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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.
What's the Difference Between Proof and Evidence?
Series Apologetics
| Sermon ID | 31416110030468 |
| Duration | 47:00 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Language | English |
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