Downhill Apologetics (Pt 2)

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

I was asked during the break when we were doing the meet and greet how we came up with the title Downhill Apologetics and I don’t remember. I know what I think it means to me but Sean, what did we mean by that when we came up with that? Well, we have the uphill position in the battle and we act like everybody has the better position than us and we’re constantly struggling and fighting up hill when, in fact, that’s not our position in any way, shape, or form. We’re the ones who have the upper hand, the upper position. And so we ought to act like it, not give pride, not that kind of upper part of the hill position.

But in terms of our reasons, being confident and bold as we speak with people, we have every reason to be excited about where we’re at. Yeah. Good, that’s exactly what I thought we were talking about. Love it when it comes together. So tonight, Ron, that makes sense. He’s the one that asked me. Tonight is then part two of our series on this downhill apologetics. In part one, a few weeks ago, Dave shared the idea that we get the idea of Christian apologetics. One place we get it from is First Peter 3.15, which says, but in your hearts honor Christ, the Lord is holy. always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect.

And again, the Greek word that’s found in that verse is apologia, from which we get the English word apologetic. You’re probably familiar with a number of modern day Christian apologists, Norm Geisler, Robby Zacharias, Josh McDowell, C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Hank Hanegraaff, just to name a few. Now not all of those though were what we would call presuppositional apologists. When I first became a believer, which is now 45 years ago, hard to imagine that, but 45 years ago I gave my life to Christ and at the time Francis Schaeffer and Josh McDowell were really very, very popular among the circles that I hung out with.

Josh McDowell actually came to one of the college groups that I was a part of as part of a large church and he spoke to our college group. Josh McDowell, if you don’t know much about him, he had written a book that was very popular called Evidence, The Demands of Verdict, which in that book, he basically describes how he came to faith in Christ by trying to prove that Christianity was false. And so he’s very much an evidentialist, was his approach.

Francis Schaeffer was largely a presuppositional apologist, although later on he began to sort of modify his approach to apologetics to include elements of evidentialism into his apologetics. And an author I came across, Jay Budzizowski, a nice Polish name, I think I said it right, he himself has written many books on the topic of apologetics. He had this to say about Schaeffer’s middle-of-the-road approach to apologetics. Jay wrote, Presupposationalists, Schaeffer held, are right to assert that the ultimate premise of Christian and anti-Christian systems of thought are utterly at odds in relation to their origin.

So we would just say, we’re coming from a different world view than the non-believers. But on the other hand, evidentialists are right to assert that between Christian and anti-Christian systems of thought, there is always a point of contact in the shape of reality itself. I love that. You know, the debate is fun until you get down to reality. And all of a sudden you say, wait a minute. But it’s in the shape of reality itself. The reason for this point of contact, he argued, is that non-believers cannot bring themselves to be completely consistent with their own presuppositions. And this inconsistency is a result of what many call common grace and is in fact the reality of God having made and spoken into a defined and unavoidable creation.

Thus illogically he wrote, men have in their accepted world views, and get this, men have in their accepted world views various amounts of that which is ours. But illogical though it may be, it is there and we can appeal to it. So all he’s saying there again, if you follow him, is that the unbelievers’ anti-God arguments ultimately break down and become logically incoherent. They end up appealing to universal truths that actually come from the Christian camp without even realizing that they’re doing so. In essence, they argue that you can’t prove the existence of a supreme authority, but then they end up appealing to universal ideas that are supposedly authoritative.

And I’m gonna have more to say about that later on in the message, that contradiction. Now before I get into the main points of my message tonight, I want to briefly comment on why apologetics, or specifically presuppositional apologetics, is so important. Dave actually gave us one of those reasons last time when he gave us his talk, and he said that all men are spiritually dead. This means that no one has the capacity to reason his way into the faith. Faith is a gift from God. It’s not an offer to take it or leave it based on the data. And so many approaches to apologetics has that idea that if I just make the right pitch, if I use enough logic, if I use enough reason, then an intelligent person can sort through the information and arrive at a conclusion.

But we know that that’s not true, given that men are spiritually dead. So this tells us that any apologetical approach that relies on appealing to man’s discernment is fundamentally flawed. This is why apologetics based solely on reason or evidence are ineffectual. But however, to be fair and a nod to Schaeffer, we do see in Romans that all men have a God awareness within them. We are told that they are desperately trying to suppress that awareness. Therefore, there is something in the human heart that we can appeal to in our apologetics. But we must remember it’s not the logic of our arguments, but rather the light of God’s word that brings a person to faith in Christ.

We can make the most persuasive arguments we want, but bottom line, it’s not gonna be our words. It’s going to be the Holy Spirit turning on the light bulbs in that person. A second and related reason why our apologetical approach is important is because non-pre-suppositional approaches can easily lead us towards preaching another gospel. And according to Paul in Galatians, that’s not a good thing. I think he said that was anathema. If I believe that I can reason a person to faith in Christ by shaping my message the right way, then there’s a tendency for me to start to tweak the gospel to suit the consumer or the unbeliever.

This mindset has manifested itself in numerous ways in the modern church. There are churches who orient their liturgy and their sermons to make them quote unquote seeker friendly, assuming that there is such a thing as a seeker. Preaching the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel is another manifestation of this thinking. Replacing terms like sin with mistake, or I heard one mega church guy refer to sin. He didn’t want to use the word sin He kept saying, it’s not God’s best, is his definition of sin. Eliminating disturbing symbols like crosses. There’s one church that actually went so far as to take the cross off their stage and replace it with a giant teddy bear because it just helped people be more comfortable.

Trying to be more attractive to the unbeliever. One famous preacher who was criticized for his softball sermons said in defense, He said, I am just the circus barker whose job is to get the people to come into the tent. Hopefully others can introduce them to Jesus Christ.

Trying to be culturally relevant as if the gospel isn’t is another. You’ll often hear that said, we’re just trying to be culturally relevant. What all these have in common is that they turn Jesus into your sensei who can make you into a better you rather than your savior who can save you from the penalty, the power and the presence of sin. Now some of these examples may seem trivial to you, but it’s this sort of mindset that puts us on the edge of a slippery slope. I often think myself of the example of a key in a lock when I think of sharing my faith. The key is the gospel and the lock is a human heart. My job is to insert the key and turn.

If the lock pops open, fantastic. But if the lock doesn’t open, it’s not my job to take out a file and file away on the key until I can get the lock to open. And that’s what often our different approaches to apologetics is exactly doing, is filing away on the gospel till it finally will get that heart to open up. And as a result, you get these false decisions for Christ because they didn’t really hear the gospel. They just heard, try Jesus, he’ll improve your flight through life. That is exactly then what most non-pre-suppositional approaches to witnessing do. they adjust the key to fit the lock. Many churches that started with faulty apologetics have now gone apostate and deny things like the deity of Christ.

Christ is the only way to salvation, the existence of the Trinity, the fallenness of man, while now affirming sins such as abortion and homosexuality. And I’m not talking about whacked out fringe churches. I’m talking about whole denominations that were once as orthodox as they come are now in this situation. Now, I’m not saying that non-pre-suppositional approaches to apologetics always leads to these outcomes, but it tends to put us in a bias in that direction. So in the time remaining, I want to apply then some apologetics. I’m going to actually give you some apologetics that deal with two so-called problems that will often be thrown at you when you’re trying to share your faith.

The first problem that will be thrown in your face is the problem of faith. And by that, your critics will say, well, you Christians are operating on faith. I have reason. I have science. I have evidence. I have facts. And so they kind of put it in a, you’re in the one corner of faith, but we have real data. But we’re going to see that’s a false premise. And then the second problem we’re going to talk about is they’ll throw the problem of evil at us as well. And to them, that’s a slam dunk. Now, in this message, I’m going to be borrowing largely from, and basically summarizing two chapters from the book Always Ready by Greg Bonson.

Dave mentioned the book last time. As I go through these issues, so a lot of this material is coming from Greg. I’ve just reworded it into my words. And I do recommend that book to anybody who really wants to read up more on the topic of presuppositional apologetics. So first, let’s deal then with the problem of faith. And in your kid’s corner, I think there were two points. First one was the problem of faith. When you share the gospel with unbelievers, you will often hear them say that they can’t accept what you’re saying because it relies on faith. In their mind, it’s faith versus reason, or faith versus observable facts.

Popular jabs at faith are that it’s something that’s contrary to evidence, or belief in something without evidence. That’ll be the two things they say.

Either you are, by faith, you are accepting something that’s contrary to what I can see with my own eyeballs or they’re saying you guys are believing in things that you can’t even back up there’s no evidence whatsoever. The debate about the age of the earth is an example that will they’ll use to show how faith is quote contrary to the evidence. They’ll point to some scientific proof that the earth is millions of years old to counter the Bible’s claim that it’s only several thousand years old. They’ll point to the miracles in the Bible and say there’s no evidence whatsoever to show that those things ever happened. Sidebar here is kind of humorous as listening to somebody talk about, they were in some college class discussing. The professor was going on about the parting of the Red Sea and the guy was trying to explain that you don’t understand that there was hot winds and they blew on the water and the water was really very shallow so it actually only had to move a few inches of water and it really

wasn’t this great party to the sea and one of the students in the back just kept saying praise God praise God and the professor finally said what are you saying I’ve just explained it this is not a miracle he says praise God the entire Egyptian army drowned in two inches of water. Well these critics though they wrongly claim that in order to have faith you have to abandon in your intellect and suspend critical thinking skills. There’s two common arguments made to support the claim that Christian faith is irrational. One, they say our dogmas defy logic. God became a man, really? The virgin birth, come on, miracles?

And two, they say it lacks empirical evidence for its claims. For example, the Bible talks about how the sun stood still for a day. They’re saying, where’s the proof? Christ rose from the dead. Where’s the proof? It’s a false assertion that Christians follow a blind faith and don’t want to be confused with the facts, as our critics say. Nietzsche, the German philosopher who famously declared God as dead, said faith means not wanting to know what is true. That was his assessment of us who operate by faith. Faith means that you don’t want to know what is true. But is that so? Do Christians really not want to know the truth?

Commons like these are really just ignorant ad hominem attacks. But they work. They put us on the defensive. Well, all of a sudden, we feel like we’re on the ones that are fighting the uphill battle. In his book, What is Faith? Jay Gresham Machen wrote, we believe that Christianity flourishes not in the darkness, but in the light. And he went on to say, one of the means which the Spirit it will use to bring a revival of the Christian religion is an awakening of the intellect. He denied the false and disastrous opposition which has been set up between knowledge and faith. That’s a false argument. Arguing that at no point is faith independent of the knowledge upon which it is logically based.

And then he also added, faith need not be too humble or too apologetic before the bar of reason. Christian faith is a thoroughly reasonable thing. Hebrews 11.1 tells us, now faith is the assurance of things hoped for for the conviction of things not seen. And that word conviction can actually be translated as proof or evidence. So our faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proof or the evidence of things not seen. The point Bonsen is driving home then is that Christian faith does not pit faith against reason. That’s what our critics say. Faith in this corner, reason in this corner. The fact of the matter is that Christianity pits faith against faith.

And that’s a key thought I want you to hang on to, is that what’s going on today in all of the debates or the world views, it’s faith versus faith. It’s not faith versus anything else. 1 Corinthians 1, 18 through 25 says, “‘For the word of the cross is folly “‘to those who are perishing, “‘but to us who are being saved, it’s the power of God, for it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preached to save those who believe.

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Pretty powerful apologetic statement there. There’s no, Paul, there’s no bashfulness. There’s no timidity there. He’s saying we have the truth and we’re going to declare it and it’s going to run up against the foolishness of this world. to think we’re fools. Granted, but that’s because they’re spiritually blind.

But that does not mean that our faith is hocus pocus made up. Paul warned Timothy in 1 Timothy 6.20, oh, Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge. For by professing it, some have swerved from the faith. The issue comes down to whose wisdom are you going to have faith in? It might be overly simplistic, but I think it’s fair to say that the Enlightenment and other modernist movements were motivated more by anti-God sentiment than a sincere pursuit of the truth. That is so important to understand the Enlightenment, that these were people who started with a presupposition, there is no God.

Now, show, I’ll go find data to support that presupposition. Their claim that they’re just looking at the fact, they’re just studying the rocks and the fossils and coming to that conclusion is bogus. They are not telling the truth. The allegation that Christianity is just another mythology is not new. Peter wrote, for we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. Now, that’s a bold claim. All you can conclude is that if that’s not true, Peter’s either a liar or he’s crazy. That’s the only conclusion you can reach, right?

Do you realize how much our lives are driven today by science that has never been observed or proven? Very interesting book in our sidebar. A good book, How to be an Atheist. What was the author’s name? I can’t remember. It’s Mitch Stokes. I actually got a copy for my atheist nephew. I said, here’s a birthday gift. Because he’s an atheist. I said, OK, if you’re going to be an atheist, here’s a book on how to be an atheist, written by a Christian. But he actually went through exploring science in there. And he really, it was very eye opening to show how much fact of science we believe in that actually we don’t know.

We have done experiments that seem to confirm, corroborate what we think is going on under the hood. But truth be told, we really don’t know. And he said it could be six months from now somebody will come up with a better explanation. Even the basic model of how an atom works that we all learned back in sixth grade. He says, we have no idea, that’s actually how it works. That’s just what we think is going on inside there. So all those pictures you see of the electrons and everything’s orbiting around? We have no idea if that’s actually what it looks like. And yet we take all of that as fact. The point being here is that we’re on the one hand, we have a man like Peter saying, I saw it.

And then we’re just, we just dismiss that. No, it’s gotta be a lie. But then we have all this science today that again is based on things that are not observable, things that we can’t reproduce, speculation. And we take that as fact. Consider the battle over climate change. We’re told that the Earth is on a dangerous warming trend compared to tens of thousands of years ago. But the truth is we only have data, actual data, that somebody wrote down in the lab book that goes back about 150 years. So everything that goes back 10,000 years and beyond is absolute conjecture and guess. And it’s built on a premise, a presupposition, that the Earth is very, very old.

What if the Earth isn’t very, very old? All of the climate science goes right out the window. It’s all they dig their ice cores. Oh, a million years ago, this is what was going on. Well, what if it ain’t a million years old? You got a problem. But they just, they refuse to believe that there’s a God, and so they come up with a story by faith, and then they sell it, and it becomes the gospel.

So again, you got this going on with science, but meanwhile, we have people like Peter who claim that they were eyewitnesses to Christ’s death and resurrection, and unbelievers just wave their hands and summarily dismiss it as myth. There’s no reason to reject Peter’s claims other than they don’t like the implications of what he’s saying is true. Go back to Nietzsche’s statement, faith means not wanting to know what is true. Juxtapose that statement against Romans 1.25 which says, they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator. That is exactly what is going on.

The unbeliever just says, I choose to believe a lie, anything but believe in God. It isn’t the believer who lacks intellectual honesty. There is no reason for a Christian to shy away from declaring what they have placed their faith in Christ. We’ve already seen in 1 Peter 3.15, which tells us to always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that’s in you. This implies that there’s a reasonableness to our faith. The unbeliever claims that Christianity is irrational. His claim that Christianity is irrational is itself irrational. Bonson writes, the Christian notion of faith, unlike most other religions, is not an arbitrary leap of emotion, a blind stab of commitment, a placing of the intellect on hold, for the Christian faith or belief is well-grounded Without the Christian worldview, reason itself becomes arbitrary or meaningless.

It becomes unintelligible. And he goes on in the book to explain how, once you throw something absolute, like the word of God out the window, you can’t even begin, if there’s no more absolutes, you can’t even begin to reason. I mean, just logic falls apart. Think about it. Without an absolute source of truth, such as God, there can be no platform from which to reason, because there are no absolutes. And as a side note again, I mean look at what’s going on in the definition of words. We can’t even agree on what a boy and a girl is anymore. It’s like, how do you, you know, would you go say hello to the boy? Well, I’m not sure who to go say hi to.

Because we don’t know what a boy and a girl means anymore. So then, Christianity does not defy logic. It reveals the organizing principles of logic. Without Christianity, without the absolute truth claims, We don’t have logic to build our arguments on. Now some argue Christianity cannot, some argue against Christianity because it cannot prove all of its claims, i.e. God exists, the earth was created in six days. René Descartes, who was a major philosopher in the age of reason, lived by the premise that one should doubt and criticize everything unless it can be shown or proven to be true. So his model was, I mean, he would have made great member of the city or the state of Missouri, doesn’t have to show me state, you know?

Show me, I won’t believe it unless you show me. And that was Descartes’ way of thinking. He literally would eat an apple and wonder, sit there eating the apple wondering, am I really eating an apple? Or am I just dreaming that I’m eating an apple? And you thought the Matrix movie was kinda trippy, but Next time you have an apple, just sit there and enjoy your apple and say, am I really eating this apple or am I just dreaming that I’m eating this apple? This is actually pretty absurd if you think about it. To truly live out this philosophy, you would have to doubt your memories of past experiences, your present sensations, the meaning of words, etc.

How could you ever know with certainty what was real or not? What if you were dreaming that you were dreaming that you were dreaming that you were eating an apple? Everything and anything is possible in this world where it’s all full of doubt. Quoting Bonson again, nobody can doubt everything, nobody. If a person were truly to doubt everything, his memory of past experiences, his present sensations, the connections between experiences, the meanings of his words, the principles by which he reasons he would not be thinking at all, much less doubting, and there would be no he to think or not to think. A fundamentally, logically basic set of beliefs, in essence, of faith is inescapable for anyone.

Everybody operates on some level of faith. Persons who say they will not believe anything without proof or demonstration are intellectual hypocrites. they violate their own standard for reasoning. It is impossible to live assumption free, again, think faith, when making truth claims. All truth claims are based on conclusions derived from earlier claims and so on. At some point in the process, you will be relying on your assumptions for what is true. If you keep drilling down on your thinking and your belief systems, if you can’t finally hit the bedrock of this is absolutely true, everything comes a tumbling down.

And so ultimately, the unbeliever who’s trying to make their own truth claims, they are relying on presuppositions. They have a set of givens that they take by faith are true. There are some critics who do accept the reality that everyone operates on some basic level of assumptions, but they have a different criticism. They object to the kind of evidence to which Christians appeal and the kind of presuppositions that we hold to, from which we reason. Specifically, they object to the idea of believing something on the basis of God’s personal authority rather than on the basis of impersonal and universally accepted norms of observation, logic, utility, etc.

These people believe that you have to start from a position of neutrality. There’s a whole other chapter in the book on that that I didn’t dive into. They say, look, look, no, we’re not going to assume there’s a God or anything else out there. There’s no truth source out there. We’re going to start with this blank slate, this neutral position. And then with our reason and our intellect and our logic, we are going to arrive at the truth somehow. You have to reason your way to the truth.

reject anything like a god interjecting himself and saying, hey, here’s the truth. Julian Huxley, he was an evolutionary biologist and eugenicist, more modern times, he wrote numerous books and articles and in one of those in the book called Religion Without Revelation, he wrote, I believe firmly that the scientific method, although slow and never claiming to lead to complete truth is the only method which in the long run will give satisfactory foundations for beliefs and we quite assuredly at present know nothing beyond this world and natural experience.” I mean it sounds like a statement of faith, right? Notice the dig of true religion in his book title, Religion Without Revelation.

Huxley rejects the notion of revealed authority and embraces the authority of natural science. Now sad for a man who spent his entire life studying nature and writing books that he missed the fact that nature was declaring the glory of God, Huxley’s approach amounts to faith. He admits that science will never fill in all the truth gaps. Because of his presupposition that there is no God, he is doomed to be among those mentioned in 2 Timothy 3.7 which says, those who are always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. These critics say you can’t use a source like the Bible to argue what is true.

Another philosopher, an English philosopher named Anthony Flew, spent most of his life as an atheist. But then later on in life he actually became a deist and when I asked him why the switch he says, well I just followed the evidence. He actually, through his own search, he actually concluded there’s gotta be intelligent design. But he never became a Christian. He still denied the authority of the Bible. He denied Christianity. But he wrote, “‘An appeal to biblical authority cannot be allowed “‘to be final in over-writing. “‘For what is in question precisely is the status “‘and authority of all religious authorities.‘” And so that would mean God too.

We, God can’t say I’m the authority because that’s gonna be a self-affirming authority. Authority can’t say I’m the authority. You have to arrive at that’s the authority some other way. The authority can’t say I’m the authority. According to him, we can’t trust the authority of the Bible even though it contains claims within it to be the written word of God because that would be a self-validating authority. So this line of thinking, if it’s true, would force you to conclude that either there is no way to ever arrive at an ultimate authority, or man himself is the final authority when it comes to deciding who and what is the final authority.

So if I get to decide what’s the authority, guess who’s the ultimate authority in that line of thinking. In his book, The Defense of the Faith, Van Til points out that the unbeliever necessarily views himself as the final authority. In the final analysis, unbelieving man is the final authority. He wrote, the natural man that assumes that he has the final criterion of truth within himself. Every form of authority that comes to him must justify itself by standards inherent in man and operative apart from the authority that speaks. Bonsen concludes his discussion of the problem of faith by saying, to criticize the Christian’s irrational faith is itself nothing more than to express a different religious faith, a faith which in one way or another adopts the ultimate authority and self-sufficiency of the human mind and reasoning.

My conclusion is this, everybody lives by faith. Everybody lives by faith. Even Stephen Hawking, who has finally figured out that there is a God, even though he said absolutely there is no God in his last book just got released, he now knows there is. He lived by faith. Don’t let unbelievers fool you into thinking they have reason and evidence on their side and that we don’t. Much of what under guards their beliefs is sheer speculation masquerading as science and logic.

Okay, so that’s the problem of faith. Let’s talk now about the problem of evil. Perhaps the biggest problem Christian apologists face and the one that is presented to them most often is the problem of evil. The problem critics say is that if God exists and is as good and powerful as Christians say, why doesn’t he stop all the evil in the world? Surely an all-powerful God could snap his fingers and all human suffering. Sounds reasonable, right? I admit it, we probably wonder that ourselves a few times. Somewhere in your life. To many, the existence of evil proves that God does not exist. Many Christians are at are lost to give a defense for this line of thinking.

One weak defense that’s offered sometimes by some Christian apologists is to use kind of the scales system. And they say, well, all right, there’s evil. Yeah, true. We can’t really explain that. But there’s way more good stuff. And God’s good. And so all the good stuff we put to God’s credit. And that tips the scale way over on the good side. So God’s still a good God. And we really can’t answer the evil part, but there’s so much good that that’s sort of irrelevant. That’s a very bad apologetic, by the way. At the root of the problem of evil is the charge that the Christian worldview is logically incoherent. Any evil, our critics say, pokes holes in the Christian outlook of a good, powerful God.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote this. He said, is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he’s impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he’s malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then why is there evil? According to Hume, there was these three propositional statements he made that he said that the Christian believes but are ill ought. You cannot hold all three at the same time. Those three statements were, God is all powerful. God is all good, and evil exists. He said, you can’t believe all three things at the same time and be logically coherent in your faith. As it turns out, there’s a problem, though, actually for the unbeliever, pointing out the problem of evil.

Only those who can declare definitively what is evil can even raise the problem of evil. You can’t even fault somebody else for evil unless you yourself can actually define what evil is, right? That stands to reason. The unbeliever cannot logically do this since there is no objective standard by which to make such an assertion. So, Bonsen is saying, hey, Christians, we can say evil exists, but in fact, the unbeliever can’t even say evil exists because they have no way to actually say what’s evil. Is public approval the measure? Is that how you decide what’s evil? If the majority says something is good or evil, Does that make it so?

If that’s the standard, then past genocides, slavery, abortion, these all could have been deemed good, have been deemed good at different times in history, even though we now all, even the unbelievers today in our culture would say, well, except for abortion, they would say those are evil. And yet in times past, because groupthink said they were good, they were good. More absurd than groupthink is the notion that good is whatever evokes an individual’s approval. If the definition of good comes down to a personal preference, then good becomes completely subjective. It would be impossible for anyone to declare anything as good or evil, except for how it pertains to them themselves.

That’s all you can say is if it’s a matter of what I think, I can, if I say it’s good or evil, it’s irrelevant to what you guys think. You have a different set of standards. Unbelievers will sometimes attempt define what is good or evil by its instrumental or consequential effects. Something as good if it achieves a certain result, such as the happiness of the greatest number of people. If you get into discussions of morality and right and wrong and good and evil with an atheist, they’ll say, well, they’ll argue that they can actually define a morality that’s binding as well. And they’ll use these instrumental arguments.

Well, if the most people think it’s good, then it’s probably good and the society should adopted. But by this standard, in order to implement a good thing, you would need to know how to rate happiness. If that was your definition of what it meant to be good, is that it brought the most happiness to the most people, you would have to be able to first define what do you mean by happiness. And you’d have to make sure you could calculate all the unexpected consequences that your good action that you implement to try to bring about happiness, how can you determine that that’s going to be the most happiness for the most people.

You end up in a no-win situation. Good can only be taken as whatever produces happiness if one can assert that happiness is good. Who said happiness is good? You have to start with the definition of good before you can decide if a chosen end is a good one to pursue. I realize we’re down at a very philosophical, logical level here in these arguments. But we throw these words out, and we We don’t realize how much we are relying on our presuppositions of what good and evil is and how much we’re relying on the Christian worldview that has informed that even for the unbelievers. And without that rock foundation, these are meaningless terms that become very, very subjective.

Philosophically, the problem of evil is a problem for the unbeliever. In order to use evil in his argument against God, he has to show that his views on what is evil are meaningful. Just because he says it’s evil doesn’t mean it’s evil, because he’s got nothing to back him up, other than his opinion. His unbelieving worldview makes this impossible for him to do so. There must be a presupposition behind the objection to evil. If he’s going to say something that’s evil authoritatively, he’s got a presupposition somewhere driving that statement. Otherwise, his statement is irrelevant. I think Bonson makes an important point here.

Who gets to define good? In Luke 18, we read the story of the rich young ruler who came to Jesus and addressed him as the good teacher. And Jesus looked back at him and he said, why do you call me good? Only God is good. The point I want to stress is that humans, as image bearers, can only reflect the goodness of God. It’s an important thought. We can only reflect goodness as God is good. We cannot define good, we cannot originate good. It’s not our concept. It comes from God and all we can do is reflect it. We are not the authors or the definers of what is good. We get into trouble when we make up our own definition of good and then throw it back into God’s face.

And I think that’s what goes on a lot, is we have our conceived notions of good that then we hold God to our definitions instead of looking to God for the understanding of what good is. I believe this is one of the fundamental mistakes that Christian Universalists make in their thinking. In case you don’t know what a Christian Universalist is, they’re a group who believe that every human being, every ever born, will eventually come to faith in Christ and be in heaven. Every soul, every born, they say, will eventually accept Jesus as their personal savior. Some of them will do it from hell in their thinking. They will have gone to hell having not accepted Christ in this life and somehow in hell they’re gonna still hear the gospel and they’re gonna accept Jesus at some point in time in Christian Universalists.

That’s what they believe. I know it does sound a little strange. They maintain that there is no way that a quote, good and loving God could ever consign people to a never-ending punishment such as hell. And so arguing, they hold to their own presuppositional definition of what is good, and then they have to go back to the scriptures and try to look at the scriptures through that lens and then work their way around the eternality of judgment and all those other problem verses. And they have ways of explaining away from them. If you’re actually interested in learning more about this particular view, you can read the book, The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbot.

I actually read two thirds of the book because I have some friends who have adopted this view. My take, though, is that the author starts with his own presupposition of what a loving God should be like as opposed to what the Bible reveals about God. Now, I’m sure if he was here, he’d probably take me to task and think I’m being too simplistic in my criticism. But I think it does boil down to that. He starts pretty much in his own testimony about he just had a problem with the idea that some people spend eternity in hell. And so he worked backwards from there and redefined what a good God would be like. So back to the problem of defining what is good and evil.

There are many things that believers and non-believers agree are intrinsically evil. Many things that both believers and non-believers agree. Child abuse, murder. Is that safe to say that probably everybody in our culture would agree those two things are not good? At least today. Neither would consider their abhorrence to these as merely personal opinions. They wouldn’t say, well, I’m opposed to, personally, I’m opposed to child abuse, but if you think differently, peace, no. They would say, no, it’s wrong for everybody. Throw them in jail. Same for murder. So we would all agree that there’s this universal truth that these two things are evil.

But where does this sense that something is intrinsically evil come from? How can a non-believer declare something is wrong and not simply not to their liking? What philosophy of value or morality are they using to make their judgments? They are reduced to using personal choice and feelings to evaluate the evilness of something. But these cannot be the basis for declaring something as universally evil. Just because I think it’s evil, I cannot speak like a god and say it’s evil for everybody. When a non-believer shows indignation at evil, they reveal a presupposition that there is an absolute standard. And I believe that’s their God consciousness at work in them.

Otherwise, their indignation merely arises out of their own personal feelings about something. When confronted, the unbeliever will say that evil is ultimately based on human reasoning and choice relative to individuals and cultures. But this is logically incoherent.

He shows on the one hand his belief that something like child abuse is inherently evil, but then he says the evil is subjective to the individual or the culture. If individuals or groups of individuals choose ethical values for themselves, they then cannot accuse others of doing evil if those others are holding to a different set of ethics. If there’s a culture out there that thinks killing your neighbor is an honorable thing, this culture who abhors that cannot pronounce evil on them if in fact the standard for evil is based on culture based on popular opinion. The best you can do is call your own actions evil when you do not follow your own ethics. The unbeliever is trapped into condoning and permitting behavior that they wish to call evil. The truth is that every unbeliever secretly relies upon a Christian worldview in order to shape their own ideas of good and evil. They have to borrow from Christian categories in order to make absolute judgments.

Anti-theism presupposes theism to make its case. Now they don’t admit that, they don’t say that, but they have to. To be logically coherent, they have to be doing that. The problem of evil is a logical problem for the unbeliever, not for the believer. Believers can make sense out of their revulsion of child abuse because it violates God’s laws. because God has said it is evil. And so we stand on an absolute standard that we can say with confidence, this is universally true, it’s always evil.

But unbelievers, unbelievers to be justified in their moral outrage need to appeal to some divine or transcendent sense of ethics which they deny even exists. So if you’re following all this, I am speaking with authority, they say to you, and this is true, and you’re saying, who died and made you God? You know, you can’t say that, because you’re in your philosophy and your worldview, you’re denying that there is any such authority, including yourself. At this point, the unbeliever could still point to the seeming logical incoherence within the Christian worldview as expressed by Hume. They’d say, well, all right, take us off the hot seat for a minute, but you still got a problem over here, Because you still believe that God is all good and God is all powerful and that evil exists.

So there, that’s a problem. You’re still in trouble. And the Bible does require believers to presume, in our presuppositions, we believe that God is all powerful and is all good. There are plenty of verses that support that statement. And the Bible does also make some very hard statements about evil. Isaiah 45, seven is probably one of the more famous ones stating this problem. And God says, I form light and create darkness. I make well-being and create calamity. I am the Lord who does all these things. And the word calamity there can be translated as evil. The fact that evil exists and is appointed slash allowed by God requires us to infer that God has a morally good reason for all the evil that exists.

God has planned evil events for reasons that are morally commendable and good. Hume’s paradox is resolved by adding a fourth premise to the other three. God, in that fourth premise, is that God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists. It’s our faith that causes us to infer that evil always serves God’s morally good purpose. More often than not, we won’t be able to discern that purpose, but it’s there. We see clear examples of it in the Bible. Abraham sacrificing Isaac, Job losing all that he had, Joseph being in prison. We know that Abraham’s act of faith resulted in the greater good of God declaring him righteous and the resulting blessings that would come to all those who were his spiritual descendants.

We know that the injustice done to Joseph resulted in the greater good of the survival of many people. He told his brothers, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. The problem of evil’s existence in the presence of God’s goodness and might is actually, and get this, is actually a psychological, not a logical problem. The only logical problem is how the unbeliever can account for making any objective moral statement about God or anything else. The presence of evil is a hard reality.

We simply aren’t told how that evil always fits into God’s plans in a morally justifiable way, but by faith we know it does. It is not logical incoherence that makes someone reject God. It is pride and self-righteousness. The unbeliever who demands that God give a defense of himself is demanding God to subordinate himself to their intellectual authority and moral evaluation. There’s not enough I went over too fast or not, but remember Hume, God is all powerful, God is all good, evil exists, and there is, it does sound like a problem there, but add, and where evil exists, God has a morally good reason for that evil to exist, and you resolve this paradox, this contradiction, and by faith we infer this fourth one from the other things that we know to be true.

Once again we see the issue boils down to faith. You either have faith in the God of the Bible, or you have faith in your own competency to judge what is good and evil. Ironically, this is exactly the same way sin first entered into the world. Satan began his deception of Eve by asking her, has God said? Over here, God says. Over here, Satan whispered in her ear, has God said? That’s exactly what’s going on today in the debates between the believers and non-believers. All of them boil down to that simple equation. And Satan went on then to proceed to give her alternatives to to what God had said. The problem of evil is not a valid, logical argument against God.

It’s a convenient excuse to not submit oneself to God. So, last few minutes, got a couple summary thoughts. At this year’s Grace Agenda Conference, Doug Wilson gave a humorous analogy that describes many Christians’ approaches to proclaiming the word of God. He asked us to imagine a mugger that approaches a victim, sticks a gun in their back and says, give me your money or I’ll shoot. The victim turns around, sees the gun and says, oh, I’m sorry, I don’t believe in guns. To which the mugger then apologizes all over themselves and then for bothering them and then walks away. In the analogy, the mugger is the Christian, the gun is the word of God, and the victim is the unbeliever.

The problem many Christians have with their apologetics is not the claims that they’re making. The problem is that too often the unbeliever’s faith in know God is stronger than the believer’s faith in God in his word. When Peter wrote, always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks for you for a reason for the hope that’s in you, he was not implying that the truth needs to be defended in a way so as to make it more compelling than all the other conflicting worldviews. Pre-suppositional apologetics makes no apologies. It declares what God has said with boldness and confidence that his word will prevail over every vain and lofty thought raised up against it.

Hebrews 4.12 reminds us of this truth. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart, and no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him, to whom they must give an account.

But that’s not because our arguments were not persuasive, that’s simply because you’ve not called them at this time to yourself. And so help us to not be ashamed, to not be embarrassed, to not feel like we have to go home and practice up on our arguments to be more persuasive, but again, to realize that your word is powerful and that it will do what you sent it out, it will accomplish its purposes. And so again, just thank you for your word and for the revelation you’ve given us. As we go out this evening now, we just pray you keep us safe and that we’d have a great week. Come back again next week ready for more corporate worship. We pray in your Son in Jesus’ name, Amen.

But that’s not because our arguments were not persuasive, that’s simply because you’ve not called them at this time to yourself. And so help us to not be ashamed, to not be embarrassed, to not feel like we have to go home and practice up on our arguments to be more persuasive, but again, to realize that your word is powerful and that it will do what you sent it out, it will accomplish its purposes. And so again, just thank you for your word and for the revelation you’ve given us. As we go out this evening now, we just pray you keep us safe and that we’d have a great week. Come back again next week ready for more corporate worship.