About this sermon
A Morning Instruction class on apologetics: presuppositions and evidence. Psalm 19 and Romans 1 teach that God reveals himself to every person in creation, so unbelief is suppression of the truth, not lack of evidence. Rather than giving bare evidence to someone in rebellion against God, the Christian shows that only the biblical worldview makes sense of logic, morality, and even the problem of evil, which the unbeliever cannot account for. The class prepares to study Greg Bahnsen’s debate with the atheist Gordon Stein.
Sermon transcript
Our Heavenly Father, you have called us to set apart Christ as Lord in our minds and in our hearts and to cast down all things that would exalt themselves up against the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. You have called us to defend the faith and to give an answer to those who would ask a question as to why we believe what we believe. We ask, oh Father, that you would guide us, help us through this hour, through this 40 minutes or so, to be able to defend the faith that was once delivered to the saints. For it is in Jesus’ name that we pray, amen.
We’re going to read a couple of passages that we read last time. First, Psalm 19. If you’d open to Psalm 19. And after that, we’re going to turn to Romans 119. I will read them just for expediency’s sake so that we can Ah, for sake of brevity, get two things. Psalm 19, God says through David, the heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse is declaring the work of his hands.
Day to day pours forth speech. And night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words. Their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth and their utterances to the end of the world. In them, he has placed a tent for the sun.
Come back to that in a little bit. Romans chapter one, verse 19. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power, and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse, for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.
We’ll stop there. Well, we did not finish last week, so I’m going to try and summarize what we talked about last week. What we are going to talk about today, it has been building on previous discussions. So I just want to apologize ahead of time for people who this is your first time here in this quarter. Let me just try and catch up as many people as possible.
We’re studying apologetics. That’s the defense of the faith, the defense of Christianity. In this world, we’re often called to give a defense of why we believe what we believe. Now, right now, we’re discussing what is a Christian epistemology and a Christian metaphysics. Don’t be intimidated by these words.
They’re a bit abstract, but They can be understandable. When we think of epistemology, think of theory of knowledge. Theory of knowledge. How do we know what we know? Okay? That’s, I can just simplify it. And then, metaphysics. Meta, with, or after, and then think of physics.
We have the physical world, and then we have that which is with it, or after it, which is, let me just say, a Christian metaphysic understands the invisible things that God has created. So in terms of our creed, we would say, I believe in all things visible and invisible, borrowing from the biblical language, Colossians, that he created, Jesus created all things visible and invisible. Our Christian doctrine of what is includes everything that God tells us there is, even if we don’t see it, okay?
Angels, demons, talking snake in the garden, talking serpent, yes. Seraphim, different types of angels. I mean, we believe in what God has told us exists. So it’s physical. And it’s non-physical in its makeup. And then these two come together. They honestly do.
Because we can talk about what there is. but it’s not long that you get into a discussion of what there is, what exists, before we’re going to be asked, well, how do you know that that exists? These two are, I wouldn’t say two different sides of the same coin, but they go together very well. Now, what we have done in previous discussion is to break down what a Christian understanding, excuse me, a non-Christian understanding of knowledge is, and just to review those very briefly. And we won’t take questions on these. I’ll just, if you have questions, you can ask me later, but there are those who are non-Christians who would have a constructive Epistemology.
They believe that truth is something that has been constructed by the bigwigs of society. And it has been imposed down on the little people. This is a Marxist understanding of knowledge. There are those who believe in a consensus that truth is what the majority believe the truth is. You shouldn’t be satisfied with any of these.
There is correspondence that the idea in my mind corresponds to the object that is out there. It’s kind of a common sense, simple way of just understanding things. The things that are out here, they conform to what’s in my mind as I’m thinking of it.
And then there is correspondence. That is to say, truth is that which, excuse me, I do that all the time. Correspondence and coherence. Truth is what coheres with the facts. It’s kind of a systematic way of thinking. Thinking in terms of systems. And then there’s just pragmatism, which says, if it works, then it must For those who were here, hopefully that’s just a quick reminder.
And for those who weren’t, we can talk and we’ve got a philosophy major here. He might be able to talk about correspondence truth. And Andrew, you’re somewhat philosophy major. You’re kind of majoring in the three things, aren’t you? I thought you had philosophy in there. Okay, my apologies, my apologies.
Okay, so what we were on to then, after looking at non-Christian understandings of truth, we began to look at what is a Christian understanding of truth. Now, a Christian understanding of truth is a revealed understanding of truth. We as believers in Christ are dependent upon God’s word to know. So what is the Bible? The Bible is God’s revelation. We can say that the Bible is God’s divine self-disclosure.
He is telling us who He is. He is telling us about His character on the pages of this Word. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, He tells us what He has decided to do, send His Son to die for us and be raised. Now, what I was breaking down at the end is, well, let me just give a, a $50 phrase or word for this. The Christian epistemology is a revelational epistemology. How do I know anything? Because God revealed it to me. God told me so.
Okay, that’s just very simple. There are all these, what I talked about in past weeks and just recently correspondence and coherence and constructive, it’s been, it can get really complex and you can do a PhD in any one of those or PhD comparing those if you want, it would be very dry. I’ve read a lot of that literature. I mean, I love it, but it’s dry, it’s really dry. But here we have this simple, God told me so.
Well, it has to be dry because it can’t be too controversial because you’ve got to please a committee. But that’s another, that’s a whole other story. But yes, it usually is. But even when they make it, even when they try to make it fun, well, I guess the only way to try and make it not dry is to put it into a movie. That’s the matrix, among other things. Okay, so, why would we say this, that we have a relative we’d have to think back to the garden, okay?
How did Adam and Eve know? Because God told them so. Isn’t this wonderful? Our understanding of defending the faith, what does it depend on? The voice of God speaking to me. God told me so. If you don’t believe that, then it’s almost like, well, that? Satan. We have a revelational epistemology. God reveals it to us. Okay, so, the attributes of Scripture, then, are that Scripture is necessary. You can’t have Christianity without the Bible.
Okay? Let me give a any sacred text, really, different forms of Buddhism. You can’t. Without the Bible, if we don’t have one, and nobody has it memorized, and we don’t have access to it, I don’t think we can go on. Our tradition, it’s not meant to last. It’s sufficient. It is all we need. We don’t need the Bible plus. It’s sufficient enough so we don’t need to add traditions, we don’t need to add our own prophecies and dreams if we could have them. It speaks authoritatively. How did God speak from the mountain in Exodus chapter 19 when the people were fearing him? It spoke with authority, right? When you read the Bible, you should read it as God speaking to you with that same authority.
Now, I don’t think we need to have the same fear that they had, because they had Moses to intercede for them. We have a much greater intercessor in the Lord Jesus Christ, so much so that there is no other intercessor. It’s only the Lord Jesus Christ, but it can strike fear into someone, and it is perspicuous, right?
It is clear. That’s God’s revelation. It’s necessary, sufficient, it is authoritative, and it is clear. Now, what are we talking about? The attributes of scripture. Scripture is all of these things. But is it only the Bible that is all these things. Open with me in the passage that we’ve read.
Psalm 19. We understand that Psalm 19, about the first half of it, talks about general revelation. And the second half talks about special revelation. Special revelation is dreams and visions and miracles and God’s voice speaking out from a cloud and doves coming down and Jesus being baptized, that’s special revelation. But there’s another type of revelation and that’s general revelation. general revelation. We have not seen, I’ve never seen, had a prophetic dream, or a vision, or a prophecy, or any sort of thing like that.
Guess what? I don’t think that I will ever have one. I don’t think anyone of you will ever have one. Because I think that’s all passed away with the apostolic age, okay? I know some people don’t agree with that, but we’re just gonna go with that for now. I’m not gonna seek to prove that. We’re gonna take that as assumed, at least for now. Now, there is a general revelation, though. It is a revelation that God gives to every single person. Hence, general.
Now, listen to what the psalmist says about, this is not talking about the Bible, this is talking about the earth all around us. The heavens, let me just, the heavens declare the glory of God. And their expanse declares the work of his hands. What does that sound like? Does that sound like there’s some clarity to what God is revealing in the world? It is a declaration.
Day to day it pours forth speech, and night to night in the creation. Now, if God speaks, wouldn’t it be authoritative any place that he speaks? There is no speech, nor are there words, I think it would be best to say, where their voice is not heard. their voice goes through all the earth and their words to the ends of the world. These are words that you’d usually think of special revelation, but this is talking about general revelation.
Let’s look at Romans 1.19 as well. It says, let me just read. from a different version. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.
So they are without excuse. Paul and David are saying that no one who is alive is going to have an excuse on judgment day because God has spoken clearly in his creation. No excuse is going to work. I never heard the gospel or there was no one anywhere near me, I never knew you.
We are totally depraved, unable to save ourselves, and God is revealing himself to us in a way that is necessary, it is sufficient, it is authoritative, and it is clear. Ordinarily, we only talk about the attributes of scripture and special revelation being necessary and sufficient. and authoritative and clear. But I think as Vantillians, as presuppositionalists, we wanna say general revelation is necessary.
We have to live in this world. It is sufficient. It’s sufficient for what God purposed for it, okay? General revelation, what is it sufficient for? It’s not enough to save you, but it provides you with enough knowledge to make you culpable such that you are without excuse.
It’s authoritative. That’s, of these attributes, the most clear, it seems to me. Well, maybe I can make a case for it’s authoritative and being very clear. If it speaks with the voice of God, then it is authoritative, and the psalmist understands that what God tells in the world around us is clear. What does Romans 121 say? In Greek especially, it couldn’t be more clear. It should be very clear to us in English as well.
For even though they knew God, This is not talking about the Israelites. It’s not talking about the Hebrews. This is talking about all the pagan nations, all the Ites, Moabites, Edomites, and all those people, Egyptians. There are no Egyptites, but everyone else is an Ite, right?
It is clear. Ganonthiston theon, knowing God. they suppress the truth about him. So what I’m saying is, you might know someone who doesn’t profess Christianity, and that person will have no excuse because everywhere God is revealing himself. God is not just revealing that there is a God, so that people in you know, the farthest reaches of China or Africa or anywhere, doesn’t, they have evidence that a god or gods exist. No. The true God, Paul is telling us. So, how do people know God? Every non-believer who will try to get you to doubt your faith, what’s going on while they do it? Every minute, God is revealing himself to them just like this. It’s just coming, the voice of God, the words of God, his clarity.
It’s just, it’s constantly, it’s like, to them, because they hate it, it’s like Chinese water torture, right? It’s just drip, drip, drip, drip, because their conscience is speaking. around them is speaking to them, and their worldview is a bundle of contradictions, and they might try to make it coherent, but it cannot ultimately be made to be coherent. Every minute. They can’t escape it.
It’s so clear that some of them, they want to just close their eyes and pretend that it doesn’t, that God’s not revealing himself to them. But every minute, God is revealing, God is revealing, God is revealing. So much so that, I mean, there are people who meditate, they want to reach a point where they don’t have sentience. They don’t have ability to say, me, Not me, to distinguish, as I’ve shared in previous weeks.
I know someone who is of an Eastern religious mindset. He says the ultimate goal, his destiny, the greatest thing he could be, would be to be a tree. Or as a tree. Why? Because trees don’t know they’re trees. Trees don’t feel pain. So if I can just, empty myself of self and become one with the universe or as one drop of water enters into the sea and it’s indistinguishable from the rest. That’s what they want. Why? Because God is revealing himself to them over and over every time their conscience, every time they hear the word, every time they hear the name Jesus Christ, clear? God’s revelation is always necessary, sufficient, authoritative, and clear.
Let me just say, there are some people who want to talk about natural law, and that’s just, that’s law that’s apart from revelation. What should our answer be to that? There’s no law that’s apart from revelation, because outside the Bible, we have natural law, but it’s not so much natural, we could just call it general revelation law. There’s no such thing as being outside of God’s revelation. Whether you’re reading the Bible or not, whether you’re waking or sleeping, God is revealing himself to the non-believer. so that you will see that the non-Christian, if there’s anything he needs, it’s not more information.
Okay? Our brothers and sisters, our evangelical fellow apologists, defenders of the faith, They walk up to someone or they try to defend the faith and they just think, let me give you more information and more evidence. Let me give you the manuscript evidence for Christianity. It’s good evidence. There’s no better document in antiquity compared to the New Testament, okay? They wanna give you the archeological evidence. They wanna give you the statistical and the prophecy evidence. They don’t need more information. They have all of the information that they need. So how do we defend the faith when someone calls us to do so?
Well, I’m glad you asked. Because what we’re going to look at is How to do it. How to do it. I’ve been hinting at it, I’m getting at it. Just by way of review, if you haven’t listened to the Bonsenstein debate, you should. I recommend it. We’re going to do the last two Sunday sessions of May on it. OK? The last two. I’m going to just highlight some things. We’re just going to listen to it, and talk about it, and critique it.
Okay, because this is a Christian, this is an OPC pastor who was really, really, really intelligent, but guess what? That’s not why he won. He wins the debate against an atheist because he was using a biblical method, okay? Now, rather than just blindly giving evidence to someone who is in rebellion against God. I meant to mention that. That’s key. This person is in rebellion against God.
If you give them 99.9% probability that Jesus rose from the dead, guess what they’re gonna say? We’ll take the 0.1%. Because, and they’re not even gonna look at the evidence in a neutral way because there’s no such thing as neutrality. These are other things that we’ve been trying to drive home. Okay, so turn to Proverbs 26, four and five. Proverbs 26, four and five says, do not answer a fool according to his folly or you will also be like him. Answer a fool as his folly deserves that he may not be wise in his own eyes. This I think is really brilliant.
There’s nothing really, some of the things that I’ve shared with you in the last two months or so have been or what I’m, I would say, expanding on what I’ve learned from Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bonson, but I would say 95% of what I’m sharing with you is stuff from them.
It might be, hopefully it’s clearer than them. Because, at least in Van Til, sometimes he can be very hard to read. But let’s talk about general revelation being necessary and sufficient. You can read about that if you want to know more. It’s in the Infallible Word Symposium, Westminster Seminary. Put that together. And Van Til, that’s his essay in there.
OK. How do we defend the faith? We want to say this is the Christian worldview. Some people say, well, don’t take Christ out of Christmas by putting Xmas. That’s the first letter. Christ’s name starts with this letter. And then we’ll say the non-Christian worldview. Christian worldview, non-Christian worldview.
Anytime someone comes up to you and says well, you’re just a Christian you Have you you believe irrational things you have you believe in a bunch of myths and fairytales This is my world view and this is your world view Okay, now I think we know a little bit about our worldview now, right?
We can say we are epistemologically self-conscious. Right? Say that real times fast. Epistemological self-consciousness. Yes, well think about this. We are epistemologically self-conscious. That means we’re self-conscious of the fact that what we know is revealed by God. and we are conscious of the fact that what exists, exists because God made it and God told us so. So this is our worldview, all right? And this is the non-Christian worldview.
What I would have us to do is kind of enter into our worldview and see that in a real sense, it is a coherent, It’s a coherent worldview. All the parts are true, they cohere, only in so far as they cohere with God’s mind. How do we know God’s mind? Actually in the debate, how do you know about the thinking of a God?
So we have Sunday school where we can just delve into these kinds of things. That’s really simple, right? Why isn’t it able to go back to a childlike faith? Because we want to have an apologetics that’s childlike. God told me so. So we have the coherent worldview, all right? We can also say it corresponds. There really is a pew right here. OK? There’s a pew right here. Because God is revealing to me, it’s really here. You cannot walk into a philosophy class and just say, well, it’s just there because All right, that Rene Descartes was a French brilliant mathematician and philosopher.
And he says, I’m gonna doubt everything. And when he tries to doubt everything, let me just say, he doesn’t wanna just believe things built on someone else’s foundation. So he does some meditations where he starts from ground level, he starts with no foundation, and he builds a foundation for knowledge, or so he thinks. And in that, he’s asking himself, what if all of this is just my brain is in a vat, and there’s an evil demon or an evil genius, depending on the translation, and he’s just poking and prodding my brain the illusion of the sensation of this pew. He’s just, he’s just tricking me.
But you can’t bring that to Hollywood, that’s the Matrix movie. Right, because their brains were in a vacuum. They really thought that there was a world around them, they were living a false reality. Okay, how do we know that it’s not that way? God told me so. How does a non-Christian know? Well he doesn’t. He has no proof for that. And so how do we defend the faith? We just skip from back and forth. Back and forth by understanding his worldview. We have to understand where he’s coming from. Are you a Buddhist? Are you a Muslim? Are you such and such? The thing is, we tailor our argument to the opponent. There’s not one argument that we can just use on everyone, but we tailor the argument. Now, let me give you an example of this. And this is one that’s gonna come up in the debate. The atheist, let’s just, It’s honestly just easier. And the smarter the atheist is, honestly, it’s easier. You don’t need to explain as much. He just knows what you’re talking about.
So the atheist universe, the atheist worldview, we’re comparing the two. And he goes on and on and on and on about the way that Christianity and there’s evil in the world, okay? There’s lots of evil in the world. Now, the atheist is not going back and forth. He’s not jumping from one world, one view to another. He just thinks all things are equal, we’re just having a discussion, okay? And you’re gonna have the same understanding of truth and logic and evil as I am.
So he goes on and on about if there’s a Christian God, he’s evil. Look at all the things that he does. And there’s evil in the world, so there must not be a strong God. He must be weak. He must not be able to do anything. And what is a Christian’s response to that? Peter? There is no such thing as evil in the world. In your world view. He says, how is there evil in your world view? How does it make sense? It doesn’t make sense. What he says is, in my world view, according to my worldview. My worldview makes sense. There’s evil because there’s a devil and because, there’s a mystery to it. There’s a mystery, we want to say.
Did God create evil? There’s a passage in Isaiah 45, 17 to say that, but we don’t understand. We’re not sure about the nature of evil, but we know that there is evil. that God is sovereign over it, that he uses it for his own good, and that the ultimate evil was the crucifixion of his own son, and God had victory over that. So we say, in my worldview, evil, that makes sense, but God is sovereign over it. Your worldview? By what standard are you judging evil? By what standard? You always want to ask that. By what standard? Where is your measuring rod for what’s good and evil? You don’t have one. If you’re in this worldview, you do this. What’s our measuring rod?
The Ten Commandments. Someone is living contrary to the Ten Commandments, he’s living. Evil, I used to be committing evil. The Ten Commandments are a reflection of God’s thinking on a creaturely level, okay? It makes perfect sense why there’s evil here, but even though there’s mystery, God is not a mystery for God.
Over here, your worldview, in your worldview, you’re just atoms banging around. You’re just a bunch of atoms in your own worldview. You’re just a bag of protoplasm. Now why does one bag of protoplasm say to another bag of protoplasm that such and such is evil? It doesn’t even make sense to do that. We’re just atoms booming and buzzing confusion. Okay? That’s how we do it. That’s how we do it.
If he wants to talk about truth, your God is not true. Well, yeah, he is. In my worldview, he’s revealed himself to me. He’s revealing himself all over, in the creation, and when the preacher reads the Bible, or when I read the Bible, he’s revealing himself to me. Truth? What’s truth in your worldview? Is it a social construction? Is it something that has been imposed upon us by the bigwigs in society? By the bourgeoisie? Is it correspondence?
What’s in my mind corresponds to what’s out there? There’s no basis for that in a non-Christian worldview. Is it coherent? Well, if he thinks his worldview’s coherent, believe me, I’m gonna find Something, a fact here, an assumption in his worldview, and an assumption over here, and guess what I’m gonna do? I’m going to expose them till the cows come home. Because his worldview is incoherent, it’s contradictory.
That’s what the atheist does. That’s what the Christian does to the atheist in this debate. He never answers him directly. He never says, oh, In the things that we have in common, let me answer you. He’s not seeking to establish common ground. There is no common ground.
In my worldview, I have logic. Remember, we did a whole week on logic, right? Our 40 minute session, we talked about logic. Now I’m all about bringing logic, telling an atheist what logical fallacy he’s committed. All right, I’m perfectly glad to do that. And in fact, we were driving, and Marianne and I were talking about logical fallacies. Sorry, I’m just a nerd. And I pulled out my trusty dictionary of philosophy, because someone had said something, and I was going to match what they had said to what logical fallacy they had committed.
And she goes, you carry that with you? Well, not always, but I just happen to have it. Logic only exists in my world view. It will exist in your world view. Because logic corresponds to what God’s thinking. What the Christian does to the atheists is he says, is logic a material thing? Laws of logic? Can you go fly to space and find the laws of logic, or saw them in half, or pour acid on them? You can’t.
They’re, at best, material. They exist in your mind. But if they only exist in your mind, then they can’t be imposed upon me. This is how you defend a Christian worldview. Every time you talk about anything, you assume my worldview. You borrow from it, because your own worldview can’t account for it. Okay, that’s what we’re gonna talk about in this last month.
Everybody, with that, answer a fool according to his folly. Don’t answer him according to his folly. In my worldview, X, Y, and Z. In your worldview, you can’t have X, Y, and Z. You can’t have logic, science, morality, personality over time, nothing. You won’t allow. I won’t allow them to have anything, and insofar as they have anything, you’re just borrowing my worldview. You’ve got to listen to it. You can look it up online. It’s on YouTube. There are CDs that, God bless Tammy, made for people. Pass it around. It’s going to be really fun. This is Orthodox Presbyterian defense of the faith. Good stuff.
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