We talked about what a worldview is last week. Anybody want to hazard a guess? It wasn't a short definition, but I would happily accept a short definition. The things you assume are real before you've learned about them. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Your basic assumptions. And everybody's got them. Nobody starts with a clean slate when they're reasoning out anything. You can't. But we live in a universe, that universe is guided by rules. We live in space and time and we have limits on what we can observe. We have limits on what we can possibly learn. uh you know we think we always think oh well maybe we'll overcome this limit or that limit and sometimes you do you know ancient sailors sailed over the horizon and saw that the ocean kept going perhaps uh and found other lands and other places um you know we we saw the moon and we got there we have sent things to take pictures other things in our solar system that's amazing that we were allowed to cross those boundaries but in the end that's still a very tiny little piece of God's creation and that doesn't even get into that's the macro view that doesn't even get into the micro view You know, we don't, you know, we understand a lot more about disease than they used to, which is why we have, you know, antibiotics and vaccines and good things like that. And yes, I do believe those are good things in general. That's all I'm gonna say. I'm not crazy, even though I do act like that at times. But we understand those things well enough to treat them. but we don't necessarily understand everything about how they work. It's a lot like Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton, in the 1600s, 17th century, figured out a set of equations that would describe gravity, that would describe the attraction between two objects. He could tell you why apples fell from trees, and how fast they were going, and how hard they hit the ground, how fast they were when they hit the ground. And he worked that out to fairly accurately, for our observations back then, described the solar system. And that's amazing. That's really something for 17th century mathematicians. And it was only in the 20th century that, as we got closer and closer to the stars, we started to realize that doesn't explain everything. The equations are really close, but they're not right. Little things change, and why do they change? How's Newton wrong about this? And it was Albert Einstein who said, because you're not even looking at it right, there's a whole world inside his little, you know, he has this law of attraction. But let me explain to you that space-time is curved and, you know, you get into all that stuff. You know, and Einstein's equations worked for his time. And we still learn things now. Yeah, well, there's limits. We talked, I think, a little bit briefly about, you know, there's atoms. OK, well, fine. There's subatomic particles, protons and neutrons and electrons. And then you're like, oh, but those are made of things, too. We get deeper in there. And you start talking about quarks. And it's like, well, where do the quarks come from? And all of a sudden, some guy's talking about strings. And it's like, does this rabbit hole ever end? I don't know. We don't know where our observational limits are. I mean, we know where we get stopped because we don't have better technology, we don't have a way of thinking about it necessarily, but anyway. So in the world that's like that, to build up an understanding of what is true and what is not true, we have to assume certain things to begin with. We have to have Well, really, the word here that I want to emphasize for this part is epistemology. We need to know how we learn things. We need to know what we base learning on. You know, this is all very meta, as they say. It's all very, you know... Gosh, you know, if you keep looking at your navel, you're just going to tumble over. You know, can we get to the good stuff? Okay, well, I'm going to try. But unfortunately, you do kind of have to start here because it's a huge mistake that's made constantly by people who should know better when they're talking about whether or not our faith is true and whether or not their view of cosmology or creation or the world is correct. But epistemology, it's that study of how we learn. How do we know what we know? Those are very important topics to certain philosophers. But really, they should be important to all of us. Because ultimately, you've got to start someplace to get on a road. There has to be a starting point. There's something that you take for granted in all of this. Let's see here, I don't know, what is something, let's see here, if you are, let's say that you're one of these cosmologists, you're trying to figure out what, how did the universe get to where it is today? What was it like in its first moments to now? And remember, the universe, that is reality, okay? Reality is what we're talking about. When something went from non-existent to reality, And you're telling me about the things that happened after that. What are you assuming? Anything? I mean, can you just do this with science and observation? I'd argue you can't really do it with observation so much, because we don't see other universes doing this. Because we can't. We're stuck in this one. It's a box, and we're trapped in it. So we kind of have to start from the perspective of being inside the box and realize that we can't really comment on what the outside of the box is, or how big it is, or exactly how anything works at some level. We know how things work inside the box completely with us, because the more we learn, the more we understand it. I'm in the box, whether the lights on or not. I know where the walls are. I know where the corners are. There's a flap up there. I don't know if I'll ever reach it. Yeah, this is the box. We understand reality, but only on reality's terms. We believe in the laws of logic. We believe that, uh, let's see here. If all men are mortal and if Socrates is a man, then anybody know what the last line of that is? Socrates is mortal. Yes. Yeah, that's called a syllogism, by the way, and I'm not going to go full on Philosophy 101 and talk about all of logic, but that's one of the most basic syllogisms there is. If we say with absolute certainty, we believe that all men are mortal, and we also believe that Socrates is a man, we are then saying, oh, well, Socrates must be mortal. Because if those two statements are true, that third one has to be. Makes sense, right? I mean, does anybody have a problem with that statement at all? I hope not. It's right. But why do we assume that reality works the way our logic does? Where did logic come from? Why is it that when you add 2 and 2, it's always 4? Does it have to be? I mean, in our universe, inside the box, we say, yes, it has to be. I can't even imagine a world where 2 plus 2 equals something else. But that's just it. We live in a box. If we were in a different box, it might add up to something else. Everything might be different in another world. We don't know if the laws of gravity or the laws of time work there the way they work here. So right there, we've just assumed something. The laws of logic. We believe that whatever is true must depend upon logic being true the way we view it. So, what is the name for someone who believes that only material things that you can observe exist? Materialist. Oh, good job. I didn't expect anybody to chime in that quickly. I was kind of hoping for a bouncer. OK. Materialism. Yeah. Yeah. And we kind of have two meanings for that word, because you can also say, oh, like the material girl. Materialistic means Madonna. I'm voting Madonna. That won't happen much. Yeah, we talk about materialism in terms of people who just want shallow things and are looking for baubles and gigas rather than important things in their lives, but that's not the kind of materialism I'm talking about. The other kind is that nothing exists that cannot be observed in some way, that cannot be described with our senses or seen or measured or whatever. Which is funny, because every materialist absolutely depends on the laws of logic. When did you observe those? Did you see them? Is there fiery letters written on the side of the universe somewhere? No. Logic came naturally to us. We got it from someplace. We believe it. The very fact of knowing things and being able to build from one fact on another to create more and more of a knowledge base for us. That is something that humans do because they have an innate ability to reason. Reason itself. You know, if you're a materialist, you can't fall back on reason or logic because they don't exist because you can't measure them by your own rules. Who created those? Where did they come from? At what point In your description of the beginning of the universe, does logic apply? And some of them have tried to answer that question. Hawking and many of the others, you know, Stephen Hawking, that guy, he thought, well, you know, it's in those first milliseconds of the Big Bang that the universe went from unreality to reality and exploded into this thing. And immediately, the law settled down. Maybe in the first moments, logic wasn't logical. Maybe 2 plus 2 was not 4 sometimes. But within less than a second, everything fell into place. And we just have to ask, gosh, why did that happen? How did that happen? I mean, lucky for us, right? There's a lot of lucky coincidences in this world. you know like like most atheists he never understood them um which is sad to say because he's dead now now he now he gets it but uh he probably still doesn't believe it or if he does believe it he's shaking his fist at god from the parapets of hell most likely we don't have any record of him ever repenting or believing so yeah i did just send stephen hawking Yeah, sometimes I do that. You know, it's not because it's my judgment. It's not because I place myself necessarily as the judge over him. But we've been given criteria in Scripture. We know what people who repent and believe look like and act like, and he's not that guy, is he? All right, so. Epistemology, how we know what we know, has to start from presuppositions. It has to start with something that we assume is true. We'll start with logic, then. All right, we assume electric is true. That's easy. All right, so. Epistemology is that theory of knowledge, and then we've got ontology. I don't know if we're going to talk much about that today, but it's going to keep coming up. Ontology is how we, not really the study of, it's more, it's concerned with the things that are real, the things that are true. What is the basic reality from which the facts that we know are the observations that we make? Where do they spring from? What's true? What's real? One example of this, which is really interesting, in Roman Catholic doctrine, this is not my doctrine, but this is Roman Catholic doctrine, When a priest is ordained, and remember, priests are special in the Roman Catholic Church. They are not like normal people. And it's because an ontological change happens to them. The moment that they are ordained, they are given the supernatural power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. And you can't take that away because it's an ontological change. You've changed reality. on them. And it doesn't go back. They can be defrocked. They can, you know, totally lose their religion. They can, you know, do whatever terrible things that priests seem to keep ending up doing in the last 15-20 years. You know, all that stuff doesn't matter. They can still celebrate mass. They can still magically turn. I shouldn't say magically. They say it's not magic. But, you know, they can turn red wine into the actual body and blood of Christ. And they do it every week. Or if they've been defrocked, they do it on the slide and nobody's watching. That's weird, isn't it? I mean, the Roman Catholic Church is claiming that, you know, you change the facts of the universe to sort of revolve one tiny one around that person. And that's the sacrament of ordination. That's a lot. That's a lot to swallow. And already you're like, is this important? Why are we talking about this? Is this better to my worldview? It'll get there, I hope. All right, so. When we speak of authority, the authority to determine what's real, the authority to actually tell us what our ontology is, what has the authority to demonstrate what's real to us? A lot of people give it to your senses. Can you trust your eyes? No. You're very quick to answer questions. Slow down. I want other people to talk occasionally. I love it. I love it. But let's be slower about it. Why can't you? Hold on. Why can't you trust your eyes now? Well, because things online are usually faked. Yes. Yes. Yeah. How often have you been? Yeah, I mean, deep fake. That's a thing. AI taking one person's head, putting it on another person's body, and it sure looks real to me on the web looking at it. You almost can't tell anymore. It's, it's very tricky. And then that in your ears too. It's like the voices, they can change those up too. Well, that's true too. Yeah. Yeah. You may not hear what's real and you know, certain psychosis, certain, you know, mental problems produce voices that speak to you that are not actually there, are not actually speaking to you in your ears. You know, another good example of that would be my, my, uh, the ringing in my ears. There is not something going right now over here. You don't hear it, right? I sure do. So anyway, I can't trust my own ears because that's not a thing. It's happening in my brain. It's not happening. in the sound waves at all. What can we trust if we can't trust our senses? Your sense of, like, knowing things like logic. Your sense of knowing things. Or logic. Um, you can trust yourself. Is that what you're saying? I mean, your own, your own judgment, pretty much. Your judgment. Is that ever wrong? Yes. We exploded that one again. Yeah, of course it is. Everybody's found that they were wrong about something, whether or not they want to admit it, and I rarely do. Yeah, every once in a while you just sit there and go, wow, I've been wrong about this my whole life. It may be something little, and it may be something huge, but something pushes you over the edge, and you're just sort of like, wow. Hey, my whole view of reality has shifted just a little bit. Maybe it's not a very impactful way, you know. Maybe you just realize that how hard you work at work doesn't necessarily determine whether or not you get raises or keep your job, because there's other factors in play. And sometimes they're way more important than what you're doing. It's what kind of data do your bots have? It's how is the whole economy doing right now? And are you seen as somebody we can chuck for a while to get the numbers back up again or not? You know, I mean, there's all these other things in play when you thought it was about your value that you bring. And the fact is, they don't even measure that. They don't care. And I'm not speaking from personal experience. Yeah, maybe I am. All right, so, yeah, so you can't, I mean, you know, you can operate off that for a while, but you can't trust it for the most basic facts, can you? You don't know. And in fact, how you got those facts into your brain involves your senses again. You read things that told you that. You saw things that said that to you in some way. You heard people talking and believed what they said. Or strongly disbelieved what they said, and it changed your view of reality in some way. You know, if L. Ron Hubbard came back from the dead, God forbid, and came in here and started explaining to us that, you know, Scientology is real and, you know, we are not actually human beings, but we are, you know, lots and lots and lots of aliens that are strapped to us by their, by their, all of their old problems that they've suffered over millions and millions of years because they were all strapped to a volcano 75 billion years ago. And that's really why we have problems. But if we got free of all those things, we'd have control over matter, energy, space, and time. That's what Scientology teaches. But who cares? It's not real. I mean, you've got to have something more than that, don't you? Unfortunately, a lot of people don't. Their Scientology is sneaky, because they get you under the wire. They're like, we're not a church. We're not a cult. We'll help you learn to communicate better. And everybody I've ever heard or seen who is a Scientologist said, that was actually useful. Those communication classes were good. But that's how they get you. That's how they sucked me in. They're like, oh, we can do that with all kinds of areas of your life. We have classes. They're expensive, but it's worth it, isn't it? Anyway. All right, I'm not going to. I have lots of weird little interests, and I will chase those things down. And if you ever catch me doing that, and I'm way off topic, you are all welcome, every single one of you, to say, hey, is this what you really wanted to talk about right now? And the answer is no. Anyway. So what has the authority to become factual to us. What has the, you know, what in our lives has an authority to tell us what's right and wrong, what's true and not true? When you're a little kid, what's the authority? Your parents. Your parents, right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, you know, you, you know, anything could be happening and you know, I mean, you think you know, but you're a little kid and you also know that every single time you've ever told your mom, no, it's not like that. Later on, you find out, oh, no, it is. She's taller than me, and she's older than me. She's seen things that I haven't seen, and she knew things I didn't know, and she explained it to me, you know? And sometimes, you know, Dad explained what right and wrong was. You know, I think that this is okay, because doggone it, I should be able to have this toy that my brother has, because I wanted more. And I can push him over, and I can take it. Mind makes right, right?