Why I Am Not a Presuppositionalist, Evidentialist, or Classical Apologist

Why I Am Not a Presuppositionalist, Evidentialist, or Classical Apologist

Feb 24, 2023 | Apologetics

I am not a presuppositionalist. I don’t believe there is only one correct apologetics methodology as the presuppositionalists claim: I’m in the whatever works camp. For those not familiar with such methodologies, these are ways of going about defending the truth claims of Christianity. I’ve long been frustrated with the one-way-to-do-apologetics insistence when I learned about these methodologies at seminary in 1986. I had gotten the book Classical Apologetics by Sproul, Gerstner, and Lindsley where I first learned of the different apologetics camps. The subtitle drew me in: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics. These guys believed that the classical approach was the right approach to apologetics, and that frustrated me too.

Being introduced to presuppositionalism at seminary, I had a difficult time understanding it as espoused by its most famous practitioner, Cornelius Van Til. What especially frustrated me, though, was the presuppositionalist contention that their methodology is the only correct biblical apologetics method. The classical apologists, and the evidentialists as well, don’t claim theirs is the only biblical approach like the presuppositionalists, only that it’s the best or right approach. After thinking about this for 35 plus years, I am convinced there is no one biblical or correct apologetics methodology. Let me try to explain why for those who are interested in this kind of stuff.

I’ve been listening to a series on Thomas Aquinas from the Ezra Institute, and listened to an episode dedicated to his apologetics. The Ezra guys are dedicated presuppositionalists and believe it is the only valid biblical way to defend the faith. Our pastor agrees, and last year did a sermon on Acts 17 from this perspective, and it was one of the most frustrating sermons I’ve ever experienced, and that’s saying something given I’ve sat through 43(!) years of sermons. Over all these years of thinking about this, I’ve finally been able to nail down my primary frustration with presuppositionalists. I agree with most of their theology, but it’s the non sequiturs that drive me nuts.

It seems this logical fallacy is common among we sinful human beings, and I include myself in that. It simply means the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise. For example, I don’t like a movie, therefore someone concludes I don’t like all movies. The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise; I just don’t like that specific movie. The more you become aware of this sinful human tendency, the more common it becomes, like shopping for cars and the car you like seems to be everywhere. Presuppositionalists commit this logical fallacy when they declare anyone who believes in another methodology believes two things:

1. Epistemological neutrality, and 2. Autonomous reason

Number one, If I utilize or believe in a different methodology, they assert that I believe my knowing is not affected by sin and the fall. No Christian believes this, least of all Christian apologists, but presuppositionalists make this accusation all the time. Here is the non sequitur: Just because I don’t agree with their apologetics methodology, doesn’t mean I believe in epistemological neutrality. The same goes for number two. If I disagree with their methodology, they assert I believe reason isn’t tainted by sin, and able by its own unaided reasoning to come to ultimate truth. This is an absurd accusation because nobody believes it! Just because I see value in the Kalam cosmological argument, for example, doesn’t mean I think human reason is pure and untainted by sin. But presuppositionalists claim that I do.

The issue is epistemological, or how we come to know what we know. The main text used for this is Romans 1:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

The presuppositionalists focus on verse 18, that sinful human beings suppress the truth, meaning their ontological status as sinners makes them incapable and unwilling to accept truth. All Christians believe this to one degree or another contra the presuppositionalists. No Christian apologist whatever their methodology, or like me if they don’t have one, believes in a pure reason untainted by sin that has the ability of itself to know the saving truth of Christianity. We all agree the gospel is revealed truth, and God must supernaturally open people’s minds or they will not accept it.

What is strange to me about the presuppositionalist position is that in the very next verse Paul says sinners can know about God because God has made knowledge of who he is plain to them in creation. In fact, he says, His supernatural divine being is in some way obvious! People know it whether they acknowledge it or not. These are deep philosophical waters, too deep to wade into in a blog post, but the main reason I don’t fully buy the presuppositionalist position as I understand it, is because human beings don’t work that way. The Ezra guys and others I’ve heard and read over the years make the assertion specifically about Thomas’s Five Ways, i.e., proofs for the existence of God, that these arguments don’t lead to the God of the Bible, but to some vague Aristotelian god. So? Nobody stops there and says, there, we proved God’s existence, have a great life! No, they lead them to the Scriptures to meet the true and living God, the Creator of the universe, the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

There is no one “biblical” apologetics method because God uses everything to bring sinners to himself. I’ve listened to hundreds of testimonies over the last several years, and few people presuppose their way to Him. I argue from assumptions all the time when I’m talking to people, but that doesn’t mean I can only use assumptions. I believe the presuppositionalist arguments are powerful, but so is everything else God uses to reveal himself to sinners. The number of people who have come to Christ because of non-presuppositionalist apologists like Willian Lane Craig, R.C. Sproul, and C. S. Lewis is all I need to know that there is no one “biblical” apologetics methodology.

One of the podcasts I consistently listen to is the Side B Stories podcast, which is interviews of ex-atheists, agnostics, or skeptics. There are over 60 now, and I’ve listened to every one of them, and these people come to Christ in every way imaginable. The latest is this young man, Nico Tarquinio, who was profoundly affected by Bill Craig’s cosmological argument, among other traditional apologetics arguments. I don’t care what the argument or reasoning is, if it leads someone to Christ, that’s biblical enough for me!

 

Audio Book of Uninvented Coming Soon! Introduction

Audio Book of Uninvented Coming Soon! Introduction

Feb 22, 2023 | Uninvented

Some time back a family member suggested that I should make Uninvented available in audio format, and I kind of blew it off at the time. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that might encourage more people to “read” the book. Given the age in which we, I realized many people who would likely never read the book might like to listen to it. So, I decided to give it a go.

Initially I was going to have my brother Nick who is a famous rock star and voiceover artist do it, and when he suggested I might want to do it given they are my words, after all, and it would be good to do it in my voice, I thought no way. I didn’t need to add something else to my to-do list, and I’d have to learn how to record and all that entails. But the more we talked about it the more it made sense to have it in my own voice. Now that I am a blog post reading professional (don’t laugh), I thought not only could I probably pull it off, but I would also actually enjoy doing it. Having written, and re-written it a zillion times, and read it many others, I could make it sound like I intend it to be read.

What I’ve decided is that I will record one chapter at a time and post them here for download, and then keep each chapter once it’s done on a separate Audio Book page I’m creating. Then when it’s completed, I’ll publish the audio book on Audible so readers will have three options, paperback, Kindle/electronic, and audio. Enjoy!

 

North Korean Defector Yeonmi Park Shares Her Experience of Wokeness at Columbia University

North Korean Defector Yeonmi Park Shares Her Experience of Wokeness at Columbia University

Feb 18, 2023 | Politics & Government

I first learned of Yeonmi Park from Steve Bannon’s War Room. Her horrific story of growing up in North Korea and her harrowing escape to the West was hard to fathom, so I read her book, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, and it’s still hard to fathom. If anyone of us is tempted to complain about anything, I suggest reading her book. It shows us how trivial most issues we complain about, get frustrated and worry about, grow anxious about, really are.

She has a new book out called While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America, and she tells Bannon on this War Room interview of experiencing wokeness at Columbia University, supposedly one of the most prestigious universities in America, one of the vaunted Ivy League Schools. As much as her story of escaping a North Korea hell hole needs to be read to be believed, the story of her experience at Columbia needs to be heard to be believed. Cultural Marxism in the guise of wokeness has completely captured American universities and the irrationality is something to behold. Her comparison of the woke leftist indoctrination centers of American universities to North Korea is spot on. We can thank God they don’t have the totalitarian power of the Kim’s of North Korea, yet.

 

 

Thoughts on the Global Disinformation Index PSYOP

Thoughts on the Global Disinformation Index PSYOP

Feb 18, 2023 | Culture

It’s a woke world, so nobody who pays attention is surprised there is such a thing as an official “Global Disinformation Index.” Truth be told, I thought it was comical. If we’ve learned anything in the last several years it’s how inept and incompetent the globalist Uniparty elite cabal really is. Not only that, but they are liars who push a “narrative” trying to accomplish their globalist goals of rule by an elite class of overlords who believe in technocracy, or rule by scientific “experts.” Of course, they claim to believe they are doing this for good and noble ends. They also believe the people who are the object of those ends are either too ignorant or stupid to know any better, so they in some way must be made to comply.

Thus some globalist geniuses learned from the Silicon Valley tech giants that only some speech is worthy of being free, and other speech has to be labeled as “disinformation,” whatever that might be. Well, we can be thankful the good folks at the GDI have told us exactly what it is:

GDI defines disinformation as “adversarial narratives, which are intentionally misleading; financially or ideologically motivated; and/or, aimed at fostering long-term social, political or economic conflict; and which create a risk of harm by undermining trust in science or targeting at-risk individuals or institutions.”

Ah, “intentionally misleading.” Of course, these people know beyond a shadow of a doubt what other people’s motives are. Got it. And of course, we couldn’t have anyone “undermining trust in science.” We know now, since the enlightened elites have informed us, that “science” is our savior and must not be blasphemed. The “adversarial narratives” are those which in any way challenge or reject the accepted narrative of the globalist technocratic elite. How convenient! There is an awful lot of fly food coming from our GDI masters made to smell like roses.

One thing in all this pabulum they do get right is that we are in an information war in which the PSYOP is everything. What exactly is that?

Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

The most successful PSYOP in the history of the world by far was the Covid scam. Whatever Covid was or is, it was not the bubonic plague—the reaction was not commensurate with the actual threat to public health. The reaction was, however, a test run by the globalist elite cabal for what they’ve called the Great Reset, in the very words of Klaus Schwab. No thanks, Klaus! I like the world of sovereign nation states just fine.

These globalist tyrants will be no more successful at stifling free speech and ideas they disagree with, than they were with “flattening the curve.” It will work as well as masks do in keeping people from getting ill from a cold virus, which is not at all, and be as effectives as a vaccine against a cold virus, which is completely ineffective, when not harmful. All told, the GDI tyrants will fail miserably, they just don’t know it yet. The question is why they will fail. It’s simple: The Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, our primary weapon in this information war.

Prior to the Internet it was much easier for the elite establishment to wage information warfare. When I was growing up information sources were limited to a handful of TV stations, AM and FM Radio, most of which was controlled by the same corporations as television, and newspapers that were mostly part of the same liberal echo chamber. When I discovered I was a conservative in the early ‘80s, it was terribly frustrating. I found the then reliable conservative publications of National Review and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Pages, but they got bad cases of TDS and are now shills for what I call Con Inc. Then Rush Limbaugh came on the scene on August 1, 1988, and it was positively shocking to hear conservative ideas on the radio. Then Al Gore invented the Internet and everything changed; climate Change Al is a very talented guy. While he was working on the Internet, Fox News was founded in 1996, and left-wing CNN finally had a conservative competitor. But cable is not the Internet, and we’ve seen how Fox has been coopted by Con Inc. and spouts the approved narrative whatever that happens to be, save Tucker who brings in far too much revenue to silence.

One of the best things we ever did was to de-couple from the Matrix by completely stopping any TV watching in our house, and that for me includes no sports. When professional sports leagues started going woke, and accepted all the Covid nonsense, I was done. What a blessing it is to not have to endure television commercials. Whatever advertising we have to endure on the Internet, can easily be skipped or ignored. We can also stream whatever we want to watch and so determine the content. Anyone who still watches cable or television news doesn’t realize how they are being programmed to see things according to “the narrative,” whatever that might be. I’ve learned that whatever “the narrative” is, the very consensus among the media and political elites is likely the exact opposite of the truth. It’s cynical, but necessary.

What’s also necessary is to search out information sources that question “the narrative.” Google, which owns Youtube, completely cooks the books in terms of search results to make sure people see only what they want them to see. It doesn’t mean information contrary to “the narrative” isn’t there, only that it’s really hard to find. The thing is, truth can never be fully, ultimately suppressed, because truth is ultimately incarnational, the very Son of God who is truth itself. Lies are unsustainable and can’t win in the long term. They can cause immense suffering and hardship, but they are ultimately futile. Just as we’re responsible for our own health, we’re responsible for finding truth whatever and wherever it might be, as best as we can discern it.

The reference to the Gutenberg Press and the analogy to the Internet is profound. The elite of the 15th and 16th centuries were the Roman Catholic Church and the nobility. What they wanted people to know, is what they were allowed to know. Then Johannes Gutenberg went and ruined everything with his invention of the first every movable type press in the mid-15th century. Less than a century later printing technology had so improved in quality and pricing that when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thesis to the church door at Wittenberg in what he thought was a little internecine Catholic squabble, it took the European world by storm. The 21st century Gutenberg Press is doing the same thing only this time worldwide, and the globalist elites will no more be able to contain it than the Catholic Church and nobles contained the Reformation.

 

The “Health and Wealth” Gospel of Proverbs

The “Health and Wealth” Gospel of Proverbs

Feb 15, 2023 | Epistemology - Trust

As I was reading through Proverbs recently for the first time in a long time, it almost made me believe there is such a thing as a health and wealth gospel. Notice the g in gospel is not capitalized so we’re not confusing it with The Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and our eternal salvation in Him. Nonetheless, when we do certain things we can have a reasonable expectation certain other things will follow as day follows night and that is good news. In a very real sense, there is no blessing from God that we do not earn.  In the Bible it’s called sowing and reaping because most of the audience to whom Scripture was written had to do that to live. We do too, it’s just not in the ground, unless of course you’re a farmer.

This, in fact, is the inheritance of Judaism and Christianity. We don’t live in the heathen/pagan universe the Hebrews were born into when Yahweh called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. God rescued us from the dead-end worldview of a universe without hope through the Hebrew people. Because of the importance of the Jewish nature of Jesus’ world, in Uninvented I referenced a book by Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Change the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. Cahill describes how the ancient world, no matter what culture or part of the world, knew nothing of an almighty, all-powerful Creator God until the Israelites came along. Heathens, by contrast, believed in gods, plural, who were just like them, only more powerful. Now humanity had agency, meaning they could change things, and that did in fact change everything! It was Christianity that brought this Hebrew conception of reality to the entire world, and without Christianity the world would be a much less pleasant place.

However, I must offer one caveat before the non sequiturs start flying. I am not saying all sowing guarantees reaping wonderful, positive results. We can’t guarantee anything and are in control of nothing. We can live out Proverbs to the T, grow wealthy and prosperous, and a plane can fall out of the sky on our house and kill us. A farmer’s beautiful crops can be wiped out by a tornado or hurricane, or locusts. The point in a way isn’t even about the results of our sowing, although of course it is. Rather it is trusting God. This trusting Him, or not, is the most important lesson I’ve learned in my four plus decades walking with Jesus, and learning just how much I suck at it. I’m always tempted to worry, doubt, fear, anxiety, i.e., not trusting Him, so daily I repent of my lack thereof, and plead for God to help me to trust Him.

I can relate to the story of Jesus healing a boy of an unclean spirit told in Mark 9. The father is desperate to have Jesus heal his boy who had a spiritual and physical malady since he was a child, and he pleads with Jesus to heal him. He specifically asks if Jesus can do anything about it, and Jesus said if the man can believe, all things are possible for those who believe (i.e., trust). I love the father’s desperate reply (in the KJV):

24 And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

I often pray, sometimes desperately, Lord, I trust you, help thou my lack of trust! And that includes in the cause-and-effect relationship of his creational order in my life. I now read the book of Proverbs through the lens of trust in the God who made the reliable reality spoken of in it.

It was some years ago that I slowly began to learn this lesson because I’m a slow learner. Once I do get something, though, I really do get it. I’ve always been the kind of person naturally lacking trust in God, who was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yeah, this or that great thing happened, but maybe disaster is right around the corner. To say this is dishonoring to God would be a massive understatement. Somewhere along the way in all my listening to learn, I heard someone reference Proverbs 10:22, and I was instantly convicted:

ESV: The blessing of the LORD makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.

NIV: The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, without painful toil for it.

NIV 1978: The blessing of the Lord brings wealth, and he adds no trouble to it.

The idea is simple but obviously hard for many of us to accept: God just flat out wants to bless us! As I very often talk about here, he doesn’t want us to live in worry, fear, doubt, or anxiety, and even commands we don’t engage in such harmful futility. What do those things come from after all? An imagination of disaster, and disasters that 99% of the time never happen! We live in the future unpleasantness that doesn’t exist instead of the present pleasantness that does. How dumb is that! We’re sinners, it comes naturally.

Clearly God wants us to succeed at life. What that looks like will obviously be different for each one of us, but he hasn’t kept the recipe for success a secret. We can be sure of one thing, though; it isn’t going to fall out of the sky on our head. Nor will we get “lucky,” hit the lottery, or get to home without going to first, second, and third.

The first several chapters of Proverbs talk about wisdom, and how important it is to search for it and seek it and do everything we can to get it. It is we’re told, more precious than gold or silver. If we do seek it, work at getting it, we’re promised the payoff will be huge. I guess the question for all of us is, how hard do we really seek it and work at getting it. The plethora of resources at our fingertips today is stunning. The contrast is remarkable even to fifteen or twenty years ago, unimaginable even in the last century. Growing in knowledge that leads to wisdom is available to anyone who really wants it.

I have a strong conviction related to this seeking of wisdom. The more knowledge I have about more things, the more resources God can use teach me wisdom. However, growing in our knowledge must lead to a deep humility. Isn’t it obvious why that would be the case? The more we know the more we realize we don’t know. It’s like coming upon a trickle of water in a dry land and following it to its source only to find out it’s as massively large and as seemingly endless as the Great Lakes! In this vein I Corinthians 8:2 has become an encouragement to continue to realize how very little I really know: “If anyone thinks he knows something he does not yet know as he ought to know.” Our knowing should be done lightly and with humility, and our knowledge used in service and love for others. Having this privilege is part of the health and wealth gospel of Proverbs because humility and loving others is woven throughout its pages.

Lastly, if we really want to be healthy and wealthy in a God honoring way, we have to be willing to question everything, and be willing change our minds about things we once held as certainties. This is a corollary of I Corinthians 8:2. Because we know so little about everything, we should at the least be willing, in humility, to consider new information and knowledge. Certainty is a good thing, but it can become a bad thing if we hold what we think we know so tightly we become deluded into thinking we own it. As if we were so omniscient that we could not possibly be wrong. Proverbs at the least teaches us that we need to be continually reminded what a gospel of true health and wealth looks like.