what we're gonna have to do here we've covered I believe three sections And all the time that we've had so far. Now we've got 20 minutes left to cover three more. So if it sounds like I'm rushing through it, it's only because I am. I'm just going to highlight a few things. And so this next section deals with does man survive death? And and you know the first argument for is the universality of human mortality well no one doubts that all humans die the real question is what follows death so the fact that humans die is not really an argument in favor uh... or is it not an argument against life after death we all agree that humans die uh... if we equate the brain with a person. uh... then the brain does die okay uh... but just because the world is destructible doesn't mean man's mind is destructible uh... everybody agrees in the mortality of the physical realm uh... there's many differences between man and animals I don't want to get off on another tangent but the bible actually teaches and thomas aquinas taught it that animals are living souls so the bible defines life not as like plant life but having self-consciousness and consciousness of your surroundings having that ability at least uh... so that basically animals have souls but an animal soul is only to put it in touch with the physical realm so when the animal dies, so the animal soul dies with it, whereas the human soul not only puts us in touch with the physical realm, the world of the senses, but it also is designed to put us in touch with God. So it's purpose transcends just physical life here. So you're saying animals have a soul, but not like a human soul. Yeah. If animals were just flesh, I don't know that an animal can look at a tree and think, wow, that's a tree. You need more than just globs. I mean, when a person or an animal dies, all the flesh is still there. You could hook it up to a machine so you could start pumping the heart, pumping the blood. But I just think that we act like a glob of flesh can actually abstract truths from physical experience. I don't think you can ever really have an experience without a soul. But whatever the case, Bertrand Russell the atheist used to argue that the body, an argument from the body-mind dependence that our mental life is dependent upon brain activity, our brains will eventually die so it's safe to say that our mental activity will die as well. The criticism of that is the present body-mind dependence says nothing about the conditions of future existence. Now different types of views. Obviously we believe in that there is life after death. Plato's immortal soul doctrine, the human soul is immortal, the soul is the real person. He didn't believe in a future resurrection. The goal is to escape the slavery of the body, and he believed that we existed as souls before we became embodied. And so it's not really Plato's view of the immortality of the soul is not really the biblical view. the shadow man or minimal person doctrine that's usually the the most common view among Christians that where the real person is the soul it can survive without the body but it is dependent upon the body in this world of the senses uh... but it can survive apart from the body and await a future resurrection now the reconstruction doctrine is the Seventh-day Adventist Jehovah's Witnesses we do not exist without our bodies so after we die before the resurrection we cease to exist when we're resurrected then we come back into existence and uh... and so this is soul sleep the doctrine of soul sleep uh... but that's not the traditional biblical view is the shadow man or minimal person doctrine that you can exist as a conscious soul uh... apart from uh... your body uh... uh... C.S. Lewis's defense of the shadow man doctrine and life after death is that rationality could not have been caused by purely material causes hence rationality is somewhat supernatural, it transcends nature in the physical realm and rationality is non-material okay uh... Another argument is the near-death experiences again Habermas and Moreland that book Immortality the Other Side of Death I believe it's called. We now have documentation of people who have no their heart has ceased to function. They have no detectable brain waves. Sometimes it goes on for a few minutes like that and then they're either resuscitated or they just cough and just come back to life, but they often can give you an eyewitness account of what occurred during those two to three minutes. So these near-death experiences, we have to be very careful about the, you know, moving down the dark tunnel and there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I think there's a lot of demonic deception that's involved with that often. But Habermas and Moreland show that we do have evidence for conscious existence apart from the body. In fact, some of these near-death experiences become out-of-body experiences where sometimes the person rises above the body and they're watching people trying to resuscitate them and sometimes they even leave the room and even leave the hospital and have given eyewitness details on something like a car accident. that occurred at that same time before returning. And so near-death experiences, but by the way, if Christians do not do what Habermas and Moreland do, if Christian thinkers don't study these issues, research these issues, we're going to by default lose to the New Agers. Because atheism has no explanation for these paranormal things. And so the New Agers are going to win the day. Okay, and then recent brain research, we talked about that, where decisions are not made in the brain. You prod the human brain and get a person to raise their right hand, and they ask them, what happened? They say, you raised my right hand. It was an involuntary action. They didn't choose to raise their right hand. The ultimate The two ultimate arguments for life after death, I would say, number one, the authority of the scriptures. If you said, I believe something, and somebody says, why? I say, because the Bible says so. And that sounds like such an anti-intellectual view, at the same time, believe me, This is the best-selling book all time, yet there's been more Bibles destroyed by its enemies than any other book in history. You've got Fulfilled Prophecies. Believe me, the Bible has a really good track record. There's lots of good reasons to believe the Bible speaks the truth. The Fountain Fathers, many of whom were not even Christians, some of them were deists, But they believe the Bible had the ultimate in human wisdom when it came to government and morality. So they based their views of government and morality on the scriptures. But the ultimate guarantee of immortality is Jesus' resurrection from the dead. There's somebody who came back after dying and so he guarantees our future resurrection. And so in conclusion to this, there's no decisive evidence against immortality, life after death. For Christians, Christ's resurrection and the scriptures settle the issue. The minimal person survives the death of the body, we see that in Luke chapter 16. and 2 Corinthians 5a, prefer rather to be absent from the body and be at home with the Lord. And at the resurrection the minimal person will be reunited with its resurrection body. Okay, are there other minds? Will you get a chance to read about this? How do we know that other minds exist? Let me just say this. If you're going to deny the existence of other minds go into a closet, close the door and say there are no other minds. There are no other minds. Okay? Once you try to communicate that to other people then what you have is one mind trying to convince another mind that only one mind exists. And by the way that's what pantheists do when they're trying to convince everybody all reality is one mind or one being. Okay, it's self-refuting. So the denial of other minds cannot be communicated to other minds without affirming the existence of other minds. And so in answer to the question, are there other minds, I would say yes. And then the final question that we face here is, what is truth? Let me take the two really weak views of truth first. The pragmatic theory of truth is that truth is whatever works. Okay? Truth is whatever works. Well, the problem with this view is that sometimes lies work. Okay? Sometimes, you know, if a doctor says, This guy's got only a 10% chance of surviving this operation, this surgery, but if I tell him he's got a 90% chance, then that 10% chance might become 15 or 20% chance of surviving. Then the guy does survive, so the lie worked. Well, it was still a lie though. Okay? And so the pragmatic theory of truth fails just because something works doesn't make it true. Okay, the performance theory of truth, when we say it's true that it is raining, we're just expressing our own views. We're just saying I agree that it's raining. agreeing that something is true though does not make it true. And so the performance theory of truth, there's all these weird theories of truth, pragmatic performance theory of truth, because these guys deny absolute truth. So they're trying to make truth fulfill some function other than, well it works, you know, other than things really being true. See if you acknowledge absolute universal truth exists and you acknowledge absolute morality exists I mean that puts you so close to the throne room of God if you don't want God you'd be better off denying absolute morality and denying absolute truth so what it comes down to really is either the coherence theory of truth or the correspondence theory of truth and so these are the two We need to spend a little bit of time, the remainder of our time, only a few minutes, but we need to spend the remainder of our time on this. So what is truth? See, and by the way, when I first studied this and first read Geigel's book, I wondered, why in the world is this? They put this in the wrong chapter. When you're dealing with knowledge, epistemology, can we know truth and all? This should be, what is truth, should be in the chapter on epistemology, knowledge. But see, what I failed to realize was, no. Epistemology deals with can we know truth, but whether or not truth exists and what is truth, That's actually a metaphysical issue. The question, what is truth? The question Pilate asked Jesus, what is truth? That's a metaphysical. Is truth real or is it just a game that we play? And so you have the coherence. My brother, when you start talking about truth, he would say, well that's your reality. Yeah, yeah. Is he a new ager? He's everything you want him to be. He wants to be what he wants to be. Just keep asking him questions until he just keeps showing the emperor has no clothes. And then there's the correspondence theory of truth. The coherence theory of truth Something is true only if it does not contradict statements in its own system of thought. Gordon Clark held to this by the way. So in this view, in the coherence theory of truth, okay, if Hinduism is non-contradictory, it would be true. Because that's all it entails is that one system of beliefs is non-contradictory, then that's a true system. It coheres, okay? The correspondence theory of truth, truth is that which corresponds to reality. Correspondence, theory of truth, truth is that which corresponds to reality. The way Aristotle said this, and this by the way has been the traditional view throughout the history of Western civilization, Western philosophy, if, and throughout the history of the church, This has been the dominant view, unless of course you reject truth altogether. But the way Aristotle spelled out the correspondence theory of truth, he said basically a statement is true if it says of what is, that it is. Or of what is not, that it is not. A statement is false if it says of what is, that it is not, or of what is not, that it is. Okay? You could sum that up. You could sum up Aristotle's definition of truth as telling it like it is. Yeah, so just telling it like it is, truth is that which corresponds to reality, okay? There are Christians in both camps, I think these guys have issues, okay? Sure, a true system of thought, the true beliefs of that system of thought are not going to contradict each other, but then the question can still be asked, does it correspond to reality? Okay? And so if I say this book is red, this book is not blue, this book is not green, and this book is not yellow. If that's all the beliefs, is that a coherent belief system? Yes, but it doesn't correspond to reality because the book is yellow. Okay? And so beyond being non-contradictory, you've got to ask, well does that belief system, does it correspond to reality? I recall G.E. Moore saying, with regards to epistemology, here's my right hand, here's my left. Surely there is a physical world beyond my own mental perceptions. OK. He says that in regards to epistemology here, and it's metaphysics he's saying that he doesn't think it's true proposition. It feels like metaphysics and epistemology are so tied together that coherence is all the skeptics can lay claim to if they want to say truth exists. Yes, some of them won't even go with that. Some of them won't even, it's really the skeptics, if the skeptics hold to the coherence theory of truth, That's pretty good for them. Now some skeptics do hold to the correspondence theory, because their skepticism is only directed towards God or whatever, but yeah, GE Moore, you find a lot of inconsistencies, but the relationship of epistemology and metaphysics is big. Because when you're asking, well what is being, you're already asking, well how can I know being? So you're dealing with epistemological issues. When you deal with epistemology and you're asking, can man know? Can man know what? Well, truth. Well, what is truth? Does truth exist? How do you define truth? Now we're doing it and now it's metaphysical. Now, where the debate gets really ugly is among Christians, what comes first? I think if Geisler, Paul Feinberg probably had them put epistemology, Geisler would have put, as a Thomist, would have probably put metaphysics first. What comes first, being or thought? Aquinas would say being, then thought. Oops. Descartes would say thought, then being. If you say thought and then being, you might be open to proving God's existence with logical necessity. Like the ontological argument, we'll talk about that later, which Descartes was. Descartes tried to question doubt everything until he could find something he could no longer doubt. So he said, I think, therefore I am. Aquinas would never say that. Aquinas would say if you start in the realm of thought you'll end in the realm of thought. You have to start in the realm of being. So Aquinas would say I think because I am a thinking being. Okay? So Aquinas would start in the realm of being. Thought has to be grounded in being. So Aquinas did not believe you could prove God's existence with logical necessity. I have a master degree student who's really, really brilliant, but he thinks that Aquinas is demoting God by saying that God's existence is not logically necessary. But Aquinas believes God's existence is existentially necessary. Mathematics, the world of ideas, there are things that are logically necessary. That's not a big deal for Aquinas. The big deal is what is actually necessary or existentially necessary. And if finite being exists, then it's existentially necessary or actually necessary that infinite being exists to ground the finite existence. So in the mind of a Thomist where being is more important and forms the foundation for thought uh... in Aquinas' thought existential necessity is much greater than logical necessity. Now having said that I'm not purely a Thomist I think God is both existentially and logically necessary But don't slam Aquinas when he compliments God. Don't slam him and say he's slamming God when he's in his thought. Existential necessity, that's the whole game right there. He's saying God actually has to exist or nothing would exist. Okay, so that's about it. That's all we have time for. So I had to rush through the last few lectures.