1 00:00:03,169 --> 00:00:08,608 Apologetics. Now, any of you familiar with what is apologetics? The defense of the faith. 2 00:00:09,075 --> 00:00:14,347 So apologetics is a branch of theology and it's specifically concerned with defending 3 00:00:14,347 --> 00:00:19,552 the Christian faith. Apologetics. Some people try to do apologetics because they figure 4 00:00:19,552 --> 00:00:22,255 that if they do it really well they're going to convince a bunch of people to become Christians. 5 00:00:23,123 --> 00:00:29,262 And so you have books like Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ or The Case for Faith. And 6 00:00:29,262 --> 00:00:32,866 some Christians think, if I just could get my non-Christian friends to read this they 7 00:00:32,866 --> 00:00:37,337 become Christian. And so the non-Christian friend reads it and what happens? They say, 8 00:00:37,570 --> 00:00:42,008 ah, that's fine for you. I don't buy it. Because you see there's more to coming to faith than 9 00:00:42,008 --> 00:00:47,714 simply being convinced of the facts. So apologetics has its limits. You're not going to argue 10 00:00:47,714 --> 00:00:52,752 people into the faith. That's not going to happen. More on that down the road. But apologetics 11 00:00:52,752 --> 00:00:56,823 do serve a pretty valuable purpose. And one of the most valuable purposes is for Christians. 12 00:00:57,924 --> 00:01:01,661 Because who is it that reads a book like The Case for Christ and gets all fired up 13 00:01:01,661 --> 00:01:08,201 about it? Christians do. And Christians read C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. And they get 14 00:01:08,201 --> 00:01:13,306 encouraged by it because they say, this is so cool. Because what happens is when we read 15 00:01:13,306 --> 00:01:20,046 that stuff is it reinforces, I'm not an idiot to believe this. This is not irrational. It's 16 00:01:20,046 --> 00:01:26,486 not unreasonable. It's not illogical. It actually fits. It makes sense. It makes sense that 17 00:01:26,486 --> 00:01:30,924 the world as it really is, it is even scientific. And that's why we get excited about things 18 00:01:30,924 --> 00:01:35,128 like intelligent design. Because we've got scientists who are affirming some of the things 19 00:01:35,128 --> 00:01:39,632 that we hold fast. Now does that mean intelligent designs are all Christians? Of course not. 20 00:01:40,033 --> 00:01:43,369 And so we take them for what they are. We take your friends where you can find them. 21 00:01:43,870 --> 00:01:47,774 And if you've got somebody who's saying, I think there's some brilliance behind this. 22 00:01:47,941 --> 00:01:52,212 Okay. I'll agree with you to that point. Does that mean we're ready to, you know, say we 23 00:01:52,212 --> 00:01:56,416 have the same faith? Absolutely not. But there is common ground. So apologetics has 24 00:01:56,416 --> 00:02:00,854 its purpose. And paying attention to cosmological and the theological and historical and the 25 00:02:00,854 --> 00:02:08,595 moral argument has value. Because it reinforces for Christians, this stuff is true. And God 26 00:02:08,595 --> 00:02:13,333 is consistent throughout his work. One of the other things we need to stress is the 27 00:02:13,333 --> 00:02:19,839 consistency of God's revelation. That God does not show one thing here and then something 28 00:02:19,839 --> 00:02:24,944 else here. There is a consistency of what's going on through the whole thing. So that's 29 00:02:24,944 --> 00:02:29,215 part of the value here. Now, there are some other arguments with the existence of God 30 00:02:29,215 --> 00:02:35,688 which also kind of grow out of a general revelation. These, I said, were more empirical. And even 31 00:02:35,688 --> 00:02:39,692 the moral is kind of empirical. This is the, you actually do studies of cultures and kind 32 00:02:39,692 --> 00:02:43,229 of figure out what's going on and is there agreement or isn't there. And the moral argument 33 00:02:43,229 --> 00:02:47,800 tends to be an empirical, you judge this thing. There's a very fascinating argument for God 34 00:02:47,800 --> 00:02:56,843 which is called the ontological argument. Ontological argument. And the guy who first 35 00:02:56,843 --> 00:03:03,583 really gets credit for cooking this baby up, a guy named Anselm. Anselm came from the 11th 36 00:03:03,583 --> 00:03:12,325 century, 12th, I think 1100 or late 10 hundreds. So, a long time ago. Anselm came up with the 37 00:03:12,325 --> 00:03:17,764 ontological argument. Aquinas was in the 1300s, a couple hundred years after Anselm. Anselm 38 00:03:17,764 --> 00:03:29,809 I think is 11 somewhere in there. So, the ontological argument goes like this. I can 39 00:03:29,809 --> 00:03:36,516 think of the greatest thing imaginable. So I start imagining the most powerful almighty 40 00:03:37,083 --> 00:03:41,654 greatest thing I could possibly imagine. Who can create everything and control everything 41 00:03:41,654 --> 00:03:46,759 and is in charge of everything. And if I visualize that greatest thing I can possibly imagine, 42 00:03:46,759 --> 00:03:50,663 there's only one thing that can make that thing greater than my imagination of it. And 43 00:03:50,663 --> 00:03:58,304 what would that be? For it to really exist. And so he argues if I can imagine something 44 00:03:58,304 --> 00:04:02,108 greater than which nothing else is greater, the only thing greater than my imagination 45 00:04:02,108 --> 00:04:05,945 of the thing would be the thing itself and the thing itself would be the greatest thing 46 00:04:05,945 --> 00:04:12,852 and that would exist. And so, God must exist. And it's kind of like, huh? Yeah, that's how 47 00:04:12,852 --> 00:04:18,725 it hits me too. But that's the ontological argument. And ontology comes from the Greek 48 00:04:18,725 --> 00:04:26,633 word ontos which means being. So it's an argument from not what things are but from being. Okay? 49 00:04:26,966 --> 00:04:33,006 Not an empirical argument. It's a thought argument and it's arguing that the very essence 50 00:04:33,006 --> 00:04:37,744 of being is what God is all about and if I can conceive of something great, that thing 51 00:04:37,744 --> 00:04:41,347 must really exist otherwise it wouldn't be the greatest thing. And if I can think of 52 00:04:41,347 --> 00:04:43,783 the greatest thing, it must be a reason why I can think of the greatest thing is because 53 00:04:43,783 --> 00:04:48,488 it really is there. That's the ontological argument. It's an old argument. Some people 54 00:04:48,488 --> 00:04:54,594 find it fascinating and really compelling. I always find it kind of bizarre. Okay? But 55 00:04:54,594 --> 00:04:59,666 that's the classic ontological argument for the existence of God. And it fits more or 56 00:04:59,666 --> 00:05:04,771 less in here as well. For our experience, probably in our culture today, it's the most 57 00:05:04,771 --> 00:05:07,674 compelling arguments if you're going to try to talk to somebody about you know God really 58 00:05:07,674 --> 00:05:13,379 exists. Probably the cosmological and teleological and the moral. Just a sense of rightness and 59 00:05:13,379 --> 00:05:17,150 wrongness. Where does that come from? Of course there are arguments against that. People would 60 00:05:17,150 --> 00:05:21,054 say, yeah, it's all culture driven. It's just what you were taught. It's what, you 61 00:05:21,054 --> 00:05:25,725 know, that's why you believe these things. But we wouldn't say no. There's a more fundamental 62 00:05:25,725 --> 00:05:31,931 issue. It's coming from somewhere. So these all come out of this sort of a sense of arguing. 63 00:05:31,931 --> 00:05:43,009 Okay. Kolb mentions another one in here and he talks about the emotional argument. And 64 00:05:43,009 --> 00:05:47,814 this would be, this is also probably a pretty popular one in our culture. The emotional 65 00:05:47,814 --> 00:05:59,025 argument is just that sense, that feeling of Godness. A sense of God. The feeling. And 66 00:05:59,025 --> 00:06:05,665 God. That God's there and I've encountered him and I have this feeling of it. A guy named 67 00:06:05,665 --> 00:06:10,837 Rudolph Otto about 100 years ago wrote a book called the Quest for the Holy or something 68 00:06:10,837 --> 00:06:14,941 like that. Quest for Holiness. No, that's not what he called it. He called him the Holy. 69 00:06:15,141 --> 00:06:20,480 Das Heilige. The Holy. And Rudolph Otto traveled around the world and spent some time in India. 70 00:06:20,880 --> 00:06:24,751 And he realized that every single religion and every culture is always having the same 71 00:06:24,751 --> 00:06:30,056 goal to kind of feel connected to God and have this feeling. And he said that feeling, 72 00:06:30,056 --> 00:06:34,961 that's coming from God and that God is there for all of us. And he's a pure modernist looking 73 00:06:34,961 --> 00:06:39,632 for the great one overall truth and we're all connecting into that. For him, it was 74 00:06:39,632 --> 00:06:46,672 the feeling of God. That sense of the numinous. The other than me. And this is still pretty 75 00:06:46,672 --> 00:06:51,978 popular. You got a lot of people who are out there looking for that God feeling. In fact, 76 00:06:51,978 --> 00:06:56,549 you got a lot of people coming to Christian churches looking for that God feeling. And 77 00:06:56,549 --> 00:07:01,654 if it works for a while, that's cool. You know, I really feel God here. But then if 78 00:07:01,654 --> 00:07:05,057 it doesn't work, then they go look somewhere else. And they might look at the Jehovah's 79 00:07:05,057 --> 00:07:09,195 Witness church or they might go looking at the Buddhist temple or they might even go 80 00:07:09,195 --> 00:07:15,234 check out the Hindus. Oh, I found it. This was the big rage. Remember back in the 60s, 81 00:07:15,234 --> 00:07:19,172 those of you old enough to remember. You know, you had people running off trying to find 82 00:07:19,172 --> 00:07:23,209 themselves and learning the reality. And Eastern religions were all the rage. You had 83 00:07:23,209 --> 00:07:26,646 the Beatles running off and sitting at the feet of the Maharishi for a while, you know, 84 00:07:26,913 --> 00:07:31,851 finding truth. That's the same idea. They're looking for that God connection. That feeling 85 00:07:31,851 --> 00:07:36,689 of connectedness. And so the emotional thing is also part of the driving force of this 86 00:07:36,689 --> 00:07:44,831 thing. Now, ultimately though, all of these different ways of general revelation or a 87 00:07:45,598 --> 00:07:51,804 kind of God showing himself just through the reality of what is all come up short. Because 88 00:07:51,804 --> 00:07:57,844 what we get from here is kind of a fragmented picture of God. You get glimpses of great 89 00:07:57,844 --> 00:08:04,984 beauty and you get hints of goodness and you get hints of wonderful creativity. I mean, 90 00:08:05,051 --> 00:08:07,487 you just walk over to the zoo and take a look at all the different animals running around. 91 00:08:07,620 --> 00:08:13,292 You go, wow, you know, what kind of creator of God is this? And you see a sense of this, 92 00:08:13,292 --> 00:08:19,932 but you also get perplexed. Because you see, you know, death and you see decay and you 93 00:08:19,932 --> 00:08:27,039 see great destruction of storms or, you know, physical forces in nature. You see man's cruelty 94 00:08:27,673 --> 00:08:31,711 and you see the breakdown of morality and you begin to wonder what kind of God would 95 00:08:31,711 --> 00:08:38,384 allow this. And so it's perplexing. And we get a rather mixed picture. So, general revelation 96 00:08:38,384 --> 00:08:43,856 or natural revelation will only take you so far. And this is also why you get people who 97 00:08:43,856 --> 00:08:48,227 are, you know, just kind of paying attention to stuff who say, there must be a God but I don't 98 00:08:48,227 --> 00:08:54,967 want to believe in Him because He seems arbitrary or He killed my mom, He didn't heal my sister, 99 00:08:55,067 --> 00:08:59,772 whatever. And they have a whole lot of baggage, a whole lot of hurts because the general revelation 100 00:08:59,772 --> 00:09:06,846 just doesn't get the job done. It won't do it. Which is probably why handing an unbeliever 101 00:09:06,846 --> 00:09:13,152 a book of Christian apologetics is not going to make him a Christian. Okay? It might silence 102 00:09:13,152 --> 00:09:17,857 some of their arguments but if they're ticked off at God, you're not going to solve the 103 00:09:17,857 --> 00:09:20,927 problem by proving to them that they really must believe in God. It's just going to make 104 00:09:20,927 --> 00:09:26,532 them more angry. And it's not going to deal with it. So, general revelation has its purposes 105 00:09:26,532 --> 00:09:31,103 but it only goes so far. Now, one other purpose before I leave this, because once I leave 106 00:09:31,103 --> 00:09:36,075 it it's done. One other purpose of general revelation, one of the very useful things, 107 00:09:36,075 --> 00:09:42,548 is simply the idea of this common morality. And what I would call growing out of this 108 00:09:42,548 --> 00:09:48,554 natural law, or natural world, is the idea of a natural law. So in other words, there 109 00:09:48,554 --> 00:09:57,196 is a common foundation for all people in creation and it's there. This is really very helpful, 110 00:09:57,296 --> 00:10:03,035 especially when we're living in a pluralistic age like we are, when you're trying to argue 111 00:10:03,035 --> 00:10:08,507 some issue of social morality. For example, okay, whether or not gay marriage is a good 112 00:10:08,507 --> 00:10:15,982 thing. Alright? The Christian's temptation is to do what? He's making his case why gay 113 00:10:15,982 --> 00:10:21,854 marriage is wrong. What's the Christian tempted to stand up and say? God says it's wrong. 114 00:10:22,154 --> 00:10:26,025 Here's the verse. And they start quoting Bible verses. And all the Christians say, yeah! 115 00:10:26,559 --> 00:10:33,265 That's it. We're done. And all the non-Christians say, so who what? That's your God, who cares? 116 00:10:34,166 --> 00:10:39,305 And you're just, you know, close minded, you're trapped in a hopelessly narrow world view, 117 00:10:39,572 --> 00:10:43,809 you've got to expand your world view a little bit more. So, if we're going to argue against 118 00:10:44,410 --> 00:10:48,180 the legitimacy of gay marriage, which I think is a legitimate thing to argue against, and 119 00:10:48,180 --> 00:10:54,553 we should argue against it, how do we do it? Don't quote the Bible. Don't talk about what 120 00:10:54,553 --> 00:11:00,993 God says. Well, there's some of these other arguments like it runs contrary to design 121 00:11:00,993 --> 00:11:07,967 and purpose. Yeah. So, you see, in other words, you start making a case based on natural law, 122 00:11:08,067 --> 00:11:14,240 things that are just there. And you can make a pretty good case for that. For example is, 123 00:11:14,740 --> 00:11:20,212 do we want, you know, is this a good thing for society? You know, you're obviously bucking 124 00:11:20,212 --> 00:11:23,916 the design of nature. How are you going to propagate children in this? You know, it doesn't 125 00:11:23,916 --> 00:11:29,021 work. Okay? Can't. And so you've got to have, that doesn't work. So you've got kind of arguing 126 00:11:29,021 --> 00:11:32,725 against the very design of creation of self, the teleological thing. You can also argue 127 00:11:32,725 --> 00:11:36,962 against the moral sense. People have a sense that it's wrong. Is this just coming because 128 00:11:36,962 --> 00:11:40,433 they were brought up in a repressive society, which is what the argument goes? Or is it 129 00:11:40,433 --> 00:11:44,170 because we have a sense that this is just not the way it's supposed to be? And you're 130 00:11:44,170 --> 00:11:49,709 far better off appealing to people's internal gut morality of you just, you know it's wrong. 131 00:11:49,709 --> 00:11:54,180 And most people are going to say, yeah, I do. I'm trying to be enlightened, but I just, 132 00:11:54,513 --> 00:12:00,953 it creeps me up. I know it's not right. You know? And that's legit. That's how you make 133 00:12:00,953 --> 00:12:06,025 a case. And then you also start arguing things like this just degrades society, it pulls 134 00:12:06,025 --> 00:12:10,362 society down, it's not advancing society. You can make historical arguments like, hey, 135 00:12:10,529 --> 00:12:14,366 what were the Romans doing shortly before they fell down the tubes? Oh, they were playing 136 00:12:14,366 --> 00:12:19,171 around with all kinds of homosexual things. It was the standard. Maybe there's a correlation. 137 00:12:19,171 --> 00:12:24,276 So you can make a really good natural law argument without bringing God or the Bible 138 00:12:24,276 --> 00:12:27,913 into it all. And we need to pay attention to that kind of stuff, especially the more 139 00:12:27,913 --> 00:12:32,518 we're living in this society. Paul himself did this. Remember when Paul showed up at 140 00:12:32,518 --> 00:12:37,523 the Areopagus in Athens? What did he do? Did he get up to give a speech and start quoting 141 00:12:37,523 --> 00:12:43,229 scripture? No. He repealed to the unknown God. He said, I was walking through your city 142 00:12:43,229 --> 00:12:47,566 and I saw all these great temples and I even saw one to the unknown God. And he talked 143 00:12:47,566 --> 00:12:52,271 about the things that they just had figured out cosmologically, teleologically. That's 144 00:12:52,271 --> 00:12:57,543 where he started. And he began there and then he worked his way. Finally he got talking 145 00:12:57,543 --> 00:13:01,413 about Jesus and the resurrection, but that wasn't until the end. And that's when, you 146 00:13:01,413 --> 00:13:06,051 see, what he did was he built on the general revelation and brought it to the specific. 147 00:13:06,652 --> 00:13:11,090 So we need to pay a little more attention, I'm going to argue, to the general revelation 148 00:13:11,090 --> 00:13:16,228 and not be so quick to just be dismissive of it as it doesn't matter who cares. It's 149 00:13:16,228 --> 00:13:19,765 more important than we sometimes realize. And we need to pay a little more attention 150 00:13:19,765 --> 00:13:24,970 to it. It matters. And the reason I would say it matters is because, just because a 151 00:13:24,970 --> 00:13:31,143 heathen realizes something or makes the argument doesn't mean it's wrong. Aristotle discovered 152 00:13:31,143 --> 00:13:35,981 all kinds of truth. So did Plato. And just because they're not Christian doesn't mean 153 00:13:35,981 --> 00:13:39,952 they are idiots and they're not going to figure something out. Because God has simply built 154 00:13:39,952 --> 00:13:43,455 some of this stuff into the creation, any fool who sits down and looks at it and starts 155 00:13:43,455 --> 00:13:47,059 thinking about it is going to often reach the conclusions God wants you to reach. They'll 156 00:13:47,059 --> 00:13:53,065 be right. So truth is to be found in all kinds of places. And we can, like I said, take your 157 00:13:53,065 --> 00:13:58,470 friends where you can find them. And people who are embracing the reality of God and the 158 00:13:58,470 --> 00:14:03,576 morality that comes with that, this is a good thing. Don't be so dismissive of it.