Let's start with a little short word of prayer. Fathers, we come back together again tonight. We thank you that we're able to engage in this kind of a study. We ask that you give us wisdom in regard of apologetics and how it's been done by others and how we might learn from that using discernment and apply these kinds of things to the needs of our day. So guide us into the truth and those things through your word. In Christ's name we pray, amen. So I'll start with the obvious. I tried putting some notes together for Morris and I just crashed and burned. So we'll see how that goes in the second hour. But for the first hour, we have plenty that Gordon Lewis has given us to think about. He's got quite a bit in this chapter, not only about Schaefer, but also contrasting Schaefer's apologetics to a couple of other major schools of apologetics. So those are helpful things for us and instructive. So Lewis's chapter here, Schaeffer's Apologetic Method, a little about Lewis. He died in 2016. When I realized after kind of following the footnote at the beginning of this chapter that the seminary that's referred to there was Denver Seminary, I thought, hey, maybe he's still around. He's not still around. So died in 2016. He was professor of systematic theology there at Denver Seminary, and he's in this school that's being referred to as verificationist, somewhat after the apologetical school of E.J. Carnell. He starts out by telling us that 1976 was a baffling year, that in 1976 there were three different books that produced three different conclusions, about Schaeffer's apologetic method. Thomas Morris books who says he's a presuppositionalist. And then we have Robert Raymond who said he's an empiricist. And Gordon Lewis concluded that he's a verificationist. He says that Schaeffer did not help his interpreters by making his methods clear. We suspect a little bit of an understatement there. So it ends up becoming somewhat of a detective process of looking at what Schaefer has written, how he's written, how he's argued, and trying to piece together from what he said and what he's done what kind of an apologetic he used. And what's part of the difficulty with that right out of the box? I'll ask questions from time to time so I can drink my coffee. What's difficult about it? Think in terms of what we have to go on to do that kind of detective work. I think at the beginning of the class we discussed that Schaefer did not really do a lot of engagement with his critics. So there's not a lot of question and answer type. Okay, so not a lot of formal interaction between people in either the same kind of school or different kind of schools of apologetics. If it's the case that most of his apologetics took place in a one-to-one setting, and that every one of those encounters was somewhere between different and unique based on the individual that he's talking to, and we don't have access to that, What we have are his written materials, which are mostly from his speeches and seminars. And that ends up being a different kind of approach. You're going to present your ideas differently in that kind of a setting than you would in a one-to-one setting. So, I point that out just to say that that adds to the difficulty that It's not even a simple matter of trying to figure out what kind of an apologist he was from what he's written, because what he's written doesn't necessarily reflect how he would talk to somebody in a more intimate setting. But he never really said, I'm a this or a that. Right, and that's what Lewis is saying here at the outset, that he didn't help us out by stating what his methods were. We might say, in a certain sense, it's kind of ad hoc, in a sense, because it was according to the needs of the situation that he would answer different kinds of questions, according to who's asking the question and what kind of question. So it's not as simple as saying, he's this one kind of thing. It's more like a pre-evangelistic type of apology. Yeah, and that's how he's describing himself, that what he's doing is engaging in a form of pre-evangelism, which is a way of answering people's questions and beginning to bring down their objections so that the conversation can move from those kinds of questions to the matter of the gospel. So, in this chapter, Lewis spells out three methods of reasoning for us. Inductive, deductive, and abductive. And how do we distinguish between those three? Randy wants to speak. I see a face looming out of the dark. Well, they're a starting point. That's how we distinguish between them. I'll just pick the one, the first one. Inductive starts with particulars and formulates principles. So from particulars to general or universal, where the other ones take a different starting point. Okay, and then deductive is going in the reverse of that process. and then the abductive which is kind of a new word to me but basically this is the scientific method isn't it we're starting with a hypothesis then we start looking at particulars from the particulars we start to look for either confirmation or rejection of the hypothesis. In other words, how well does the data fit the theory? And if the data fits the theory well, we think we've got something. And if it doesn't, then we go back to the drawing board and come up with a new hypothesis. So this abductive or verificational kind of apologetics fits into that third category. It's more like Morrison. How so? Morris or Morrison? Am I misunderstanding? Morrison. Morrison, the critique, the one book that we had to blast through. Morris. Morrison. I'm sorry, Morris, right? He sets up a hypothesis about how we come to a process of reasoning and It's very much, if you don't read through it all the way, you think, wow, is this all humanity? Is this all psychology? And then you see that he includes also the fact that this drawing of the Holy Spirit and the Father to Jesus Christ, of course, is the supernatural aspect of it. Yeah. the big critiques I've gotten. And here's my question, did he actually say the Holy Spirit or did he just say that we have to pray about this? Because we have to get all the way down. Well he didn't get to the fact that he said God does supernaturally draw. He didn't get to that. So, that has to be in there somewhere and it's an interesting question of What part does that play in our apologetics? Are we so busy formulating methods that we're missing the importance of that spiritual regenerating work? Very easily, I think, for us to wander off into what we think are clever methods, maybe persuasive methods, that are not taking into account that spiritual problem. Okay, so we've got these three basic ideas, starting with the particulars and formulating the universals, or starting with the universal and looking at the particulars, or combining those two into this thing called the scientific method. Now, this is where I start going off on my own. So you're going to have to bear with my soapbox for a little while because this is a problem both in terms of apologetics and in terms of science. Let's think about this for a bit. So in practice, the scientific process begins with data. We have some data that we've observed. And we're trying to figure out how to explain the data, so we formulate a hypothesis. We're looking for some kind of a pattern. And the pattern leads us to say, there's this kind of a relationship that we're observing. Then we do more investigation. And specifically, if we've done our hypothesis correctly, we should be looking for data that's going to do what to the hypothesis? Try again. I reject the null hypothesis. I'm sorry, I forgot. There you go. I know most of you guys have done some statistics, so this is exactly the parallel that I'm drawing here. When you formulate an hypothesis to apply a statistical test, what you're really trying to do most of the time is to use that statistical test to falsify the hypothesis. Do you have enough data to falsify the hypothesis? If so, then you move on to the alternative, and the alternative may be a very general kind of alternative. So, how would we formulate the hypothesis in this case? Probably atheism. There is no God. The alternative is There is a God. So if we find evidence that rejects the hypothesis, what do we end up with? What's the best case scenario, unfortunately? Some kind of theism, right? Tell me if I'm wrong. It seems to me that about the best we can do with a verificational kind of apologetic is reject atheism in favor of theism. And this is where some of the criticism comes in, and I think Morris picks up on this, that Schaeffer goes directly to the conclusion of Christianity as the explanation of theism, rather than going through all the other possibilities and falsifying all the other possibilities before arriving at Christian theism. He even says orthodox christianity, and I'm using him for that too. We're using the term orthodox christian. Yeah, and then we get into our arguments about definitions. So that's how the scientific process is designed to work. It's a process of elimination, not a process of confirmation or verification. And as somebody who has worked with those kinds of methods over the years, I've been conditioned, and properly so, not to talk about confirming the hypothesis. Because just because you don't reject it doesn't mean you've confirmed it. It can still be wrong. Okay? Has anybody been noticing some of the rumblings that are going on in cosmology right now? About the Big Bang theory? Well, the James Webb Space Telescope is allowing us to see more data. We're gathering new data from that new measurement system and we're looking for data in that measurement system that would agree with our beliefs about the Big Bang and especially the early universe. but there's doubt about it now. Oh, so now we're not seeing what we would expect to see based on the theory. And then when that sort of thing happens, you end up, you know, the way it ends up being couched in scientific circles, we'll say there's a crisis in cosmology. What does that mean? Is there really a crisis? Or is it just that we're collecting new data that doesn't fit the hypothesis and we're now forced I mean, some departments at universities will not get their grants this year. Well, that could be a crisis in the world of academia. I will concede that point. But yeah, the idea is that we have this theory and the data that we have fits the theory fairly well, well enough for us to work with the theory. But then there may come a point in time where new measurements or a new theory like relativity can turn the science on its head. And that's the nature of science. So you can never say that science has proved X, Y, or Z. Science is in the business of disproving things. and I'm making those points because we're dealing with the same kind of idea here with this verificationist and I'm gnashing my teeth a little bit when I use that because it doesn't really You can't verify things by this kind of a methodology. And they finally admit that, and I think Morse picks up on that a little more so perhaps, and says that basically all we can do is say, well, we're really pretty, pretty, pretty sure that this is right. So we end up with a probability rather than a certainty. So that's the kind of methodology that we're dealing with. And I use this illustration and it's fitting in more than one way. It's a courtroom analogy of guilt and innocence. When you step into a court of law, what is the assumption? What is the hypothesis? That's what it's supposed to be. that you're presumed innocent and then the prosecution has to bring evidence to prove guilt. Not the other way around. What happens if we reverse that? If you're presumed guilty, what does the prosecution have to do? Nothing. The prosecution has to do nothing. Now the burden of proof is on the accused to prove innocence And how much more difficult is that than trying to prove guilt from the other direction? Can you ever really prove that you're innocent? Can you still beat your wife? Yeah, you better have a really good alibi. So that's where we have to realize that the burden of proof is on it's in favor of having just a little bit of information in order to make a decision because the only way that you ever prove a hypothesis is by having all knowledge and there's only one that I know who has all knowledge so he knows all things with certainty but the rest of us are kind of doing the best we can with a very sloppy process of elimination For it to be a valid hypothesis, it must be falsifiable with a minimum amount of data. A non-falsifiable hypothesis is religion, not science. And this is part of what gets me riled up when those in the world of science are saying things that are not scientific statements. They're religious statements, like man-made climate change, So if we did a brief thought experiment, how would you falsify the hypothesis that man is changing the environment? Kill everybody and see if it's better. Yeah. Well, in a scientific sense, we have nothing to compare it to. We only have one world to work with. So we can't create an experiment with a second world just like this one, where we change the conditions and see whether the environment's affected differently in that world than it is in this one. It becomes a kind of religious dogma when we treat it like that. I say that as a warning because that kind of thing is going on all the time and it's very upsetting when science is pretending to say things with certainty that it doesn't really know and can't know. Here I say that science is based on assumptions not assertions. assertions in science or articles of faith, and whatever the prevailing paradigm is, such as the Big Bang, is little more than a convenient summary of the available evidence. And something that's true in the world of science, as well, is that no matter what the theory is, it doesn't fit the data exactly. So you always have anomalies. If there are just a few, we can just ignore them. and not feel too badly. The problem is when you get a new measurement system like the space telescope that starts bringing data that you did not expect, those anomalies are not going to be ignored for very long because they're too big. They contradict the prevailing paradigm. So this idea of a theory that's in crisis really just means that the anomalies are piling up and they can't be explained by making adjustments to the model. Now in the statistical world, I'm thinking of regression, you have this idea of overfitting. You know what that refers to? I'm gonna try to draw a picture. For those of you who are remote, I hope you can kind of see what I'm doing. And those are supposed to be data points. I've blurred them a little bit, hopefully to make them easier to see if you can. So what do we normally do when we have some kind of a relationship like this between X and Y? What's the simplest? The simplest model or the simplest way to describe this data is to find the best fitting line. And we call that regression. and probably everybody has done it or everybody has seen it. Now, could we do a better job of fitting the data because that's not exact? And the answer is sure. This is just a simple linear model. But if we want to be clever statisticians, we can use a higher order model. In fact, if we want to fit the data perfectly and get a perfect R-squared, all we have to do, I may have to redraw some of my data, is just come up with a model that forces its way through every data point. That's called overfitting. Simplicity counts for quite a lot when it comes to modeling. But the point is that no... Yeah, you can force fit the data with the statistics, and that's why statistics has been described in a certain way that I won't repeat right now. You can make the data... Does this make world views? Does this create world views that are inaccurate? Finish that thought for us. Answer your own question. Well, I mean, You know, statistics are a way of slamming the truth in favor of... How do we force fit the data? I'll give you an example. When it comes to human behavior, what kind of things do we use to try to force fit the data? How do we explain man's behavior in a pseudo-scientific way? By aberrant behavior. By pathology. How do we explain it though? We observe the behavior, then the question is, what is the model that we use to explain the behavior? If the correct answer is that we explain that behavior by virtue of what we call the fall, but you don't believe in the fall, but you can see people misbehave, so how do you explain misbehavior in a secular context? Yeah, right. Who is the real model? Is it pre-fall Adam or is it Desmond Morris' naked ape? Yeah, so if you subscribe to an evolutionary view of behavior or a deterministic view of behavior, then you can say people just do what they do and people are not responsible, they're not free moral agents. we're going to come up with a psychological or sociological answer to the question of why people misbehave that does not rely on what we know to be true about the nature of man, which is that it's fallen. So I think the answer to the question is yes, even in something like that we can try to force fit a theory to explain the data. and yet in the end we know it doesn't really explain anything. Kate appreciates the backlight Randy. You were scaring her and frankly you were scaring me a little too. That's a great Christmas We can hardly see you. Yeah, that helps. So, there's a recognition among the verificationalists that the God hypothesis is never really proved. That he simply represents the most likely explanation in relation to the alternatives. And frankly, this is where I see the Achilles heel of this verificational approach to apologetics. And when we throw Morris in there as well, when we start trying to say that we're going to find common ground in reason, I'm putting the context here that this is 1976 when this is being stated. I'm not sure that you can rely on reason as common ground anymore. Anybody who's tried to have a conversation with a neighbor or a friend or someone around the dinner table, perhaps, you're finding that it's harder and harder to find even a common ground of reason. When you just used that word reason, my mind automatically went there. Today, I don't think there is any reason. I mean, people just go off the deep end whenever to try to have a, you know, any kind of common ground conversation anymore? We're trying to make an assumption that if we can present the rational inconsistencies in someone's belief system that, in Schaeffer's words, we're taking the roof off, we're exposing them to the reality, how reality is different from what they claim to believe, that somehow And perhaps 50 years ago, that was a fairly persuasive argument. But it's getting harder to use that kind of persuasion today. It almost seems as if, you know, Schaefer says that we passed the line of despair around 1935, and sometimes I feel like Schaefer is acting as if we still haven't passed the line of despair. He's acting as if we can still relate to each other in terms of some absolutes. But we're now nearly a hundred years past the line of despair, and I think as Kate says, we're seeing the effect of that where you can't even necessarily rely on reason as a way of trying to have a conversation. In Schaeffer's time, I think you could, to a certain degree. And that's what I'm arguing. What we're looking at were books written back in the 70s. Schaeffer's writing back in the 60s and 70s. The critiques are coming in the mid-70s. All of that to say that what may have worked fairly well at that time as an apologetic method may not be very effective today. The question becomes how do we find common ground today when there seems to be hardly a point of communication. It's food for thought for us in terms of how we think about applying what we're learning in the class. Not to try to duplicate what worked 50 years ago, but to understand maybe why it worked at that time and why it's not going to work today. Why do you think that we're having such a breakdown in communication anymore? I mean, it just seems like People don't want to have any kind of common ground or... Yeah, how much time do you want to take trying to answer that question? I wouldn't try to say that it's one thing. I think it's many things at one time. And when I see many things happening at one time, I'm not inclined to think that it's a coincidence what we're seeing, but that it's a pattern. And part of the pattern that we're seeing and have been seeing in earnest over these last 15 years, and you can do the math and figure out what I'm referring to, is that we're seeing deeper and deeper divisions and more and more suspicion. We're intentionally dividing people against one another. That became really clear early in the COVID crisis. And I'm not saying that it was a crisis because of COVID. I'm pushing a shopping cart down the aisle in Walmart, and because I'm not wearing a mask, I get a disparaging remark from someone who is wearing a mask. Now if we use reason here, what would reason tell us? If you want to wear your mask, fine. If I don't want to wear a mask, you know. Well, there's individual choice. That's part of it. But how about this? If masks work in preventing the transmission of this thing, then we don't both have to wear a mask. If you're wearing one or if I'm wearing one, we're both safe. Doesn't reason tell us that? And the same thing with the, you know, the jab. It's not necessary for everyone to be part of that in order for it to work if it does what it says it does. But what you saw in the midst of that was frankly a national panic or worldwide panic. It was mass hysteria. People were frightened by the news and I think the news and the science was being manipulated for that purpose and that has the effect of making everyone suspicious of everybody else. even around the family dinner table. So I would say that's part of the answer to the question. But it's also the case that we continue further and further down the road away from reason to a reliance on feelings to the exclusion of everything else. Now some people get their feelings hurt just knowing that there's someone in the room who doesn't agree with them, even if they don't say anything. Since when did we need safe spaces in the United States of America? Well, since not long ago, I suppose. So yes, that presents all kinds of challenges for us. If we can't even have a conversation, about everyday kinds of things, then what kind of a challenge does that present to us in terms of spiritual things? And I think the answer is that it's much harder. So, let's return to Lewis's discussion here. He gives us a nice way of describing the elements of an apologetic method Number one is the logical starting point. Two is common ground. Three includes the criteria for truth. Four is the role of reason. Five is the basis of faith. And then we have these three schools of apologetics. We have names that we'll give to those and representatives that we'll use to describe them. inductivism being represented by Oliver Buswell, presuppositionalism by Cornelius Van Til, and verificationalism represented by E.J. Carnell. And in this chapter Lewis provides some helpful comparisons between those. I'm referring those to you on pages 73 and 74 as well as the figure on page 87. You might want to have those handy on the quiz this week. Regarding verificationalism, there's a big difference between something that's confirmed and something that's disconfirmed. and it makes me gnash my teeth when I see those two words next to each other as if they are about the same thing when they are completely different things. We are reminded that Schaeffer was dealing with his particular cultural context coming out of the 60s and into the 70s. confronting the thought form of existentialism, particularly as it was both affecting society and the church. Lewis says, he sought to confirm the truth of the Christian message and to demonstrate its relevance for life lived to the fullest. No editorial comments are necessary. I've told you it's an axiom that you find all of your misprints or typos right after you go to press. Schaeffer's purpose was evangelistic for those who were outside the church and more pastoral for those who were inside the church. Lewis says he was not a specialist in logic but a general practitioner in pre-evangelism. That term keeps coming up because that's a term that Schaeffer himself was very fond of using. Schaeffer says this, that evangelism is two things, giving honest answers to honest questions and showing them what Christianity means across the whole spectrum of life. So in some sense, that is his apologetic. Apologetics is about answering questions. And in any particular encounter, And you don't necessarily know what questions someone's going to bring. Lewis does lament the fact that Schaefer doesn't give us a lot of evidence of his influences. That his books were based on lectures and they did not contain footnotes. And again, my commentary is that that's not a particularly good excuse. That if you had put your lectures together, from an assortment of sources like that, it wouldn't be that difficult to backtrack and include some references to your sources when you take your speeches and convert them into books. And it's understandable in one sense. We can use the analogy of a sermon It's frankly distracting if your pastor is standing up there and quoting chapter and verse when he refers to someone that's helping him make a point. That's getting in the way of the message if you do that in a sermon. But if that pastor turns around and writes a commentary on that text, then you would expect him to include those references. Schaefer himself used the term verification frequently. that he was always trying to show the truth of scripture corresponds to the world that we all live in. And he also uses the word presupposition quite a bit. But how is he using the word presupposition? Definitions are important at this point. His is missing a missing something. He's presupposing that the Orthodox Christian faith is the final answer and it makes sense out of all of the incompleteness and the, what you might say, everything that the upper story is is proposing with all of these other isms and ideologies that the Orthodox Christian faith is the universal. It unites it all. I mean, that's what I get from reading Schaeffer, that that's the presupposition. And then again, then everybody each has their own presuppositions, and they're kind of in Schaefer's mind's eye, they're all patent, they're all, we all have kind of these inconsistencies with our world, our worldview. We have these presuppositions, yet we contradict them by the way that we approach our daily life, that we all do that to some degree. And the more that we do it, the less that the less illogical we are. No, the less we do it, we're more logical when we don't live up to our worldview. When we try to live our worldview, we're less logical. I don't know, I think I got dyslexia on that one. Okay, so let me pick up on what you were saying there, because even in describing what you were saying just now, notice that you're using the word presupposition to refer to different things. I realize that, but you presuppose that everybody had these presuppositions. Yes, and so, basically, when he uses the word presupposition, We would probably be more likely to use the word worldview. That's the one that we've been using in our recent classes, talking about someone's worldview. Everyone has a different worldview. And it represents that set of beliefs and assumptions that they carry with them. Lewis argues this way that Schaefer should have called this presuppositions by the term hypotheses. And hypotheses is frankly another word for assumptions. So what are the assumptions that we carry about the way the world is and the way the world works? And then how well, as Leland says, do those agree with the world that is? So can we verify that our hypothesis agrees with the way the world is, or is it the case, when we start to examine it more closely, that we find inconsistencies, which then are suggestive of what? That there's something wrong with the worldview. At least, that's the general idea. Now, in contrast, Van Til's presuppositions are those things that must be assumed. They are not subject to verification. And I suspect that when we look at Van Til's critique that we're going to see that that's going to be where part of the disagreement comes up in the way that we're using the idea of presuppositions. The verificationist is always vulnerable to having his presuppositions disproved. And here we recall that Schaeffer's spiritual crisis in 1951 took him all the way back to his agnosticism. And it was his determination at that time to test and to prove what he thought he believed about Christianity. And that ended up shaping the rest of his ministry. And here's where we could also say that this brings up a question that Morris also raises about the influence of his own experience of doubt and questioning and eventually conversion of how that may have affected his unapologetic. That frankly got me to thinking about the same thing and how Before I was converted, I started to study Reformed theology and I found that it made sense. that the subjective kind of Christianity I'd been exposed to prior to that, which never really made sense, suddenly I realized there is a kind of way to understand Christianity that does make sense, that doesn't have to go through your feelings, but it can come through your mind. So I'm seeing that same kind of thing. If we look at the pattern of Schaeffer's life going back to his teen years, he was in church, he realized that the church he was attending was not providing answers. By happenstance, he begins to read philosophy. He finds that he enjoys the world of ideas. He's immersed in that. And yet he begins to get frustrated because philosophy doesn't have the answers either. And then before he decides to simply walk away from Christianity, what was it that turned the tide? Zoli and Dioli, Anthony and Dioli. You read the Bible. He started reading the Bible. And he starts reading the Bible and he discovers that not only answers to specific questions, but the answers to the big questions are found in the Bible. And that was what was transformative in his experience. So if we think about that experience that he went through when he was, let's say, 16 to 18 years old, Can we see how that may have influenced his later approach to answering questions and drawing people to believe by addressing the answers to those big questions, just as he had to go through himself. And it seems like there's maybe something there. It seems like Morris puts theology, I mean apologetics, Not so much as a tool for bringing the unbeliever to Christ as it is for the believer to confirm his own experience. He talks about that rear view type of apologetic, like a Christian looking back at the steps of how, and then he's talking about how sinners actually come to Christ through Process that isn't really as apologetical as you would like to believe He makes a distinction there and when you're reading that especially in the I don't know maybe the third or fourth to the last chapter I Don't know if you've encountered what I'm talking about, but he's talking about the the apologetics really you become a believer? Well, I think there's a role for apologetics in both cases. And you know what we were just mentioning a few bullet points ago is that Schaeffer's approach could be seen as more evangelistic when he's talking to the unbeliever, and more pastoral when he's talking to someone who is either in the church and may already be a believer, but is still wrestling with questions. So, apologetics is not just for the unbeliever. I certainly wouldn't try to argue that. You know, we could say that Schaeffer, I think there's good reason to think that Schaeffer was generally converted back when he was about 18, So then why did he go through this spiritual crisis 20 years later? Was he lost? Or was it just a case that because of things that may have been swirling around him at the time, an assortment of doubts, that it was necessary for him to go back as it were He couldn't go back to unbelief, but he certainly went through some kind of an intellectual and spiritual wrestling during those months in order to come back to a place of full assurance. So there's room for apologetics certainly in the life of the believer. Okay, it's 619. Let's take our 10 minute break. And we will continue with this discussion. And as this is unfolding, we're kind of incorporating Morris and Lewis at the same time, which I think will work out pretty well. So bring some more thoughts about that when we get back at 630.