In this podcast we discuss presuppositional apologetics. This is in preparation before we review the Bahnsen vs. Stein debate.
Link to presentation document: http://logicalbelief.org/documents/-How_do_we_know_the_Bible_is_true.pdf
Video Podcast:
Audio Podcast:
Jeff Durbin from Apologia Church knocks it out of the park with a reasoned defense of the faith and with a great presentation of the Pre-supositional Apologetic.
Every human being’s beliefs about the world has a starting point, a line of reasoning that has a beginning. Most have not even taken the time to think about the fact that they have this starting point, but everyone, no one excluded, has a starting point to all lines of reasoning. Most assume their starting point without giving it any thought.
This starting point can be described as a world view. A world view is comprised of a set of presuppositions and is controlled by an ultimate authority. Some will insist that they have no world view. They may say that they are completely objective and weigh all the evidence for all arguments and choose the one with the most evidence. This may sound good at face value, but the belief that we need to except the possibility of everything and weigh all the evidence is in itself a world view and a rather absurd and self-refuting one at that. They will say they are completely objective but by their own definition of their world view they exclude all world views that they don’t believe to be objective therefore they are not being completely objective. These same people often claim to be tolerant but won’t tolerate a view they deem intolerant. This means they will only tolerate those that share their world view of tolerance. This is very intolerant and therefore refutes their own world view. No human being is completely objective. All approach the evidence with a set of presuppositions and an ultimate authority. As a Christian I do not claim to be completely objective or tolerant. I will not even waste any time examining evolution to see if it might be true or has enough evidence to support it. Any world view outside of the Bible has to argue for itself by borrowing presuppositions from the Biblical world view therefore I have no reason to even entertain it. (I will expound on this further in the article)
Let us examine for a moment if atheism even has the possibility of being rational or viable. The primary tenant of atheism is that there is no evidence for God therefore there is no God but let us take this view to its rational and logical conclusion. If there is no God the atheist must provide proof and evidence that something can come from nothing. He also must provide a foundational reason for absolute, invariant and unchanging laws in our reality. The atheist will usually respond to this question by trying to give what he believes is evidence for evolution, but this is a red herring fallacy and does not actually answer the question. He will also have to argue using the laws of logic while not being able to account for them in his world view.
For evolution to even be possible (it is not) it presupposes a universe with time, space and matter that abides by uniform laws. The universe (our reality) is something; therefore the atheist must explain the existence of reality before he can even go on to give evidence for evolution. The atheist often jumps over this huge chasm and just hopes his opponent does not notice. The belief that something can come from nothing is so irrational however that no scientist in his right mind has ever pursued any experiments to see if this is even possible. If a scientist did investigate this question even the atheist would laugh at him. If one did try an experiment to see if this was possible and created a lead box with a vacuum to see if anything ever spontaneously arose from the vacuum of space in the box he should quickly come to the realization that his so called “empty” box is not really empty at all but contains space that has dimensionality and conforms to the laws of nature (like gravity). Therefore for him to really be able to perform an empirical experiment to see if something can come from nothing he would have to perform his test outside our boundaries of reality and see if there is some sort of law that can create something from nothing.
