again, I come back to the question of Darwinism. How can we talk about morality if our operating worldview is Darwinism, if progress is just survival of the fittest and survival of the fittest depends upon vicious competition and violent death? I'm adding some terms to that to make it more impactful, right? This is what Darwinism drives us to. And I wonder if we're not back to Camus' dilemma at this point. that we're hindering man's progress at time by improving his chances for survival. Now I say that because I ran across something recently that in the late 19th century in the Malthusian eugenics movement, there were those who were opposing the development and the distribution of tuberculosis vaccines, because their view was that if you caught tuberculosis and died from it, then you were part of the unfit that was being eliminated. So we're holding back Darwinism in that case. And again, it sounds just like Camus' dilemma in the plague. How do we explain the dilemma of cruelty? And Schaeffer says, either man has always been that way, or he was different at some point. And if God created men cruel, then God is cruel. Or if God created the world cruel, then we cannot fight against God. And he says, in liberal theology, we jump into the irrational, mystical answer. We just assume that God is good, even though it goes against all reason and evidence. Mysticism can bail us out of a lot of difficult places, huh? He goes on to say, if man has always been the same way, always been cruel, then there's really no hope for some qualitative change in his condition. In other words, from bad to good. But if man has not always been this way, then there's a possibility of real change. And as we go through this argument, we're seeing how Schaeffer's just kind of building up a systematic rational argument by considering what's possible and what's not possible. If man changed, who changed him? Well, if it was God who changed him, then God's still bad. But if it wasn't God who changed him, then man must have changed himself. He says, man by his own choice is not what he intrinsically was. In this case, we can understand that man is now cruel, but that God is not a bad God. So that's where we end up. If man was once good and then changed by his own choice, The dilemma of cruelty, he says, is now a true moral problem and not merely a metaphysical problem. In other words, evil is not a property of his existence. It's something that happened after he was created. He follows with these four points, that with this idea, we can explain God's goodness and man's cruelty, that there may now be a solution to man's moral problem, He says specifically in liberal theology, the death of Christ is always an incomprehensible God word. What does the death of Christ do if man doesn't have a moral problem? That's what he's getting at there. We may talk about the death of Christ, but it can't be anything more than symbolic. Or maybe, you know, Jesus is just setting an example. Many will say that. The third point he says, we have a reason to fight evil now. Quote, I have a basis to fight the thing which is abnormal to what God originally made. And then lastly, he says, we have real moral absolutes. And he points out that even Plato pointed out that unless you have absolutes, morals don't exist. So it is therefore God himself and his character who is the moral absolute of the universe. So without the historic space-time fall of man, the answers to man's moral dilemma do not exist. So here we are again, driving the argument toward its conclusion. Questions or comments on that? All right, in the next chapter he goes on to talk about epistemology. First, he's gonna talk about the problem. What is epistemology? The theory of knowledge, the question of how can we know? And that seems trivial at first, but when you really begin to think about it, it is a very difficult question. You may say, I know this, that, and the other. And as soon as I ask you, how do you know that, you're going to start to fumble around. You may say, well, that's what I saw, or that's what I heard, right? But how do you know that's what you saw or what you heard? I could give you a quick lesson in biology and remind you that your senses are just electrical signals from your sense organs that are sent to your brain and it's up to your brain to turn that into what we call perception. That's a very complex process. And how many of you haven't had a dream that was so vivid that when you woke up, you couldn't believe that it was just a dream? What's a movie that taps into this idea I haven't seen that one. Are you thinking of the Matrix? Yeah, I'm thinking of the Matrix. Where they put a probe into the brainstem and basically provide the electrical signals to your brain to make you think that you're living in a real world and experiencing real things. And it's all just electrical signals that have been put in your brain. That was kind of a rough wake up call for Neo when he got out of there. So in this chapter, we're starting to deal with the relationship between particulars and universals. Plato pointed out there have to be more than particulars in order to have meaning. So we have a need for universals, something that will help us make sense out of the particulars. Schaefer says, in learning, we are constantly moving from particulars to universals. Plato's solution. Hmm? Connecting the dots. Yeah, trying to connect the dots. How do things relate to each other? We can do that on the level of particulars, but at some point we want to relate the particulars to something. Yes, that helps us understand. Okay. Plato's solution was the idea of ideals, We have the analogy of Plato's cave, for example, and the idea that there is somewhere, maybe we're not sure where, where the forms that we see in particulars have some representation as an ideal. We've kind of dealt with this part before that in the area of the morals, Greeks tried to find an answer in society and in their gods, neither was sufficient. The idea of nature and grace that he develops here is that in nature is where you have the particulars and in grace, you have the universal. So what is the connection between nature and grace or particulars and universals? He says that Aquinas brought us back to an interest in particulars, but then the dilemma was that grace got eaten up, both in the area of morals and epistemology. He talks about Da Vinci, and this was an interesting example because he says that Da Vinci wouldn't have been willing to take the modern solution. He says Da Vinci was so far ahead of his time that he really understood that everything was going to end up only as a machine, and there were not going to be any universals or meaning at all. Now here's where it starts to get into an area that's nearer and dearer to me, the area of science. He says, with the rise of modern science, that's not a misprint, we end up with the idea of positivism, which is a theory of knowledge that assumes that we know facts and objects with total objectivity, and that modern scientism, or what we would call naturalistic science, is based on that. What's the problem with positivism? Isn't it what I was just illustrating a minute ago? We say that we know something, we know the facts, but how do we know we know the facts? Who's right? You are the schizophrenic. That becomes an even more important question today because I think we have more and more crazy people who are claiming to have some knowledge, especially in the world of science. Little concerned about that. Rousseau takes this idea and gives us the concept of nature and freedom. And what he means by that is autonomy, not really helpful. Without universals, we have not only moral chaos, but an epistemological dilemma. And this is just what Leland was saying. How do we know the difference between reality and non-reality? Poor Neo, for years living in the Matrix, thought he was living in the real world. But when he was let out of the Matrix after taking the red pill, his life was changed forever. Kant and Hegel follow Rousseau, and they change the concept of epistemology. We have the loss of antithesis at this point. And then he says after Kierkegaard, Meaning is separated from reason. The universal is now just some mystical experience. Quote, rationality, including modern science, will lead only to pessimism. Man is only a machine. Man is only a zero. And nothing has any final meaning. And that brings us back to Camus' question. What was that? The moral dilemma. of humanity. Yeah, and with that kind of dilemma, who wouldn't be driven to the question of suicide? That's where we are. If man is nothing. And I would say it's even worse than that because modern man is nothing has made himself less than nothing. In fact, he's made himself into something that is destructive to this planet. and completely distorted the relationship between the created world and his own existence. Schaefer says that unlike earlier forms of mysticism, modern mysticism is semantic mysticism, meaning that there's nothing there. And then he refers to Polanyi who argues against positivism and basically says, it doesn't get us anywhere. that as a philosophy, positivism is dead, but the scientists keep on as if it were still there. It fails because it does not account for the observer's presuppositions. In other words, he's never neutral. And that starts to sound like Bonson or Van Til. The other guy is not neutral, and neither are you, and you shouldn't be. You can never know for sure that anything is there, nor can you ever be sure that you know it. That becomes a real problem if you want to be a scientist. And he says, science cannot exist without an observer. So there has to be an observer, but we have to account for his presuppositions. Now here he also quotes from Karl Popper. And this is interesting to notice that at first Popper says the thing is meaningless unless it is open to verification and falsification. And then he says, well, no, actually you can't verify anything, you can only falsify it. And here we agree with his latter statement. Proof from a scientific standpoint requires omniscience. And here I'm using the analogy of the presumption of guilt. How many of you have taken statistics or have used statistics? I see a couple of nods, a little bit here and there. When it comes to statistical tests, we have something called a hypothesis and we have something called the null hypothesis and the alternative. And what are we typically trying to do with the null hypothesis when we use our statistics? We're trying to falsify it. And what happens if our data do not allow us to falsify it? Do we throw our arms up in victory and say, yay, I proved my hypothesis? Have you proved anything by failing to falsify it? And here the answer is no. You're a little reluctant to shake your head at this point, but the answer is no. You can't really prove it. And the analogy is to the courtroom situation. How much more difficult would it be, and I fear that the day is coming, where you step into a court of law and instead of being presumed innocent, you are presumed guilty. Which is going to be more difficult to prove? Guilt or innocence? Why innocence? Where were you last night at 1030? Because somebody a lot like you was seen robbing a stop-and-go market. And unless you can prove that it wasn't you, you're going to be punished for that crime. We're going to assume that you're guilty unless you can prove your innocence. It has to do with the burden of proof. And there's a much higher burden of proof when it comes to innocence. So we put the lesser burden on guilt. It takes less evidence to prove guilt. And the same kind of idea happens in the scientific world. We never really prove any of our theories. We make hypotheses or we make theories. We test them. But if we fail to falsify them, we haven't really proved anything because the next experiment might falsify it. And has very important implications as we think about the loss of authority that is occurring in society and our turning to science as sort of a substitute authority. That frankly is very scary. All right. Positivism leaves us with one of two possibilities. Oh, I'm sorry. It leaves us only with possibilities and not certainties. And that's the best that science can do. We could call it contingent knowledge, meaning that what we think we know today is gonna be contingent on what we learn in the next 10 minutes and tomorrow and next week and so on. Because we never know everything. There's only one who knows everything. and it's not man. He goes on to refer to Wittgenstein and says there's only silence in the upstairs of meaning and morality, there's just nothing there. He refers to the two anti-philosophies of existentialism, which has no rationality, and linguistic analysis, which has neither values nor knowledge. And that comes back to that idea of semantic mysticism. We're just engaged in wordplay, but the words have no real objective meaning. He summarizes like so, modern man has no categories to enable him to be at all sure of the difference between what is real and what is an illusion. So there is the problem. Questions or comments? We have about six or seven minutes to solve this dilemma. It's amazing. God's given us the perception that we use it. Other creatures use other methodology perception. We're supposed to be the highest of the created order. And so our perceptions get given to us by God. We kind of dictate what reality is to us, but reality to an animal that can only see inside of a malou of cellular fluid, a bacterium or something like that. Perception is different for each living thing. What is reality? Without God, there is no reality. So you have to look to God for reality. Yeah, you can't be sure of much if you don't have something besides yourself as a reference point, which takes us back to what Sartre said. Eli, were you going to add something? I think it was in this chapter that he made the observation that with this modern modern science and in the fall of positivism that he worried that science was going to develop into just a mere exercise in technology and or a method of social manipulation. So I thought that was just another one of his observations, it was just very sort of prescient. Yeah, I have that in your notes. I won't tell you what page it's on because it's different in your notes than it is in mine. But about halfway through the notes on chapter four, the dangers of sociological science. More and more we're going to find the scientists manipulating science according to their own sociological or political desires rather than standing upon concrete objectivity. And I go on to point out to you that we have a name for this it is called THE SCIENCE in caps okay and we're to understand that applying the definite article to science means Leland you do not get to question or dissent you must hold your peace because science has spoken again that's that idea we all have to have an authority And if we start putting our authority in science, watch out. It's going to get ugly. My statistics professor said that it depended on who paid him the most. Kind of like in the world of law, you go get the best lawyer you can, even if you're guilty. The goal is to raise enough doubts to get a ruling in your favor. We can put our thumb on the scale. And it was alarming to me during the summer of 2020, watching way too much news and seeing just how on a daily basis, The science, scientists, the authorities, the experts were putting their thumb on the scale to get a particular outcome. And one of the ways that that was happening was in the area of measurements. Think about how in the spring of 2020, the number of cases of COVID exploded. Why did it do that? Messing with the number. Well, when did we start testing? Think about this. The number of cases of COVID went up. The more we tested, the more we found. We hadn't been testing before. All we were doing in many cases was finding what may have already been there. But it makes for a very dramatic narrative when that curve is climbing very steeply. Sure, that was part of the thumb on the scale, an oversensitive PCR test. There was a financial nugget for hospitals to claim that it was a COVID-based case. Yep, and also a financial incentive to put people on ventilators. It was a scientific and medical disaster. Here again, this is where we look at what Schaefer said, and we call the guy a prophet because he could see what was gonna happen with this. Now in his day, Carl Sagan was a popular figure. And so he refers to Carl Sagan as an illustration of manipulated science. Quote, he mixes science and science fiction constantly, which the media then present to the public as if it were all factual information. Does that ring a bell? And do you remember Sagan's Credo? The universe is all it is, or was, or ever will be. Now is that science or religion? That's Greek. That's Greek philosophy. Whatever it is, it's not science. Put that in a hypothesis and see if you can disprove it. And that's the problem with things like climate science while I'm on my soapbox. You create something that is an unfalsifiable hypothesis and then you try to call it science. That's manipulation. And that is happening all the time these days. All right, let me hit a couple other points. How bad is the situation today? The situation of phoniness, with social media. You get onto social media, the expectation is that you create a persona. It's completely made up. If it's not made up, then it's probably not very interesting. You're probably, probably about average. Most people are average and don't want to admit that. So you make up some persona to draw attention to yourself. And here seems to be the dilemma, that you want to differentiate yourself in some way so that you draw attention to yourself. And yet, you still have this drive to be part of some kind of a group, to be in conformity to some kind of a group or identified with some kind of a group. I put it this way that we're grouping for the universal in the sea of particulars. Our identity is bound up in some kind of group identity and yet we want to be unique. And here's where I think there's a connection to what's happening in our culture today. That social media is, quote, transformative. And we keep using that word trans all the time. We're all pretending to be something different than what we are objectively. And that's happening more and more, and it's becoming more extreme in our attempt to express that. Okay, we're just about out of time. Last thoughts or questions. I'll let you read the rest of what we have in the notes. I got a lot closer to finishing today, didn't I? I'll give you this concluding thought there on the last page. Identity is directly related to epistemology. For if I cannot know anything with certainty, then I can never really know myself either. So I think this helps explain the time that we live in. It's tragic. And it's having tragic consequences. Eli, would you pray for us in conclusion? Lord, I pray that by Really considering these things, it would help us to become better at communicating to the world around us, help give us wisdom and how to take your word and then address it to some of these sorts of issues so that people will have the opportunity to put their faith in you. And so that's my prayer for how we can take advantage of all this work that's been done. Amen. Thanks. Good night, folks. Good night.