...belief that there is no God, okay? Pantheism is the belief that God is the universe, that God is a non-personal force, and that God is the universe. Since man is part of the universe, man is God. This is getting more and more popular in New Age circles. There are Hindu pantheists, there are some Buddhists are pantheists, New Agers are pantheists. Panentheism is very closely related to pantheism. It's the belief that the universe is God's body. That's an oversimplification, but basically God in His basic nature is both limited and unlimited, both finite and infinite, and we'll talk about that as we deal with panentheism and try to refute it. Deism, God created the universe but doesn't intervene, can't perform miracles. There's a lot of people to this day that still believe in God, but they do not believe that God can or that God chooses to perform miracles. It's the old Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson God, a God who created the universe and then he just leaves it alone. He doesn't perform miracles. There's finite godism, the belief that God is limited because of evil, and God might lose his battle to evil if we don't help God win. Then there's polytheism, the belief in many gods, and then of course theism, the belief in a personal god, and theism, I believe, is the only worldview that is supported by the evidence. Now, if I have time, too, I'll try to provide some reasons why I think Christian theism is superior to Islamic theism or Jewish theism, okay? But with these worldviews, let me explain, let me just give you an example or two on why it's important. We hear a lot about the sanctity of human life, that human life is sacred. But the fact of the matter is that human life is sacred in a theistic worldview. When you compare it with other worldviews, such as pantheism or atheism, human life is really not sacred. Now, if theism is true, human beings were created in God's image, and therefore human life is sacred. This would affect our views on abortion. which is killing of unborn babies, infanticide, which is killing of babies already born, and euthanasia, killing of the elderly or the handicapped. A theist would say, human life is sacred, we were created in God's image, only God is the giver of life, only God has the right to take life, innocent human life, Therefore, human life is sacred. We do not kill innocent unborn babies. We do not kill babies that are already born. We do not kill the elderly or the handicapped. Now, if atheism is true, okay, if atheism is true, then human beings are machines. We're highly evolved animals. We are mere molecules in motion. If atheism is true, there's really no difference between kicking a mound of dirt and kicking a human being. Okay? And atheists will try, with everything that they have, atheists will try to reject the existence of God, but then they'll try to borrow capital from the Christian worldview, and still cling to some type of sanctity of human life, but in the end, they end up trashing human life. Now, we all hear these arguments that the unborn baby is just tissue, the unborn baby is not really a human being. Those are the arguments you hear at Planned Parenthood. But the atheist thinkers, that are cutting-edge thinkers, the guys that win the Nobel Prizes, like Watson and Crick, when they won the Nobel Prize for cracking genetic code, okay? Brilliant guys, but in the early 1970s, they basically argued that it's great that we're legalizing abortion, but in their view, we should go a step further. and that we should wait until after three days after a baby is born, so from birth to three days, and just say, hey, we're going to arbitrarily say that a human being is not a human being and doesn't have human rights. We're not going to declare the baby human until at the end of the third day. And that way the parents and the doctors can look at the baby and decide if it fits into our definition of what a human being should be. So, at the end of the three days, if it doesn't measure up, we can kill the baby and all live happily ever after. In fact, they brought this out in their speeches when they were accepting the Nobel Prize. So, cutting-edge thinking atheists always understood that human life begins at the moment of conception. And these leading atheists are saying, look, we've arbitrarily said that a human being is not a human being until the human being is born. When we know the human being is a human being from the moment of conception, nine months earlier, why not just arbitrarily carry out that decision, that magic wand and declare the baby, let's not declare the baby human beings until three days after birth, and then we can weed out a few more of these undesirables who may cost us an awful lot of money to take care of. And why? Because in the atheistic worldview there is no God to give value to human life. We're not created in God's image. The Founding Fathers said all men are created equal. That verse was a doctrine of creation. Charles Darwin never said all men have evolved equally. In fact, Charles Darwin and the early atheistic evolutionists would compare different peoples, different races, and argue that one race looks more like AIDS, therefore they're inferior to other races. You get some horrible, horrible races among the early evolutionists. So human life is not sacred in the atheistic worldview. The pantheistic worldview would say, listen, you've got to hear our view of man. We give more dignity. Okay, sure, the atheist says man is mere molecules in motion. There's no value to human life. But the Christian theist only says that man was created in God's image. We'll one-up you. We'll go a step further, says the pantheist. We don't believe man was created in God's image. We believe man is God. And so you can be a pantheist with Shirley MacLaine and stand on a beach in her movie based on her best-selling book, Out on a Limb. And believe me, she went out on a limb with her beliefs, but you could stand there on a beach with her and say, I am God, I am God, I am God. And that really brings value to human life. No, it doesn't. Because the atheist view of human life, they view humanity collectively as God, as if we're like one big tree or one big plant. And what do you do if some of the branches on a tree die? you cut them off to enhance the growth of the rest of the tree. Which is why Barbara Marx Hubbard, a New Age thinker, she was an advisor to President Jimmy Carter, she's real big in United Nations circles, she's a leading pantheist thinker, believes that God is the universe, man is part of the universe, and man is God. She believes that we're evolving forward, we're going to reach the new age of peace and righteousness on the planet Earth, and the only people that get in the way are these people who believe there is a God and we're not Him. And so, in her way of thinking, one out of every four people on the planet Earth needs to be exterminated. Now, you would think, wow, what a coup, and this is really weird stuff. But no, she gave, she continues to, she not only has that imprint, in some of her books, but she talks about it when she gives speeches at Mikhail Gorbachev's State of the World Forums, which he gives every year or so, and Mikhail Gorbachev, last I heard, is the highest-paid speaker on the planet Earth, and he's jumping on this New Age, pantheistic bandwagon as well. So, what I'm trying to say is the worldview that we choose is not going to just affect our view of God, but it's going to affect our view of the universe, and it's also going to affect our view of man and the value of human life, whether human life is sacred or if we view it as being less than sacred. And we see this coming up time and time again. Where was it? In Florida, where the husband was trying to get permission from the judges so that he could starve his wife to death. You know, what is that, Peter Singer, an ethicist, he's supposed to be an expert on what is right and what is wrong, and he teaches over there at Princeton University. He's supposed to be one of the world's leading ethicists, and because he's an atheist, he argues that handicapped people, the only value that their lives have is whatever value the healthy people give to them. Now, if you read his books, every other page he explains why what he is saying is not exactly what Hitler and the Nazis said. Now, think about it for a minute. If every two sentences, after every two sentences I give, I have to explain. Now, keep in mind, what I'm saying is a little bit different than what the Nazis said. If I have to keep telling you that over and over again, what does it tell you? It tells you that my views would be very close to that of the Nazis. And that's the way after Peter Singer, and that's why you'll see people at Princeton with wheelchairs going around and protesting his views, and protesting the fact that Princeton hired the guy and gave him tenure. So, basically, ideas, though they may sound boring, and it's like, oh, this is all abstract stuff, why do we even... Why do we even think hard on issues like that? It hurts my head, and blah, blah, blah. Well, the fact of the matter is, if we don't think hard on these issues, if we don't win the debates, the guys who do think hard on these issues, and do win the debates, are going to rule us tomorrow. In fact, the sad thing is that many of them are ruling us today. Okay? If there's no God, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German atheist, acknowledged If there is no God, and he believed God is dead, he believed there is no God. If God is dead, truth is dead, morality is dead, meaning in life is dead, and what he failed, refused to accept, would be the next step, and that is that man is dead as well. If there is no God, there's no value to human life. Now, C.S. Lewis pointed that out in his work, The Abolition of Man. Francis Schaeffer pointed out in his work, he referred to it as the death of man. I have a chapter in my latest book, God, Government, and the Road to Tyranny, where I take the thought of Nietzsche, the German atheist, and then C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, two Christian thinkers, and argue that Western civilization, as we know it, will die. will collapse if we do not repent and turn back to the God who has blessed Western civilization so abundantly. And, you know, I do believe, you know, what do you need to be saved? You need to trust in Jesus alone, the true Jesus of the Bible alone for salvation. At the same time, I think when it comes to the salvation or the continued existence or the survival of civilizations, you need to acknowledge the existence of the Creator God, and you need to abide by His moral laws, or your civilization will collapse. Okay? I mean, just show me from history one civilization that promoted and tolerated homosexuality for centuries and flourished. you will not find them. If a society promotes immorality, society eventually collapses and falls from within, as did ancient Rome. So, whatever the case, our worldview ideas have consequences. Our worldviews do affect the way we think, and the way we think affects the way we act. And if you want to be treated like human beings, You need a culture that's built upon the belief that the God of the Bible created the heavens and the earth. Now, we don't have time to go into all of God's attributes. I'm just going to quote two verses for you. One, Genesis 1.1, the first verse of the Bible. And God says there, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And there's so much that we could pull out of that. That in the beginning, before anything was created, God already existed. So, God is eternal. It's not a limited God. It's an eternal, unlimited God, and this God is not equated with the universe. but created the universe from nothing and exists separately from the universe and sustains the universe in existence. Psalm 19.1, King David said, The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of His hand. So God has not left us without a witness, even for those who have not read the Bible. The invisible creator, has proven His existence through His visible creation. And so we don't have an excuse, as Paul says in Romans 1, for suppressing that truth and for denying the fact that God exists. So what I want us to do right now is to take a look at some of these different worldviews and then very briefly respond to them. Atheism is the belief that there is no God, okay? To be totally honest with you, atheism is probably one of the weakest, if not the weakest, worldview in the history of philosophy. Now, I'm not just trying to sling mud at atheists, and I've debated many atheists, I have many atheists who are my friends, But the fact of the matter is, you search the history of Western philosophy. Philosophy is supposed to be the love of wisdom. You wouldn't always know that if you look into the beliefs of different philosophers. But, in the history of Western philosophy, which has been going on for about 2,500 years, over 2,500 years, you'll find only a small, like one generation here, early on in the history of philosophy, Thales and Aximander and Aximenes, some Greek philosophers from the Milesian school who believed that everything could be explained in materialistic terms. In other words, only matter exists, there is no God. Now keep in mind, these guys are refuting the ancient Greek myths, saying, no, when it thunders and lightenings it's not because the gods are slapping each other around, that's a fairy tale. There's some natural cause there. Then these guys went a little bit too far and said, in fact, I bet if you give us enough time, we'll find natural, physical causes for everything, because only the physical exists. Okay? And by the way, atheism, it always leads. Ultimately it leads to the recognition, no God, therefore no such thing as truth, no such thing as absolute morality, so what's right for you is right for you, doesn't have to be right for me and vice versa, so you get the ancient Greek skeptics. And then that brings on a philosopher, like an ancient philosopher Thrasymachus, who said might is right. If there's really no such thing as right and wrong, then whoever's the strongest, he will dictate what is right and what is wrong. It might be the guy with the biggest muscles, but then about 10 or 15 little guys can band together, and now they're the strongest ones. They're in charge. And so then the big guy gets together with a few other big guys, and they figure out, you know, if we throw rocks at these little guys, then we got more power than them. And then the little guys invent the bow and arrow, but whoever's got the most power... He's going to dictate what is right and what is wrong. The sad thing is, is with modern atheism, which only really, only the first half of the 20th century did atheism really reign. Now the problem is, is some of these old dynasty atheists are still teaching at our universities. They have tenure, they can't be fired. Until they die out, atheism's not going to be a thing of the past. The debate that I take and my friends take, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, we're really just doing a little mop-up job on the final atheist, but atheism is a dinosaur of the past for all practical purposes, but its effects, we're still feeling its effects, and unfortunately, too, it doesn't mean that there's going to be a big return to Christianity. The return of the movement now is towards pantheism, New Age-type pantheism. But whatever the case, we have our modern Thrasymachus, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that if God is dead, morality is dead as well, and unfortunately we haven't had Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle type, or Saint Augustine type, to argue that there is such a thing as right and wrong. There are real moral laws that exist that are not material. I mean, things like love. You can't weigh love. You can't throw it, you can't bounce it, you can't tell me what color it is. There are non-material entities that exist that are real things. Thou shalt not kill is a real command. It's a real, it doesn't have to be physical to be real. And that's why atheism is such a weak worldview. It says only the physical exists. So when I debated Dan Barker at Bellevue Community College, and this is a big-time atheist, okay? This guy's been on Oprah Winfrey, he's been on Phil Donahue, he's been on Hannity and Collins, and I asked him, how much does a thought weigh? And he said, oh, you can weigh it. And I said, are you telling me that a thought is a chemical reaction, nothing but a chemical reaction that occurs inside someone's brain? And he said, yeah. This is the same guy who was using Timothy McVeigh's act of blowing up the Oklahoma City bombing as an argument against God. Why would God allow such evil? So my response to him was, why are you so hard on Timothy McVeigh? How can you call his actions evil when he was just responding to a chemical reaction inside his brain? I mean, if I... I just had a mole removed. You know, people don't, when they find out, say, what happened to your face there? I had a mole removed. They don't say, how could you? You call yourself a Christian and you grew a mole? And on your face, I didn't have a choice, the mole thing just happens. It's a biological thing, I'm out of control of that. Maybe your face didn't grow a mole, my face did. So you're not going to get down on me and say, don't go listening to that Fernandez guy who grew a mole on his face. If your pastor catches some kind of bug and gets a bad flu, you're not going to say, Boy, can you believe that? He was supposed to preach on Sunday, and he comes down with the flu? Boy, that's... It's not a choice. It's not a choice he makes. He doesn't choose to get the flu. I don't choose to grow a mole. That's a biological thing. So if there's no immaterial, no non-material, non-physical soul where we make decisions and then those decisions act upon the brain, okay? If there's no non-material soul, then we should not be held accountable for our actions. Yet atheists want prisons just as much as Christians do. So we do hold people responsible for their actions. So what we're saying is you really did make a choice. You made the choice, and from making that choice you created some chemical changes in your body, but the chemical changes in your body didn't make you do it, because you are ultimately non-physical, and you can be held accountable for your free choices. But whatever the case, atheism is not... atheism is... They just try to explain away obvious aspects of human experience, like moral laws. Oh, there really is no such thing as right and wrong. Oh, do atheists really believe that? Do they really believe there's no such thing as right and wrong? No. Because you don't forget, the atheists always tell you we shouldn't teach Christianity in the public schools. So what are they saying? They're telling the Christian, look, and when the Christian says homosexuality is a sin, saying, look, you are wrong to call the actions of another person wrong, because there is no such thing as wrong. It doesn't make sense. Even the atheist has to live like Christianity is true, and like there is such a thing as right and wrong. explains away obvious things like the beginning of the universe, the existence of absolute truth, the existence of absolute morality. It says, well, those things really don't exist or whatever. Given enough time, science will prove the universe is eternal, which all the available evidence shows the universe had a beginning. Or atheism will end up being a non-explanation, just saying, well, Bertrand Russell said about the universe in his debate with Frederick Copleston, a Jesuit priest. Copleston asked him, what should we say about the origin of the universe? And Bertrand Russell said, we should say it's just there. Well, if an atheist believes in moral values, moral laws, that killing innocent people is really wrong, I guess the atheist would have to say, well, the moral laws are just there. An absolute truth is just there. Okay? So, it's either a total non-explanation, which makes it a lousy worldview, since the worldview's supposed to explain these aspects of human experience, Or it tries to explain them away and say, yeah, those things aren't really real, they just appear to be real. I mean, atheists like Dan Barker will deny the existence of truth. So, really, there's no way for him to win a debate. As good as he sounds, boy, this guy could sell a lot of cards. He's in the wrong line of work. He should be a politician. He should be a politician because he's a real sharp talker and stuff. But the fact of the matter is, he rejects the existence of God and he's consistent enough to acknowledge that if there is no God, there's no such thing as absolutely true. Which means if his view is correct, even atheism isn't true. Because there's no such thing as true. So his view can't be true. It's automatically false. So, whatever the case, hey, to refute atheism all we have to show is there's no adequate explanation for the existence of the universe, Intelligent design that we find in the universe, the morality we find in the universe, absolute truth. Atheism offers no real explanation for any of these things. Every time an atheist tries to come up with an explanation, in the end it's something like counting noses. I had two atheist students. admitted to me that if their atheism was true, and that they believe that each society determines what is right and what is wrong, they admitted to me that if their atheism is true, that 150 years ago it was not wrong for people to put the whip to the back of a man just because he had a different color in his skin. And I just shook my head, we had an audience and everything, I just shook my head and said, if that's what your atheism produces, on that basis alone, I would trash the atheistic worldview. If your worldview can't call a horrible thing like slavery evil, It's time to go out and get a new worldview. I asked Dan Barker during that debate, rape and incest, are they wrong for all people, at all times, in all places? You know what his response was? No. He was honest enough to admit that his atheism You can't call them wrong for all people at all times and all places. He could say, I would rather people not do that, but they're not really wrong unless the God of the Bible exists. And deep down inside we know, no doubt about it, rape and incest are wrong for all people at all times and all places. Therefore, God exists. See, if you don't have the perfectly straight line, if you don't have perfection, then there's no way to determine, well, that's a crooked line, that's imperfect, because evil is a perversion of that which is good. If there's no ultimate good, i.e. God, then there's no basis to call anything evil. If there's no absolute moral law giver, then there's no such thing as absolute moral laws. A modern scientist has proven anything. He's proven that the universe had a beginning, and whatever has a beginning needs a cause. Therefore, the universe needs a cause. Now, people could say, well, maybe the universe caused its own existence. Well, think about that. Can something pre-exist its own existence in order to bring its own existence about? No, no. Quentin Smith and many other atheist philosophers are now saying that the universe popped into existence totally out of nothing, totally without a cause. It doesn't happen. It does not happen. When we see a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, we know it's the art of illusion, he's tricking us. Rabbits don't pop into existence, neither does the entire universe. The design in the universe. Do you realize atheists are telling us that all the order and complexity in the universe, a single-celled animal, enough highly complex information to fill a library with information? Do you realize that the atheist says that all got here by chance? through this big explosion called the Big Bang? That's not scientific. That is not scientific. When have we ever scientifically examined a random explosion that produced more and more order and complexity out of chaos? It doesn't happen. Explosions take things from a state of order and produce chaos. Okay? It doesn't get more complex, it gets more random. And so, even if you wanted to cling to the Big Bang model, which I don't think we need to do, but even if you wanted to cling to that, you would still have to assume the existence of something like the God of the Bible to take this random, chaotic explosion and to somehow work more and more order out. I mean, the atheist doesn't believe there was just this and there was nothing, and then boom, there was this big explosion, and that produced all the order in the universe. No. This thing has been going on for 15 to 18 billion years, and it continues to produce more and more order and complexity as time goes forward, and then they turn to the Christian and say, I can't believe in your God, it takes too much blind faith. Either an intelligent being caused all the intelligent design that we have in the universe today, and that would be Christianity, or a chaotic random explosion produced all the order and complexity in the universe by accident, and continues to produce more and more order and complexity by accident. I mean, we're multiplying billions upon billions of accidents here. that are all producing more and more order. It just doesn't work. It does not work. And that's why atheism has been short-lived in the history of mankind. That's why Paul says in Romans 1, you reject the existence of the true God of the Bible, you end up bowing down before a statue of four-legged creatures. We thought we could throw out God and be atheists. We threw out God, threw him out of the schools in the 1960s, and already in the 1960s we were already dropping acid and worshipping rocks. And we thought, well, that was the 1960s, that was a time of counterculture, those weirdos are gone. No, they're not. They went out and got haircuts, they shaved their beards, they got washed, they brushed their teeth, they threw on three-piece suits, and now they're in Congress. Okay? When we had a president who was saying, what do you mean by the word is? Okay? That shows that he shaved his throat. He shaved off his beard and mustache. Hopefully he stopped smoking pot, I'm not too sure on that one. But when everything's said and done, his views have not changed one iota. Same with Al Gore. Al Gore still loves hugging trees. But see, with the counterculture, what they realized was protesting and blowing things up on college campuses does not work. You want to beat the system, let's start dressing like those guys, wearing a three-piece suit, let's start looking dignified, let's cut our hair, and let's get elected to office, and that's the way we can make the change we want to make. But that counterculture movement that invited gurus from India to come into our country and give us a new religious experience, those guys are now occupying high places in our land. So, atheism inevitably... You know, Jesus said, man does not live on bread alone, Matthew 4.4. Atheism says, no, that's all we got is bread. We can live on bread alone. No. When atheism takes over the schools, people say, well, you know, I like this idea that I can do whatever I feel like doing, so I'm going to do that. However, I've got to have some kind of religious experience. I know there's something out there greater than this. something more to life in the physical realm. And so what's happened in America, we've rejected atheism and have jumped on the New Age pantheistic bandwagon, the belief that God is the universe. It says God is the universe and man is part of the universe, man is God. So we can have a religious experience, but we can still accept practical atheism. You decide what is right or wrong for you. But you don't have to accept philosophical atheism. You can have a religious experience and acknowledge there's mortal life in the material realm, and when you want to worship, all you've got to do is get in front of a mirror and you can look at your God. Several problems with pantheism. Number one, it fails to explain the existence of evil. That's why, you know, Lucas, George Lucas with his Star Wars movies, I know we've got at least one Star Wars addict here. I'm not going to mention any names. I don't want to embarrass the guy behind the camera. Is it the Star Trek 2? I could run down a long list. I don't want to. But whatever the case, it's not the Lord be with you. Lucas wanted to introduce Eastern pantheistic thought to Western minds, and so he did so with his Star Wars movie, because when we think we're being entertained, that's when you can really educate people, or indoctrinate people, because we drop our guards. We just think it's popcorn, a Coke, and a movie, and we don't even realize we're being indoctrinated. But it's the force be with you, not the Lord be with you. And the force, in the end, is a dark side and a light side. You see, there's no basis. If God is non-personal, if God is an it, much like electricity, if God's got more in common with electricity, a non-personal entity, than with a personal being, then there's no moral categories there. And so it fails to explain the existence of evil. Whatever is, is. There is no duality, no distinction between right and wrong, true and false. All duality is removed, which in itself is a fallacy because either pantheism is true or it's false. Neither you're a pantheist or you're not. Well, if there's no dualities, then everybody would be a pantheist. They argue, the pantheist argues that the physical world, consistent pantheists argue that the physical world is an illusion. So there is no physical world, there are no physical bodies, and your individual soul is an illusion. Okay? because your individual soul is really part of the world's soul. Everything is one being. The problem is, pantheists also believe in reincarnation, but reincarnation needs physical bodies and individual souls, because individual souls, when the physical body dies, the individual soul is reincarnated in another body, and it goes on and on. But if pantheism is true, there are no physical bodies and there are no individual souls. So how can you be both a pantheist and believe in reincarnation? You have yet to meet a pantheist who wasn't a reincarnationist. They argue that God is unknowable. You can't put God in rational categories, you can't really know Him. Well, if God is unknowable, how can we know that pantheism is true? Because then we'd have to know something about God. if we knew pantheism was true. We can't live like the world is an illusion. If you and your pantheist friend are walking on a train track and you hear a train whistle, the pantheist will jump off the train track as quick as the theist will. Okay? So then they say the physical world's an illusion, but they really can't live that way. No reason to be moral. If you believe that God exists, the God of theism, then there's good reasons not to hurt your neighbor. But if your neighbor is giving you a hard time, and you think, well, it might just slow down my reincarnation process, it might just slow down my attaining of Nirvana, my escape from the cycle of reincarnation, and killing my neighbor is worth it. So what if it slows me down an extra million years? It's worth it, because that guy really gets on my nerves. That's not enough incentive. to do the right thing. But if Christianity is true, then our actions have eternal consequences. One other thing I would add to the reputation of pantheism, pantheism teaches us that there is only one mind, only one mind exists. So every time a pantheist tries to persuade you to become a pantheist, That is one mind trying to convince another mind that only one mind exists. It's self-refuting at its core. And so pantheism doesn't have a legacy. Now, it's really where when you confront pantheists and you point out their contradictions, they think you're paying them a compliment, because they don't believe in categories like truth and falsehood, or so they claim, but they believe their pantheism is true. Again, if you can't live consistently with your worldview, it's time to get a new worldview. And other than Christian theism, you cannot live consistently with your worldview. Panentheism, where the universe is God's body, teaches that God is both finite and infinite in His basic nature, both limited and unlimited in His basic nature. That's a contradiction. An unlimited being that has limitations is a limited being, okay? Now, somebody might say, well, then what about Jesus? You claim He's both limited and unlimited because He's God, the unlimited God, but became a limited man. And he didn't cease to be God. Yeah, but keep in mind, Jesus is one person with two natures forever. It's what theologians call the hypostatic union. In his divine nature, he is unlimited, and in his human nature, he is limited, so that he could say he didn't know the day or the hour of his return. Only the Father knows, he didn't know. So that's like a truck with two gas tanks, one could be empty, the other could be full. But you can't have one gas tank that is both empty and full at the same time in the same way, and that's what pan-emptyism teaches. So really the God of pan-emptyism is a limited God. Well the problem is, a finite, changing, limited God is not big enough to ground the existence of everything else. In fact, it needs its own existence to be grounded by an unlimited, unchanging, infinite God. In other words, the only way to salvage the panentheistic God is to make it a lesser God and say that it was created by the God of the Bible and the God of the Bible sustains it in existence. Okay? So it doesn't disprove theism. It would need the God of theism just to keep it in existence. Deism. Deism says God created the universe, but doesn't intervene. So Thomas Jefferson cut out all the miracles of the New Testament. You know, he just thought that the New Testament just teaches morality, and all the miracles are fairy tales and all. Well, creation is God's greatest miracle. Why can't He perform lesser ones? Thomas Jefferson would say, well, the laws of nature, you know, a miracle would violate the laws of nature. The laws of nature can't be violated. What are you talking about? God's the one who set the laws of nature in motion. He's the one who invented them. He can supersede them any time he wants. God doesn't have a problem. He can't say, oh, you know, I became a man and I wanted to ascend to heaven, but I can't do it. It violates the law of gravity. He made the law of gravity. It's no big deal for Him. He wants to go up, He goes up. Okay? He's God. And so God can supersede the laws of nature. And if God cared enough to create the universe, if He cared enough to make rational, moral beings that could communicate with Him and fellowship with Him, then it makes sense to me that any time He wants to catch our attention, He would do things in a unique, somewhat strange kind of way, so that, you know, if he wants to say, okay, my son became a man, and just in case you missed that, I'm going to raise his body from the dead. And most of the time, dead bodies stay dead, but not him. His dead body came back to life and stayed alive, never to die again. Get the hint? He claimed to be God, he rose from the dead, he is God. Do you know what the atheists will say? Or the deists? They'll say, no, no, dead bodies stay dead. That does not refute Christianity. The miracles of Christianity, there's no way for God to get our attention if the miracles of Christianity happened all the time. If dead bodies always rise, then it wouldn't be a miracle when Jesus was raised from the dead. So, the fact that dead bodies usually stay dead, almost always stay dead, that's not evidence against Christianity. It's not evidence against miracles. It's the backdrop so that we can make sense of miracles. So, don't tell me, like the atheist says, there's evil in the world. Don't tell me. I know there's evil in the world. That's why God wrote the Bible. If we didn't fall into God, do you think God would have written a Bible? about telling us how his son, what's the ultimate answer to the problem of evil? The ultimate answer to the problem of evil is not a philosophical answer that you can write on a chalkboard in a philosophy lecture hall. Because the problem of evil is not just an intellectual problem for philosophers to throw back and forth, it's an existential problem, it's a problem of human experience, it's a real problem. And real problems take real solutions. Okay? The real solution to the problem of evil is God became a man, because He loved us so much, God became a man and died on the cross for our sins, and then rose from the dead to conquer death for us. Now, the atheists can talk about, oh, evil this and evil that, what's your solution to the problem of evil? Most atheists say, well, evil really doesn't exist. I'm just saying, if it did exist, if Christianity is true, those things would be evil, and blah, blah, blah. All right, most humans don't buy that argument. In prosperous countries, the most prosperous countries on Earth, Biblical Christianity is in decline, like in America and Europe. In third world countries, where human suffering is at its peak, that's where Biblical Christianity is growing in leaps and bounds. So suffering, if it does anything, it tends to draw people to God, not away from God. Okay? So, but whatever the case, the real solution to the problem of evil is in the name of Jesus. So, the atheist wants to talk about evil. Okay, Mr. Atheist, what's your solution to evil, to the problem of evil? And don't tell me evil doesn't exist, because you know it does. You know it exists. If that atheist, if his house gets robbed, he knows he's a victim of evil. He knows evil is real. Real problems demand real solutions. What real solution to the problem of evil does atheism produce? What real solution to the problem of evil do any of these worldviews, other than Christian theism, what do they produce? Finite godism, where God is limited because of evil, you know, Rabbi Harold Kushner, His son died in a tragic car accident at age 14, so Rabbi Harold Kushner rejected his Jewish beliefs and instead, rather than believing in an all-powerful God, he started to believe and to teach that God is limited in His power and God might lose the battle to evil. in the end. So we need to help God fight evil. We need to forgive God for making us imperfect, because God makes mistakes. All this is from Rabbi Harold Krishner. And by the way, you don't have to go to Barnes & Noble to buy his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, to find out about a problem. I bought it in the Krishner books, because it had a stack this big. When bad things happen to good people, $1.95 you can buy those books. So some Christian walks in, some new Christian, they're hurting, when bad things happen to good people, sounds like a good book, I'll buy two of them, $1.95 apiece, you know. And this guy is saying we've got to forgive God for his mistakes. We've got to help God defeat evil, because God might lose the battle to evil. I explained to the owner of the Christian bookstore, look, look, and I read these quotes to this guy, because I knew who Harold Kushner is. And the guy would not remove it from his Christian bookstore because the quotes that I was reading to him, he didn't even know enough about biblical Christianity to know that this guy's from the other side. Even a traditional Jewish thinker like Rabbi Daniel Lapham would consider Kushner a heretic. But, whatever the case, a finite, limited God doesn't deserve our worship. We worshiped something that was saying, you are the ultimate in worth. And if God's limited by evil, God's not the ultimate in worth. He doesn't deserve worship. A limited God would need an infinite cause. He would still need the God of the Bible to ground it in existence. And a limited God can't guarantee that evil will be defeated. Why side with God against evil when in the end evil might win? The Hitlers and the Stalins might win if Rabbi Harold Kushner is right. And evil, by the way, does not prove that God is limited. Okay? You know, the atheists used to say, An all-good God would not want evil to exist. An all-powerful God can prevent evil from existing. Evil exists, therefore no all-good, all-powerful God exists. The problem with that is putting a time limit, an unnecessary time limit on God. Because all we can say is an all-good God does not like evil, an all-powerful God can defeat evil, therefore an all-good, all-powerful God will eventually defeat evil, or may even be in the process of defeating evil, and lo and behold, when I read my Bible, through the incarnation, God becoming a man, His death, resurrection, and return, the Lord Jesus defeats evil. Polytheism is the belief that there's many gods, but several gods, whether it's two or an infinite number of gods, like our Mormon friends think, several gods would limit each other. But limited beings are dependent on other things for their continued existence, Therefore, eventually you have to arrive at an unlimited being that is the ground of the existence of all these lesser gods. Okay? And by the way, the Christians, we call these lesser gods the demons. The ancient Greeks, they had a word for the gods, daemonium. And the ancient Christians and ancient Jews said what they call the gods are actually fallen angels and unclean spirits and evil spirits. That's where we got our word demon from. So, this idea that the Mormons have that there's many limited gods just does not make sense. In the end, the only worldview that makes sense is theism, the belief in a personal God. It makes no sense that we have personality, that we have a will. that we are moral beings, that we are rational beings. It makes no sense unless we were caused by a rational, moral being. So, theism is the belief in a personal God who is transcendent, beyond the universe, created the universe, and exists separately from the universe, but he is imminent. He is involved with the universe, he sustains the universe, keeps it in existence, and he can intervene and perform miracles, and this is the only worldview supported by the evidence. When you examine human existence, we find that a personal God must exist, there's no other way around it. Now let me say this, that would argue for Christian theism, or Islamic theism, or Jewish theism. So how do we know which of those three are true? And I would argue in several ways, and I can't touch on everything here, but just in closing I'll say this, that With Christian theism, we can turn to history and provide evidence that God has intervened in human life and that the Lord Jesus Christ has fulfilled hundreds of Old Testament prophecies, proving He is the Messiah, that we can provide historical evidence that He did, in fact, rise from the dead, and thus proving that His death on the cross was exactly what He said it was, It was for the salvation of mankind. He died on the cross for our sins. His resurrection proves that He is who He claimed to be. So the historical evidence shows Christianity to be true, because for Islam to be true or Judaism to be true, Jesus of Nazareth, at best, can be a prophet. At worst, He's just a regular god. But there is no way they can allow for divine Jesus. So the historical evidence goes against them. But in the end, I would say this. The God of Christian theism is more just and more loving than any other God. And right now we're just going to compare with Jewish theism and Islamic theism, because all three religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, believe in the existence of a personal God. But think about it. Paul tells us that in Romans 3, that God proves His own, demonstrates His own justice in Christ's death on the cross. In Romans 5-8, Paul tells us that God demonstrates His love toward us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. What I'm getting at is this, the God of Christian theism is superior in both His love and His justice. to the God of the Jewish faith or the God of the Islamic faith. No other God is so just that the only way for Phil Fernandes to get to heaven, God had to slaughter his justice demanded. God cannot forgive sin unless it's been paid for in full. The only way for Phil Fernandes to get to heaven was for God to slaughter his own son in my place. Yet God is also so loving that he loved a sinner like Phil Fernandez so much that he chose to slaughter his only begotten son in my place. You don't find that kind of love in the God of present stage of Judaism or in the God of Islam. God of Islam, every time, look in the Quran, every time it says, for Allah is loving and merciful. Well, that always follows a passage where they're being told to, you know, cut off the hands of the infidels, slaughter the infidels. If they won't pay you alms or convert to Islam, kill them. However, if they pay alms or convert to Islam, let them go, for Allah is merciful and forgiving. That kind of mercy, you know, who needs hatred? But I'll just close with this, you know, my daughter, she's been going to teach. would go to sleep at night as a little girl. She would get all white and pale, and I would have to stare at her. for 20 minutes, literally 20 minutes, just to see her chest rise, to see that she was breathing. She's going through almost a comatose state. And for parents, that's like, you know, I mean, you're standing there biting your nails, thinking, is this kid breathing or not? Am I imagining this? She looks perfectly still. I just stood over her, and we're watching. Now with her son, my grandson, when he sleeps at our house, It gets all white, and I had to stare at him for a long time to see that shaft moving, okay? Well, there was a father who had a son, and he loved his little son much more than I could love my daughter, much more than I could love my grandson. And his father would look at his little baby, His little son. And I'm sure the father would watch his son and make sure that chest was moving at night. Because he loved his little boy. You think the father didn't love the son? The father loved the son. The father watched the son. That angel surrounded him and protected him. Satan and all his demons would love nothing more than the crusty existence of that little baby. The Father loved the Son, His only begotten Son, yet He loved us so much that the day came when He was willing to have His Son's glory for you and for me, even though we don't deserve it. Now, you try to tell me some other worldview, some other religion other than Christianity, that as a God, that has that kind of love for us, because it just ain't going to happen. Next time you read John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, you remember what he gave. Christian theism is the true worldview, the only worldview supported by the evidence.