All right, let me pray first and then we'll get started. Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for your truth. We pray that you would help us today in the class and in the sermon and the service to worship you with our minds and our hearts. I pray that this subject would be fruitful that what might look like an academic part of it would bear fruit, that we would be better apologists being able to make a defense for the hope that is within us to anyone who asks. I pray that you would use my words toward that end. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, so this is, it's week two, but it's the third session, because I did one on Wednesday, because we had extra, an extra space, so I put a second session in. This one is going to be called, What's the Difference Between Proof and Evidence? And you could put it as a subtitle. Why does that difference matter? It does. You'll see some practical application as we go. I'll probably deviate from my notes because my notes were long. I got carried away. And I put a lot of footnotes and other such things because I was having so much fun interacting with different authors. But some of it's pretty academic. So very often, the problem in speaking to unbelief, and I mean the unbelief of unbelievers and the unbelief of believers, is that people in our culture don't really know when a thing has been demonstrated anymore and when it hasn't. There is a glaring epistemological ignorance in our day. And you don't have to know that word, but you kind of see it when you're talking to people. You could be talking about abortion, and one person's talking about life, and the other's talking about choice. You could be talking to a Mormon, and one person's reading out of their scriptures as properly interpreted by Joseph Smith or whatever, and you've got your scriptures, and what's happening there is you're comparing apples and oranges. You're throwing apples and oranges at each other and you're wondering where is the point of departure here? That's part of what we're talking about. This ignorance of where to start and knowing when something's proven and when it's not becomes the playground of the devil. In fact, C.S. Lewis in his fictional book about the devils gives us a glimpse of it in the very first of the screw tape letters where screw tape advises his understudy devil Wormwood about his patient by saying this, It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time, humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not. And if it was proved, they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing, and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered. So that's the voice of a demon. And they're in on this, this exact thing that seems pretty academic. So here's how I'm breaking this down on what's the difference between proof and evidence. Defining proof and evidence, avoiding proof and evidence, placing proof and evidence. In other words, getting them in their proper order. I guarantee you most of the problems in apologetics are just not understanding this. Most of them, vast majority of them. In fact, a lot of the, problems in theology and debates you have with other Christians. This is the problem happening. So, let's get to definition first, defining proof and evidence. Here's the difference. I'm just going to say it in three different ways, and hopefully you'll catch it. Proof belongs to formal disciplines such as logic and mathematics. Evidence belongs to empirical disciplines such as the physical sciences and history. I'll say it in two more ways in a second. Let me write something on the board. And I'm going to have to mix metaphors for a second here. I'm going to have to put a foundation to a house. And I'm going to put proof. And then I'm gonna put the house resting on top of that, and I'm gonna put evidence. Now, here's where I'm gonna mix the metaphor. Actually, the reason this is at the foundation is because proof has to do with what we're about to talk about. Necessity, I'm gonna put it at the top, and now, and this is why it's gonna be so tricky, because here, the foundation's at the bottom, but actually what that means is that the eternal truths above this line are the invisible things of God. They're always true. They're unchangeable. They're in God's mind. And below that line are the, what we're gonna call contingent necessity. Well, let me just match them up here. Let's put necessary instead of necessity, okay? Necessary truths versus contingent truths. So I know they're, I know I'm flip-flopping them there, but just bear with me. Here's two more ways to say it. Proofs are of necessity evidence of probability. Proof deals with what must be and what cannot be. Evidence with what happens to be or what most likely happened. Proof and evidence, here's something they have in common. They're both objective. Now, it's true that sometimes when we speak of certainty, we're speaking about some subjective feeling that's supposed to accompany proof or evidence. Sometimes we speak of a threshold of evidence that's beyond any reasonable doubt, as in a courtroom. But when we speak in this way, we're starting to blur the lines between the objective qualities of the proof and evidence and the subjective qualities of our assenting to them. And so we may start to confuse proof with persuasion. So when I say, here is a proof for the existence of God, I do not care, nor should you, that you, well, I don't mean it like that. I should care that you get it. I should care, for you, that you get it. But I'm not talking about that right now. That's what I mean by care. When we're talking about proof, we're not talking about your levels of feelings. We're talking about something that must be. It's an object of knowledge. It doesn't matter what you feel about it. It doesn't matter what I feel about it, or whether we understand it. Or, well, that doesn't work for them. Or, well, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't see it. OK, well, you're not proof. You're not mathematics or logic. Okay? You're not necessity, and neither am I. So we're starting to confuse the subjective feeling of assurance with the necessity in a logical or mathematical proof. So, understanding that proof is objective and that evidence is objective provides an anchor when we're having conversations with unbelievers or believers similar to the anchor that we should have when we take the Bible seriously, when Paul says in Romans 1 that all sinners really do know that God exists. That does something for us when we know that, when we believe that. Similar here. If you get this, this will start to provide an anchor in you to not start defining and changing your message by how much they get it. Is it doing it for them? Proof begins with a first principle, or sometimes it's called an axiom. If you're geometry, that's what you would call it. An axiom is a proposition or principle that is considered to be self-evident. It's the agreed upon starting point. But not all axioms are equal. Not all axioms are equally valid. And that's primarily because every premise to an argument is always assuming a bunch of other things. And those other things might need to be demonstrated to the person you're talking to, or they might not. And the key is, in our conversation, to make sure that the unbeliever can come to grips with our premises, that we're not speaking past them. Whether or not he agrees with them, at least we should make them see what we're talking about. Now, arguments that are aimed at the proof of necessity are broken down into two kinds. So let's, well I don't want to erase this. But I'm good anyway. I'll just do this in here. Blue, you can't see blue. So let's do this. Contingent under evidence, those are gonna come after. And necessity under proof. So let's just fit that in there. Now, of these proofs, there's going to be basically two kinds. And you hear us say this all the time in classes, and if you go to Shepherd's College, and maybe some people don't have a background in this, it's just a little Latin. One of them is a priori, and the other is a posteriori. They're two lanes of traffic in our reasoning. They're the two ways we think. Now one of these just means basically from what is before and one is from what is after, but that doesn't really help us. So in philosophical terms you would cash these out as before experience, that's a priori, and after experience, that's a posteriori. So a priori truths are truths which would be true whether the world ever existed or not. In other words, they don't depend on occurrences, or events, or effects, or the way it happened to happen, things that are probable. These must always be true, no matter what world existed. They're necessary truths, they're unchanging truths. A posteriori truths are truths which, once we experience something, we observe something. So if you're a student in the academy, even though I've just made this upside down so it'll totally mess you up, a posteriori thinking is sort of thinking inductively. You take things in this world, you observe them, and you draw general conclusions from those things. So a posteriori thinking is the thinking that you think of when you're doing science, or even history. A priori thinking is the thinking you're doing when you're doing mathematics or logic. You're starting, you're doing deductive reasoning. You're going from general principles to particular conclusions. Now, that's a little oversimplified, but that's what we have to do because we only have 50 minutes or so. Okay? So, how much of this do I want to skip? A posteriori arguments depend on our experience. Our experience is the starting point. What I have seen is the starting point. But what's the basic problem with that? And I'm not saying you shouldn't think like that, we have to think like that, we have no choice, but is there a shortcoming? If I say all swans are white, what do you need to, come on kids, you know this already, you've done this all year last year with David Hume and the problem of induction. All swans are white, what's the problem, what do I need? I need to be omniscient and? Omnipresent? Why do I need to be omnipresent? OK, but what if there's swans in the future that'll? OK. So I need omniscience. I need omnipresence. Stuff like that. So there's a basic problem of induction. It doesn't mean don't do it. It's messed up. It just means it's limited. Surprise, surprise, we're limited. We have finite minds. The a priori argument does not depend on each experience or tomorrow. So for example, married bachelors, square circles, what's the problem? Academy students, I am picking on you. Married bachelors, do I need to send out a census worker to find out if there's any married bachelors in a square circle home? Why? What do you mean? Maybe you haven't looked everywhere. Ah. So you're saying it can't possibly be anywhere. Okay, so you're starting to get this? An a priori truth, an a priori proof, is something that either must be, or it's contrary, cannot be. And if it's contrary cannot be, by the law of the excluded middle, it must be. it would be impossible for it to not be. Okay, now this was called into question in the 18th century by David Hume, but he didn't know what he was talking about. We already covered that last year in the Academy. He was wrong, because the statement contradicts that. Basically, he said that the contrary of any particular thing implies no contradiction, which is just another way of saying nothing is necessary. But if nothing is necessary, finish his problem. If no one thing is necessarily so, then the truth that nothing's necessarily so is not necessarily so. Down the toilet, right? Okay, good. All right. Within the system of logic, there's various ways to test for validity, logical consistency. And these constitute proofs that yield necessary truths. There's many things that you guys have covered in the last two years in logic class that test for validity. Syllogisms, detecting formal fallacies in syllogisms, Venn diagrams, truth tables, rules of inference, and more involved proofs start to prove whether or not a thing, but then there comes the problem. A David Hume type would say, or a materialist would say, yes, logic and mathematics is proof about necessity, but not about things, because it's never talking about things. But what's the problem with that? If mathematical and logical statements that are necessarily the case are not talking about things, by the way, why would a materialist want to believe that? Okay, numbers. But he doesn't, you know, stay up at night sweating thinking about numbers, though. What is he really trying to get at? What is he really trying to plunge the dagger through? Not numbers. He doesn't care about numbers. In fact, many atheists are mathematicians. Metaphysical things like? God. Right. So, if something is both necessary and a thing, the materialist has a problem. And so you have to separate these two things, analytical a priori truths and a posteriori truths. That's why this matters. Like, oh, it's a bunch of Latin stuff. But that's what the whole debate was about during the Enlightenment. All right. Well, the presuppositional school of Christian apologetics they have a proof, an argument that they like a lot. It's called the transcendental argument for God's existence. And we're gonna look at the arguments for God's existence in a future week. But right now we're just introducing this idea of proof. And in this transcendental argument, apologists like Greg Bonson and John Frame, it's a kind of what we're gonna call conditional proof, which I'll explain in a second. John Frame explains how it works. He says, quote, That method, this transcendental argument, does not try to prove that genuine knowledge is possible. Rather, it presupposes that it is. Then it asks, what must the world, the mind, and human thought be like if this presupposition is true? The transcendental method then goes ahead to ask what the necessary conditions of human knowledge are. So a conditional proof, which is all it is, I'll just do it over here, there's no more room on the board. A conditional proof doesn't try to prove everything and then go down into the world. I like that kind of proof. Totally a priori proof. What it does is it picks something in the world, say morality, or human reasoning, or whatever, and it just inserts it into the argument, it presupposes it, an X of some kind. And it says, OK, let's agree as our axiom, as our presupposition, that there is a moral law. And C.S. Lewis' moral law argument could be considered an example of this. Or let's assume that reason is valid. What must be true about the whole world or beyond it, what must be the preconditions of this presupposition? So this is our axiom, or our presupposition. Presupposition is the word we're probably going to use much more often in the course of this class. So let's just use that. So we're going to assume something about the world, and we're going to get the person that we're talking to to agree with that presupposition. Then in the conditional proof, you're just going to argue for what must be all the conditions. or the preconditions of this thing. Now, does your worldview contain these preconditions where this agreed upon presupposition? Now, obviously, the atheist is going to want to believe in valid reasoning, right? Because he thinks, he's not a postmodern, he's just a modern atheist, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris. formerly Christopher Hitchens, was an atheist. And they're going to want to say that there's valid reasoning, because they think that valid reasoning and the scientific method, if you look out there, will show us that Christianity was just an old fairy tale. So he's going to want to believe in valid reasoning. So get the atheist to believe in valid reasoning and then argue what must be the conditions in the world in order for valid reason to exist. Now, we're going to get into that in a future week. Right now I'm just showing you what proofs are trying to do. According to Cornelius Van Til, he was sort of the father of presuppositional apologetics, he says, there is absolute certain proof for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism, end quote. Now consider for a second that the clarity of God's general revelation that we talked about in Romans 1 20 and Psalm 19, that God's speaking everywhere, that it's absolutely clear. Consider that the clarity of God's general revelation actually demands this level of certainty. So when we look back in history, maybe, and we look at different arguments for God's existence, and we see that they might be lacking in this or that point, the answer to that should be to expand on them, not to turn back on the whole enterprise of God's objective revelation. If God has been absolutely clear, as he's described in his word, in nature, then we should never shy away from using all these different elements of nature in order to show God's existence. All right. Scientific method, okay, as to evidence, that's proof. This is our biggest point, okay, the defining part. As to evidence, what is evidence and what does it do? Well, there's two basic species of kinds of evidence and methods that go with them, the methods of history and science. They have something in common, namely evidence. There's empirical stuff, there's observation, there's the physical world outside of me, space and time. That's what they have in common, but they also diverge in terms of their method. And this is going to be relevant. Hold on and you'll see an example of how it's relevant. The scientific method works by repeatable tests. It flows within a paradigm from observation, to hypothesis, to experiment, to results. Notice I said within a paradigm. When we're in third grade or whatever, we learn, and they still do it in college, which shows you they haven't elevated beyond third grade level, but the scientific method, we're told, starts with observation and so on and so on. Well, hold on a second. Does it? Do I, the observer, start with observation ever? No. I start with presuppositions. I start with money from the government, with a gun to my head that says if I don't give them the results that they want, then they'll take my grant away. I've got peer pressure. I've got a lifestyle to justify. Oh, that would never happen. And I've got all these different assumptions. I've got the operating paradigm right now, which might be right about some things, wrong about others. And then I've got a bunch of good things. That's science. presupposes quantity, causality, a knowable world, a predictable orderly cosmos, a common field of vision that I can see and you can see. And I had a list one time of 10 things that cannot be measured by science that science presupposes. So with all that said, inside of all that, it works from observation to hypothesis to experiment to results. That's science. Repeatable. The historical method works by the study of documentation, preferably primary source material. And then it compares, and it gives a trial of the testimony, similar to what would be admissible in courts of law. And so obviously, these two methods, the scientific method and the historical method, have evidence in common. That's what they have in common. They both involve observation of phenomenon in the world of space and time. And yet, the scientific method can only work in the present and future, whereas the historical method works back to the past. And both of those directions create problems for certainty. And so, as we just saw with the problem of induction, The problem with evidence, it's not really a problem, as long as we understand that proof is not the same thing as evidence. Sometimes we'll loosely speak about them as if they are. In fact, most of the time. Same people that say that if you're logical, it means you're smart, or modern, or something like that. In other words, materialistic. In other words, not logical. So logical means anti-logical. Well, the same thing here. You know, prove it to me. I didn't see it. Okay, then you don't understand what the word prove means. Proof is not about your changeable eyes matching up to changeable phenomena. It's about unchanging necessary truths, whether you like it or not, or get it or not. Okay? Now, interestingly, David Hume, the skeptic, saw this problem of induction. that you actually would have to be omniscient and omnipresent to know whether all swans are white. Swans didn't bother him too much. But he used all these other examples to show that our belief in science really depends on our belief that the future will be like the past. But we actually don't have any experience of the power behind causality or the future of it going that same way. We only put cause and effect together by what he called custom. And we don't actually have direct knowledge of the physical world. And so his empiricism led him to all out skepticism. And yet the same David Hume complained against miracles, and particularly the resurrection of Christ. And he wanted us all to have a standard of philosophical certainty applied to the resurrection. Because if this Jesus is asking me to devote 100% of my allegiance to him, then he ought to give me 100% assurance of certainty that these things happen. Well, you can't give 100% assurance that any historical thing happened, but that's true of atheistic historical things or theistic historical things, if there could be such a thing as atheistic historical things. Okay, so he was mixing up mathematical and logical categories with historical categories. C.S. Lewis, in responding to this, and in addition to a lot of other really funny things that Lewis did to put the smack down on Hume, he also said, you can't find out who won the Battle of Waterloo by digging up Napoleon and the combatants and making them fight it again in a test tube. that misunderstands the difference between what science is and what history is. Okay? So there's a difference between these two methods, and understanding this will help you be able to, you know, lasso people back into sanity when they bring up things like this. All right, a lot more could be said about that. Now let's talk about avoiding proof and evidence. You might not believe this, but it turns out that Christians have often tried to avoid proof and evidence every bit as much as unbelievers have tried to avoid it. One common objection to doing positive apologetics coming from Christians is that even if you succeed with your arguments about God's existence to an unbeliever, the skeptic is still light years away from the cross. In other words, the traditional arguments for God's existence always conclude with something less than the God of the Bible. And so you have this idea of the God of philosophers versus the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Well, that is a highly dubious objection. Consider the arguments for God's existence, if you've ever heard of them. They're not trying to say everything about God, just like none of your statements about God. Just like the preacher, when he reads from a particular passage of Scripture, isn't saying everything about God. Is he giving you the God of the philosophers instead of the God of the Bible? Or is he just giving you enough of his own finite speech because it's the best he can do? Think about this. The ontological argument concludes that there is a greatest conceivable being, or there is a necessary being. Isn't that true about God? He's necessary. The cosmological argument concludes that there is a first cause, or a prime mover. Isn't that true? The teleological argument concludes that there is an intelligent designer of nature. The moral argument, that there is a transcendent lawgiver. and the epistemological argument that there is an infinite mind and a ground of all of our knowledge. Now, if somebody says to me, yeah, but Matt, isn't God so much more than any one of these things? Of course he is. But it would be a straw man to imagine any of these arguments demanding that this is all that God is. That's a non sequitur. It simply does not follow that Thomas Aquinas meant to communicate that all God is is Aristotle's prime mover. That's a straw man. So these arguments are not meant to show us everything about God. They're not meant to be a replacement for the gospel. They're meant to be exactly what they are, and they follow through. Now, theistic philosophers sometimes give us very sophisticated ways of avoiding doing the hard work of apologetics. For example, the most popular Christian theistic philosophers in the last generation, Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, have popularized the idea of what they call justified or warranted belief. And their critique of Enlightenment skepticism on this point is good, but then there's a thud. Justified or warranted belief refers to the fact that all people, everybody, believe most of what we believe without having it pass through any tests of epistemological criteria. And there's nothing wrong with that. This does not mean that there are no such tests that will fit. It simply means that we are perfectly reasonable in believing all sorts of things without consciously subjecting those things to either proof or evidence. There are many things that you learned as a child which it turns out are actually still true. You should have respected your mother or father. Jumping out of a 30-story building will make you splat. All true. Okay? And many, many, many other things. And you never subjected them to rigorous logical proofs, or evidence, or anything like that, and yet you were perfectly rational in believing that thing. Now note that such warranted beliefs have to meet the following objective criteria. They are beliefs which are not held consciously against either logic or evidence. In other words, Planning and Wolterstorff are not saying that you're perfectly reasonable to believe things against logic or evidence. That's not the point. The point is, secondly, only that they've never been subjected to logical or evident tests. But three, they have nevertheless sufficient evidence to cause the belief. Perfectly reasonable thing to do. Well, this is the strong point to their idea. This idea, by the way, goes by the name Reformed Epistemology. Don't confuse that with regular Reformed theology, even though people do, because Planting actually used to teach at Calvin College. Calvin College used to be Calvinistic, too. Oh, sorry, did I say that out loud in my out loud voice? All sorts of seminaries used to be Christian, but anyway. The trouble comes when we reduce the task of Christian apologetics to clearing this hurdle alone. The whole thing becomes an exercise in excusing ourselves to the culture and excusing ourselves from apologetics. Well, I am perfectly warranted to believe in God, even though I've never read the five ways of Thomas Aquinas. or C.S. Lewis' moral argument, or whatever. I am perfectly rational in believing God because I see Him in nature and so on, and you start to make an argument of your own, or you just say nothing at all. All truth. But, when we stop there, all we're basically doing is saying, we are not unreasonable to believe. If your kids come away from the academy, or if once I leave, and all we can say about ourselves is that we've learned that we are not crazy, then I have utterly failed you. Because part of the point here is to make your kids intellectual terrorists on campus. We don't simply want to survive in college or in the world. We want to move that way. We want the professor to be afraid of your kids, or at least greatly annoyed. With gentleness and respect, 1 Peter 15 says, by the way. Add that in there. What these guys are concluding is training a bunch of people to say, we are not unreasonable to believe, when what we should be communicating is, you would be unreasonable to disbelieve. We don't simply want epistemic permission Apologetics is about the unbeliever being served epistemic obligation. I don't care if the unbeliever thinks that I'm within my rights or I'm okay with believing, because the way he'll finish that sentence is, as long as you keep that in your little hole with all your other pink unicorns. I want him to know that he's the one that believes in pink unicorns. I want him to be on the run. And so the idea of proof here is not about excusing ourselves. It's about sending them on the run and making them retreat. Another truism that can excuse us from the task of apologetics is that any man who would ever require proof is just a rebellious fool. Well, that's true. I can justify that in scripture. Total depravity. In fact, Soren Kierkegaard once compared the apologist to a court jester, arguing for the existence of the king a few feet before his throne. And the point was the whole thing is an affront to his majesty. Well, Frame seems to say something similar by asking, what shall we think of a child who demands proof that his father is really his father before he agrees to obey? Clearly, in most cases, he's avoiding responsibility. I was going to say, you give him a good, give him a good, I knew you were thinking that in the back. Say, what am I going to do about it? I'm going to give him a good, Give him a good beat down, that's what I'm gonna do. But that's true, that's true. That would be what we would say about a child in that situation. Such proofs are for the foolish and not the wise. But the scriptures call the unbeliever a fool. Now, do we withhold the gospel message for that same reason? No, we don't. Okay, so true statement. but using it as a red herring. All right, I mentioned last week this idea of circularity. All of our thinking is circular. We always have to assume things that we're trying to prove and so on. And so some apologists will recognize that, and some people who maybe are against apologetics, again, one more reason to say, well, what's the point then? If we can't reason someone into the kingdom, if the Holy Spirit has to doink them first and so on, what's the point in arguing outside of our circle into their circle? Well, some apologists have sought to answer this question by distinguishing between what they call circularity in general, or let's just call it a normal circle, and what they call a vicious circle. In other words, one in which the audience is spoken to as if he and his questions are not invited. So R.C. Sproul was dealing with this in his book, Scripture Alone. He was analyzing the presuppositionalist way to answer the question about the Word of God versus a classical and then an evidential way to answer the question about the Word of God. And oftentimes presuppositionalists will argue in-house as if what they're going to say to the unbeliever is, I believe this because the Bible says to believe this, and the Bible is true, and the Bible says to believe this, therefore this is true, and I believe this is true based on the Bible. And what do we call that? We call that the fallacy of circular reasoning. That would be a vicious circle. In other words, one where we're speaking to the unbeliever as if we're purposely just kind of sticking up the hand and saying, look, you don't know the secret password. You can't come in. When what we should be doing is getting out of that, just a step and saying, here's what I mean by my reason to believe that the Bible is the word of God. And so the difference between a vicious circle and a normal circle is that in the former, in a vicious circle, there is a genuine fallacy of circular reasoning at work. The skeptic detects a premise that he's not going to accept, It seems to be restated in the conclusion. It's circular reasoning. And at that point, our job as Christian apologists is to expand the circle, to find out where's the point of departure? Where do he and I agree on something so that we can then work on some proof and some evidence here? Consider the following argument. Listen carefully to it. Premise one, everything that the Bible says is true. Premise two, the Bible says that Jesus rose from the grave. Therefore, it is true that Jesus rose from the grave. Now notice that all three statements in that syllogism are sound. They're true about the world. Notice that the argument is also formally valid. But there's a problem still. we would never expect an unbeliever to buy into that logic. Why? It's not because anything's wrong with the soundness of it. It's not because anything's actually wrong with the logic. But because he would deny the first premise. Let me read the first premise again. Everything that the Bible says is true. So if that argument could be represented as three, sorry, three statements, two premises and a conclusion, it would go like this. Everything the Bible says is true. The Bible says Jesus rose from the dead. Therefore, it is true that Jesus rose from the dead. At that point, he's going to say, why do you believe that? Well, I already told you why I believe that. So the problem isn't necessarily the validity of the argument or the evidence for it. The problem is right here. The unbeliever does not accept the reliability of Scripture, the divine inspiration of Scripture, and so on and so forth. So what do we do at that point? We expand the circle. We expand the circle, one step, two steps, whatever it takes, we expand the circle. All right. The classic means of avoiding proof and evidence, and I'll close with this, and we'll get to the third point, and I'm okay with that. The classic means of avoiding proof and evidence comes from the unbeliever, and it was given philosophical sophistication by Immanuel Kant, but it's far older, and that is the position of agnosticism. So let's just deal with this, clear some ground. It comes from two words, ah, which means no or non, and gnosis, would be ah yes, but that means knowledge. So agnosticism means no knowledge. Now, there's a soft agnosticism where the person is proclaiming ignorance in his own right, but that's not usually what's meant. What's usually meant is a restriction on your knowledge. So the famous parable of the six blind men and the elephant would be an example of someone restricting knowledge to others by supposedly giving you this humble picture of what we cannot know. But what's the problem with the six blind men? And by the way, it's meant to say, I know you guys in the academy, you hear this all the time, but for everybody else, there are six blindfolded men standing around an elephant. Of course, the elephant stands for ultimate truth or God. And the Hindu blindfold guy reaches out and says, I think the elephant is like a leather bag. And then the other Eastern guy says, no, I think that the elephant is like a rope. And then the other guy says, no, I think the elephant is like a wall. None of them know what an elephant is, but they're all describing it, and they're all right. Because religion and philosophy and different cultures are all seeing part of the truth. What's the problem with the parable? There's a seventh guy telling the story, who presumably does not have a blindfold on, which is why he can tell you the story. He, and his worldview should be called, I alone can see the elephant-ism. Because that's what he's doing. He's reserving for himself what he's restricting for everyone else. All right, but what's the real problem with agnosticism? Well, agnosticism has to obey the laws of logic and language as much as any other position. It has to state its terms, and when it does so, it amounts to a form such as the following sentences. Let me draw, let me write up five sentences, and we'll just tackle them real quickly. Can you get this part right here? All right. Five different forms, and they're all saying the same thing. Number one, supernature is Knowable. Secondly, God is too big of a concept. Now, you normally wouldn't say it like I just did. I'm just trying to go fast. You'd normally say, God is too big of a concept. You'd have to end it in a question mark and prove that you're humble and so on. Three, truth is relative. Four, Reality is an illusion. Five, the infinite cannot be grasped by the finite. Notice that all five sentences, just like you would expect, have a subject and a predicate. Subject is going to be in pink. Supernature, God, truth, reality, the infinite. And every sentence has a predicate. Unknowable, too big of a concept, is relative, is an illusion, can't be grasped by the finite. What's the law of non-contradiction, Academy students? A thing cannot be and not be at the same time or in the same relationship, or A is not equal to non-A. But what do we see in all five of these sentences? We are ascribing and denying essence to a thing at the same time and in the same relationship. The predicate negates the subject. Supernature is unknowable. How do you know that? If supernature is unknowable, then there is nothing that could be known about supernature. But nothing is no thing. And one thing would be something. Never mind many things, let's just start you off easy and go with one thing. Is it no thing or one thing? And if it's no thing, then this is not a thing. If supernature is unknowable, you wouldn't be able to know that. God is too big of a concept. What is this bigness you speak of? God is too big of a concept. To what? He's saying the same thing. To know anything about Him. Except His bigness. Exception. Truth is relative. Relative to what? Truth is relative. It just means subjective. It's in the eye of the beholder. It's the blind man and the elephant. The eye alone can see. Reality is an illusion. Except for that statement. Some of the kids have gotten good at this, the fourth through sixth graders. Yeah, they're good at that, the girls in the front row. I'll start busting out this line from Kant, and they'll say, except for what you just said, except for what you just said. They get that smart alecky tone in their voice. It's good, as long as you know what you mean by it, and you know what the contradiction is. The infinite cannot be grasped by the finite. What is it about infinity that cannot be grasped by the finite? What is this thing you know about infinity that makes us all not be able to know anything by infinity? So, I'm just drawing out what we're saying here, is that these statements are a violation of the law of non-contradiction. They are saying A equals non-A. That's what they're saying. A equals non-A. If the sentences mean what they seem to mean, Well, then the sentences are saying that this thing is something and no thing at the same time and in the same relationship. And that is nonsense. All right. What I'm going to do next time is I'm going to introduce the scoreboard, going from left to right. And that scoreboard is going to basically go like this house, except we're going to turn the house over on its side so that proof and necessary truth will be on the left side and will be flowing over to evidence. And what we're going to see very quickly, I call it the AK-47 approach. Yeah, and I believe this is what the classical method at its best does. And I agree with Ann Till that there are certain proofs for the Christian faith. And so what we're going to do is we're going to show how, even before you get out of the proof round of the game show, You don't even have to get to evidence. We will get there. But in the proof round, right out of the gates, every other worldview besides Christian theism falls to the ground, right out of the gates. You don't even have to compare apples and oranges. You don't have to break out your book versus their blue book. You don't have to do that, because right out of the gate Everything they believe, they can't believe. They're contradicting themselves immediately. It's just a little bit bigger than this. You have to expand the brackets. Agnosticism, it's easy to show, but with the other ones, and once you show that their whole premise is incoherent, everything else inside of that square circle house can't possibly be. So it's a proof that only Christian theism can possibly be true. All right, let me end there, and we'll get to the fun stuff starting next week.