The Impossibility of The Contrary - Without God You Can't Prove Anything (Greg L. Bahnsen)

THE IMPOSSIBILITY
OF THE CONTRARY
THE IMPOSSIBILITY
OF THE CONTRARY
WITHOUT GOD YOU CAN’ T
PROVE ANYTHING
GREG L. BAHNSEN
The Ame ri c a n Vi si o n
Powder Springs, Georgia
The Impossibility of the Contrary: Without God You Can’t Prove Anything
Copyright © 2021 by The American Vision, Inc.
Published by The American Vision, Inc.

PO Box 220
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Cover design and typesetting: Kyle Shepherd

Editing: Gary DeMar and John Barach
Printed in the United States of America
Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version and the New
American Standard Bible.
Paperback ISBN: 978–0–9840641–4–4
Published in the United States of America

CONTENTS
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
1 Answering Fools According to Their Folly. . . . . . . .1

2 Prejudicial Conjecture and Philosophical Baggage. . . 17
3 Inconsistent and Fallacious Arguments . . . . . . . . 35
4 Unbelief and Its Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5 The Preconditions of Intelligibility . . . . . . . . . . 74
6 Proof and Persuasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
7 The Evolutionary Worldview . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
8 The Problem of Evil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
9 Islam, Jesus, and Presuppositionalism . . . . . . . . 147
10 Circular Reasoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
v
FOREWORD
By David Bahnsen
I have often thought about various ideas for book titles about
my dad and his life’s work that would capture the essence of
who he was and what he believed. The festschrift that was pub-
lished about him posthumously was aptly titled The Standard
Bearer, a powerful play on several things working in concert
with each other (his presuppositional apologetic, the personal
standards to which he held himself, and the two books he wrote
that had the word “standard” in them).
Always Ready will always be a perfect title for his most popu-
larized apologetics work, cut and pasted straight from the pages
of Scripture, and encapsulating the actual commandment in
the Bible for apologetical preparation. Other books capture the
antithesis, which is really the unique value proposition of his
approach to epistemology.
But I believe my favorite title of a Greg Bahnsen book to
date is this one—The Impossibility of the Contrary: Without God
You Can’t Prove Anything.
All at once, this title captures a crucial element of the meth-
odology of presuppositional apologetics, all the while explain-
vii
viii THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE CONTRARY
ing in the simplest of terms of what the fatal flaw is of making

logical or ethical truth claims devoid of God. The title is not
merely a description of the book—it is an argument in and of
itself—and it is an irrefutable one at that.
There is a God and we are not it. This is sort of the basic
summary of my late father’s teaching and preaching ministry in
one sentence. It is also in a lot of ways a one-sentence summary
of the Bible. The ethical implications of the second half of that
sentence warrant volumes of more books, but all of our elabora-
tion of theology, philosophy, and ethics must first start with the
first part of the sentence. Jehovah God, the beginning of wis-
dom. The whole world changes the day we get this down. And
the best way for the world to comprehend it is for us to teach it.
For us to teach it we need to first understand it ourselves, and
boldly proclaim it to others. An inadequate understanding of
Christian apologetics does not merely keep us uninformed, it
keeps those we are trying to inform confused and uninformed.
Such methods equip us with insufficient artillery.
Sometimes words like “artillery” and “battle” may seem a little
harsh metaphorically, especially if one thinks all of this is merely
for a lecture hall in a university. But for those who appreciate the
antithesis, there is a lot of power in understanding the challenge
in front of us. I have never been around a person in my life who
was singularly focused on anything as my dad was in Christians
being fully equipped to intellectually and behaviorally defend
the truth claims of God’s Word. This was his passion as a scholar,
a minister, and as a father. And he lived it out as beautifully as he
taught it, wrote it, lectured it, and preached it. His was a living
apologetic—and he found distinctions between our intellectual
argument and our Christlike model to be wholly unscriptural.
Foreword ix
We believe in God—and defend God—the same way C. S.

Lewis spoke of the sun, not because we see it, but because apart
from it, we can see nothing else. That distinctly Van Tillian sen-
timent captured by the British master is at the heart of Greg
Bahnsen’s apologetic methodology. Not only is our own under-
standing of the world rooted in the impossibility of God not ex-
isting, but it is our duty as faithful defenders of the truth claims
embedded in Christianity to never, ever, ever let the unbeliever
off the hook for their own assertions. For Greg Bahnsen, that
methodology was not merely a brilliantly effective debate tactic
(though I assure you many college lecture halls will attest that it
was that). Above all else, though, it was faithfulness. True faith-
fulness to what Scripture called us to in defending our beliefs,
in accounting for the hope that is within us.
We live in a world in search of proof right now—proof of
something, and a growing vulnerability to be willing to believe
almost anything. The critical need for unbelief to rid itself of
any God is largely being replaced with the need to validate any
god—an “any god will do” religion. And while the world hope-
lessly meddles with morally and spiritually bankrupt schemes
to account for the great alienation plaguing their souls, the
apologetical brilliance of Greg Bahnsen stands tall, reminding a
world who needs to hear it and a church who needs to preach it:
All of this is impossible without God. Without Him, you can’t
prove anything.
INTRODUCTION
By Gary DeMar
When we go to look at the different worldviews that atheists

and theists have, I suggest we can prove the existence of God
from the impossibility of the contrary. The transcendental
proof for God’s existence is that without Him it is impossi-
ble to prove anything. The atheist worldview is irrational and
cannot consistently provide the preconditions of intelligible
experience, science, logic, or morality. The atheist worldview
cannot allow for laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, the
ability for the mind to understand the world, and moral abso-
lutes. In that sense, the atheist worldview cannot account for
our debate tonight.
— From Dr. Greg Bahnsen’s Opening Statement

in his 1985 debate with Dr. Gordon Stein
Dr. Bahnsen made a bold and shocking statement that would

rattle anyone: “The transcendental proof for God’s existence is
that without Him it is impossible to prove anything.” But athe-
ist scientists and mathematicians prove all kinds of things every
xi
xii THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE CONTRARY
day. It’s these proofs that make our world run. In 2021, NASA
landed a rover with a drone on Mars. It was a remarkable ac-
complishment of the utmost precision. Every calculation and
measurement had to be precise. A degree off here or a miscal-
culation there would have sent the multi-billion-dollar cargo
careening off into the void of space. It’s obvious, therefore, that
these scientists and engineers were able to apply the fixed prin-
ciples of “intelligible experience, science, and logic” in their
work. We can also assume, that for the most part, the people
who worked on the multi-year project were relatively moral.
It’s difficult for unbelievers and even some believers to agree
with Dr. Bahnsen’s claim that God is necessary to think ratio-
nally and act morally. He was not saying that atheists aren’t
rational or moral; it’s that they “cannot consistently provide
the preconditions of intelligible experience, science, logic, or
morality.” What does this mean? It’s not that unbelievers don’t
know anything, or don’t think logically, or act morally, it’s that
they can’t account for these “things” given the underlying as-
sumptions of their worldview.
Atheists are materialists. The only things that matter consist
of matter. There is the initial problem of accounting for the
origin of matter and how it self-organized to produce the mind.
How does the materialist account for the non-physical informa-
tion necessary to animate unconscious matter to become con-
scious beings? The mind is not material. There is no physical
substance associated with morality. There is nothing to see in
our DNA that identifies whether an action is moral or immoral.
And even if there were, who or what demands that we should
follow these material demands? So many questions and so few
answers given the operating assumptions of the materialists.
Introduction xiii
While unbelievers function within a rational and moral

world, they can’t account for why anything is ultimately rational
or moral. Dr. Bahnsen spelled out the dilemma in great detail:
[Cornelius] Van Til says the spiritually dead man cannot in

principle even count and weigh and measure. Van Til says that
unbelievers cannot even do math or the simplest operations in
science. By that he means the unbeliever’s espoused worldview
or philosophy cannot make counting or measuring intelligible.
Now why is that? Briefly, because counting involves an abstract
concept of law, or universal, or order. If there is no law, if there
is no universal, if there is no order, then there is no sequential
counting. But the postulation of an abstract universal order
contradicts the unbeliever’s view of the universe as a random
or chance realm of material particulars. Counting calls for ab-
stract entities which are in fact uniform and orderly. The unbe-
liever says the world is not abstract—but that the world is only
material; the universe is not uniform but is a chance realm and
random. And so by rejecting God’s Word—which accounts for
a universal order or law—the unbeliever would not in princi-
ple be able to count and measure things. As it is, unbelievers do
in fact count and do in fact measure and practice science, but
they cannot give a philosophical explanation of that fact. Or as
Van Til loved to put it: unbelievers can count, but they cannot
account for counting.1
If religious skeptics have forsaken biblical presuppositions,

why is it that they can think rationally, work in terms of the
scientific method, and require some semblance of morality? The
1. Greg L. Bahnsen, “At War with the Word: The Necessity of Biblical An-
tithesis”: https://bit.ly/3p5D57y
xiv THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE CONTRARY
answer is simple. Unbelievers are philosophically schizophrenic.

They don’t often live consistently with the governing principles
of their materialistic worldview. For example, “The success of
modern science has been due to its ‘borrowed capital,’ because
modern science is like the prodigal son. He left his father’s house
and is rich, but the substance he expends is his father’s wealth.”2
Those who deny God and assert that the world and all of
its studied connections came into being randomly have no way
to account for the uniformity of the laws of nature, specifically
creation. “[N]atural man does have knowledge, but it is bor-
rowed knowledge, stolen from the Christian-theistic pasture or
range, yet natural man has no knowledge, because in terms of
his principle the ultimacy of his thinking, he can have none,
and the knowledge he possesses is not truly his own. . . . The nat-
ural man has valid knowledge only as a thief possesses goods.”3
The late Robert Bork made a similar point:
Some few years ago friends whose judgment I greatly respect

argued that religion constitutes the only reliable basis for
morality and that when religion loses its hold on a society,
standards of morality will gradually crumble. I objected that
there were many moral people who are not at all religious; my
friends replied that such people are living on the moral cap-
ital left by generations that believed there is a God and that
He makes demands on us. The prospect, they said, was that
the remaining capital would dwindle and our society become
less moral. The course of society and culture has been as they
2. Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press,

1967), 87.
3. Rousas J. Rushdoony, By What Standard?: An Analysis of the Philosophy of
Cornelius Van Til (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1958), 24.
Introduction xv
predicted, which certainly does not prove their point but does
provide evidence for it.4
Anti-Christian worldviews are held together by Band-Aids

stolen from the Christian worldview medicine cabinet. The Bi-
ble tells us that in Christ all things are held together (Heb. 1:3).
The skeptic cannot account for the necessary cohesion of the
world from within his system. If left to itself, the man-centered
worldview of modern skepticism, like the occupants of over-
turned war machines of Wells’ War of the Worlds, falls ill by an
irrational and amoral virus of self-destruction.
The Impossibility of the Contrary completes the apologetic
trilogy, along with Pushing the Antithesis and Against All Opposi-
tion, based on the talks that Dr. Bahnsen presented at American
Vision’s three Life Preparation Conferences in the early 1990s.
It’s been a privilege to give these lectures new life in printed
form.
4. Robert H. Bork, “Preface,” Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction:

Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Wheaton, IL: Cross-
way Books, [1983] 1993), xviii.
“In various forms, the fundamental argument advanced by the
Christian apologist is that the Christian worldview is true be-
cause of the impossibility of the contrary. When the perspective of
God’s revelation is rejected, then the unbeliever is left in foolish
ignorance because his philosophy does not provide the precondi-
tions of knowledge and meaningful experience. To put it another
way: the proof that Christianity is true is that if it were not, we
would not be able to prove anything.”
— Greg L. Bahnsen,
Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith
CHAPTER 1
ANSWERING FOOLS
ACCORDING TO
THEIR FOLLY
Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like
him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his
own eyes. (Proverbs 26:4–5)
But who is a fool? Sometimes we get a little misled, thinking the

Bible is using terms the way we would in contemporary lingo.
If you call someone a fool, you’re being abusive, calling people
names. But the Bible is not doing that. The Bible uses the word
“fool” descriptively, applying it to someone who is spiritually
ill-informed, who just doesn’t get it.
Who is a fool in the Bible? “The fool says in his heart, ‘There
is no God’” (Ps. 14:1). I hope you can see how foolish that is.
What else does the Bible tell us about fools? “The wise man
builds his house upon the rock,” Jesus tells us. “The foolish man
1
2 THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE CONTRARY
builds upon the sand” (cf. Matt. 7:24–27). Jesus is saying that
His words are the rock, the rock upon which everything is built.
The wise man builds upon the rock foundation of God’s Word,
while everyone else builds his life on the foolish and destructive
sand of human autonomy.
In Proverbs 1:7, we read, “The beginning of knowledge is the
fear of the LORD, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 1:18 that “the word of the cross is
foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being
saved it is the power of God.”
The fool does not understand the gospel and believe, and the
fool does not begin with the Word of God and reverence Him.
The fool does not even believe in God or act as though there is
a God. The fool builds his house upon sand, and as a result, it is
easily destroyed because of the inherent instability of its
foundation.
The fool builds his house upon sand and, as

a result, it is easily destroyed because of the
inherent instability of its foundation.
The Bible is not using the word “fool” in a name-calling way.

It’s referring to a specific spiritual condition, spiritual stupidity,
the stupidity that does not know how to live in God’s world and
honor God and be successful. The unbeliever is a fool. I don’t
recommend that you stand up in class and call your professor a
fool. I don’t think it would be good to say to your roommate,
“You’re such a fool.” But you do need to know, whether you use
Answering Fools According to Their Folly 3
that language or not, that the person you are dealing with is a
fool in terms of his own autonomy and claiming that he is the
ultimate reference point in determining truth from error and
right from wrong.
What God has called you to do is to draw out their foolishness
or to let them keep talking so they’ll give you the rope by which
they’ll hang themselves. Their foolishness will destroy them.
This is what God’s Word is telling us in Proverbs 26:4–5.
Do these two verses appear contradictory to you? I don’t believe
they are contradictory, but they appear that way because it says,
“Answer not a fool according to his folly,” and the next verse
says, “Answer a fool according to his folly.” Which is it? One or
the other? The answer is that it’s both. What we have here is a
twofold procedure that works very well in apologetics.
STEP ONE
The first step is to “Answer not a fool according to his folly.”

Why not? “Lest you also be like unto him.” When someone
who is an unbeliever throws out an objection against your
Christian faith, don’t use the presuppositions of the unbeliever.
Do not answer the fool according to his folly. Don’t answer in
terms of his worldview, because if you buy into his most basic
assumptions, if you’re using his presuppositions, you will end
up just like him. His presuppositions determine where you can
come out in an argument. If you buy into your secular pro-
fessors’ presuppositions, if you buy into the basic assumptions
your friend wants you to use in an argument, you will end up in
the same place they’re in. Don’t answer the fool according to his
folly, lest you be like unto him.
When you answer the fool, you have to use your presup-
positions and your worldview which are based on the Bible’s
presuppositions and worldview about God and the world He
created. You are going to show him how history and science
and morality make sense from within your worldview. You’ll
never be able to show how sensible God’s Word is from within
his worldview. From within his worldview, Paul tells you, the
gospel will seem foolish and ridiculous. God makes foolish the
wisdom of this world, Paul says, and that brings us to the sec-
ond step in Proverbs 26:4–5.
We’ve been told not to answer a fool according to his folly.
Now we’re told to answer the fool according to his folly. That
is, accept his presuppositions, take his basic assumptions, and
answer him according to the operating assumptions of his worl-
dview. Why would you do that? What will the outcome be?
“Lest he be wise in his own conceit,” lest in his own pride and
autonomy, his own self-sufficiency, he thinks he is wise.
You answer him according to his worldview so you can show
how ridiculous it is. Answer the fool according to his folly so
that he’ll have nothing to stand on. He’ll have no reason to be
conceited.
Many of your professors and the unbelievers you’re coming
in contact with think they have everything in place. They have
an answer. They understand life, they think—but they don’t.
Answer them according to their folly. You can show them what
their folly is all about, lest they be wise in their own conceit.
Again, we can think of this as a twofold apologetic proce-
dure. The first step—where you don’t answer the fool according
to his folly—is a positive presentation of the Christian world-
view, showing that it does make sense out of science and logic
and moral values. It makes sense out of the dignity of man. It

makes sense of human freedom. It’s a positive presentation of
your worldview, not buying into their assumptions.
That’s the first step—although when I say “first” and “sec-
ond,” that’s not necessarily the chronological order. You might
do step two first because of where the conversation is going and
then do step one. But the first one mentioned here in Proverbs
26 is the positive one: Don’t answer the fool according to his
folly, because you’ll end up like him. Instead, you answer posi-
tively, according to the positive Christian worldview.
STEP TWO
The second step is negative. Here, you answer the fool accord-
ing to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Now you use
the non-Christian worldview to reduce it to absurdity. What
happens is that the unbeliever has a choice now—to use biblical
terminology, the choice between life and death, intellectual life
and death, as well as spiritual life and death.
What happens is that the unbeliever has a

choice now—to use biblical terminology, the
choice between life and death, intellectual life
and death as well as spiritual life and death.
You’ve shown that you can make sense out of this moral
problem or out of the use of logic because a positive presen-
tation of the Christian worldview explains who God is as the
Creator and who man is as made in his image, and so on. The
alternative is to try to answer this problem or deal with this is-
sue from within the unbelieving worldview, where everything is
chance and there is no God and you’re using arbitrary assump-
tions—and you reduce that unbelieving worldview to absurdity.
Step two is what we’ve been calling an internal critique of the
unbeliever’s worldview.
It’s not that hard to do this, but here’s why you might have
some difficulty in doing this with the unbeliever’s worldview.
You’re accustomed to thinking as a Christian. And it’s difficult
for you, in a sense, to put that aside and think like an unbeliever.
You almost instinctively go back to thinking as a Christian. But
if you do that, the unbeliever will take advantage of that by giv-
ing you an answer that is consistent with Christianity.
You’ll say, “I agree with what he said. How can I attack it?”
But you must get accustomed to attacking things that you be-
lieve—not attacking them because you think they are weak or
wrong, but attacking them because within the unbeliever’s sys-
tem of thought he has no right to them.
The unbeliever might say, “I thought you believed in moral
absolutes.” You’ll say, “I do. That was the first step. I’ve given
you a worldview where moral absolutes and logic and scien-
tific inference make sense. I’m not attacking that. I believe in
those things. But what we’re doing now is standing on your
worldview, coming over to your territory, and seeing from this
perspective whether we can support these things. From this per-
spective can we support moral absolutes or logic or science?”
The answer is “No.”
Become accustomed to thinking the way an unbeliever must
think concerning these basic issues. You’ll do an internal cri-
tique, going into that worldview and wreaking havoc. That may
sound violent and unkind but understand what I’m getting at.
You want to show that this house cannot stand intellectually.
How can you do that? How can you do an internal critique
of the unbeliever’s position? Let me outline for you some things
that you should be looking for when you talk to anybody who
is an unbeliever, some things that will help you develop an in-
ternal critique of the unbeliever’s system.
MERE OPINION
The first thing to look for is arbitrariness. There are several ways
in which unbelievers will show their arbitrariness. The most ob-
vious way is that they offer a mere opinion. This is one of the
most common ways to oppose Christianity. People say, “Well,
you believe that, but I don’t.”
Modern colleges don’t teach critical thinking very well. It
used to be you went to school to learn to reason, to think, to
have some facts, and to make educated judgments about things
instead of saying, “I believe this and other people believe that
and both can be true even if they contradict.” People who are
educated are supposed to have principles by which they test
theories. They’re supposed to have a method of reasoning that
will allow them to draw conclusions without just saying, “I feel
this way or that way.”
The minute an unbeliever says, “You have all

those arguments, but my opinion is this,” they
have conceded the case. They’ve lost the debate.
In fact, the minute an unbeliever says, “You have all those

arguments, but my opinion is this,” they have conceded the
case. They’ve lost the debate. If you were in a public debate, you
could take the microphone and say, “Speak up for the audience.
Tell them this is simply your opinion.”
But why do Christians put up with that kind of thinking? A
good part of the answer may be that when Christians go to Bi-
ble studies, they hear the same sort of thing. You read a passage
and then everyone shares their opinion. “I want to think about
God this way. I want to think of God that way.” But our opin-
ions don’t matter. Rather, we are all answerable to God’s Word.
And yet, even with the most authoritative Word we could have,
we think we have the right to express our opinions.
A while back, I was diagnosed as having diabetes. When the
doctor told me, “Greg, I’m sorry, but the tests indicate that you
have diabetes,” I argued with him, nicely and politely. Finally,
he said, “Greg, you have to understand. I’m a doctor. Trust
me.” I told him, “I’m a doctor, too, and it’s my job to ask ques-
tions. I want to know more about this.” I did not want to have
diabetes.
But if I were to say, “I don’t want to think of myself as having
diabetes,” would that change anything? If I said, “I’m not going
to take my medicine and skip all those sweet desserts, because in
my opinion, I don’t have diabetes,” that would be preposterous.
Yet, when it comes to topics that are far more important
than our health, things having to do with our eternal well-be-
ing, people will tell you, “I don’t want to think of God being
that way.” or “My God is not like that.” or “If I were running
the universe, I wouldn’t. . . .” You’re not running the universe
and you are not God and your opinion is irrelevant.
Please understand that I’m not telling you how to speak to

the unbeliever here. There may be a place for being sarcastic and
saying, “If that’s your opinion, big deal.” But usually, you want
to be more polite.
You need to know, though, that when someone says, “It’s my
opinion” that has no weight intellectually. Opinions are a dime a
dozen. They aren’t worth anything. If someone wishes to assert
that something is true, he needs to do more than just say, “I be-
lieve it,” because the intellectual question that is asked in every
department of the university—not just in philosophy—is “Why?”
Until someone goes beyond mere opinion

and offers an argument—some line of proof or
evidence for his views—he hasn’t got anything
to say worth listening to.
Why do you believe that quinine relieves malaria? Why do

you believe that Napoleon was mentally unfit? What’s your ev-
idence? What’s your proof? Until someone goes beyond mere
opinion and offers an argument—some line of proof or evidence
for his views—he hasn’t got anything to say worth listening to.
R E L AT I V I S M
The second form of arbitrariness that you should be looking for

is similar to the mere opinion we’ve been discussing, and that
is relativism. Somebody says, “It’s not my opinion that there is
a God,” or “It’s not my opinion that God is like that” and so
forth. That has no value at all. The relativist says, “You’re con-
vinced by that, but I’m convinced by other things.” It’s “differ-
ent strokes for different folks,” a good 1960s expression. “You
like to think this way and I like to think that way.”
The relativist can deal with a naive Christian apologist by
saying, “I’ve heard all your arguments. They’re pretty impres-
sive. But they’re true for you, not true for me.” It’s as if we create
our own reality.
I went to an international conference on religious liberty in
Moscow, Russia once. It was held in the building that was used
for the Communist Youth Brigade, where people were taught
atheistic communism. Now Russia has religious liberty, but “re-
ligious liberty” means different things to different people. For
two days I heard how religion is the realm of the mysterious,
how we’re all doing our best and are very sincere, and how we’re
all brothers under the skin and love each other and respect each
other. And then I stood up and said, “Well, no, as a matter of
fact, we don’t all respect each other and we aren’t all brothers.”
The argument for religious liberty that I was hearing from
Muslims and Hindus and Roman Catholics and Lutherans and
Seventh-Day Adventists and Russian Orthodox and Old Believ-
ers and so on was relativism. No one knows for sure, and so you
create your reality. You have to live with your own understand-
ing of God. You have to make your own way in this world, and
if your view of God helps you feel better, then that’s true for you.
But other traditions should be equally respected in Russia now
that the door to religion is opening. That’s what they were argu-
ing. Everyone has a right to his own opinion.In my response, I
said that religious liberty cannot be founded on relativism. If ev-
eryone creates his own reality, then Adolf Hitler created his own
reality too. And in terms of his reality, he had the right to kill
the Jews. That’s the reality he had created. Relativism condones
genocide, because, after all, everyone creates his own reality.
Then I went through an ugly laundry list of all the persecu-
tions that each of the groups in the audience, including Ameri-
can Protestants, was guilty of in terms of religious liberty. “Ev-
ery one of our groups is guilty of persecuting other people,” I
said, “and if we are relativists, then we have to allow for it.”
If everyone creates his own reality, then Hitler

creates his own reality too. And in terms of his
reality, he has the right to kill the Jews.
When someone says, “You create your own reality and ev-
eryone is right.” But if everyone is right, then no one is wrong,
including the Idi Amins1 and Hitlers of the world.” Relativism
kills itself.
It isn’t sufficient for someone to say, “You believe that, but
I believe something else; reality just twists and turns to fit any
and all beliefs.” On that view, reality becomes a smorgasbord.
You go to the smorgasbord and maybe you’ll choose the egg-
plant. I wouldn’t. I’ll choose the fried chicken, but you don’t
particularly want fried chicken. Reality will be whatever you
want. You have the eggplant approach to reality or the chicken
approach to reality—pick whichever you want.
1. Idi Amin was a military officer and president of Uganda from 1971–
1979. His presidency was known for its brutality. He came to be described as
the “Butcher of Uganda” for the 300,000 people who were killed and tortured.
But it’s not like that. And certainly God is not like that. God
is not a smorgasbord. God doesn’t say, “Please let Me into your
life. I’ll be whatever you want Me to be.” He isn’t like Mr. Po-
tato Head. Some people will put Mr. Potato Head together with
eyes here and ears over there and all the rest. People treat God
like that: “On my view, God’s not like this; He’s really like that.”
But it isn’t adequate to say that God is whatever you want Him
to be. What an insult! If God is whatever you want Him to be,
then He is not God.
God is not a smorgasbord. God doesn’t say,

“Please let me into your life. I’ll be whatever
you want me to be.”
A relativist says, “It’s true for you but not true for me.” But
“true for you” is one of the most asinine statements in the En-
glish language. For the relativist, truth is person-relative.
Let’s go back to the doctor’s office. The doctor tells me I have
diabetes. He is supposed to know. He has the blood work, the
lab test results. But I say to him, “Well, that’s true for you. It’s
not true for me.” Does that make sense? Do I create my own
reality by what I believe?
“ I S T H AT A B S O L U T E LY T R U E ? ”
But if the teacher talks to you after class, it’s often condescend-
ing: “Let me help you out of your Sunday School superstition
and ignorance. The university is going to mature you. This will
be the age of enlightenment for you.” After you hold to your

faith and give answers to the objections, the teacher will often
say, “You have to understand that truth is relative. You’re very
committed to this view, but at the university, you’ll learn that
there are other truths, other universes to explore.” Other uni-
verses? I’d like to live in the one where I find myself at this
moment in time. I want to deal with this one.
When someone tells you that the truth is

relative and that there is no absolute truth,
the question you’re going to have is “Is that
absolutely true?”
When someone tells you that truth is relative and that there
is no absolute truth, the question you’re going to ask is, “Is that
absolutely true?” Now we’re on the horns of a dilemma, as logi-
cians put it. If the teacher says, “No, even that is not absolutely
true,” you’re going to say, “Then I’m free to believe otherwise,
and there is absolute truth.” If the teacher says, “Yes, it is ab-
solutely true,” then you’re going to say, “Then you’re wrong to
say there is no absolute truth; after all, you’re saying that it’s
absolutely true that there is no absolute truth—and so you’re
contradicting yourself.”
Relativism is just another form of being arbitrary. Educated
people know better than to be arbitrary, but there are not many
truly educated people in our culture today. Even most college
graduates are not educated people. I do not say that as an insult
but as a description of the truth. People can get a piece of paper
from a college and still not know how to think, to research, to

put together a decent argument.
One major reason why people don’t think well any more is
that we’ve gotten used to being arbitrary, offering mere opin-
ions, and then, when there’s a clash between the mere opinions,
running to relativism because it’s more comfortable. You can go
to cocktail parties, then, and everyone is welcome. Even Jesus
would be welcome, so long as He didn’t say He was the only
truth. You could have Jesus and Buddha and Confucius and
Mao and all the rest, and everyone could have a good time. I’m
welcome and you’re welcome. I’m okay and you’re okay.
But relativism is academically shoddy. People who contra-
dict each other cannot both be right. In some cases, depending
on the nature of the contradiction, both can be wrong. But
both cannot be right. I cannot have diabetes and not have dia-
betes at the same time.
We’re going to go on to discuss other problems, other chal-
lenges to the Christian faith, but I daresay that those challenges
will be only about twenty percent of the challenges you face.
What you are going to run into most often, over and over and
over again, will be these two: mere opinion and relativism. Get
used to that, and tell people, “If that’s only your opinion, then it’s
academically worthless. If it is only your opinion that God doesn’t
exist, then you’re in real trouble.” If they say, “It’s true for you, but
it’s not true for me,” point out that that doesn’t make sense.
GLOSSARY
Apologetics: Does not mean to apologize for being a Christian.

“The application of Scripture to unbelief (including the un-
belief that remains in the Christian). The study of how to give

to inquirers a reason for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15).”2
Autonomy: To think autonomously (Greek: auto (self ) + nomos
(law) = a law unto one’s self ) means that the individual is
“subject only to his own criteria of truth, free to ignore those
of God.”3 J. I. Packer writes the following: “Man was not
created autonomous, that is, free to be a law to himself, but
theonomous, that is, bound to keep the law of his Maker.”4
Presupposition: “A ‘presupposition’ is not just any assumption
in an argument, but a personal commitment that is held at
the most basic level of one’s network of beliefs. Presuppo-
sitions form a wide-ranging, foundational perspective (or
starting point) in terms of which everything else is inter-
preted and evaluated. As such, presuppositions have the
greatest authority in one’s thinking, being treated as one’s
least negotiable beliefs and being granted the highest immu-
nity to revision.”5
S T U DY Q U E S T I O N S
1. Are we being insulting if we think the unbeliever is a fool?

2. What does the Bible mean by the word “fool”?
3. What two steps of apologetics are implied by Proverbs
26:4–5?
2. John M. Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief (Phillips-

burg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2015), 289–290
3. Frame, Apologetics, 48.
4. J. I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Carol
Stream, IL: Tyndale House, [1993] 2001), 91.
5. Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillips-
burg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1998), 2, note 4.
4. Why must we not answer a fool according to his folly?

5. Why is it hard for believers to do an internal critique of the
unbeliever’s worldview?
6. Why is it the case that, if the unbeliever appeals to his opin-
ion, he has already conceded the debate to you?
7. What is the problem with saying that truth is relative and that
we make our own reality and set our own moral standards?
8. How can Christians, even in their Bible studies and their
talk about God, fall into compromise with arbitrariness
(mere opinion and relativism)?
CHAPTER 2
PREJUDICIAL
CONJECTURE AND
PHILOSOPHICAL
BAGGAGE
In the previous chapter, we began looking at ways in which un-

believers are arbitrary. Often, they will offer a mere opinion in-
stead of presenting an argument. Another common form of ar-
bitrariness is relativism, the claim that something that is true for
you might not be true for me. In this chapter, we will consider
two more ways in which unbelievers are arbitrary, specifically in
their opposition to Christ but also in their whole system.
PREJUDICIAL CONJECTURE
The third form of arbitrariness is ignorant or prejudicial conjec-

ture. Sometimes you’ll find unbelievers, both educated and un-
17
educated, who will take the offensive against Christianity before

they become familiar with what they’re talking about. Instead of
research and honest assessment of the available evidence, what
they end up giving you is personal conjecture about what seems
likely to them. Most of the arguments you hear against Christi-
anity come from people who have no idea what they’re talking
about. They haven’t read a book on the subject or thought it
through; they’ve heard this or that and they’re talking about
what “it seems like” to them.
Most of the arguments you hear against

Christianity come from people who have no
idea what they’re talking about.
For instance, the Bible was written hundreds of years ago,

and so it will seem likely to many unbelievers that we cannot
trust the text of the Bible that we have in our hands today. They
will think that scribes have surely altered and supplemented the
original texts—so much that we cannot be sure what was orig-
inally written by Moses or Jeremiah or John or Paul. For all we
know, what we read in our Bibles came from the pen of some
monk in the Dark Ages. And so people say, “We don’t know
what the Bible originally said anyway.” That ignorant criticism
seems intellectually sophisticated to some unbelievers.
After all, in our natural human experience, messages that are
passed from one speaker to another usually do get garbled or
distorted or augmented, don’t they? The unbeliever says, “The
Bible is just another book, like any other book, and so that
probably happened to it, too.”
Prejudicial Conjecture and Philosophical Baggage 19
To unbelievers who reason in this way, we must not tire of

pointing out that they are relying upon conjecture, not research.
It may seem likely that the biblical texts would not be reliable
or authentic after all these years. But that likelihood is, in fact,
nothing more than an evaluation based on prejudice.
LIKE ANY OTHER BOOK?
What is the prejudice of the unbeliever when he throws this ar-

gument at us? The first prejudice is the assumption that the bib-
lical text is no different from any other written document that
we find in our natural human experience throughout history.
But if that’s the assumption of the unbeliever, then the unbe-
liever has assumed what he is supposed to be proving—namely,
that the Bible is like any other book.
We don’t begin with that assumption. There are two different
worldviews here. They have begged the most fundamental ques-
tion over which the believer and unbeliever are arguing. If the
Bible is—as it claims to be—the inspired word of Almighty God,
then the history of the textual transmission of the Bible may
very well be quite different from that of other human documents
because God has ordained that the text of the Bible would be
preserved with greater integrity than any other ordinary book. If
our worldview is right, we don’t worry about the text of the Bible
becoming so corrupt that we don’t have the original anymore.
THE MISSING EVIDENCE
But there is a second prejudice seen in this claim, and the evi-
dence of that prejudice is that the unbeliever doesn’t offer any
concrete evidence that some medieval monk tampered with the

text that’s before us.
I could tell you that I believe that before I walked into the
cafeteria for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, Martians came down,
brought the food, put it into their microwave, and then re-
placed the real people who work in the cafeteria with human-
oids. I could make that sound sophisticated and intellectual.
But you’re still going to say, “Do you have any evidence for that
view or is that just some opinion you have?”
But when the unbeliever throws some claim out at us, don’t
forget to ask that same question. Ask why. “Why do you believe
that? On what basis do you believe that?” When they attack Chris-
tianity, they have to have some evidence that substantiates their
attack, just as much as we need evidence to defend ourselves.
When they attack Christianity, they have to

have some evidence that substantiates their
attack, just as much as we need evidence to
defend ourselves.
When the unbeliever says, “Very likely the text of the Bible
has changed over all these years,” the first thing you might want
to ask them is, “Have you ever studied the subject? Do you have
some reason for believing that?” Do you know what they’re go-
ing to answer? “Well, no . . . but it just seems likely to me.”
That is prejudicial conjecture. It’s not argument. It’s not evi-
dence. It’s just a prejudice, an opinion that they have.
If they want to play that way, then we can—with equal ar-
bitrariness—conjecture that the words that came down to us as
Paul’s own words were actually written, not years later than Paul
but years before Paul. Maybe Isaiah wrote these words and Paul
found them and put his own name on them. Would they grant
this possibility? Of course not!
Arbitrariness is a two-edged sword. If they’re going to argue
arbitrarily, according to their prejudice, and conjecture that the
words in our Bible were written many years after Paul lived, you
can come back and be equally absurd and say, “No, I think they
were written many years before Paul.” Why would you do that?
Only to show how asinine what the unbeliever is saying really
is. Anyone can be arbitrary.
A TRUSTWORTHY TEXT
The third indication of prejudice in the criticism of this unbeliever

is that he has not taken into account the actual evidence that is
publicly available regarding the text of Scripture. If the critic had
taken the time to look into the subject, he would never have offered
such an outlandish subjective evaluation of the text of the Bible.
Unbelievers who do know anything about the textual criti-
cism of ancient texts do not criticize the Bible. The only people
I have run into who criticize the text of the Bible are those who
know nothing about the subject.
This came home to me when I was taking advanced courses
in the study of Plato and Aristotle in graduate school and we
had to do textual criticism on the body of work of Plato’s writ-
ings. The earliest testimony to the text of Plato’s treatises is in-
complete. It dates from about AD 900 and is known as Oxford
B. It was found in a Patmos monastery by E. B. Clarke and is
known as the “Clarke Plato.”
Plato lived around 350 BC, and we don’t have any man-
uscripts from that time. No manuscripts from 200 BC, 100
BC, 50 BC. We have no manuscript (discounting papyrus frag-
ments) of Plato until AD 900. How many years are there from
when Plato wrote to when we have a manuscript of what he
wrote? Over twelve hundred years.
By contrast, do you know what the gap is between the earliest
fragments of the New Testament and the time they were writ-
ten? Fifty years. We have a particle of John’s Gospel that dates
from roughly fifty years after it was written, Rylands Library
Papyrus P52, also known as the St. John’s fragment. The front
contains parts of seven lines from the Gospel of John 18:31–33
in Greek, and the back contains parts of seven lines from verses
37–38. The bulk of our most important extant manuscripts date
from two to three hundred years after the original composition.
Furthermore, the text of the New Testament is remarkably uni-
form, and it is well established by textual critical science. The re-
liability of the Old Testament has been demonstrated over and
over again by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So when the unbeliever starts throwing this arbitrary criti-
cism, you can come back and say, “Have you studied the sub-
ject? Do you know anything about it?”
No one questions that we know what Plato wrote, and yet
there’s a twelve-hundred-year gap between when he wrote and
the evidence we have of what he said. There’s a lot of room
there for people to mess with the text and change it, but we
have pretty good confidence that it’s all right. And yet people
will turn around and say, “We can’t be sure what Paul wrote or
what John wrote or what Peter wrote,” and there we have a gap
of between fifty and three hundred years.
Does that seem reasonable to you? The person who makes

this kind of criticism is living by a double standard: one stan-
dard for secular works and a different standard for the Bible.
But the overall authenticity and accuracy of the biblical text
is well known to scholars in the field. Frederick Kenyon con-
cluded that “the Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand
and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true
Word of God, handed down without essential loss from genera-
tion to generation throughout the centuries.”1 Such assessments
from competent scholars could be multiplied easily.
When we defend our Christian faith, then, we have to be con-
stantly on the lookout for the way in which the reasoning of unbe-
lievers rests on prejudice or mere opinion. It crops up repeatedly.
DID JESUS LIVE?
I’ve even heard some people present the radical opinion that
we have no literary or historical basis for believing that Jesus
of Nazareth ever actually lived. It’s not as common today, but
in the early part of the twentieth century, many liberals said,
“We’re not even sure there was a Jesus of Nazareth.”
Can you see the prejudice in that remark? It takes for granted
that the Bible itself should not be taken as a literary source of
historical information. They say, “We have no historical evi-
dence that there was a Jesus of Nazareth,” and you say, “Did
you forget about the Bible? There’s quite a bit in here.” But
what they mean is that we have no historical evidence outside of
the Bible. Of course, you can win an argument if you arbitrarily
1. Frederick Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts: A History of the
Text and Its Translations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 23.
cut out all the evidence contrary to your opinion. But where
do they get the right to exclude the Bible as historical evidence?
Just about any unbelieving historian of the ancient world will
have to admit that the Bible is a source of information about the
ancient world. That doesn’t mean he’s willing to accept what the
Bible says or the way the Bible puts things.
You’ll undoubtedly run into an interpretation of the Bible
like this: “In the Old Testament, we read predictions of the Bab-
ylonian captivity, but of course we know that predictive proph-
ecy is impossible and so those portions of the Bible were really
written during or after the captivity in Babylon.”
But if the Bible is what it claims to be, then there can be
predictive prophecy. And if you say that predictive prophecy
is impossible, you must know a lot. You must know that God
does not exist, that He is not personal, that He does not reveal
Himself, that He doesn’t bother to give prophecies like that. If
you know all of that, then you can interpret the Bible and say,
“This must have been written later.”
But even those unbelieving scholars who claim there’s no
predictive prophecy and who don’t accept every bit of the Bible
still tell us that the Bible is the main source of information
about the ancient Near East. So when someone says we have no
evidence for the historicity of Jesus, they’re throwing out the
Bible, the main source of that information. They’re not treating
it the way they treat other ancient literature.
When someone says we have no evidence for

the historicity of Jesus, they’re throwing out the
Bible, the main source of that information.
Such criticism doesn’t show familiarity with the secular allu-

sions to Jesus in ancient literature either. For instance, the Ro-
man historian Tacitus referred to one Christus who suffered, he
said, “the extreme penalty . . . at the hands of one of our procu-
rators, Pontius Pilatus.”2 The Jewish historian Josephus spoke of
James and describes him as “the brother of Jesus, who is called
Christ.”3
Criticism such as this—“There are no references to Jesus in
ancient secular literature”—usually tells us more about the critic
than about the object of his criticism. What it tells us about
the unbelieving critic is that he doesn’t have any idea what he’s
talking about.
A R C H A E O L O GY A N D T H E B I B L E
There was a time when critics of the Old Testament ridiculed it

for mentioning the people known as the Hittites, who were as
yet unknown outside the Bible. Such critics presumed that there
were flaws in the biblical record and that the biblical record was
worthless as a historical document. And then Hittite artifacts
and monuments began to be uncovered around Küçükçekmece
by archaeologists, beginning in 1871. Today, the Hittite civili-
zation is one of the best-known cultures of the ancient world.
Over and over again, archaeology has proved to be the en-
emy of the critics because it unearths their negative prejudices
and confirms the accuracy of Scripture. H. M. Orlinsky wrote,
2. Tacitus, Annals 15.44, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (1876),

online: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Annals_(Tacitus)/Book_15#44.
3. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston, online: https://
en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Antiquities_of_the_Jews/Book_XX#Chapter_9.
“More and more the older view that the Biblical data were sus-
pect and even likely false and less corroborated by extra-Biblical
facts, is giving way to one which holds that by and large, the
Biblical accounts are more likely to be true than false.”4
Even as unsympathetic an umpire as Time magazine, in a
lead article in 1977 entitled “How True Is the Bible?,” had to
admit: “After more than two centuries of facing the heaviest
scientific guns that could be brought to bear, the Bible has sur-
vived and is perhaps the better for the siege.”
UNARGUED PHILOSOPHICAL
BAGGAGE
When you talk to the unbeliever, you are looking, first of all, for
arbitrariness and that may take the form of mere opinion, of
relativism, or of ignorant or prejudicial conjecture, claims that
are based on bias and a lack of research.
You need to learn to expose the philosophical

precommitments of the critic that the critic has
taken for granted rather than putting them on
the table and being open about them, arguing
for them, or supporting them.
The fourth form to watch out for is unargued philosophical

baggage, philosophical assumptions that are brought into the
argument without any proof, evidence, or support. You need to
4. Harry M. Orlinsky, Ancient Israel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954), 6.

learn to expose the philosophical precommitments of the critic

that the critic has taken for granted rather than putting them
on the table and being open about them, arguing for them, or
supporting them.
“MIRACLES CAN’T HAPPEN”
Let’s imagine that there was enough external evidence available

from the textual critics, the archaeologists, the natural scientists,
and the historians—enough evidence to authenticate all the ordi-
nary data we find in the literature of Scripture, all the linguistic,
cultural, and chronological facts found in the Bible. In the Bible
we also read about things like floating ax heads, fiery chariots,
water turning to wine, a virgin birth, and resurrection. When
unbelievers read about these miraculous events in the Bible, their
first inclination is to say, “That just can’t happen.” They won’t be-
lieve the written report of the miracle. “We all know people can’t
walk on water, and so that story has to have been fabricated.”
We all engage in that line of reasoning. We see headlines at
the checkout counter at the supermarket: “Woman Gives Birth
to Her Own Father.” How do you reason when you see that?
“That’s impossible, so it couldn’t have occurred.” We under-
stand that line of reasoning.
Unbelievers dismiss in advance the possibility of miraculous
events. “Jesus didn’t rise from the dead,” they’ll say, “because we
know the dead do not rise.” They easily assume that people who
live in the enlightened scientific twenty-first century cannot ac-
cept the superstitious myths and fairy tales found in the Bible.
After all, we use computers and smartphones today. There can’t
be miracles.
But unbelievers who doubt the biblical narrative of mira-

cles ought to pause to recognize and scrutinize their controlling
premise, which is “We know miracles are impossible.” We’re
not talking about an opinion; we’re talking about knowledge. To
know something is to have a justified true belief.
But the vast majority of people you talk to, even at the uni-
versity level, are not going to bother to argue the impossibility
of miracles. They’re just going to take it for granted.
That’s a bias. Rational people don’t just take things for
granted. They don’t just say, “Well, I don’t want to think this
universe is capable of producing miraculous events and so I’ll
just not interpret anything as miraculous.”
Unbelievers think they know miracles cannot take place be-
cause, having a scientific outlook, they are convinced that all
of nature operates in a predictable and law-like fashion. Mira-
cles run counter to the regularities of our ordinary experience.
They aren’t predictable. To which the astute apologist should
say, “Isn’t that just the point? They’re unpredictable. They aren’t
your run-of-the-mill experience. If they were, we wouldn’t call
them miracles.” The unbeliever is begging the question.
The unbeliever’s bias against extraordinary events has to be
challenged concerning its rational foundations: “How does any-
one know that miracles cannot and do not happen? How do you
know that nature operates in a law-like fashion at all times and
all places?”
How could the unbeliever know that? There are two possi-
bilities. He could have done the empirical research so that he
knows every place on planet Earth and every moment of history
that has ever taken place. Then he could say, “I’ve done the
survey and there are no miracles.” He could make that universal
generalization if he had experienced everything there is to expe-

rience. The other possibility is that he could talk to somebody
who does know everything. But who’s the only one who does
know everything? God.
So here are the choices for the rational unbeliever. He can
either say, “By my experience, I know there can be no miracles,”
in which case you can laugh: “You’ve experienced everything so
that you know there can be no miracles?” By his own empirical
standards, the unbeliever has no justification for that universal
negative remark. Or he can say, “God said there cannot be mir-
acles.” But if there is a God, then there can be miracles, because
God controls everything.
Unbelievers are on the horns of a dilemma. How do they
know what the limits of the possible are? They haven’t created
the world. They don’t control the world. To reject the Bible be-
cause of its account of miracles, then, is philosophically to beg
the question.
Within the Christian worldview, miracles are

no problem. They are a problem only in the
unbeliever’s worldview.
If what the Bible tells us about God, man, and the creation
of the world is true, then miracles are no problem at all. If God
created the world, He can certainly create wine out of water. If
God gave life originally, He can give life to the dead and raise
the dead. Within the Christian worldview, miracles are not a
problem. They are a problem only in the unbeliever’s world-
view. But you must notice the unargued philosophical baggage

that comes trailing into the unbeliever’s argument.
BORROWING CAUSALITY
FROM CHRISTIANS
Notice this, too, about the unbeliever’s bias. He doesn’t allow

for any possibility of miracles because he believes causality op-
erates in the universe. In fact, according to the unbeliever, if you
wish to be scientific and rational, and enlightened, you must
causally explain things. There must be a natural causal explana-
tion for everything that happens.
But why does the unbeliever believe there’s predictability in
the universe? Why can we use causal analysis to explain anything?
The unbeliever says, “We’ve used causal analyses in the past. The
sun has come up every day in the past, just as we predicted. We
can tell you the time of sunrise and sunset and so on.”
But what about the future? How can an unbeliever be sure that
the causal analyses that he has used in the past will still apply in
the future? No one has observed the future. He is reasoning from
the past to the future, but on what basis can he do that? How can
an unbeliever expect uniformity between previous experience and
future experience? Because there always has been in the past? I
agree that in the past the future was like the past. But will it con-
tinue to be? Does the unbeliever have any basis to think it will?
We do have a reason to believe the future will be like the
past and that is that there is a sovereign God who created this
universe and controls it sovereignly, who is true to his word and
has promised that the future will be like the past. He even built
that continuity into the Noahic covenant. You can count on it
that seed time and harvest will follow each other (Gen. 9). We
can have dominion in the world and subdue the world to God’s
glory because the world is a predictable place. Given the Chris-
tian view of the universe, we do expect the sun to rise tomorrow.
The unbeliever, though, runs to the Christian view of the
world and says everything operates in a law-like fashion and then,
having used the Christian worldview to prove the predictability
of the natural world, turns around and takes the predictability of
the natural world to argue against miracles that are found in the
Bible and says, “See? Christianity is not true.” The unbeliever has
to assume a Christian view of the world in order to have a foun-
dation for his argument against the Christian view of the world.
The unbeliever has to assume a Christian view

of the world in order to have a foundation for
his argument against the Christian view of the
world.
Cornelius Van Til used the example of a little child that was
sitting on his father’s lap on a train and reached up and slapped
his father’s face. That’s analogous to what the unbeliever has
to do intellectually, Van Til said. The unbeliever sits on God’s
lap—assumes the truth of the Christian worldview—to be in a
position to reach up and slap his heavenly Father’s face.
When unbelievers have this unargued bias about miracles—
everything operates in a law-like fashion and so there can’t be
miracles—the fault is not that unbelievers have philosophical
presuppositions that they bring to the evidence. There may be
some teachers of apologetics who would say, “What’s wrong

with the unbeliever is that he is arguing based on assumptions.”
But that is not bad in itself, because everybody has assumptions
and reasons based on them. Everybody has fundamental pre-
suppositions. The problem is that the unbeliever can make sense
of his argument only by using our presuppositions, and then he
turns around and tries to refute Christianity based on them.
As you listen to your roommate or your college professor, the
first thing you need to do is to ask yourself about the argument
or the alleged argument and look for arbitrariness.
Is this opinion that’s being thrown at me? In that case, it’s
worth nothing. Is it relativism? In that case, it’s self-contradic-
tory. Is it ignorant conjecture (“It seems to me . . .”)? In that case,
it doesn’t stand up to investigation. Does it depend on an unar-
gued bias—the assumption that the universe works in a law-like
fashion, even though the unbeliever has no evidence for the
universality of causality or rather has only Christian evidence,
which he then tries to use against the faith? In that case, too, it
is self-contradictory.
GLOSSARY
Philosophy: Technically, the love (philo) of wisdom (sophia).

As an academic discipline, philosophy is the study of the
fundamental source and nature of being, knowledge, reality,
existence, and moral standards.
Textual Criticism: “Textual criticism is the science and art that
seeks to determine the most reliable wording of a text.”5
5. Paul D. Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible: Its

History, Methods, and Results (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 24.
There are some differences in wording between the various

manuscripts of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic
and the New Testament in Greek, many of them minor and
some more significant. Textual criticism involves examining
these differences and evaluating them in order to determine
which wording is most likely the original one.
1. What is “prejudicial conjecture” and how is it a form of

arbitrariness?
2. Why do people think what our Bibles say today is probably
not what the Bible originally said? What assumption under-
lies such a belief?
3. What question should we ask about all the claims the unbe-
liever makes?
4. How is arbitrariness a two-edged sword?
5. What is the primary historical document that provides evi-
dence for the existence of Jesus? What does the way unbeliev-
ers treat this document tell you about their basic assumptions?
6. What is meant by “unargued philosophical baggage” and
how should you respond to it when the unbeliever relies on
it in his arguments?
7. Can miracles happen? How do you know? And how does the
unbeliever “know” that they can’t?
8. Where does the unbeliever get the idea of cause-and-effect?
Why is that a problem for his whole system of thought?
9. Is it wrong for the unbeliever to argue on the basis of as-
sumptions and philosophical presuppositions?
CHAPTER 3
INCONSISTENT
AND FALLACIOUS
ARGUMENTS
It can be helpful to listen to someone defend the faith well, but

it is important not to simply memorize the answers that I or
someone else might give to a particular challenge. What is more
important is to learn the method. What is the apologist doing
here? What kinds of maneuvers is he using intellectually? What
kind of reasoning is being applied to answer this problem?
And so, in a book like this, I can’t deal with every particu-
lar challenge to the faith, every false religion, every cult, every
particular problem. But as we deal with some of them, you can
learn a method.
There are two ways to approach apologetics. Think of your-
self as being in a room with a man who has a revolver. You have
no weapon to use against him. He has all those bullets in his gun
and he’s getting ready to shoot you and there’s no exit. As I see it,
35
there are two things you can do. And if you knew you were going
to be put into this room, there would be two ways to prepare.
One way to prepare to deal with those bullets that are going
to be shot at you is to practice dodging bullets, to work on all
the maneuvers, up and down, and so forth. You hope that, even
though the guy has six or eight bullets in his gun, you can just
jump around and he’ll miss every time. Another way to deal
with the situation would be to practice disarming your oppo-
nent so that he isn’t able to shoot anymore.
Of those two, which would be the more practical way to
approach apologetics? We may dodge some bullets in dealing
with specific arguments. But what is more important to learn is
how to get the gun out of the other guy’s hand, to learn how to
disarm your opponent.
We may dodge some bullets in dealing

with specific arguments. But what is more
important to learn is how to get the gun out of
the other guy’s hand, to learn how to disarm
your opponent.
The method of apologetics that I’ve taught and used—pre-

suppositional apologetics—is specifically designed to do just
that, to go after the presuppositions by which the opponent of
Christianity is preparing to shoot bullets at you. As you follow
this approach, you are going to take away his ability to hit you
with the bullets because they will turn out to be blanks.1
1. For a comprehensive study of this principle, see Gary DeMar, Thinking
Inconsistent and Fallacious Arguments 37
In the first chapter, I started giving you a checklist of things

to look for when someone argues against the Christian faith.
You could write the list down on a card and pull it out every
time somebody argues with you and ask, “What about this?”
But it would be better to internalize it so that you can use it.
When you’re sitting in class and hear a professor say things con-
trary to the Christian faith, start asking these questions. I’ve
boiled them down to four, though there are some subdivisions.
But if you can remember these four issues you will be able to
deal with any argument that comes up.
These four questions apply to the key intellectual sins that all
men, including Christians, commit. First, is he being arbitrary? We
talked about the unbeliever’s arbitrariness in the previous chapters.
Now, we’ll look at the second question: Is this argument incon-
sistent? Why is inconsistency a problem? Because if you accept
inconsistent premises, then you can end up believing anything.
As with arbitrariness, there are different forms or varieties of
inconsistency. We’ll first discuss some logical fallacies. Another
kind of inconsistency you want to be on the lookout for may
best be typified by the Latin expression reductio ad absurdum,
a reduction to absurdity. If you can take the argument of your
opponents and reduce it to absurdity, you have demonstrated
an inconsistency in their thinking. If their argument leads them
to this absurdity, then they are asserting some view that they
don’t hold. Then there are inconsistencies between what they
claim to believe and what they do: actions speak louder than
words. And finally, there’s a form of inconsistency that I will call
a presuppositional tension.
Straight in a Crooked World: A Christian Defense Manual (Powder Springs, GA:

American Vision, 2001).
L O G I C A L FA L L A C I E S
Let’s begin by considering logical fallacies. Whether you are go-

ing to be a philosophy major or not, the study of logic will help
you. You’ll know what arguments should look like, and you’ll
also be able to avoid pitfalls in your reasoning process. If you’re
going to be effective in defending your faith in college, you need
to know some logic because unbelievers make a lot of logical
mistakes. It is helpful to recognize these mistakes so that when
unbelievers make them you can say, “Your arguments are falla-
cious for this reason.”
If you’re going to be effective in defending

your faith in college, you need to know some
logic because unbelievers make a lot of logical
mistakes.
Suppose someone says, “Christianity is not true because it

gave rise to the Inquisition. In the Inquisition, people who pro-
fessed to be Christians did horrible things. They tortured people
and killed people. And so, Christianity cannot be true.”
The logical fallacy being committed here is called the ad ho-
minem fallacy, arguing against the man rather than against what
he believes. If a Marxist were to say—and I don’t know why he
would, but let’s just say it for the sake of the argument—that so-
cialized medicine isn’t going to work in America but will make
it more difficult for people to get competent medical attention,
it would be irrational for me to say, “Don’t believe what he said.
He’s a Marxist and we know how bad Marxists are.” If I were to

say that, I would be arguing against the man, not against his
argument.
Likewise, when an unbeliever says, “I could never be a Chris-
tian because what Christians did in the Inquisition was terri-
ble,” I would say, “I wasn’t around when the Inquisition was
taking place!” He might respond by pointing out that people
who said they were Christians did those things. But I want to
know whether what they believed is true. The fact that you don’t
like people who profess to be Christians has nothing to do with
whether what they said they believed is true or not. There are
many other versions of an ad hominem argument, but this is one
example.
The fact that you don’t like people who profess

to be Christians has nothing to do with whether
what they said they believed is true or not.
REDUCING AN OPPONENT’S
ARGUMENT TO ABSURDITY
While you do need to know something about logical fallacies

so you can point out the inconsistencies in the unbeliever’s ar-
gument, you should also know the technique of reasoning that
is called reductio ad absurdum, reducing your opponent’s argu-
ment to absurdity. Reductio ad absurdum rests upon a law of
logic that says that whatever implies what is false is itself false.
If your starting premise leads to a false premise, then it implies
that the original premise must also be false. So, if you can re-
duce your opponent’s position to something that is known to
be false, something that is absurd, then you have refuted your
opponent’s position.
Let me give you an example. Here’s the first premise: “If
there are no universal moral principles, then it is invalid for
one culture to condemn the activities of another culture.” This
is the view known as cultural relativism. It is not right for
twenty-first-century Americans to condemn any other culture
because ethics is relative to the society in which you live.
William Graham Sumner is reputed to have written, “If there
is a law of God that applies to all mankind, God has been sus-
piciously secretive about it.” That was his way of snidely saying,
“Whatever you take to be God’s universal law, isn’t it interesting
that the Samoans didn’t hear about it?” A famous example in
the previous century was Margaret Mead’s work with the sexual
practices of unmarried Samoan girls. She concluded that since
young Samoan girls don’t practice the chastity that is taught in
America, all moral values are relative.2
There are, of course, some huge leaps of logic there, but that
is the kind of thing people bring up to support their claim that
different cultures have different standards for marriage or pri-
vate property or life. We hear stories about various cultures and
from those examples, people conclude that there are no uni-
2. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive
Youth for Western Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, [1928] 2001). Mead’s
work has been challenged, in particular, by another anthropologist, Derek Free-
man, in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthro-
pological Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful
Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (New
York: Basic Books, 1998). See also Benjamin Wiker, 10 Books that Screwed Up the
World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help (Washington: Regnery, 2008), chap. 13.
versal moral absolutes. And then the cultural relativist says, “If
there are no universal moral principles, and there don’t seem to
be, then it’s invalid for one culture to condemn the activities of
another culture.”
Your response is to bring up counterexamples that are not so
easy for the cultural relativist. “Well, then,” you say, “I guess it
was wrong for us to have condemned Hitler’s Germany and try
them in 1945–1946 Nuremberg Trials.” The Nazi atrocities were
fairly true to the Nazi philosophy of life. In that culture, then,
what the Nazis did must have been perfectly all right.
Or if you want to step on some toes, you could try this one:
Martin Luther King, Jr., was out of place when he tried to re-
form American culture. After all, the absolutes of any culture
give us our moral standards, and yet he was trying to criticize
the absolutes of racist American culture—or at least what he
took to be racist American culture.
If you’re a cultural relativist, you have no

justification for changing the world because
everything is relative.
The irony is that cultural relativism doesn’t allow you to criti-

cize anyone, and yet cultural relativists will turn right around and
criticize racism. They’ll criticize Hitler. They’ll criticize someone
like Ugandan military officer and President Idi Amin who was
known as the “Butcher of Uganda.” They’ll criticize the Indian
practice of burning widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres.
They’ll say, “These things shouldn’t happen. We have to change
the world.” But if you’re a cultural relativist, you have no justi-

fication for changing the world because everything is relative.
Here’s the reductio ad absurdum: The first premise was that if
there are no universal moral principles, it’s invalid for one cul-
ture to condemn the activities of another culture. But that rel-
ativism implies something that you know is not true. It implies
that you shouldn’t condemn Hitler. You shouldn’t condemn rac-
ism. You shouldn’t condemn any atrocity that might be brought
up. And since relativism implies what is known to be false, then
relativism itself is false. It has been reduced to absurdity.
You reduce relativism to absurdity by taking it and ringing
the logical changes on it, taking it to its consequences, and
showing that no one is willing to accept those consequences.
They may appear to, but once you bring up the right illustra-
tions, they say, “No, we don’t believe that.”3
You reduce relativism to absurdity by taking it

and ringing the logical changes on it, taking it
to its consequences, and showing that no one
is willing to accept those consequences.
B E H AV I O R V E R S U S
PROFESSED BELIEFS
Another kind of inconsistency to notice is behavior that betrays

the belief the unbeliever professes to hold. Actions, we say, speak
3. For a comprehensive study of logical fallacies, see Joel McDurmon, Bibli-

cal Logic in Theory and Practice: Refuting the Fallacies of Humanism, Darwinism,
Atheism, and Just Plain Stupidity (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2011).
louder than words. When answering a fool according to his

folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes, it is useful to point out how
the unbeliever himself is the hypocrite. That might not be the
wording you want to use, but what you are trying to show is that
he says one thing and does another. This is both a kind of moral
hypocrisy as well as a form of irrationality: there is one belief at
work when he speaks and another belief at work in his behavior.
The life of the unbeliever is riddled with such inconsisten-
cies. He will presuppose human dignity and attend a funeral to
honor a dead friend, even though he has previously argued that
man is, in principle, no different from any other product of
evolution, such as a horse or a dog. You can say in the classroom
that man is no more than a dog or a horse, just an advanced
piece of protoplasm, the slime that has evolved, but you don’t
go to funerals for dead dogs or horses. This behavior indicates
that the unbeliever does believe in the dignity of man, that man
is above the animals, somehow different from the animals—and
yet he argues that that is not the case.
The unbeliever will insist that man is nothing more than a
complex of biochemical factors controlled by the laws of phys-
ics, and then he will go home and kiss his wife and children as
though they shared something called “love.” It’s one thing to
teach biochemical determinism at the university; it’s another
thing to live it. Why does he feel sympathy for his children or
love his wife?
The unbeliever will argue that in sexual relations anything
goes and there are no moral absolutes, and then he will indig-
nantly condemn child molestation or necrophilia. But if any-
thing goes in sexual relations, we can’t turn around and say that
these behaviors are to be ruled out.
The unbeliever will suggest that things in this universe hap-

pen completely randomly, by chance, and then look for regular-
ities and law-like explanations of events, seeking uniformity and
predictability in natural science. It’s all chance, all random, he
says, but in science we expect regularity. Again and again, the
unbeliever says one thing with his words but his actions speak
louder than words.
Again and again, the unbeliever says one

thing with his words but his actions speak
louder than words.
PRESUPPOSITIONAL TENSIONS
The fourth kind of inconsistency to look for are presuppositional

tensions, presuppositions that don’t comport with each other,
basic assumptions in the unbeliever’s thinking that don’t harmo-
nize with each other. When we talk to unbelievers about their
views, and particularly about their basic worldviews, we should
be especially sensitive to hear and discern their controlling as-
sumptions about the nature of reality, about how we know what
we know, and about what’s right or wrong in human behavior.
That is, we’re going to look for their metaphysical commitments,
their epistemological procedures, and their ethical values.
Although not everyone thinks clearly and specifically about
these matters in the abstract or does philosophy in a profes-
sional and well-guided way, everyone does have some philo-
sophical assumptions about the nature of reality, how we know
what we know, and how we should live our lives. But most peo-
ple do not come out and say, “By the way, my presuppositions
are. . . .” They don’t say, “I’m a naturalist,” or “I am a material-
ist,” or “I am an existentialist.”
When we talk to unbelievers about their views,

and particularly about their basic worldviews,
we should be especially sensitive to hear and
discern their controlling assumptions about
the nature of reality, about how we know what
we know, and about what’s right or wrong in
human behavior.
If you want to be effective in defending the faith, you need

to listen closely to your opponent so that you can say, “Oh, I
see. He thinks this about reality. He thinks this about how we
know what we know. He thinks we have to live our lives in this
way.” You need to be able to categorize what he’s saying in a way
that he may not have done and may not be able to do.
Suppose your neighbor says, “I’ve never studied any philos-
ophy. I just think you only go around once in life, so grab for
all the gusto you can get.” You could identify this as a form of
hedonism—if you want to be precise, it’s not qualitative hedo-
nism of the Epicurean sort, but it’s quantitative hedonism—
but if you said that to him, he might say, “I don’t care what
hedonism is. Just pass the beer.”
When you talk to people, they may not know what the tech-
nical vocabulary is. They may not know that they represent a
particular school of thought, but you need to know that, though

not to show off. You need to know that school of thought and
how to refute it. And after you listen for a while, the unbeliever
will give you the rope to hang himself with because his philo-
sophical assumptions—his presuppositions—will be inconsis-
tent with each other.
Listen sensitively and ask yourself what is being assumed
about the nature of reality. Is reality of one sort or two sorts? Is
reality mind and matter or only matter? Is reality made up of an
infinite set of bits of matter? Is reality controlled, so that there
is no free will, or is there in some sense freedom in this world?
Ask not only about the nature of reality but also about how
we know these things. Do we know things just by using our
senses? Do we know things by reflection and logical compar-
ison? Do we know things based on memory, intuition, revela-
tion? Where does your neighbor get the idea that “we only go
around once”?
Ask what this person is assuming about human nature and
the place of human beings in the universe and how we should
live our life. What’s right and wrong in human behavior?
When you listen to the arguments of unbelievers, you will
find that their presuppositions are always inconsistent. They do
not work well together. They may not think through these mat-
ters of reality, knowledge, and behavior. They may not identify
their underlying principles or operating assumptions. But ev-
eryone utilizes some basic perspectives about reality, knowledge,
and conduct. And if you listen closely and seek to identify what
is being taken for granted, you will be able to point out—even-
tually, at the appropriate point in your discussion—how the
unbeliever’s presuppositions conflict with each other.
ETHICAL TENSIONS
Let me give you some illustrations. I’ll start with ethics because
it’s the easiest concept to latch on to. Imagine this tension
within the ethical perspective of the unbeliever. We’ll go back
to your neighbor who expresses his outlook this way: “You only
go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can get.”
What do you know about him? His assumption is that pleasure
is the leading value in life, and he assumes that there is no ac-
countability after this life. After this life, it’s all over.
On the other hand, this same neighbor expresses indigna-
tion over certain things in this world. Perhaps he’s indignant
about police brutality. He’s indignant about the invasion of
weaker nations by tyrants. He’s indignant about light sentences
handed down to rapists, bribes taken by government officials,
racial hatred, and discrimination.
So, on the one hand, he thinks you have to grab all the plea-
sure you can in this life because you only go around once. And
on the other hand, he has strong moral views that lead him
to condemn something out there in the world. But those two
views—pleasure is the highest value and brutality must be con-
demned—expose a conceptual tension within your neighbor’s
thinking. He isn’t being consistent.
After all, if policemen or rapists or tyrants get pleasure from
what they’re doing to others, then on the neighbor’s hypothe-
sis—“Go for all the gusto you can get”—they ought to pursue
those activities with enthusiasm and not be condemned. What
you have found, then, is that the presuppositions of your neigh-
bor do not comport with each other.
TENSION IN THE THEORY

OF KNOWLEDGE
What about the theory of knowledge, epistemology? Unbelievers

have a great deal of tension within their epistemological presup-
positions, as well.
Let’s think of a critic at college who doesn’t like your Chris-
tian faith and says, “You’re superstitious and gullible if you
believe those things.” According to this critic, you shouldn’t
believe anything that’s not verified—or at least verifiable—by
observation or, more broadly, by perception. To put it simply,
the critic says, “Seeing is believing.” But you believe things that
you haven’t seen so, on his view, you are gullible and supersti-
tious. The problem with Christians is that they believe all sorts
of things on the alleged authority of God speaking in the Bible.
“You didn’t see this to be true,” he says. “You can’t verify
it—not even in principle—and yet you believe it. I know better
than that. Seeing is believing.”
But how has he come to hold the view that knowledge is
limited to observation? You ask, “How did you find out that
seeing is believing?” Maybe he says, “I’ve been taking a course
in logic at college” or “I’ve been reading a book on that subject,”
or “I have a professor at the university who says that.” Someone
has convinced him that you can trust only your senses to deter-
mine what to believe about the world.
But what has he been criticizing you for? For believing what
God said. You’re relying on some authority rather than on ob-
servation. But that’s what he’s doing too. Regardless of how he
came to his view that knowledge is limited to observation, the
view that knowledge is limited to observation is self-contra-
dictory. No one has had an experience of all knowledge being

restricted to observation. You can have an experience with ta-
males, with baseball, or with God. You can have an experience
of being hot or cold. You can have an experience of seeing the
sunset in Hawaii. But one thing you will never experience is
knowledge of things being restricted to observations. That’s not
something we know by observation.
No one has observed a universal negative. In fact, no one
has observed a universal positive either. No one has a universal
vision about anything. In a limited lifetime, you are not going
to see everything.
The thing we’re talking about isn’t seeable anyway, even if
you could see everything. You can’t see abstract entities or prop-
ositional truth. You can see sentences in which a propositional
truth is written down, but you can’t see that propositional truth
itself. You cannot observe everything, nor can you observe the
alleged propositional truth that knowledge is restricted to
observation.
Most unbelievers who hold this view that

seeing is believing have no idea that they’re
contradicting themselves when they say it.
They have a presupposition about knowledge,
but they are living contrary to it—or they have
another presupposition that is in tension with it.
The unbeliever has this tension in his theory of knowledge,

and yet most unbelievers who hold this view that seeing is be-
lieving have no idea that they’re contradicting themselves when

they say it. They have a presupposition about knowledge, but
they are living contrary to it—or they have another presupposi-
tion that is in tension with it.
T E N S I O N S I N T H E N AT U R E
OF REALITY
Then there are tensions in the unbeliever’s metaphysical presup-

positions as well, that is, his presuppositions about the nature
of reality.
Imagine that you have a professor at school who holds a be-
havioristic view of man. He claims that our human behavior is
determined by stimulus-response conditioning and that all hu-
man behavior is theoretically predictable if only we could know
what the factors are that go into it. Ultimately and in principle,
according to the professor, human free will is an illusion. All of
us think and do only what we have been conditioned to think
and do, given the variable factors of our environment. Every
human action is the theoretically predictable consequence of
antecedent factors, conditioned responses, heredity, genes, and
things like that.
So imagine that you have a professor who holds this view.
Imagine further than when you take the final exam in this
course, you cheat on the examination and the professor catches
you doing it. He’s indignant and insists upon imposing a strict
penalty. “You’re going to flunk the course,” he says.
But if he does respond this way, he is in open conflict with
his own view of human nature, isn’t he? By punishing you, he
assumes that you were free to choose how to take the test and
you freely chose to take the wrong route by cheating. You could
have studied hard, prepared to answer all the questions on your
own, but instead, you decided to ride upon the efforts of the
fellow students around you.
But if his view is right and you can’t help doing what you
do, then you couldn’t help making that alleged choice either.
“Given my previous conditioning, professor, I couldn’t help but
rely upon somebody else. It makes no sense for you to punish
me.” By the way, that answer assumes that the professor has
some freedom about whether he’ll punish you or not. You can’t
live your life on that behaviorist assumption.
Sometimes there’s a tension between somebody’s theory of
knowledge and his view of reality, between his epistemology
and his metaphysics. Imagine you have a colleague who fancies
himself rather intellectual about matters of religion. According
to him, there is no God, no spiritual realm, no spiritual forces
or events whatsoever. The physical world is all there is.
Moreover, this colleague finds it intellectually impossible to
accept the Christian outlook because he says there are logical
contradictions within the Christian outlook. We say that God
is one and yet three. We say that God is loving and all-power-
ful—and nevertheless, there is evil in the world. He considers
these things to be logically contradictory, and according to him,
we cannot know anything to be true if it conflicts with the laws
of logic.
Before you get around showing him that the things you be-
lieve don’t entail a logical contradiction, you could point out
that, given his presuppositions about the nature of reality, he
has no right now in the area of the theory of knowledge to
charge Christianity with being illogical.
He says there’s nothing but the physical cosmos, and yet now
he appeals to the laws of logic, which—according to him—are
violated by Christian dogma. But are the laws of logic physical
in nature? No. You can’t touch them or see them or smell them.
So what he’s appealing to doesn’t exist, given his worldview. His
insistence that you have to be logical—and his assumption that
the laws of logic are real—conflicts with his theory of reality,
namely, that reality is limited to what is physical.
The non-Christian simply does not have a workable worl-
dview. It is as if he got on the plane to Boston but thought he
could get off at Chicago. But as you defend the faith, you want
to show that he can’t get off at Chicago. If you choose the air-
line of autonomy, you will end up where you don’t want to be:
illogical, immoral, unscientific, and unfree, with no dignity.4
At that point, the choice is between life and death—spiritual
life and death, moral life and death, intellectual life and death.
“Answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his
own conceit.”
GLOSSARY
Ad hominem fallacy: An ad hominem argument argues against

the person instead of arguing against what he believes or the
argument he is presenting (e.g., “You believe that only be-
cause you were poorly educated”; “He’s a Marxist and we
know how bad Marxists are”; “I could never be a Calvinist
because Calvin did some awful things”; “Christianity cannot
be true because Christians have persecuted people”).
4. For a fuller statement of this analogy, see Greg L. Bahnsen, Against All
Opposition: Defending the Christian Worldview (Powder Springs, GA: American
Vision, 2020).
Behaviorism: The psychological doctrine that says human be-

ings act as they are conditioned to act. Given a certain stim-
ulus, there will be a certain response—and people can be
trained to respond in a certain predictable way to a certain
stimulus (“stimulus-response conditioning”). The behavior-
ist says that all human behavior is the theoretically predict-
able outcome of previous conditioning, so that people are, as
it were, advanced white rats.
Cultural relativism: The belief that there are no universal moral
principles so that it is invalid for one culture to condemn ac-
tivities or beliefs of another culture.
Epicureanism: Argues that pleasure is the chief good in life.
Hence, Epicurus advocated living in such a way as to derive
the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one’s life-
time, yet doing so moderately to avoid the suffering incurred
by overindulgence in such pleasure.
Epistemology: Theory of knowledge. What are the nature and
limits of human knowledge? How do you know what you
know?
Existentialism: Nothing governs what you will be. You come
into this world as an existent and then you choose what you
will be: “Existence precedes essence.” Nothing determines
your essence from outside yourself. Jean-Paul Sartre: “What
is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It
means, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene,
and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existen-
tialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is
nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he him-
self will have made what he will be. . . . There is no human
nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man
what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he

wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is
nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first
principle of existentialism.”5
Hedonism: The belief that the chief good in life is pleasure so
that the purpose of life is the pursuit of one’s own pleasure.
Qualitative Hedonism (Epicureanism) emphasizes living in
such a way that you can derive the greatest amount of plea-
sure possible during one’s lifetime, which requires modera-
tion to avoid the suffering that results from overindulgence
in such pleasure. Quantitative Hedonism aims at getting as
much pleasure—or pleasure as often—as possible: “You only
live once, so grab all the pleasures you can get.”
Materialism: The belief that there is an infinite number of bits
of reality, but they’re all made of matter. Reality is made
up of physical stuff, and that physical stuff is broken down
into smaller and smaller bits of matter. That is the view that
comes closest to the common outlook of our culture today.
It is the prevailing view in the sciences in the university, and
it’s what most people take for granted until you start pressing
them on the implications of their worldview
Metaphysics: The study of the nature of reality. What lies be-
yond the physical world? What is the nature of the world in
which we live? Where did it come from? What is its struc-
ture? What things are real? Does God exist? Does man have
a soul? Is there a life after death?
Naturalism: Is also known as “atheism, scientific materialism,
and secular humanism. . . . The most fundamental belief
5. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism,” Existentialism from Dosto-

yevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman, (New York: Meridian, [1956] 1960), 290–291.
from which all others flow is that nature or matter is all that
exists. It has always existed, or it came into existence from
nothing. There is nothing outside or before nature, i.e., the
material universe that is studied by modern science. There is
no God and no supernatural.”6
Presuppositional Apologetics: An approach to the defense of
the faith that recognizes that all people think based on foun-
dational commitments and assumptions (presuppositions)
that affect how they interpret the facts and what they con-
sider evidence for their views, argues for the faith-based on
the Triune God’s revelation of Himself in Scripture and all
of creation, and demonstrates that no other presupposition
provides support for knowledge, logic, science, ethics—in
short, that no system, except one built on God’s revelation,
can make sense of anything.
Presuppositional tensions: Presuppositions that don’t harmo-
nize with each other. For instance, a person may believe that
everyone should pursue as much pleasure as they can and at
the same time believe that some behavior is wrong and should
be stopped, even if it brings pleasure to the one who is doing
it. These two basic beliefs conflict with each other. Though
the person holds both beliefs, they cannot both be true.
Reductio ad absurdum: Reducing your opponent’s argument
to absurdity. Since a premise that leads to a false conclu-
sion must be false, if you can draw out the implications of
your opponent’s premises and show that they lead to conclu-
sions that are false and absurd, then you have shown that his
premises must be false, thereby refuting his argument.
6. Terry Mortenson, “The Religion of Naturalism,” Answers in Genesis (May

5, 2017): https://bit.ly/2UrBDxD.
1. What two approaches to apologetics are presented at the

outset of this chapter? Which is wisest and most effective?
Why?
2. Why is the study of logic valuable to everyone, not just to
philosophers?
3. What is an ad hominem fallacy and what are some examples?
Why do ad hominem attacks seem more powerful than they
are?
4. What does it mean to reduce your opponent’s argument to
absurdity and how do you do it? Give an example.
5. What are some of the absurd implications of cultural
relativism?
6. What are some inconsistencies you might notice between an
unbeliever’s professed beliefs and his own behavior and what
it indicates about his beliefs? How are these inconsistencies
both moral hypocrisy and irrationality?
7. What are “presuppositional tensions”? Provide two examples
that you might find in an unbeliever’s views about knowl-
edge, the nature of reality, or ethics.
8. Why is it valuable for you to understand and recognize vari-
ous schools of thought even though your unbelieving friend
might not know he’s representing any particular school of
thought?
CHAPTER 4
UNBELIEF AND ITS

CONSEQUENCES
We’ve been going through a checklist of questions to ask when

we are confronted with an unbeliever’s arguments against Chris-
tianity. We’ve talked about arbitrariness and inconsistency—
two primary intellectual sins. Now we come to the next item on
the checklist. What are the consequences of this argument or
this viewpoint? Jesus said a tree should be judged by the fruit it
bears, and every person has fruit as the result of their worldview
regardless of what people say about the tree. You know it’s a
banana tree if it brings forth bananas rather than peaches.
One of the things we can do as Christians is to ask what
the unbelieving approach to the world has spawned. What has
been brought about by that approach to life? I’m going to give
you what I think are some interesting considerations in every
department of the university and also in our culture.
Before I do this, though, I want to get into the topic by
considering how the news media dealt with David Koresh. Back
57
in 1993, in Waco, Texas, Koresh was a cult leader of a tiny sect

called the Branch Davidians.1 We’ll accept, for the moment, the
news media’s assessment that what Koresh was doing was very
wicked. What goes along with the news report of the misdeeds
of a man like David Koresh?
We were reminded that he was a religious fundamentalist
without any accurate definition of what it means to be a fun-
damentalist. Of course, most fundamentalists don’t want to be
identified with someone like Koresh who was an oppressive cult
leader, but those in the news media do not present distinctions
among religious groups. We are reminded that these are religious
people who are fundamentalists. What’s the implied judgment?
“This is what religion spawns.”
It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if distinctions were drawn
and there was some fair reporting. A while back, in Califor-
nia, we had two cases of tragic mass murders. I was waiting for
the neutral, objective world of newscasting to remind us of the
murderers’ beliefs. We would hope to here something like the
following: “These people didn’t believe in the living and true
God. They didn’t trust in Jesus as their Savior or keep His laws.
So what do you expect them to do?”
When unbelievers do abhorrent things we are never told
about their religious beliefs. It’s only when professing funda-
mentalists do bad things that religion becomes important to the
media and a relevant thing to report. I would like to return the
favor now and say, “Let’s consider what unbelief brings about.”
1. See Gary DeMar, Last Days Madness: Obsession of the Modern Church, 4th
ed. (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2019), 27–28. Also see Kenneth
Samples, Erwin de Castro, Richard Abanes, and Robert Lyle, Prophets of the Apoc-
alypse: David Koresh and Other American Messiahs (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).
Unbelief and Its Consequences 59
I highly recommend that you pick up Paul Johnson’s book,

Intellectuals.2 In some ways, it’s not an enjoyable book. But I
enjoyed almost every page of it because I understood what
Johnson was doing. He took a series of illustrations of intellec-
tual giants, people who are highly regarded in the academic
community—Rousseau and Sartre and Russell and others—
and pointed out how they lived their lives. They said one thing
and they lived another. The book is full of the most amazing
hypocrisy—and not just hypocrisy, but downright meanness,
selfishness, and brutality. Again, and again, Johnson asks, “How
did they live their lives?”
When unbelievers act in abhorrent ways, we

are never told about their religious beliefs.
It’s only when fundamentalists or professing
fundamentalists do bad things that religion
becomes, in the news media’s mind, a relevant
thing to report.
That is a fair consideration in a world that wants to know the

consequences of religion. Let’s look at some of the consequences.
2. Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky,
rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Also see Dave Breese, Seven Men Who
Ruled the World From the Grave (Chicago: Moody Press, 1990); John P. Koster,
The Atheist Syndrome (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989); D. Bruce
Lockerbie, Dismissing God: Modern Writers’ Struggle Against Religion (Grand Rap-
ids: Baker, 1998); Benjamin Wiker, 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And
5 Others That Didn’t Help (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2008); Kevin Swanson,
Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West (Parker, CO: Generations
With Vision, 2013).
THE UNBELIEVING UNIVERSITY
Confusion in the Departments
First, in the university community, in the sociology depart-

ment, what has the rejection of Christianity spawned? Lots of
things, of course, but I’m going to over-generalize and say that
for the most part what it has produced is cultural relativism.
We’ve dealt with this a bit in the previous chapter, but it’s help-
ful to review.
As we’ve seen, Margaret Mead3 taught us to affirm the idea
of “different strokes for different folks.” The argument for this
view was remarkable logically. It went like this: “People live in
different ways. Therefore, all people ought to live in different
ways.” You won’t find it presented that way—plainly and sim-
ply—on any page in Margaret Mead’s writings, but that’s what
the argument boils down to. Samoan girls, she said, do not have
the mores of unmarried American girls. And there you have it:
Ethics is relative. It’s proven.
That’s like a math teacher who collects junior high home-
work and finds different answers on these different pages and
then says, “Lo and behold! Math is relative. Different answers
are being given. Apparently, you can create your mathematical
reality.”
The sad thing is that when you take a sociology class, people
take this approach seriously. You ought to poke fun at it. You
have to say, “I think the emperor has no clothes.”
But let’s accept cultural relativism for a moment. Remember
what we said in the previous chapter. If everything is culturally
relative, then it was completely wrong for Martin Luther King,
3. Wiker, 10 Books that Screwed Up the World, 177–193.
Jr., to lead a reform effort against a racist and segregationist cul-

ture because, in any such culture, those who try to reform it are
violating the norms of their culture.
You will be taught cultural relativism and then, in the same
sociology class, you will be told that what the warlords have
done in Somalia is horrible. But when in Somalia, do like
the Somalians, right? You can see through that in a moment,
but that view is at the heart of what is taught in the sociology
classroom.
Many years ago, one of the spokesmen in Plato’s Republic,
Thrasymachus, argued that might makes right or, if you will,
that justice is what is in the interest of the stronger. What we
call “justice,” then, is just a euphemism for whatever is wanted
by the one who gets his way or by the group of people in society
who get their way. Law, then, is simply the positive declaration
of the will of the stronger in society. Justice is defined by law,
and the law is determined by the strongest individual or group
in a culture.
In the law department, legal theory is widely disdained by
budding lawyers, or so I’ve been told by lawyers and law stu-
dents. They say that everyone considers legal theory to be the
rump end of the curriculum. But if I was given the opportu-
nity to teach, that’s exactly what I’d want to teach: legal theory.
What is the foundation of law? What is the nature of law? How
is it to be applied? What is the nature of justice? And so forth.
But many lawyers, I’m told, don’t care about these types of
foundational questions anymore. Nevertheless, you’ll still hear
arguments from lawyers about how people haven’t been treated
rightly. They’ll argue that our culture has wronged other groups
or individuals in society. Rather than saying “The mightier got
their way,” they appeal to what they see as the right way to live.
And yet in their legal theory, they believe that might makes
right.
There’s tension within the sociology department and the law
schools. The same is true in the political science department. It’s
getting to the point where I think we ought to begin sneering
when political scientists think they’re giving us a science.
Let’s ask this question. We don’t want Christian political
theory, so what do we want? We want free elections. Why? Be-
cause people have to be free, right? It would be unfair to have
some political order imposed on them. They should only have
imposed on them something they freely choose. To which the
answer is: Who says so? Why should people have the right to
choose their political order?
When people say, “Free elections are a necessity for fairness
or justice in society,” they are appealing to something beyond
might, aren’t they? They’re appealing to some form of law or
right, some notion of fairness that goes beyond considerations
of power in a culture.
In the psychology department, you’ll be told that man does
not have a spiritual dimension. Man is made up solely of mat-
ter. What we call the mind of man is just brain tissue. We use
the terms mind and brain interchangeably sometimes, but there
is a difference. Brain tissue is made from gooey stuff that fol-
lows the laws of biology and chemistry. But if the psychologist
says that man’s mind is just brain tissue, then the real question
is why any of us should trust the results of the biological and
chemical reactions of the gray tissue up in our craniums.
Why, then, should we have debates over what is true, what is
just, what is beautiful? What is self-consciousness if man’s mind
is nothing more than brain tissue? If man’s mind is nothing more

than brain tissue, then there is ultimately no dignity to man.
If the psychologist says that man’s mind is just

brain tissue, then the real question is why any
of us should trust the results of the biological
and chemical reactions of the gray tissue up
in our craniums.
The economics department seems to have become a division

of political science, in that it is no longer a study of the way peo-
ple make economic decisions. Economics is the study of how
property is manipulated and who should own it and things like
that. What is the justification for private property? Is there any
justification for it if you’re not a Christian?
In the physics department, what’s the justification for believing
in the regularity of the universe? We’ll come back to that later.
In environmental studies, why is it that human beings should
not abuse animals? Why should we be held responsible for the
environment?
In the biology department, even leaving aside the absurdi-
ties of evolutionary theory for now, what is the essence of life?
Try getting an answer to that question. Why do human beings
have any special dignity? If you raise that question, the biol-
ogy professor may say, “They study that in psychology.” But
then you get to psychology class and they say, “Man is nothing
more than a biological creature.” So you go back to the biology
department.
If all these other departments have trouble, certainly the

math department does too. Ask your math professor why the
laws of math apply to the world in which we live. “What is it
we’re studying in the math department?” The answer will be,
“Numbers and their relationships.” But are numbers physical?
Are their relationships physical?
It seems the math department is committed to some kind of
metaphysics that goes beyond what the biology, physics, psy-
chology, and political science departments believe in.
In the history department, the real issue is whether there is
meaning in history at all. If history is meaningless—that is, if
we cannot find a basis for meaning—why should history be
studied? What is it that makes certain events important in his-
tory, while other events are not worth mentioning? When you
read a book about the War for Independence, it doesn’t talk
about everything that was going on. It leaves out things that
seemingly aren’t relevant to the professor. But how do you know
what is and what is not relevant if you don’t understand the
meaning of history?
What about causality? There are causes for wars. What
brings about certain events in history? The need for a particular
invention has a history behind its development In history de-
partments that do not have a Christian philosophy of life, they
don’t have a clue about these matters.
In the literature department of our major universities, the
leading critical theory—if it can be called a theory—is decon-
structionism. The deconstructionist, if nothing else, can be
credited for saying that we want no semblance of a Christian
understanding of life, of literature, of meaning at all—and that
“no semblance of meaning” comes down to this: No text of
literature has an objective meaning so that every reading of a

text by Shakespeare or Hemingway or whoever is a misreading.
Every interpretation is a misinterpretation. A text cannot have
inherent meaning because that would assume something about
the nature of the world that the deconstructionists don’t want
to believe. Deconstructionists come right out and say that the
view that you can read an author and determine his meaning is
a semblance of a Christian view of life. But this deconstruction-
ist approach destroys literary criticism, doesn’t it?
University or Multiversity?
Unbelief leads to the destruction of every department of the

university. But consider, more broadly, the modern university
itself. Not only is there cancer growing in every department
intellectually, but the university as a whole has no center, no
unity. Originally, the university was called the uni-versity be-
cause something was uniting all the diversity of departments.
There was a unity to the way the diversity of areas of life were
going to be explored. The world was seen as a universe, and so
there was a university, a united study of how all of life coheres.
Originally, the university was called the uni-

versity because something was uniting all the
diversity of departments. There was a unity
to the way the diversity of areas of life were
going to be explored. The world was seen as
a universe, and so there was a university, a
united study of how all of life coheres.
What was the unity that originally informed education? It

was the Christian worldview. We believed in God, His creation,
man and woman and their place in the universe. We shared a
view of how we know what we know and how we should live
our lives. Then, with this common perspective, we could spe-
cialize and focus on understanding what God has done in the
areas of music or literature or history or physics or biology, and
so on.
There was unity to the curriculum. But I guarantee that un-
believers will say that there is no unity to the modern university.
It has become a multiversity. What you hear in one department
will conflict with what you hear in another department, partic-
ularly in terms of their underlying assumptions.
We’ve only scraped the surface, but I hope you get the point.
Start looking at the consequences of rejecting the Christian
worldview. When people offer you an argument against Chris-
tianity and in favor of some other perspective on life, you have
the right to say, “What does this understanding produce? What
does it bring about?” Look at the fruit that is being produced
and ask, “Is this anything people would want to eat?” How
many people are satisfied with the modern university and its
inability to have foundations in any department?
N O N - C H R I S T I A N C U LT U R E
What about outside the academic world? What is the culture

that has been spawned by the non-Christian or unbelieving
worldview? We’re going to look briefly at artistic, political, eco-
nomic, intellectual, and family culture.
Artistic Culture
Let’s start with artistic culture. What is the unbelieving world

creating in art these days? Consider musical composition. In
many modern musical compositions, you’ll often find defiance
of order, harmony, and resolution. When it’s pointed out that
people don’t want to listen to that music and don’t come to
concerts to listen to it anymore, people are then disdainful of
the masses.
What we have created in our culture are various pockets of
musical elitists. That’s true in the classical domain, but it’s also
true in the domain of rock. Some people will say, “It doesn’t
matter to us. We’re not writing music that communicates with
people and what the masses like. What do they know? They’re
quite ignorant.”
We have artists who present things in order to offend—pur-
posely—in the name of personal liberation or, in some cases,
social liberation. They say, “We have the right to offend, to do
what we want.” So, you’ll see a crucifix submerged in a jar of
urine—and that’s supposed to be artistic. There is homoerotic
art, and so on. The paintings and photographs may be offensive,
but the artist will tell us that it’s the road to liberation.
What is the boundary between decency and

indecency, between beauty and ugliness,
between art and non-art for that matter? In
our culture, no one can tell anymore.
But then why not have snuff films? A snuff film depicts the
murder and mutilation of someone, usually during sexual acts.
Part of the uniqueness of these films is that they are not sim-
ply artistic depictions of what it would be like for someone to
die while engaged in these perverse sexual acts; they do have
someone die. And why not, given the modern approach to art
that we have in our culture? What is the boundary between
decency and indecency, between beauty and ugliness, between
art and non-art for that matter? In our culture, no one can tell
anymore.
Political Culture
Turn now to political culture. We are inundated with

self-serving politicians who are interested primarily in pay raises
that they try to hide from us, while engaging in pork-barrel
legislation, giving their own re-elections the highest priority.
We no longer have wise statesmen who are concerned for the
good of the corporate body—but then, on the non-Christian
worldview, why would we? Why shouldn’t politicians be selfish,
self-serving, hypocritical creeps?
We see double standards all over our political culture. Con-
gress passes the laws by which the rest of the country is to live,
but Congress does not usually bind itself to the rules it imposes
on others. Congress passes laws about equal opportunity and
then exempts itself from equal opportunity legislation. Congress
passed laws about Social Security taxation on the citizenry and
exempted itself from the program. Congress passes laws about
environmental protections and exempts itself and its properties
from environmental protection.
And why not? In terms of the non-Christian approach to

the world, why should anyone have to be consistent? On that
view, there are no objective limits to State authority. The State
intervenes whenever people think the State should intervene,
and there is no limit to it.
The result, of course, is unprincipled statism and violations of
jurisdiction. For instance, the United States went to Panama and
picked up a dictator, Noriega, and hauled him to this country, de-
ciding it wanted to try him. There were questions related to inter-
national law and justice, but our country no longer respects them.
We have a growing State, a State that is intervening in more
ways in our lives. And yet, at the same time, in this glorious
non-Christian world, we also have growing criminal activity.
The State exists to protect us from crime. But at the very time
the State is expanding its reach and power and demanding more
in taxes, it’s doing a worse job in limiting crime. This is one of
the consequences of the non-Christian worldview.
Economic Culture
Look at our economic culture. We no longer have a gold stan-

dard or any kind of monetary standard on which our money is
based. Instead, we have fiat money, that is, money created out
of thin air by printing presses and numbers entered in a com-
puter. The value of the dollar is now determined by political
whim. And who gets hurt by the manipulation of economic
value? Who gets hurt by inflation? The people who are most in
need of economic help: the aged and the poor.
We have closed shop unions and minimum wage laws that
exclude those who need gainful employment from entering the
marketplace and competing for the available jobs. How does the
minimum wage do that? Like this: Some people would be willing
to work for, say, $6.50 an hour to sweep your floor, but the gov-
ernment says you must pay $7.50 or whatever the latest minimum
wage will be. You don’t believe this person’s work is worth $15.00
or even $7.50 an hour, so he can’t get a job. Those who are most in
need of entering the workplace and competing at the low end of the
wage scale to gain experience and skills cannot enter the workplace
because of minimum wage laws. Mandatory union protections do
the same thing: People cannot compete for the available jobs.
Because of decisions made by politicians, we have legalized
theft through taxation, and we have legalized theft through in-
flation that is increasing the money supply with the printing
press or bits and bytes in a computer program. In our personal
lives, debt has become a way of life. Many people live with
massive debt, even leaving aside the amount they owe on their
mortgages. On top of that, we have rising unemployment for
people who are untrained and poorly educated. The work being
done in this country is increasingly uncompetitive and low in
quality due to apathy on the part of workers.
Intellectual Culture
In the realms of science, medicine, and industry we have cut-

throat competition that leads to fake lab reports and artificial
studies done to gain research grants or a place in the market.
The United States’ school system is littered with unmoti-
vated teachers and with schools that produce increasingly lower
scores, high dropout rates, and intense social problems with vi-
olence, drugs, and sex.
Family Culture
What about family culture or sexual culture in this world of

personal freedom, selfishness, and hedonism? More than half
the marriages that take place in our culture today end in di-
vorce. What does that say about our view of marriage in general?
Think of sexual infidelity. Though it is promoted and glam-
orized in the movies, it brings with it personal anguish, pain,
and despair. Most children in our culture will now experience
a broken home at some point in their lives—either a home in
which they grow up or which they later establish. Broken homes
lead to instability and personal bitterness.
We have an increase in child molestation and abuse in this
wonderful new world of freedom that the unbeliever has cre-
ated. We have millions of unborn babies killed every year, and
yet we have the hypocritical audacity to condemn Adolf Hitler
for the Holocaust where some six million Jews were killed.
I hope you get the point. When the news brings to our at-
tention that someone who professed to be religious or had a
religious upbringing went out and killed people or embezzled
money or something like that, that shouldn’t necessarily be hid-
den. I believe in free disclosure. But it galls me when unbeliev-
ers suggest that it’s religious beliefs that create these problems
in our culture.
Let’s start having a full disclosure as well as a free disclo-
sure. Every time we find people who are guilty of these crimes
against humanity, let’s remind people that that’s what unbelief
produces. When someone raises objections against Christianity,
it is perfectly fair for you to ask what the consequences would
be if what this person is claiming were true. If his view were ac-
cepted, what would it lead to? What has it led to? That’s another
way of checking whether his argument will fly.
GLOSSARY
Deconstructionism: Deconstructionism, associated with phi-

losophers such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, is noto-
riously hard to define, not least because Derrida himself used
the term in a variety of ways. Applied to literary theory, de-
constructionism is often taken to mean that no text has an ob-
jective meaning. Every text has more than one interpretation
and those interpretations contradict each other. Every reading
is, therefore, a misreading and every interpretation a misinter-
pretation, a failure to establish finally what the text is saying.
1. How does Jesus teach us to judge people and their beliefs?

2. Why do news reports draw attention to the fact that certain
people who commit atrocities are or were “religious”? Why
don’t they mention, in other cases, that the perpetrator was
an unbeliever?
3. What are some of the confusions that unbelief has produced
in various departments of the university?
4. Why is it a problem that law schools produce lawyers who
are not interested in legal theory, have barely thought about
it, or who do not have a solid basis for it? You don’t need to
think philosophically about math in order to do math. Do
lawyers need to think about the philosophy of law—about
legal theory—in order to practice law?
5. What question(s) should we ask in connection with every

subject in the university curriculum?
6. How has the university become a multiversity?
7. What are some of the cultural consequences of an unbeliev-
ing worldview in the realms of art, politics, economics, sci-
ence, and education?
8. What consequences has an unbelieving worldview had for
marriages and families?
5
THE
PRECONDITIONS
OF INTELLIGIBILITY
In the previous chapters, we’ve been running through a check-

list of questions to ask about the arguments unbelievers use to
support the position they espouse. Are their arguments arbi-
trary? Are their views inconsistent in some way? What are the
consequences of their views? Now we come to the fourth ques-
tion on our checklist: What are the preconditions of intelligibil-
ity for what unbelievers are claiming?
I realize that’s not the language you would use when you are
talking to a friend. But what I mean by asking about the pre-
conditions of intelligibility is simply asking what things would
have to be true for what a person is saying to make sense. What
would have to be true about reality? What would have to be
true about how we know things? What would have to be true
about ethics and human behavior?
74
The Preconditions of Intelligibility 75
W H AT D O E S I T TA K E T O M A K E S E N S E ?
When you ask these questions about the preconditions of intel-

ligibility, what you’re driving at is that unless Christianity is
true, this person wouldn’t even be able to make sense at all.
Unless Christianity is true, this person wouldn’t

even be able to make sense at all.
We’ve looked at an illustration of this earlier. People will say

that miracles are impossible. But why are they impossible? Because,
they say, the universe operates in a law-like, uniform fashion.
But what would have to be true for such a statement—that
the universe operates in a law-like, uniform fashion—to make
sense? We’ll consider this in more detail, but the answer is that
you would need a Christian understanding of the universe, a
sovereign God who controls all things rationally and predict-
ably to be able to say that the universe is that sort of thing.
Those who argue against miracles because

everything happens in a law-like predictable
way could make those claims intelligible only
if Christianity were true.
It turns out that those who argue against miracles because

everything happens in a law-like, predictable way could make
those claims intelligible only if Christianity were true. The truth

of Christianity is the precondition of a uniform universe, and
to argue against the possibility of miracles, you need a uniform
universe. The argument is calculated to show that Christian-
ity is false, and yet the precondition of intelligibility for that
argument is that Christianity is true. The unbeliever could be
successful in advancing this argument only if he is unsuccessful.
When I debated the atheist Gordon Stein at the University
of California (Irvine) in 1984, I pointed out that the fact that it
was a debate meant that he wanted things to be presented log-
ically.1 He wanted to look at the arguments to decide who had
the best arguments, but debates presuppose the laws of logic.
What would have to be true for the laws of logic to make sense?
What are the preconditions of intelligibility of the laws of logic?
Why are the laws of logic logical? What makes them consistently
logical? The answer is that these abstract and non-material uni-
versal and absolute laws make sense only if Christianity is true.
We’re not talking here about how the laws of logic work but
about what makes it intellectually sensible to refer to them at
all. If you tell me that nothing exists except matter in motion,
and you tell me that the laws of logic are neither matter nor
motion, then you can’t have the laws of logic be some objective
reality that governs the way you reason.
So when Dr. Stein came to debate, the precondition of the
intelligibility of him debating was the acceptance of the Chris-
tian worldview—and yet, ironically, he came to debate against
the Christian worldview. To generate his argument, he would
first have to be wrong in what he was trying to prove.
1. The text of the debate is available at https://bit.ly/3s2X1bL. The audio is

available at https://bit.ly/3ltGifw
Now that is not ordinarily what you are taught when you
study apologetics. We don’t usually think this way. But that is
the most powerful form of refutation—asking what are the pre-
conditions of intelligibility and then showing that the proof of
God’s existence is simply that without Him, you can’t prove
anything. God is the precondition of the intelligibility of all
lines of proof including a certain view of the universe and how
men know what they know and how they ought to live their
lives. Proof—to be intelligent—requires the Christian world-
view. It requires the existence of God.
Proof—to be intelligent—requires the Christian

worldview. It requires the existence of God.
You might say, “But I know lots of people who prove things
and who nevertheless say they don’t believe in God’s existence.”
And that’s right. After I debated Dr. Stein at the University of
California, we began writing to one another. I challenged him
and pushed him further about what his unbelieving worldview
could not account for. He tried to give answers, and I responded
to them. He finally said, “I haven’t given you adequate answers,”
but then he added, “Neither can you.” I said, “Give me the
questions and I’ll answer them.” That is, I intended to try to
give a Christian approach to the things we were discussing.
In the process of this correspondence, I explained that unless
he had a Christian view of the universe, he wouldn’t be able to
balance his checkbook. Why? Because balancing a checkbook
assumes the laws of mathematics. But on his view, the laws of
mathematics are arbitrary; they can be defined any way you

want. And in that case, you don’t have to worry about balanc-
ing your checkbook.
When the bank says, “You’re out of money,” you can say,
“No, I’m not. I have different laws of mathematics. I have all the
money I want,” but you know very well that you can’t do that.
Balancing a checkbook assumes the objectivity, universality,
and abstract nature of the laws of mathematics. And yet regard-
ing Dr. Stein’s worldview, there are no universal abstract and
absolute laws of logic, morality, or anything—including math.
Dr. Stein’s response was this: “You may say that I can’t bal-
ance my checkbook, but I do it all the time.” But that wasn’t the
point. I didn’t say he couldn’t balance his checkbook. I said he
couldn’t make sense out of balancing his checkbook. He could
not account for mathematical laws.
“It’s my conviction,” I said, “that you do know this God and
therefore you do know that the laws of morality and logic and
math and so on are absolute—and therefore you can be suc-
cessful in balancing your checkbook. But you could not be suc-
cessful and you couldn’t even make sense out of balancing your
checkbook if you believed what you say you do about reality,
knowledge, and human behavior.”
Don’t think that the argument for God’s existence is that
unbelievers are blithering idiots or that they must walk around
being illogical and immoral all the time. That’s not my point.
People are logical—not completely, but for the most part, they
try to be logical. They do have some kind of morality they live
up to or try to live up to.
But the point is that if you’re not a Christian, you can’t make
sense out of that. As Cornelius Van Til used to point out, we’re
not saying that unbelievers can’t count. They know how to say
“one, two, three, four, five.” They know that two times two is
four. We’re not saying they can’t count; we’re saying they can’t
account for counting. They do it, but they can’t make sense out
of it, given the operating assumptions of their worldview.
We’re not saying they can’t count; we’re saying

that they can’t account for counting.
Unbelievers make moral judgments and sometimes they’re

correct—at least formally and outwardly. Child molestation is
wrong. It’s ugly. It’s perverse. It’s abominable. When an unbe-
liever tells me that child molestation is wrong, I have the right
to say, “Can you account for the wrongness of child molesta-
tion? I agree with your judgment, but on your worldview, it
doesn’t make sense.”
OBJECTIVE PROOF OF
GOD’S EXISTENCE
Those are the four items on your checklist. When you hear
an unbeliever’s arguments, you want to consider the (1) arbi-
trariness, the (2) inconsistencies, the (3) consequences, and the
(4) preconditions of those arguments. You want to point out
that unbelievers are arbitrary (that they have no right to say what
they are asserting), or that they’re inconsistent (that they contra-
dict themselves in one way or another), or that the consequences
of their arguments are utterly absurd or unwanted, or that the
preconditions for the things they’re saying are such that they
would have to affirm Christianity to argue against Christianity.
To illustrate my fourth point in an argument for God’s exis-
tence, I’m going to give an illustration to show that Christian-
ity is the precondition of intelligibility for unbelieving thought
and argumentation. I’ll introduce the argument, clarify what
the argument is about now, and then present the argument in
the next chapter.
On April 7, 1980, Time magazine published these words in
an article titled “Modernizing the Case for God”:
In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly any-

one could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a
comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening . . . in the crisp
intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the con-
sensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.
That is true. For a long time, during the twentieth century,

the idea of theism was dismissed in academic and philosophical
circles, but toward the end of the century, there was a great deal
of attention being given to arguments for the existence of God,
but I think it’s not just a matter of God making a comeback.
Rather, He has always been here and no one could have argued
without Him.
The crucial question of God’s existence points, in one way or
another, to the greatest of all illusions. Sigmund Freud once said
that the existence of God is the greatest of all illusions. If there
is no God, then believers in God are believing in an imaginary
friend, like children who never grew up and still believe in Santa
Claus. But if God does exist, then atheists are living like a child
who denies his parents’ existence, and it is the atheists who are
guilty of the greatest of all illusions. Who is living in the world

of fantasy?
The existence of God is objectively true and,

on top of that, objectively provable.
The existence of God is objectively true and, on top of that,

objectively provable. I say “objectively” because the question of
the truth of God’s existence has nothing to do with the psychol-
ogy or the character of those who argue one way or another. We
aren’t talking about the character of those who are Christians or
those who are atheists. If I happen to have learned algebra from
a child molester, does his behavior invalidate the algebra that
I learned? Obviously not. It may be that those who believe in
God have terrible things on their moral record, but that’s irrel-
evant. The question here is the truth of what they believe or the
falsity of what they believe, not their character.
Moreover, the psychology of those who believe has nothing
to do with whether God exists or not. If Alexander Graham Bell
invented the telephone out of insane hatred of his father—let’s
say his father was a postman and Alexander wanted to invent
the telephone to put his father out of business—would that in-
validate the truth of his discoveries? Not at all. He may have
hated his father. He may have invented the telephone because
he was greedy for money. But it makes no difference: the tele-
phone was a valid invention.
Likewise, the truth of God’s existence has nothing to do with
the psychology or the character of those who believe in God or
those who reject him. We must avoid what is known as the ge-
netic fallacy in logic, that is, trying to refute something based
on its subjective origin rather than on the merits of the case it-
self. We must, more broadly, avoid ad hominem arguments, that
is, arguments against the person rather than against what he or
she believes and the reasons they offer for those beliefs.
Someone might say, “The only reason people believe in God
is that they’re projecting God as a father figure.”
The first thing that can be said in response is that the biblical
God is not the type of God we would project. If I were inter-
ested in creating a God that would comfort me, I would not cre-
ate the biblical God. People who say that just don’t understand
enough about what the Bible says about God and how uncom-
fortable it is for all of us, even for those who do believe in Him.
People say that theism originates in fear or that it originates
in wishful thinking. Freud said, “Our heavenly Father is just a
substitute for our lost earthly father.” People will tell you that
belief in God grows out of an infantile dependency.
They’ll say that belief in God distracts from a pleasurable life
in this world. You’ll be told that belief in God is nothing but a
ploy of hypocritical preachers who want to control their audi-
ences and fleece them for their money.
You’ll hear that belief in God is a tool for suppressing the
manliness of men and their independence or that it’s an agency
for oppressing the minorities, the poor, and women, a ploy to
keep people in their places.
But it’s interesting that these charges are reversible. How
about if we argue in this way: Atheism is false because atheism
originates in fear of judgment. Atheism originates in wishful
thinking about one’s personal independence. Freud had a bad
relationship with his biological father, and so he took subli-

mated vengeance on his heavenly Father by saying “You don’t
exist.” There’s the psychological explanation of atheism.
Or I might argue that atheism is wrong because it prevents
living life to the fullest. Atheists are full of angst, a generalized
brooding fear of life and confusion over the meaning of life.
Atheism spawns misery. Look at the dissipation and the licen-
tious lifestyle of the atheist. Look at the brutality of the French
Revolution.
Or atheism is a tool for justifying Statism. Tyrants don’t
want there to be a God as a judge over them that they’ll have
to answer to. Atheists say there is no God so they can make
the State their god and fashion it in their image. Atheism is a
tool for justifying oppression or pragmatic intolerance. After all,
Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, as communists, said that their
atheism was crucial to their political theory.
What I’m getting at is that every snide reference made by an
atheist, for example, about the Inquisition can be matched by
the theist with a reference to the French Revolution, the Com-
munist Revolution, or whatever. Every snide reference made by
an atheist to Puritan strictures or the witch trials of Salem can
be matched by the theist with a reference to the communist
gulags. Every snide reference to the hypocrisy of religious huck-
sters like televangelists can be matched with a reference to the
debauchery, arrogance, hypocrisy of atheist intellectuals like the
poets Shelley, Byron, Marx, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Rus-
sell, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
When we talk about proving the existence of God objec-
tively, we are not talking about psychology here. Nor are we
talking about the character of believers in God or of unbelievers.
I grant that the existence of God is a very personal issue. It

touches us all deeply and concerns us in vital ways, especially
in the most important aspects of human experience, like the
enigmas of who we are as people—our personal identity—and
of suffering and evil in the world and of love and death.
But when I say the existence of God is a personal question, I
do not mean that it depends on personal feelings. Some people
prefer vanilla to chocolate ice cream. That’s a personal issue, too.
But when I say that the existence of God is a personal issue, I
am not saying that it’s just a matter of taste.
Nor is our argument for the existence of God addressed to
that personal mindset that William James called “ten-
der-minded,” referring to people who are swayed more by per-
sonal and subjective factors in making their philosophical con-
clusions or people who will look at the utility of this or that
position or the happiness it will bring or the comfort and satis-
faction it might lead to.
Our argument appeals for people to believe

in God, not because such faith comforts them
but rather because such faith is unavoidable
as an intellectual necessity.
Rather, our argument appeals for people to believe in God,

not because such faith comforts them but rather because such
faith is unavoidable as an intellectual necessity. If God is a delu-
sion, it’s no comfort to believe in Him. Furthermore, the proof
that I will present will not convince—or even attempt to con-
vince—those who refuse to believe in God because that would

hamper their desires or make them unhappy in this world. The
existence of an all-knowing God was disgusting to Jean-Paul
Sartre. He said he couldn’t stand the idea of God looking at
Him all the time.
Our argument for the existence of God does not try to ap-
peal to people by claiming that belief in His existence will make
them happy. It doesn’t matter if you like it or dislike it. The
argument is not about personal desires, not about personal psy-
chology, not about personal character. Rather, it is a presenta-
tion of the objective truth of God’s existence as an unavoidable
precondition for the intelligibility of us proving anything at all.
GLOSSARY
Genetic Fallacy: An attempt to refute or defend something

based on its origin or source or historical associations, rather
than on the merits of the case itself.
For instance, someone might argue that Christmas trees
are pagan because pagans used to bring trees into their houses
in the winter. But even if that is the origin of the Christmas
tree—a point that may be debatable historically—it does not
prove that having a Christmas tree in your house today is
somehow pagan. Why do people have Christmas trees to-
day? Not because they worship them, nor for any reason as-
sociated with paganism, but simply because they like them.
The Bible tells us that Cain’s wicked offspring were lead-
ers in blacksmith work, agribusiness, and the development
and use of musical instruments (Gen. 4), but the origins of
those practices among the ungodly did not mean that it was
wrong for God’s people to use, benefit from, and enjoy these
practices.
Likewise, the fact that a belief or practice had good origins
does not mean that the belief is correct or the practice is good.
The origins or historical associations of a view or activity do
not determine whether it is true or false, righteous or wicked.
1. What do we mean when we speak about the “preconditions

of intelligibility”?
2. What has to be true for the unbeliever’s argument against
miracles to make sense?
3. Would it be true to say that an atheist who wants to debate
the existence of the God of the Bible has already lost the
debate, even though he doesn’t realize it? Why or why not?
4. How could it be true to say that if he doesn’t have a Chris-
tian view of the universe, an atheist cannot even balance his
checkbook? After all, atheists do balance their checkbooks,
don’t they?
5. What does it mean to say that unbelievers can count but
can’t account for counting?
6. What does it mean to say that the existence of the God of the
Bible is not only objectively true but also objectively provable?
7. How could you respond to someone who says that the rea-
son you believe in the God of the Bible is psychological (e.g.,
you find the thought of His existence comforting)?
8. Give some examples of the way that the atheist’s charges
against belief in God can be turned around and used on the
atheist equally well.
6
PROOF AND
PERSUASION
In the previous chapter, we saw that the precondition for the

intelligibility for the unbelievers’ arguments is, in fact, the truth
of Christianity. For the unbeliever to argue against Christianity,
he must assume the truth of Christianity, and therefore his view
cannot be true. At the end of that chapter, we began to develop
this point by presenting an argument for God’s existence. That
argument is not subjective, not based on anyone’s psychology or
character, but is instead objective. Now we will develop that
proof of God’s existence further.
There is a difference between proof and

persuasion. You can prove something to be
true even though you have not persuaded
your opponent.
87
But to understand what we’re doing when we prove God’s

existence, we need to understand that an argument need not
be accepted by everyone for it to be conclusive. There is a dif-
ference between proof and persuasion. You can prove something
to be true even though you have not persuaded your opponent.
Sometimes well-meaning Christians engaged in apologet-
ics—especially those who want to do apologetics in a presuppo-
sitional way—can get misled at this point. They talk to people
and give what seems to be a really good argument, but the per-
son they’re talking to isn’t convinced by it. And so they say, “I
must have done something wrong.”
That’s not necessarily true. If that happens to you, you may
have done everything right but your opponent still does not
want to give in. People are not completely rational. Other
things affect their behavior and attitudes and verbal responses
besides whether they see the truth—or whether they want to see
the truth. The Bible tells us that people are spiritually blind and
that they have hard hearts.
You can hold the truth up in front of somebody who is spir-
itually blind. But no matter how perfectly you do it, if the per-
son remains blind he isn’t going to say, “You’re right!” God must
change people’s hearts. It’s not our job to convert people; the
Holy Spirit brings about conversion. Our job is to close their
mouths; the Holy Spirit’s job is to open their hearts.
Our job is to close their mouths; the Holy

Spirit’s job is to open their hearts.
Proof and Persuasion 89
If you can show that they have nothing to say against the
faith or that what they’re offering can be reduced to absurdity,
you’ve done your job. You have defended the faith. You have
been loyal to your Lord, faithful to his Word. You close the
mouth of your opponent. Whether the Holy Spirit opens his
heart so that the light gets in and brings new life to them is
really in God’s sovereign disposition.
You must not judge your apologetical efforts based on how
many notches you have in your belt: “Another conversion this
afternoon. I’m doing pretty well!” No Christian, I trust, really
has that attitude explicitly. But it does come out subtly when we
think, “If I could just do a really good job, then another person
will come to the Lord.”
It is God’s grace that changes anyone’s heart, including our
own hearts. That’s why presuppositionalists—of all people—
ought to be the most humble when they defend the faith.
When we reduce our opponents’ positions to absurdity, we
don’t stand over them like victorious warriors and gloat. We’ve
been there, too.
The only thing that raises you to your feet or—to use the
biblical figure of speech—that gives you a new life is the love
and grace of God. And the only reason an apologist hurts you is
that he wants you to know how good God is. All of us are fools
until Jesus changes us, and then the world thinks we’ve really
become fools by following Jesus.
In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul tells us that what the world calls
foolishness is the wisdom and power of God. Do you know
what God does with the foolishness of the world? He destroys
the wisdom of the world. In apologetics, by God’s grace, if you
are faithful to the Lord, you can reduce your opponent’s views
to foolishness, to absurdity. But when you do it, you do it for

the sake of his coming to a new life—and yet the giving of that
life is not your work. God does that, and all the praise and glory
goes to him.
In this chapter, I am going to prove God’s existence to you.
I do not mean that in an arrogant way. I mean that as a philos-
opher. I am going to give you what I believe is proof that God
exists. It’s an objective proof. It has nothing to do with what
people like or dislike, what their desires are, what their subjec-
tive background is, or anything like that. What I’m going to
show is that to prove anything, you first have to believe in God.
PROOF THEORY
But first, let me give you some background on proof theory.

There are essentially four ways to approach proving things, with
different schools of thought associated with those four ways of
proving things. You might think of them as the rationalist ap-
proach, the empiricist approach, the pragmatist approach, and
then a fourth one which I’ll talk about when we get to it.
The Rationalist Approach
First of all, the rationalist approach. The word rationalist in

English is ambiguous or equivocal. It is used in several different
ways in the history of philosophy. But when we speak of the
rationalist approach to proof, what we mean is that something
is proven when it logically uses clear and distinct ideas. If you
can come up with a logical presentation of what are considered
self-evident or clear distinct concepts, then you have proven it.
In the history of philosophy, you have a school of thought

known as continental rationalism, represented by men such as
René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. All
three of these men, interestingly, thought that they were using
logically sound and conceptually clear ideas that were self-evi-
dent so that whatever conclusions they came to based on those
self-evident and logical processes of reasoning would have to be
accepted by any rational person.
I can’t go through the whole history of philosophy here,1
but the ironic thing is that for all the clearness and distinctness
of their ideas and their logical soundness, Descartes, Spinoza,
and Leibniz came up with radically different philosophies.
That may tip you off that maybe their concepts weren’t so
self-evident after all.
The ironic thing is that for all the clearness

and distinctness of their ideas and their logical
soundness, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz
came up with radically different philosophies.
Descartes was a dualist. He thought all of reality is divided

into two kinds of things—mind and matter. Spinoza was a pan-
theist. He thought mind and matter were two different ways
of looking at the very same thing. Leibniz was what is called
an atomist, a spiritual atomist. I don’t know of another one
in the history of philosophy. He believed all reality is made up
1. See John M. Frame, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology (Phillips-

burg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2015).
of an infinite number of bits of something—not bits of matter,

but bits of energy or mind, which he called monads (from the
Greek monas, “singularity”).
The rationalist approach is unreliable because there is dis-
agreement—and ultimately subjectivism—about what’s consid-
ered self-evident.
The Empiricist Approach
The second approach in our basic analysis of proof is called

empiricism. We can describe empiricism this way: A rationalist
says, “If you want to know if something’s true, stop and think
about whether your concepts are clear, self-evident, and logical,”
but the empiricist says, “If you want to know if something’s true,
go and look.” The empiricist says that we know things through
our senses, by observation. Many people in America think they
are empiricists. Seeing is believing, they say. If you’re going to
prove something, you have to put it in front of me so that I can
see it, taste it, touch it, smell it, or hear it, otherwise it’s not real
The problems with empiricism are basic problems with what
is called cognitive psychology. John Locke was an empiricist,
the father of British empiricism. Locke struggled with the psy-
chology of knowing things or learning things if everything is
based on some kind of sensation or observation.
Locke finally concluded that he couldn’t really know things
in the world or know that the world outside himself was real.
Essentially, he locked us into our own sensations. If all I know
are my sensations, how can I be sure that there is an external
world that corresponds to my sensations? After all, I never know
the external world. All I know are my sensations.
George Berkeley worked on that problem and came up with

an interesting solution that was called subjective idealism.
Berkeley said that something exists if it is perceived. People said,
“That’s kind of silly. On that view, the socks in my drawer at
home don’t exist because no one is currently perceiving them.”
Berkeley, being a devout Christian, had an answer to that: “God
is looking at everything all the time, and so the socks do con-
tinue to exist.” As a human view of the psychology of knowing,
though, that’s not very adequate.
Then David Hume got hold of this view and destroyed it.
He said, “If all we know are the things we observe, then we don’t
know about causation because no one ever sees causation.”
We think we see it all the time. You play billiards and see
the cue ball roll across the table and hit another ball that causes
it to move. But you don’t see causation. What you see there
is succession, one event and then another event, and you con-
clude that the first event caused the second. But you do not see
causation.
Moreover, you don’t see your own identity. Are you the same
person your mother gave birth to? “Come on,” you say. “There
are things you can just take for granted.” But that’s one thing
I like about philosophy. Though we might all want to say that
we know our mothers gave birth to us, the philosopher is going
to say, “Yes, but if that’s true, then that should be an excellent
specimen of how your theory of knowledge works.”
Try testing your theory of personal identity by thinking back
to this baby your mother gave birth to. Has anyone ever seen
the continuity of personal identity through time? Never mind
someone else’s personal identity. What about your own? You
look at that picture of you as a baby and you’re adorable and
you say that’s you. That’s the same person you are. But did you
see continuity through time? Did you observe continuity? Did
you feel continuity? No, you didn’t.
Hume said we don’t know causation. We don’t know per-
sonal identity. And then he went on to give some other exam-
ples. He came to a point where he said, “We can’t know any-
thing; I’m going to play backgammon with my friends.”
That’s the best the unbelieving world can do with empiri-
cism. Empiricism starts out sounding so reasonable—seeing is
believing—but it ends up telling us that we can’t know anything
at all. It proves to be self-defeating and leads to skepticism.
Empiricism starts out sounding so reasonable—

seeing is believing—but it ends up telling us
that we can’t know anything at all.
The Pragmatist Approach
The rationalist approach is unreliable. The empiricist approach

reduces to skepticism. And eventually, in the history of philoso-
phy, we arrived at what is known as pragmatism. The pragmatist
says, “I’m not going to answer the problems the rationalist was
trying to answer, and I’m not going to answer the problems of
empiricism. I’m going to ignore them as utterly irrelevant.”
We can have some sympathy for the pragmatist because
essentially the pragmatist is saying, “While you philosophers
keeping fiddling away, trying to answer all these intellectual
questions, we’re still living our lives. The philosophical prob-
lems don’t keep anyone from knowing to step out of the way
of the train or to plant in the spring and harvest in the fall, or
those sorts of things. Despite the rationalists’ and empiricists’
problems, we live our lives anyway.”
To the pragmatist, the only thing that matters is adjusting to
your environment and being successful in life. Truth has nothing
to do with being rational or having evidence. Truth is a matter of
what works. I’m being overly simplistic here, but that’s essentially
the position: Truth isn’t a matter of evidence or logic; it’s a matter
of what works. If you seek the proper end and you’re successful
in reaching it, then you have the truth. If the hypothesis that you
are following doesn’t get you to that end, if you haven’t solved
your problems, if you haven’t been successful, then it isn’t true.
But all of this assumes you know what the proper end is.
Successful—at what? What are we supposed to do? What is the
pragmatist’s goal supposed to be? Is it the preservation of the
race? Is it the individual’s adjustment to his environment? To
know if you’re being successful, you have to know why you’re
supposed to be here.
If you live forty, fifty, sixty years, and you

appear to have done well in your biological
or economic or social environment, but then
you die and go to hell forever, that’s pretty
counter-utilitarian.
As a Christian, I would say to the pragmatist, “Whatever

you do, you want to make sure you live your life in such a way
that on the day of final judgment God finds you acceptable. If

you live forty, fifty, sixty years, and you appear to have done well
in your biological or economic or social environment, but then
you die and go to hell forever, that’s pretty counter-utilitarian.
Your approach to life wasn’t very useful, was it?”
The pragmatist needs to know not only what the proper
end of life is, but also whether God exists and whether there’s a
heaven or a hell. That puts him right back into the traditional
problems of philosophy. You can’t decide whether you’re being
successful if you’re going to be shortsighted and say, “Success
is in the short run. Let me get through a minute or a day or a
month or a year or even a lifetime.”
Who knows what we are supposed to be living for? You can’t
make pragmatic judgments about that. You can make arbitrary
judgments, but you cannot make pragmatic judgments without
answering the traditional questions. When all is said and done,
pragmatism is a refusal to look at the tough questions. It is intel-
lectual adolescence: “All that matters is whether I’m happy.” That’s
not answering the tough questions; it is only avoiding them.
I am not going to try to prove that God exists rationally—
that is, in terms of clear and distinct ideas, logically carried out.
Neither am I going to try to prove God exists empirically as if we
can go to the pantry and open up a box and—lo and behold!—
we see that God exists. In 1961, Soviet Cosmonaut and Airforce
test pilot Yuri Gagarin was the first man to go into space. At
the time, the atheist Soviet propaganda machine claimed that
Gagarin had said, “I went up to space, but I didn’t encounter
God.”2 But God is not the sort of thing you can prove observa-
2. This claim by the Soviets was atheist propaganda. “Russian journalist An-
ton Pervushin was a close friend of Yuri Gagarin. He says that Gagarin was a
tionally. I’m not going to try to satisfy the empiricist. Nor am

I going to try to prove that God exists pragmatically, by saying,
“Your life will go better if you believe in Him.”
How am I going to prove God’s existence? The only way you
can prove something ultimate like the existence of God is tran-
scendentally. That’s not a word we have been using, but we’re
going to use it now as a kind of shorthand. A transcendental
proof asks “What are the preconditions of intelligibility? What
must be true for something to make sense?”
A transcendental proof asks “What are the

preconditions of intelligibility? What must be
true for something to make sense?”
We’re coming back to our checklist from the previous chap-

ters. Are these considerations arbitrary? Are they inconsistent?
What are the consequences? And then finally—and this is where
apologetics goes into high gear—what are the preconditions of
intelligibility?
A transcendental proof argues from the impossibility of
the contrary, saying, “You have an ultimate presupposition. I
have an ultimate presupposition. And the problem with yours
is that if what you say is true, we can’t prove anything. Noth-
true Christian, a firm believer who never gave up his faith. . . . Gagarin’s Christian
faith was never a secret to his close friends. He was a baptized member of the
Russian Orthodox Church and would happily talk about his faith with them.
But Gagarin had to be careful in his role as a Colonel in the Soviet air force. The
Government was officially an atheist regime and the repression of Christianity in
every form was party policy.” http://bit.ly/3tErQ7o
ing would be intelligible, nothing would make sense on your

presupposition.”
You prove your presupposition by the impossibility of the
contrary. “My presupposition,” you say, “provides the transcen-
dentals, the preconditions of intelligibility.”
In my debate with Dr. Gordon Stein in 1985,3 I focused
mainly on the transcendentals of logic. Having a debate presup-
poses the laws of logic. You have to have something by which
you evaluate arguments or lines of reasoning. But what would
have to be true for there to be laws of logic?
To answer that, you have to ask what laws of logic are. Are
laws of logic like marbles? Can you trip on them on the ground?
Could you accidentally swallow a law of logic? No, laws of logic
are not material things at all. A law of logic is abstract; it’s im-
material. It’s also universally applicable and it is absolute; it ad-
mits of no exceptions.
But on the atheist and materialist worldview Dr. Stein pre-
sented, could there be anything abstract, universal, and ab-
solute? For someone like him, only material things exist. The
smell of a rose exists because there’s something there—a rose
that you can have an experience of. But the laws of logic? You
can’t smell them. You can’t taste them.
What are the preconditions of intelligibility? If there’s going
to be a debate, there have to be laws of logic, and laws of logic
presuppose that there are abstract, universal, and absolute enti-
ties. But the materialist and atheistic worldview rejects belief in
abstract, universal, absolute entities. Therefore, that worldview
3. The audio version of “The Great Debate,” as it has been called, can be
found at https://bit.ly/3ltGifw. A transcript of the debate can be found at http://
bit.ly/3s2X1bL
destroys the possibility of logic and so also the possibility of de-

bate. But since Dr. Stein came to the debate, he must have been
assuming a Christian worldview, and so I said to him, “Your
coming to the debate means that I win. The very effort to ar-
gue—to debate, to use logic—already assumes the worldview I
am trying to prove.”
That is an argument from the impossibility of the contrary,
a transcendental argument. So in our simplistic summary of
proof theory, people try to prove things rationally, empirically,
pragmatically, or transcendentally.
The Proof of God’s Existence
With that as background, I am now going to prove God’s

existence.
It turns out that none of us can know anything from our expe-
rience unless we assume the uniformity of nature. The world we
experience demonstrates continuity or uniformity. You can ex-
pect that the experiences you have had in the past will be repeated
in the future. You stub your toe walking through the house in the
dark and it hurt. You expect that you could do it again and that it
would hurt that time too. And so you try to avoid doing it.
When you bake a cake, you follow a certain recipe. You as-
sume that since you baked a cake successfully following that
recipe in the past, you could put these ingredients together
again in the same way, and doing so will make a cake again.
Wouldn’t you be shocked if it produced an alligator instead? But
the world isn’t that way.
Everything we know assumes the uniformity of nature. Be-
cause of the uniformity of nature, you can induce from par-
ticular experiences a generalization about the future. Everyone

knows that there is causation, in such a way that we can orga-
nize the data of sensation into law-like principles and expecta-
tions so that we can live successfully in the world.
Now let’s compare worldviews to show that the Christian
God is the starting point for all reasoning and all argumenta-
tion. Set atheism and Christian theism as worldviews side by
side and ask, “Which of these worldviews provides the precon-
ditions for intelligibility, for intelligible experience, for science,
for induction, for causation?”
Set atheism and Christian theism as world-

views side by side and ask, “Which of these
worldviews provides the preconditions for
intelligibility, for intelligible experience, for
science, for induction, for causation?”
Atheism doesn’t. Causation is not a mere succession of

events. If causation is mere succession, then the reason eggs fry
when you put them on the griddle could be because the alarm
clock went off. Isn’t that what happened this morning? The
alarm went off. You got up and had a shower and then cracked
some eggs on a hot griddle and they fried. It must have been the
alarm clock that caused all of that, right?
But the fact that the alarm clock ringing preceded the fry-
ing of the eggs doesn’t mean that the ringing clock caused the
eggs to fry. That’s just a succession of events. Hume said that
causation is not succession of events; it’s the necessary succession
of events. But can we see causation? We see succession, but do

we see causation? We see the cracking of the eggs, and we see
them frying in a hot pan, but do we see any necessary connec-
tion between the two events?
Bertrand Russell, who hated Christianity, has a chapter on
induction in his book The Problems of Philosophy. Again, induc-
tion is the principle that our experience in the past is a reliable
guide to how things will happen in the future. In the chapter, he
goes through various ways that you could intellectually justify
the principle of induction. He says, “The inductive principle
. . . is . . . incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience.”
Someone might say, “I know the sun will rise tomorrow. I
know the eggs will fry.” You ask, “Why?” And he says, “Because
I’ve experienced it in the past.” But Russell is saying, “You can-
not prove the inductive principle by appealing to experience.”
I quote him further: “Experience might conceivably confirm
the inductive principle as regards the cases that have been already
examined.” But those are the cases we’ve examined. What about
unexamined cases, future cases, or cases in other settings? If eggs
fry on a hot pan in the United States, do they do that in China,
too? We assume that they do, but we haven’t examined those cases.
“As regards unexamined cases,” Russell says, “it is the induc-
tive principle alone that can justify any inference from what has
been examined to what has not been examined.” That’s a crucial
sentence. It’s also what puts the noose around his unbelieving
neck. He’s saying that if you appeal to experience to prove that
eggs fry in China or that eggs will fry next Tuesday, you’re as-
suming the inductive principle.
Experience does not justify the inductive principle; rather,
it’s the inductive principle that allows you to use experience and
draw conclusions about unexamined cases. All arguments that

reason from experience to draw conclusions about the future or
unexperienced parts of the past or present assume the inductive
principle.
Russell goes on: “Hence we can never use experience to prove
the inductive principle without begging the question. Thus we
must either accept the inductive principle on the grounds of its
intrinsic evidence, or forgo all justification of our expectations
about the future.”
There are two options, Russell is saying. Of course, being an
unbeliever, he’s excluding the third option, which is that nature
is uniform because the personal God who created the heavens
and the earth and sovereignly controls everything that happens,
right down to the hairs on our head, makes the future like the
past and amenable to our knowledge so that we can get to know
it and use it to his glory.
Russell leaves that option aside and says either the inductive
principle should be justified based on intrinsic evidence for it
or there is no justification for it whatsoever and believing in the
inductive principle is irrational or arbitrary. Here’s a man who
is talking about the most basic principle of science and who
admits that that foundational principle is arbitrary.
Either that or we have to accept it on its intrinsic evidence.
But intrinsic evidence is just a euphemistic way of saying that
it is to be accepted on its own evidence, that it is self-evident.
Russell says,
The general principles of science, such as the belief in the reign

of law and the belief that every event must have a cause, are as
completely dependent upon the inductive principle as are the be-
liefs of daily life. All such general principles are believed because
mankind has found innumerable instances of their truth and no
instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their
truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed.4
What we have here is an unbeliever giving us all the evidence

we need that only the Christian worldview provides the precon-
ditions of intelligibility for science, for reasoning, for language.
It is the most reasonable thing in the world to believe in God. It
is entirely unreasonable not to believe in God. Why is that?
Because God’s existence is the precondition for all reasoning.
It is the most reasonable thing in the world to

believe in God. It is entirely unreasonable not
to believe in God. Why is that? Because God’s
existence is the precondition for all reasoning.
I set all of this up by talking about proof theory, about how

subjective considerations are irrelevant, and so on. I am simply
talking about objective matters pertaining to intelligibility or
reason. And how I’ve proved God’s existence now is by showing
that it’s entirely unreasonable not to believe in God, which is to
say that it’s entirely reasonable to believe in God because God’s
existence is the precondition for all reasoning.
Any time the unbeliever wants to reason with you, he has
lost. On the non-Christian worldview, there are no laws of
4. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, [1967] 1998), 38.
logic, no inductive principles, no moral absolutes, no dignity

for man, no freedom of the mind—all of which are assumed in
the reasoning or arguing or debating process.
The atheistic worldview cannot provide a cogent reason for
what we necessarily assume in all reasoning. And therefore athe-
ism must be dismissed as just another version of intellectual
arbitrariness. Atheists live by habitual conditioning, by blind
faith regarding the rationality of the universe.
The fact that he won’t cry uncle doesn’t mean we don’t have
him in a hammerlock. Remember that proof and persuasion are
two different things. Your job is not to make him cry “uncle.” It
would be wonderful if he did, but if he does it won’t be because
your arguments are so amazing; it’s because the Holy Spirit is
so strong. You shut his mouth, and the Holy Spirit, by God’s
grace, will open his heart.
GLOSSARY
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes, includ-

ing how we know or learn things.
Dualism: The view that there are two types of reality: mind and
matter, or spirit and body.
Empiricism: The view that sense experience is the foundation
of human knowledge. Seeing is believing.
Induction: Taking something we have experienced in the past
and projecting it into the future. For instance, we know that
the sun has risen in the past and therefore we conclude that
it will rise tomorrow morning.
Intrinsic evidence: Evidence or proof of the truth of something
from within that thing itself. Bertrand Russell suggests that
we might accept induction on the basis of intrinsic evidence,

that is, because it is self-evident that induction works, with-
out the need of any other proof.
Pantheism: From two Greek words, pan meaning “all” and
theos meaning “God.” According to Scripture, God is dis-
tinct from His creation: “In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). If the cosmos were to go
out of existence, God would still exist. Pantheism teaches
that all is one, thus, everything is God. All things make up
what some people claim is “God.”
Pragmatism: The approach to philosophy that watches all these
other schools of thought argue and says, “Who cares?” To
the pragmatist, what is true is what works, what results in
success in his endeavors.
Rationalism: From the Latin ratio, “reason.” (1) The view that
human reason is the final judge of what’s true and false, right
and wrong. (2) The philosophical position that human rea-
son is to be trusted above human sense-experience. Ratio-
nalism holds that something is proven when it logically uses
clear and distinct ideas.
Spiritual Atomism: The view held by Gottfried Leibniz that
reality is made up of an infinite number of bits of some-
thing—not matter, but energy or mind. Leibniz called these
things monads.
Subjective Idealism: The view presented by George Berkeley
that says that something exists only so long as it is perceived.
Berkeley said that things continue to exist even when we
can’t perceive them because God always perceives them.
Transcendental proof: A transcendental proof argues based
on the preconditions of intelligibility: What must be true
for something to make sense? It demonstrates the truth of

a claim by showing that the contrary—or the denial of that
claim—is impossible. For example, if denying the Christian
view of the world leaves us without laws of logic, without
morality, without science—without knowledge and without
any way to prove anything—then the Christian view of the
world must be true.
1. What is the difference between proof and persuasion? Why

aren’t proofs always persuasive? If someone is not persuaded
by your argument, does it necessarily mean that it is a bad
argument or that you failed?
2. What is our task in apologetics and what is the Holy Spirit’s
work?
3. What is the problem with the rationalist approach to proof?
4. What is the problem with the empiricist approach to proof?
5. What is the problem with the pragmatist approach to proof?
6. What is a transcendental proof? Give an example.
7. How did Bertrand Russell undermine induction?
8. Why is it unreasonable not to believe in the God of the
Bible?
7
THE EVOLUTIONARY
WORLDVIEW
We have already looked at several apologetic problems. We’ve con-

sidered whether you can trust the text of Scripture and whether
Jesus ever existed in history. We’ve dealt with the question of God’s
existence, as well as matters of faith and reason. And we’ve been
learning to use our four-point checklist to deal with unbelievers’
arguments: Are they being arbitrary? Are there inconsistencies in
what they’re saying? What are the consequences of their arguments?
What are the preconditions of intelligibility? That last question led
to my argument for God’s existence in the previous chapter.
But now we’re going to start to deal with different specific
problems that people will throw at you. In this chapter, I want
to address the problem of evolution. You can’t trust the Bible,
people say, because it teaches creation, and we now know from
science that man came about through the evolutionary process.
Or if they’re willing to grant that God started the evolution-
ary process, they will still point out that the Bible, in contrast,
107
teaches that God created everything in six days, and on the sixth
day God created man, not with animal origins but by forming
him out of the dust of the ground and breathing into him the
breath of life.
Whichever approach they take—involving God to some de-
gree or not—the Bible teaches that man is a special creation of
God rather than a consequence of an evolutionary process over
millions of years. More than that, man was created on the sixth
day, whereas we know, they’ll say, that the world is billions and
billions of years old.
For many people, evolution is a stumbling block for the
Christian faith. Today, moral issues are becoming the biggest ob-
stacle, but for most of the twentieth century, the biggest cultural
opposition to Christianity came from the evolutionary debate.
For most of the twentieth century, the biggest

cultural opposition to Christianity came from
the evolutionary debate.
That debate has never been a matter of presenting the Chris-

tian view and the evidence for it and the evolutionary view and
the arguments for it and then allowing people to make up their
minds. Those who hold to an evolutionary view are very aggres-
sive. They use the classroom as their pulpit. They try to control
the educational process and make sure they screen out argu-
ments against evolution.
We’ll come back to this, but I want to say at the beginning
that you need to be suspicious of anyone who says, “I don’t
The Evolutionary Worldview 109
want to hear the contrary evidence.” All through my educa-

tional career, I’ve heard that it is those who have faith who sup-
posedly act that way, that it is Christians who are unwilling to
hear the other side. “I wouldn’t send my children to a Christian
school or a Christian college,” people say, “because I want them
to hear both sides of the issues”—as if they’re going to hear the
Christian side when they go to a secular school!
The fact of the matter is that only in Christian schools are
both sides—more than both: all sides—are presented. When I
taught a History of Philosophy course to high school seniors in
a Christian school, I had them read what the other sides had
to say. The truth, after all, has nothing to fear from exposure.
Granted, there are some clever debaters with false worldviews
who may mislead people, but if you are patient and do the anal-
ysis and are critical in your thinking, the truth has nothing to
fear from exposure to other points of view.
EVOLUTIONISM IS RELIGIOUS
Why, then, do evolutionists today act the way fundamentalists

supposedly did back in the days of the 1925 Scopes trial?
Let me give you an example. Some years ago, the State of
Louisiana passed a law calling for the equal treatment of evo-
lution and abrupt appearance, meaning the view that man did
not come about through a natural process of evolution but
just appeared. It was called “abrupt appearance” to strip away
any appearance of religious language or connotation. Accord-
ing to the law, evidence for evolution had to be balanced with
the evidence against it and with other views that compete with
evolution.
Of course, the ACLU, ever mindful of the rights and liber-

ties of people, jumped in immediately and challenged that law
so that it would not be implemented. That went to the courts,
and then a protracted process of taking depositions and prepar-
ing for a day in court transpired.
One day, I got a call at the school where I was teaching.
Someone said, “I need to know more about your religious con-
victions and your educational background because some people
have said that you would be good as an expert witness on phi-
losophy on this particular matter.”
I eventually agreed to do it. But I was hesitant because the
defense in this trial—which amounted to the State of Louisi-
ana—wanted to take the approach that the teaching of non-evo-
lutionary origins and the teaching of evolutionary origins is not
a religious matter. They wanted to say that it’s a matter of sec-
ular science.
I said, “That’s not really true. The teaching of origins—in
fact, the teaching of anything foundational to man’s reasoning
in science—is religious.”
They said, “Yes, but people won’t understand that. They’ll
think we’re asking for religion in the classroom.”
I said, “You’ve got religion in the classroom. That’s the point.”
“Yes, but we can’t use that language.”
The reason I agreed to do it is that it put evolution and cre-
ation science on an equal footing in terms of their theoretical
nature. If you don’t want to use the language of religion, there
are other ways of putting it. But it is not that evolution is scien-
tific and the other views are religious. Whatever you want to call
the Christian view—call it religious, call it a matter of funda-
mental conviction, call it a matter of worldview—the evolu-
tionary view is that as well. That was why I was willing to do it,
though I wasn’t particularly happy with the strategy of calling it
all secular.
It is not that evolution is scientific and the

other views are religious. Whatever you want
to call the Christian view—call it religious, call
it a matter of fundamental conviction, call it a
matter of worldview—the evolutionary view is
that as well.
I gave a long deposition in Los Angeles one day before some

ACLU attorneys. About 10:30 in the morning, one of them
asked for the court stenographer to stop. What he meant was
that he wanted to say something and have a discussion off the
record. You’ll understand why in a moment. She stopped, and
he turned to me and said, “I’ll be honest with you, Greg. I have
never heard anything like this.”
Essentially, my argument was this: What’s sauce for the goose
is sauce for the gander. I had just spent a little over two hours
showing him that evolution is not a scientific theory. That’s
what I’m going to explain to you in this chapter. But that’s hard
for many people to grasp because evolution is part of the air we
breathe scientifically and culturally now. People think that evo-
lution is a matter of the facts of science that disprove the truth
of the Bible.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution is not a
scientific theory in terms of the scientific method. I know it’s
taught in science classrooms. I know it is pervasively labeled as

“scientific theory.” By the way, just so you aren’t misled, I realize
that many people will point out that evolution is not a fact but
only a theory. That’s not the point I’m making. I’m saying that
it is a theory, but it is not a scientific theory. It does not have
scientific credentials. Evolution is a philosophy.1
Evolution has a scientific veneer—a very

thin and inadequate one—but nevertheless,
evolution is a philosophy, a worldview.
Evolution has a scientific veneer—a very thin and inade-

quate one—but nevertheless, evolution is a philosophy, a worl-
dview. In the end, the way to refute evolution is to compare the
two worldviews.
The most important thing for an apologist to do in these
discussions is to set things up right, to close all the exits that
allow people to escape, to get rid of all the misconceptions so
that we can determine the real issue. When we do that, apolo-
getics is easier than most people think. That’s what we did in the
previous chapter and it is what we will do with evolution here.
The main thing you must get across to people is that evolu-
tion has no scientific credentials. It has no evidence, nor does
1. For more on this subject, see “On Worshiping the Creature Rather Than
the Creator,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction 1.1 (1974), which is available
online here: https://bit.ly/3tKgKha. This article traces the ideological and cultur-
al context of Charles Darwin’s work, The Origin of Species, showing that Darwin
didn’t present a new philosophy but rather put a scientific veneer on views that
had been propagated long before Darwin.
it have even the traits of a scientific theory. That goes against

everything people have heard.
You may have to present this point several times. Our temp-
tation, when we have good arguments, is to think that if people
aren’t convinced, our arguments must not be good. But some-
times you must shoot a bear repeatedly. If the bear’s still stand-
ing, you don’t say, “I guess my gun isn’t any good or my bullets
aren’t good. I’ve got to switch to something else.” Some bears
take more than one bullet to put down.
The same is true in debating a topic like evolution. When you
make this point, people will hear it, but it will go in one ear and
out the other. They’ll go right on talking along these lines: “We
have the facts of science and you have this Sunday School faith
commitment in God the Creator.” You say, “No, that’s not the
nature of the debate here.” It is critical that you make this point.
T H E M AT H E M AT I C A L
IMPROBABILITY OF EVOLUTION
I’m going to make this point by talking about some of the prob-
lems with evolutionary theory.
Let’s start with this one. In 1967, a book was published en-
titled Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpreta-
tion of Evolution.2 It’s a very technical book, not easy reading.
It was not published by a religious publishing company. It was
not written by Christians, much less evangelical believers. It was
not even written by people who are committed to creationism.
2. Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, eds., Mathematical Challenges

to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, Wistar Institute Symposium
Monograph 5 (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute Press, 1967).
It was written by people who were trying to be honest with their

assumptions.
In the book, an author named Eden Murray wrote an essay
entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scien-
tific Theory.” Again, remember that this is not a sectarian, prej-
udicial, biased, emotional presentation. This is not a person
who is a creationist. Eden Murray says, “It is our contention
that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation
from a probabilistic point of view”—that is, if you are interpret-
ing the word random according to probability theory in a seri-
ous way—“the randomness postulate is highly implausible and
that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the
discovery and elucidation of new natural laws, physical, chemi-
cal and biological.”3
The theory of probability, understood mathe-

matically, has made it impossible to believe in
the theory of evolution.
Why is that? What is the mathematical problem with evolu-

tion? If you believe that evolution happened randomly, then you
must look at the probability of things coming together that way,
all of these chance permutations ending up being amenable to
the environment and surviving and so forth. Evolutionists say
that the world has been around between fifteen and twenty-five
3. Eden Murray, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific

Theory,” Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, eds., Mathematical Challenges
(Philadelphia: Wistar Institute Press, 1967), 109.
billion years. The mathematicians calculated the probabilities

and said that, on the randomness postulate, you would need
vastly more time than any evolutionist tells you is credible for
the age of the earth. That’s why Murray says you would need
new natural laws to prove evolution.
The theory of probability, understood mathematically, has
made it impossible to believe in the theory of evolution. Now,
that was in 1967. Is this mathematical and scientific study being
discussed in secular schools? Do they say in the classroom that
the theory of evolution has been slaughtered by the mathemati-
cians? No, they probably don’t.
Michael Denton, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,
gives us some idea of the mathematical problem.4 He says that
to get a cell by chance, according to the randomness postulate,
would require at least one hundred functional proteins to ap-
pear simultaneously in one place at the same time. The prob-
ability for each, he says, could hardly be more than 10 to the
minus 20th power.
To get some perspective on this, think of going to a casino to
gamble. You go to the blackjack table and hope that your prob-
ability is one in three. If it was one in ten, it would be foolish to
play blackjack. If it was one in a hundred, it would be suicide.
You wouldn’t play, expecting that ninety-nine times out of a
hundred you would lose your money. What if it were one in a
thousand? One in ten thousand?
Denton points out that for only one protein to appear, the
probability could hardly be more than 10 to the minus 20th
4. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Chevy Chase, MD: Adler

& Adler, [1985] 1986). More recently, Denton has published Evolution: Still a
Theory in Crisis (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2016).
power. That’s for one functional protein. But you need a hun-
dred of them to have a cell that’s alive. That means you have to
add two more zeros, 10 to the minus 2000th power. Is anyone
going to gamble on that one?
Those who propose the theory of evolution require you to
believe the mathematical impossibility of the origin of life. Fred
Hoyle, in his book Evolution from Space,5 says that there are
about two thousand enzymes, so the chance of obtaining all two
thousand enzymes in a random trial is only one part in 10 to
the minus 40,000th power. And yet people believe in the theory
of evolution.
What do you think fuels that belief? Is it its sterling scientific
credentials? Is it because it is just so likely that it happened?
THE MYSTERIOUS ORIGIN OF LIFE
If you look at the fossil record, life appears abruptly, which is very
distressing to the evolutionist. Not only does it appear abruptly,
but it also appears in complex forms in the fossil record. There
are gaps—gaps that evolutionists even admit exist—between
various kinds in the fossil record. We have millions of fossils
in museums around the world, and yet not one of those fossils
provides an intermediary form or what was commonly called a
missing link between these various living strata. There should be
evidence of millions of links.
There are no fossil traces of a transition from an ape-like
creature to man. Lord Zuckerman admitted that in his book
Beyond the Ivory Tower, the ivory tower being those scientists
5. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space: A Theory

of Cosmic Creationism (1981; reprint, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
who still believe in evolution.6 Paleontology is a great enemy of

evolution.
It turned out that one of the men who was giving a depo-
sition contrary to me in that Louisiana case was Stephen Jay
Gould (1941–2002). Gould was perhaps the most famous pa-
leontologist in our country at the time, maybe in the world. He
taught at Harvard. Gould understood that the fossil record is an
embarrassment to evolution. He came up with a new theory of
evolution that he called punctuated equilibrium.
Here’s the problem: The fossil record shows equilibrium,
continuity. It does not suggest that there was evolutionary de-
velopment from one simple form so that it gradually gets more
and more complex and evolves from one kind to another higher
kind and so forth. Gould claimed that evolution must have
taken place in short spurts rather than over the long haul. And
if it took place in short spurts, then there wouldn’t have been
enough time to leave fossil remains during these evolutionary
hot periods. This meant that the fossil record would be just
what we find it to be, punctuated with these life forms.
What that means is that the evidence for evolution, in
Gould’s view, is that there can’t be any physical evidence for
evolution. Evolution, he says, must have taken place in such a
way that it couldn’t leave physical evidence in the fossil traces.
Does that look like a scientific approach or has someone got his
mind made up before he even finds the fossils?
It is not as though evolution has all these great pieces of evi-
dence and we, as Christians, need to be embarrassed. There are
so many contrary pieces of evidence. But this is the real point:
6. Solly Zuckerman, Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Frontiers of Public and Pri-
vate Science (New York: Taplinger, 1970).
People do not believe in evolution because of its sterling scien-

tific credentials. It’s a silly theory. It is philosophical silliness to
believe in evolution.
THE PROBLEM OF COMPLEXITY
As we compare worldviews, think about which worldview

makes sense out of the human eye, the evolutionary theory or
the theory of special creation? Or what makes sense out of the
fact that mammals have hearts and lungs and kidneys—and not
only that but hearts and lungs and kidneys that work together,
that must work together from the start of their existrence? A
partially evolved kidney is no good to the human body.
That’s significant. Evolutionists believe that organisms de-
veloped gradually over time. It won’t do any good for a human
being to have a heart if the human being doesn’t also have lungs.
It won’t do any good to have a heart without kidneys. You need
all three working in tandem.7 But evolutionary theory says that
hearts must gradually develop, lungs must gradually develop,
kidneys must gradually develop.
And that’s an insurmountable problem. How could hearts
gradually develop if there aren’t already lungs and kidneys
waiting for them? But they have to be developing at the same
time. Did they all develop together, these little proto-hearts,
proto-kidneys, and proto-lungs: “We’re going to grow up some-
day to work together”? No, that doesn’t work. If they gradually
develop, rather than appearing simultaneously in fully mature
form, the organism can’t live any longer.
7. See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolu-
tion (New York: Free Press, 1996).
Evolutionary theory cannot account for the development of

these organs together. It cannot deal with the function of the
human eye or its development.
Every change in a living organism is preserved, according
to evolution, because of its favorable interaction with the en-
vironment. That is, it provides some advantages for life. But if
the human eye is going to develop over a billion years, how did
that happen?
Start with the creature that had no eyes. The first step
wouldn’t look much like an eye, but it would be preserved only
if it is favorable to interaction with its environment.
What is a proto-eye worth to an organism? It’s worth exactly
nothing. Not even a quasi-developed or halfway-developed eye
would be beneficial to the organism. Only a fully functional
eye is helpful. You can see the dinosaurs coming and run away.
That’s helpful. But how did the eye develop?
It’s a strange development. You know how the eye works. It
is connected to the back of the brain. You wouldn’t expect that
on the evolutionary theory. You would expect it to be wired to
the front of the brain. That would be the quickest and easiest
way to do it. But it’s wired to the back of the brain and it’s
wired backward. As you know, the image that comes in is up-
side down, and the brain has to reverse it. What about all of that
was favorable to the organism as it developed?
The human eye is a great embarrassment to evolutionists,
but so is sex. Where do babies come from? They come through
the process of copulation. But you also know that we suppos-
edly evolved out of a puddle of slime, to put it bluntly. Billions
and billions of years ago, our grandparents were nothing but
little amoebas and the little amoebas didn’t copulate. Amoebas
multiply by cell division. Then, according to evolutionary the-

ory, they developed into mobile, sentient creatures who began
to copulate. But what explains that? What led to the changeover
from cell division to copulation in the process of reproduction?
And how did that happen gradually? And what is the value to a
creature of partially developed genitals?
What led to the changeover from cell division

to copulation in the process of reproduction?
And how did that happen gradually?
T H E S U RV I VA L O F T H E F I T T E ST
One more thing to consider: Darwin held that the way evolu-
tion works—and this was a philosophy of life long before Dar-
win—was by the survival of the fittest. Organisms change, and
the ones that have changed and are the most fit for survival do
survive and produce more changes and so on. The unfit ones
drop off along the way.
But the problem with that claim—as analytic philosophers
pointed out, some of them unbelievers violently opposed to
Christianity—is that it is not falsifiable. There is no way to dis-
prove the survival of the fittest. There is, after all, no way sepa-
rately to identify the organisms that are fit for survival and the
ones that survive. To test the theory, you would have to know
which organisms are most fit and then wait and see if they are
the ones that happen to survive. But there is simply no way to
do that.
T H E B E S T R E F U TAT I O N
Compare the worldviews. According to evolutionary theory,

there was once nothing but disorder. Then the world as we know
it was packed into an infinitesimal point. Then it exploded, but
the explosion created an ordered realm that was inorganic. We
went from disorder to order. Why? “We don’t know. Trust us on
this one,” say the evolutionists.
This ordered inorganic world at some point began to live.
How? How did the nonliving become living? This is contrary to
every pattern of reasoning that you’ll see in the scientific process
and contrary to logic too. You get more in your product than
you had in the cause. If there wasn’t life to begin with, how did
it start?
Maybe you think that life is just a more complex form of
non-life, but there are conceptual problems with the view that
life is the complex version of non-life. It’s like saying that bricks
don’t live, but if you put them together just right, they’ll look as
if they’re living. That’s what evolutionism is telling you: Every-
thing was inorganic, but one day it got so complex that it started
living.
That’s what evolutionism is telling you:

Everything was inorganic, but one day it got
so complex that it started living.
But this life is just a kind of soup right now, a little pud-
dle of slime. And what’s living is all identical in its lifeforms.
Then, says the evolutionist, we start getting diversity. The living

identical soup becomes varied, unintelligent forms of life, var-
ious kinds of amoebas, and other sorts of things. What caused
the identical living soup to start diversifying into lifeforms? We
don’t know.
Those varied lifeforms were unintelligent and eventually
something developed that was intelligent and articulate. What
caused those lifeforms to jump from non-intelligent to intelli-
gent, from inarticulate to articulate? Evolutionists can’t tell us
because they don’t know.
Then this language-using lifeform, which did not have any
traces of morality previously, started having moral notions,
thinking not just of what is the case but of what ought to be the
case. Where did those moral notions come from, and why are
they moral? We don’t know.
We’re supposed to believe that, step by step by step, there
were huge unexplained and irrational changes that brought
about the inorganic, then the organic, then the diversified, then
the intelligent, and then the moral forms of life that we call
human beings.
In some ways, the best refutation of the theory

of evolution is just repeating it, telling people
what evolutionism is saying.
In some ways, the best refutation of the theory of evolution

is just repeating it, telling people what evolutionism is saying.
When people encounter the theory of evolution, they always
get it in little pieces, a slice here and there of evolution. They

cheat. When you ask for evidence, they’ll often give you evi-
dence of change within a particular lifeform.
They’ll point to light-colored moths. When factories put
soot out and covered the bark of trees predators could easily
spot the light-colored moths against the darkened bark. Then
came the “miracle” of evolution. The moths developed darker
wings so they could blend in with the trees.
There are problems with that story, but my point here is that
it is not evidence. By their genetic makeup, moths are different
colors. There have always been moths that are light in color and
dark in color. Throughout the millennia, they are still moths.
Moths have not evolved into birds.
No one doubts that there are changes within species. Just
look at all the different colors of eyes humans have, all the dif-
ferences in hair color, height, weight, body build, and so on.
There are changes within lifeforms. But what we want to know
is if there are changes between lifeforms.
Evolutionists never give you those. They just give you a little
slice of something. You want to ask them to tell you the whole
story, and then you can say, “You expect me to believe this fairy
tale? No rational person could believe this.”
WHY UNBELIEVERS LIKE

EVOLUTIONISM
Now we come to a startling conclusion. John Tyndall, a profes-

sor at Harvard in 1874 who was trying to reconcile Christianity
and evolution, wrote these words: “The basis of the doctrine of
evolution consists not in an experimental demonstration—for
the subject is hardly accessible to this mode of proof—but in its

general harmony with scientific thought.”8 That was his way of
saying with how I began this chapter: Evolution is not a viable or
verifiable scientific theory. Rather, he says, the reason we should
believe in evolution is that it harmonizes with the whole spirit of
science—and here, of course, science is understood as a secular
procedure for interacting with and learning about the world.
Let’s go to Stephen Jay Gould again. In his article entitled
“Punctuated Equilibria,” in which he presented his theory, he
says, “The general preference that so many of us hold for grad-
ualism, that is to say, evolutionary development of man, is a
metaphysical stance”—metaphysics is the division of philoso-
phy that studies the nature of reality, so Gould is saying that
the preference for gradualism in evolution is a philosophical
stance—“embedded in the history of Western cultures. It is not
a high order empirical observation induced from the objective
study of nature.”9 This famous defender of evolution said we
don’t believe this because we have studied nature; rather, it is a
philosophical commitment on our part.
Evolution is not useful for science, but it is useful for reli-
gious purposes, for religious prejudices. The value of the theory
of evolution is that it enables us to dispute the biblical view of
man’s origins. And if you take away the first three chapters of
the Bible, you have taken everything away. That has always been
what gives evolution credibility. It is the first refuge of those
who do not want to face what the Bible says: We have to find
another way to explain man’s origins, besides the biblical one.
8. Quoted in Denton, Evolution, 72.

9. Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria: The Tem-
po and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,” Paleobiology 3.2 (1977): 145.
But the result of this alternative, unbiblical view is an absur-

dity. The theory of evolution wants us to believe that life came
from non-life, intelligence from non-intelligence, morality
from non-morality, and so forth.
The value of the theory of evolution is that

it enables us to dispute the biblical view of
man’s origins. And if you take away the first
three chapters of the Bible, you have taken
everything away.
Moreover, if the argument is that we are products of blind

chance, that undermines physical science. If everything in the
physical universe, including ourselves, comes about by chance,
then there can be no scientific endeavor. Chance is not a thing.
Chance cannot account for anything. It is meaningless.
GLOSSARY
Punctuated Equilibrium: A new theory of evolutionary prog-

ress to explain how the fossil record is devoid of needed mas-
sive numbers of transitional forms. The fossil record shows
equilibrium: stability and continuity. It does not suggest
that there was transitional development from one simple life
form so that it gradually gets more complex over time so that
it evolves from one species to another higher species or kind.
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge claimed that evolu-
tion must have taken place in short spurts, punctuated with
new life forms, rather than over long eons of time. And if it
took place in short spurts, there wouldn’t have been enough
time to leave fossil remains during these evolutionary hot
periods.
1. Is evolution a scientific theory or a religious theory? What

would be wrong with saying that we should teach evolution
in the classroom but not creationism because one is scientific
and the other is religious?
2. What is the mathematical problem with the theory of
evolution?
3. People often point to fossils as evidence of evolution. Does
the fossil record support evolutionism? Why or why not?
What should we see in the fossil record if evolutionism is
true?
4. How is the complexity of the human eye or the relationship
of heart, lungs, and kidneys or sexual reproduction a prob-
lem for evolutionism?
5. What is the problem with the theory of the “survival of the
fittest”?
6. How is the retelling of the whole theory of evolution in some
ways the best refutation of it?
7. How do people cheat when you ask for evidence for evolu-
tion? What makes this sort of answer cheating?
8. Why do unbelievers like the theory of evolution? What at-
tracts them to it despite its absurdities and problems?
8
THE PROBLEM
OF EVIL
Perhaps the most intense, painful, and persistent challenge

believers face is what we call the problem of evil: If God is
all-powerful and all-knowing and good, why does evil exist? The
suffering and evil we see all around us seem to cry out against
the existence of God, at least of the God who is benevolent and
almighty.
PHILOSOPHY AND
PERSONAL SUFFERING
To many, this is thought to be the most difficult of all the prob-

lems we face as Christians, not only because of the apparent
logical difficulty within the Christian outlook but also because
of the great personal perplexity that any sensitive human being
feels when confronted with the terrible misery and wickedness
found in the world.
127
Man’s inhumanity to man is notorious in every age of history

and every nation of the world. History is a long story of oppres-
sion, indignity, unkindness, torture, and tyranny. We find war
and murder, greed and lust, dishonesty and lies, fear, hatred, in-
fidelity, cruelty, poverty, and racial hostility. And when we look
at the natural world, we see what appears to be needless suffer-
ing and pain: birth defects, parasites, attacks by violent animals,
radioactive mutations, debilitating diseases, deadly cancer, star-
vation, crippling injuries, typhoons, earthquakes—and on and
on goes the list of natural disasters.
When the unbeliever looks at this unhappy vale of tears, he
feels there is strong reason to doubt the goodness of God. Why
should there be so much misery? Why should it be distributed
in such a seemingly unjust fashion? After all, if it were left up
to you to be the architect and ruler of the world, would you
permit this kind of misery? Most people would respond to that
rhetorical question by saying, “Of course not!”
When you encounter that kind of objection, you must re-
member that the people who are bringing it up are often doing
so because they have been personally affected by the wicked-
ness, cruelty, and pain in this world. It’s always important to
take into account the emotional or existential condition of the
person you’re talking to. People want to know why their brother
died in childhood. They want to know why they had to lose
their mother to cancer so early in life.
Remember your audience. Don’t imagine that when you’re
answering this question, it’s just a matter of dealing with the aca-
demic or philosophical aspect. You need to minister to that person.
When I was in Moscow, I gave a lecture at the Russian Or-
thodox University on Dostoevsky, where I used a portion of
The Problem of Evil 129
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writings to show the presentation of the

problem of evil but also how the author himself, in his own life,
resolved it. When I finished the lecture, I asked the students if
they had questions.
Because I was a foreigner, speaking in an academic setting,
I expected that people would want to take on the philosophi-
cal aspect. But there was a young Russian girl who began the
questioning, with tears in her eyes. “Dr. Bahnsen,” she said, “I
understand how the problem of evil can be answered by those of
us who are believers when people who are atheists throw that at
us. What I don’t understand is how we who are believers can an-
swer the problem of evil ourselves, because it seems so often that
the righteous suffer.” She had been through a lot, and so had all
those who claim the name of Christ in Moscow. She wanted to
know how these sorts of things could take place if God is really
in control of the universe.
God was gracious and, I think, gave me some grace to respond
to her. I talked to her about the evil I have suffered in this world.
I talked about the sorts of physical problems I have with disease
and so forth, and some of the injustices and hard things I have
been through. I told her that, in the end, as a believer, I want to
cry out to God, “Why? Why do you let these things happen?”
Even committed Christians struggle with God. Read the
Psalms and you’ll see David struggling with God, wondering
about these things. It’s helpful to remember that the first word
of Jesus in that famous line from the cross is also why: “Why
have You forsaken Me?” If the Lord of glory, who knows every-
thing, could also suffer that way, then I don’t believe that I have
lost my humanity or my conviction about God just because it
also hurts me.
So remember, when the problem of evil is brought up, it’s

not always being brought up by a snide philosopher or a profes-
sor who thinks he’s going to defeat the Christian faith by that
argument. Many times people are suffering personally.
THE REALITY OF EVIL
It is also important to recognize—and indeed, to insist upon—

the reality and the serious nature of evil. The subject of evil is
not an intellectual parlor game. It’s not something to be dealt
with in a cavalier manner, something whimsical, some relativis-
tic choice, or simply one person’s way of looking at things that
happen in the world. Evil is real and evil is ugly.
Dennis Prager used to have—or so I was told—the most
popular religious radio program in southern California. It was
on Sunday evenings. His format was to have a Jewish rabbi and
a Roman Catholic priest and a Protestant minister appear. He
would throw some religious question out, and they would kick
it around for about half an hour. Then, for an hour and a half,
people would call in. For a couple of evenings, I was the Protes-
tant representative on the show.
One night, I used the expression “adoring God.” Someone
called in and was irate with me for talking about adoring God. I
asked why. If I understand it correctly, he had been on jury duty
that last week in a particularly terrible case of child molestation
and had to look at pictures of the child who had been abused.
He said, “How can you speak about adoring a God that would
allow that kind of thing to happen?”
But I wanted him to be indignant. I appreciated his indigna-
tion. I said, “That really makes you angry, doesn’t it?” He said,
“It really does.” I said, “It does me too.” It’s important—and I

hope that by the end of this chapter you see why—that when
people bring up the problem of evil, they bring it up as evil, not
just as unhappiness, not just as “different strokes for different
folks,” but as something they want to condemn.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL
PROBLEM OF EVIL
The problem of evil is first a logical problem. You’ll be told that

Christians hold to premises and that you cannot hold consis-
tently. Christians believe God is all good. Second, we believe
that God is all-powerful. Third, we believe that evil exists. But,
as the argument goes, if God is all good, He doesn’t want that
evil. If He is all-powerful, He can eliminate that evil. Therefore,
if evil exists, God is either not all good or He is not all-power-
ful. There is, allegedly, incoherence in the Christian worldview
because we have premises that will not hang together logically.
But remember the four questions we’ve presented earlier in
this book. When somebody gives an argument against Chris-
tianity, you want to know (1) if his claims are arbitrary, (2) if
there are inconsistencies, (3) what the consequences of his view
are, and (4) what the preconditions for the argument are.
The Existence of Evil
Here’s the question I want to ask: For whom is evil logically

a problem, for the Christian or the non-Christian? It should be
obvious, upon reflection, that the unbeliever cannot urge the
problem of evil against you unless the unbeliever has the right
to assert that there is evil. If there’s nothing that counts as evil,

then there is no problem of evil that has to be accounted for. It
is crucial to the unbeliever’s case against Christianity that he can
assert that there is evil in the world and to be able to evaluate
some specific instance as an instance of evil.
What does the unbeliever mean by good and evil? By what
standard does the unbeliever determine what counts as good
or evil? What are the presuppositions in terms of which unbe-
lievers can make any moral judgment about goodness or evil
whatsoever?
Let’s look at some possibilities.
Public Approval or Disapproval
Perhaps the unbeliever takes the words good and evil to per-
tain to what evokes public approval or disapproval. But if
good or evil pertains to the evoking of approval or disapproval,
then on that basis, we could never say that the vast majority of
people in a community approved of and willingly joined in an
evil deed. If evil is what evokes a community’s disapproval, then
it can never be true that the majority of people engaged in an
evil deed.
The fact that a large number of people feel a certain way
doesn’t—and shouldn’t—rationally convince anyone that that
feeling is correct. The topic of ethics doesn’t reduce to statis-
tics. Ordinarily, people think of the goodness of something as
evoking their approval rather than their approval constituting
its goodness. Even unbelievers talk and act as though there are
personal traits, actions, or things that possess the property of
goodness or the property of evil irrespective of the attitudes or
beliefs or feelings that people have about those traits, actions,

or things.
Now if there are problems with saying that good and evil
are defined by what evokes the approval of most people or the
disapproval of most people, then the problem is even worse if
you think that good and evil are defined by what evokes the
approval of the individual, rather than the public at large. If by
the use of the word good somebody means, “I approve,” then
it turns out that we can never agree with each other in ethical
judgments.
On this view, if I say that helping an old lady cross the street
is good, all I mean is that I approve of it. When you say that you
think helping the old lady is good, that means that you approve
of it. But that you approve of it and that I approve of it are not
the same judgment. One is a judgment about me; the other is a
judgment about you, and therefore there is no public or objec-
tive nature to goodness.
Utiliarianism
The unbeliever then usually turns to what is called instru-

mental theories of the good, saying that good is defined by
the consequences that are brought about by an action or at-
titude. An action is good if it achieves a certain end, like the
greatest happiness for the greatest number. This view is called
utilitarianism.
Now the problem with that concept of goodness for making
ethical determinations is that one would need to be able to rate
and compare happiness to make any judgment about goodness.
If I say the good act is what promotes the greatest happiness
for the greatest number, then I need to be able to evaluate or

in some way measure the happiness that is created by the ac-
tion. Moreover, I need to be able to compare, because some
actions might bring unhappiness to a few individuals (or maybe
to many) and happiness to a lot of individuals (or to a few).
Unhappiness and happiness have to be balanced, and then you
have to draw on that judgment.
Consider this illustration. Suppose there’s an individual who
is particularly disliked and I propose to stick a pin into that
individual. Maybe a bunch of you wish that I would, but the
individual himself pleads with me not to. As a utilitarian, I have
to measure his unhappiness. And he claims that his amassed
unhappiness if I stick the pin into him will outweigh the total
happiness of the group that wants me to do it. I may not think
that’s true, but he’s going to say, “How do you prove otherwise?”
Utilitarianism, which appeals to so many people, makes it
impossible to make moral judgments. All we can do is guess
what would bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
We can’t really prove it one way or another because we can’t
calculate all the consequences and we can’t compare pains and
pleasures.
Utilitarianism is unworkable. But there is an even more fun-
damental logical problem with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism,
or any consequential, instrumental view of goodness, says that
good is what produces a particular end. You could only know
if it was good if the end that is mentioned is itself good. And
so consequential, instrumental theories of ethics always beg
the question as to what is intrinsically good. They always say
that good is what achieves a particular goal. Libertarians, for
instance, say that something is good if it maximizes freedom
for people—but that’s right only if freedom for people is itself

good, and that’s the very thing that has to be defended.
Accounting for Evil
None of these are workable theories of ethics. But they are

worth considering because the unbeliever claims that you say
God is good and yet there is all this evil in the world. In response,
you have the right to say, “Can you prove that this or that is
evil?” And it turns out that, on their ethical basis, they cannot.
Be careful here. Consider the guy who called into the radio
program and talked about the terrible case of child molestation.
I can say to him, “You need to show, on your premises, why
that’s evil.” But he’s going to come back and say, “You don’t
think that’s evil?” And the temptation is to think, “Oh, yeah. I
don’t want to say that it’s not evil. It really is evil.”
But the point is that you can say that it’s evil because your
worldview accounts for that judgment. After all, there is a true
and living Creator of heaven and earth who sovereignly con-
trols all things and who is holy and unchanging and who has
revealed himself, and so on. It makes perfectly good sense for a
Christian to say that child molestation is wicked. It is abomina-
ble in the eyes of God. I would argue that it should be punished
with death, it’s so terrible. I can make sense of that claim. But
what I want to know is how the unbeliever can. You want to say
to the unbeliever, “On what basis do you call that act wicked?”
The Right to Do What You Want
If the unbeliever gives us his philosophy of ethics and it al-

lows for arbitrariness or relativism, then he has lost the argu-
ment. Maybe he says that good is what gives pleasure or happi-

ness. I suggested to the caller that, if the Christian God doesn’t
exist, and good is just what gives pleasure or happiness, he has
forgotten that the act allegedly gave happiness to the molester.
Being angry at God for this case of molestation condones this
case of molestation because if you reject God, that is what you
are left with, everyone having the right to do whatever he wants.
Let me remind you that people who say, “Everyone has the
right to do what they want” don’t actually mean that. They
mean “just as long as everybody lives within the general param-
eters of what I want them to do.”
What about the molester? Does he have the right to do
what he wants to do? If he does, then you shouldn’t condemn
him. You should just say, “Different strokes for different folks.
Some people molest children to get their thrills.” The unbe-
liever doesn’t really believe that. But how does he account for
his moral condemnation?
When I said above that you want unbelievers to take evil
seriously, that is because you don’t want them to weasel out of
things by saying that evil is just what makes people unhappy
or that evil is a relative judgment, depending on a person’s de-
sires or ultimate goals. When a person condemns child moles-
tation—or pick whatever example you want—he is assuming
moral absolutes, but moral absolutes are not intelligible without
accepting the Christian worldview.
Remember, once more, the preconditions of intelligibility.
The problem of evil itself is not intelligible—you can’t even
make sense of the problem of evil—unless you begin with the
Christian conception of the world.
The Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil
The reply that will sometimes be given is this: “Maybe as an

unbeliever, I’m not able to call something evil, given my operat-
ing assumptions. But the fact is that you Christians, within the
circle of your own thinking, still have a problem that has not
been resolved. I may not be able to call that act evil, but you call
it evil and still believe God is all-powerful and all good.”
This is a slightly different approach to the problem and we
need to answer it. We need to show that there is no incon-
sistency here. And this is where presuppositional thinking is
powerful.
Remember that we always evaluate our experiences or the
particulars we encounter in light of our ultimate assumptions or
presuppositions. What are my ultimate presuppositions? If I’m
a Christian, I presuppose God’s revelation of Himself, what He
says about Himself in Scripture. We learn that God is all good
and that God is all-powerful. We also learn that evil exists, but
for the time being, I’ll just say that is something we observe in
the world.
If my ultimate presupposition is the goodness and power
of God and then I point—or someone points—to evil in the
world, I am going to evaluate that in light of my presupposi-
tions and draw a conclusion. What conclusion? That there is a
morally sufficient reason for that evil. If that is my worldview, it
is perfectly logical for me to draw the conclusion, not that God
doesn’t exist, but that God must have a good reason for what
He has done.
This is a lot more profound than you might realize. The un-
believer has brought the problem of evil to you, thinking that
you must neutrally evaluate evil. But if your commitment is to

the existence of this God, then when evil is presented to you,
you conclude that evil must have a morally sufficient reason
because the God you worship is all-powerful and all good.
That is just as legitimate a way of reasoning formally as the
line of reasoning the unbeliever wants to take. He claims that
evil shows that God cannot be all good or all-powerful. But
what you tell him is that as a Christian you believe something
else: Not only is God all good, not only is God all-powerful, but
there is a third proposition taught to us in the Bible, and that is
that God has a good reason for everything He does. With that,
there is no longer a logical problem of evil.
T H E P S YC H O L O G I C A L
PROBLEM OF EVIL
The dissatisfaction—if any—with approaching the problem

of evil in this way is that you still feel that, even if there
isn’t a logical problem, there is certainly a great psychological
problem.
I don’t think the problem of evil is ultimately a logical dif-
ficulty for people. It isn’t all that difficult to point out that if
God has a good reason for evil, then it’s not contrary to His
character. If God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil
that exists, as the Bible teaches us, then His goodness and
power are not challenged by the reality of evil events or evil
things in human experience. The only logical problem that
arises in connection with discussions of evil, then, is the un-
believer’s philosophical inability to account for the objectivity
of his moral judgments.
Trusting without Understanding
The problem of evil is not fundamentally a logical one. The

problem that people have with God when they come face to
face with evil and suffering in the world is not philosophical but
psychological. We find it emotionally very hard to have faith in
God and trust His goodness and power when we are not given
the reason why bad things happen to us and others.
The unbeliever presents the problem of evil—whether he
says it explicitly or not—with this underlying demand: If there
is a morally sufficient reason for this evil, then I need to know
what it is. Why did such terrible things happen? Unbelievers
internally cry out for an answer to that question. So do believ-
ers, as I’ve already said. But God does not always provide an
explanation to human beings for the evil they experience or ob-
serve. In Deuteronomy 29:29, we are told that the secret things
belong to the Lord our God.
We might add that, even if God did tell us why evil things
took place, we still might not understand or accept it. It’s some-
what arrogant to think that if God gave us a reason, we would
be able to grasp it. We might be totally baffled. Isaiah tells us
that God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts (55:8–9). God
may be doing things with the evil you’re undergoing or that your
loved ones are undergoing that is so complex and in a sense so
mysterious that, even if He told you, you might not understand.
God doesn’t usually tell us why we suffer evil. Nevertheless,
the fact remains that, though He hasn’t given us the reason for
our misery and suffering or for the injustice of this world, they
are a part of His plan for history and our individual lives. As
God says, for those who love Him, everything will work to-
gether for good, and those who don’t love Him are going to be
ultimately and eternally cursed.
The Bible, you see, calls on us to trust that God does have a
morally sufficient reason for the evil in this world, but the Bible
does not give us the reason or reasons that are morally sufficient
so that we could then judge whether God has been good or not.
The unbeliever will find that intolerable, intolerable because of
his pride, his feelings, maybe his rationality, because he refuses to
trust God. He won’t believe in a God who doesn’t tell him why
evil things take place. The unbeliever says, “Unless I’m given the
reason, so I can examine and assess it, I won’t believe in Him.”
The bottom line is that the unbeliever won’t trust God unless
God subordinates Himself to the intellectual authority and the
moral evaluation of the unbeliever. That is what it comes down
to. The unbeliever says, “Let God be on trial, and when I’m
satisfied that He has a good enough reason for the evil, then I
will trust in Him.”
Is God willing to enter into that kind of negotiation? Will
God say, “You are the guilty party and so I will let you judge
Me”? No.
Ultimate Authority
The problem of evil comes down to the question of whether

a person should have faith in God and His Word rather than
place faith in his own thinking and evaluations and values. It
is finally a question of the ultimate authority in a person’s life.
There is no escape from that. In the end, it’s a matter of whether
the unbeliever will judge God or whether God will judge the
unbeliever.
What would happen if unbelievers had the right to judge

the Almighty? Do unbelievers all agree with one another about
what is good and what is evil? No. The minute you take it out
of the ultimate authority of God, in a sense, you’ve made it im-
possible for any moral judgment to be made.
The only logical approach and the only one that maintains
logical consistency is to say that only God has the right to declare
what is good and evil. But from the psychological standpoint,
it finally becomes a matter of ultimate commitment and trust.
The Origin of Evil
How unbelievers struggle with the problem of evil is only

a continuing testimony to how evil entered history in the first
place. The Bible tells us that sin and all of its accompanying
miseries entered this world through the first transgression of
Adam and Eve, and the question with which Adam and Eve
were confronted way back then is precisely the question that
unbelievers are facing today: Should we have faith in God’s
Word simply because He says so? He says, “I’ve got a morally
sufficient reason for what I’m doing. Trust Me.” Or should we
evaluate God’s Word based on our own ultimate intellectual
and moral authority?
God told Adam and Eve not to eat from a certain tree, testing
them to see if they would define good and evil for themselves.
God said, “Trust Me. Don’t do it.” Satan comes and challenges
the goodness of God. He says, “God has an underlying reason
for this test, Eve, and so you’re going to have to decide. Will you
really die if you eat of this tree? Can you trust God to do what
is right for you, Eve?”
The entire course of human history rested on how she would

approach that problem. Hypothetically, Eve could have said,
“I’m not going to listen to you, Satan. Get behind me. You’re
challenging the word of the only ultimate authority in this
world. You have no right to call into question the motives of
God or His goodness.”
But you know that isn’t what she did. Instead, she said,
“Well, Satan’s has a hypothesis. God has a hypothesis, and I’ll
have to be the final judge.” That’s where evil came from, based
on the Christian story. Since they would not presuppose the
goodness of God, Adam and Eve have visited upon the human
race—which Adam particularly represented—all the torments
that are too many and too painful for us to inventory.
When unbelievers refuse to accept the goodness of God
based on His self-revelation, they are simply perpetuating the
source of all of our human woes. That is to say, rather than
solving the problem of evil, the unbeliever is just part of the
problem of evil.
WHO WILL BE THE JUDGE?
Let’s summarize. First of all, the problem of evil does not pres-
ent anything like an intellectual basis for a lack of faith in God.
There is no intellectual—or, if you will, logical—problem in
what is called the problem of evil. Rather, what’s called the
problem of evil is simply a personal expression of a lack of faith.
That is true for the unbeliever, when the unbeliever says,
“I’m not going to trust God. You give me a reason or else.” Of
course, when it’s a psychological problem for you or me or any
other believer, it’s also a lack of faith, isn’t it? God constantly
humbles me and brings me back around that circle again and

says, “Will you trust me for the sake of my promises and my
word, or do I have to prove everything to you?” Or to put it very
simply, “Will you be God, or will I be God?”
The problem of evil, when it is urged against Christianity, is
not a logical problem; it’s a psychological problem. It is not a
ground for a lack of faith; it is simply an expression of a lack of
faith. If God is all-powerful and all good, why does evil exist?
As far as I can see, the only answer the Bible gives us is to glorify
God all the more fully. How is that going to work? We’re going
to have to wait to find out. If you don’t wish to glorify Him
and trust Him, you will find out that you won’t be able to call
anything evil at all.
The Killing of the Canaanites
This approach helps us with another question that is some-

times raised. How could God endorse genocide in the Old
Testament, having Israel kill not only men and women, who
admittedly were in utter rebellion against God, but also all the
children of the Canaanites? How can God be deemed just if He
commands something like that?
Here, too, as with the problem of evil, the question pre-
supposes an absolute standard of justice by which God himself
must be judged. But how can there be an absolute standard if
God Himself is not the standard? Again, we ask about the pre-
conditions of intelligibility.
If you have doubts about that, read Romans 1 thoroughly.
Paul tells us, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against
all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the
truth in unrighteousness.” He describes the entire human race

as guilty of breaking the laws of God. He says that all men know
the laws of God through the testimony of conscience and also
from the created order around them, and because all men know
these laws, they are guilty for violating them. Understand: God
is not going to send anyone to hell for not hearing the gospel.
They are going to be sent to hell for violating God’s law, which
they know in their heart of hearts.
GLOSSARY
Instrumental theories of the good: Various approaches to eth-

ics that have in common the view that good is defined by the
consequences that are brought about by an action or attitude.
Actions are good if they help you reach the desired conse-
quence. These theories of good and evil are sometimes also
called consequential.
Problem of evil: If God is all-powerful and all-knowing and
good, why does evil exist? The problem is presented as an ar-
gument against the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing,
good God. If He knows all things, including how to prevent
evil, and He is powerful enough to prevent evil but He lets
evil happen, then He must not be good. But if He is good
but can’t prevent evil, no matter how much He wishes, then
He must not be all-powerful or He must not know how to.
Public approval or disapproval: The favorable or unfavorable
opinion of other people. The question raised in the book is
whether right and wrong, good and evil, are determined by
what people—or the majority of people or some commu-
nity of people—like or dislike, what meets with their favor
or their disfavor. If good is whatever the majority of people

like, then you could never say that the majority of people did
something evil.
Utilitarianism: The belief that one ought to maximize happi-
ness in this world for the greatest number of people without
regard to moral commands or a fixed standard to determine
what is ultimately good or bad. The utilitarian says you
should do what is in the best interest of the most people. The
greatest happiness for the greatest number is what should
govern your free will. You should do whatever will be con-
ducive to the good of everyone, as much as you possibly can.
1. What are the two main reasons people bring up the problem
of evil? Why is it important to take our audience into ac-
count as we do apologetics?
2. Why is it important to remember—and to insist that the
unbeliever recognize—the reality of evil?
3. What are some ways non-Christians attempt to account for
the judgment that some behavior is evil and how would you
respond to them? How do Christians account for their belief
in good and evil? On what basis do we make such judgments?
4. What is the problem with the belief that everyone has the
right to do what he or she wishes? Do unbelievers really be-
lieve this?
5. What is the philosophical problem of evil and what is the
Christian solution to it?
6. What is the psychological problem of evil and what is the
Christian’s answer to it?
7. Does God command people to do evil things in the Bible?

8. Is it evil for God to send unbelievers to hell? Why or why
not? What is the real problem with the doctrine of hell?
9
ISLAM, JESUS, AND

PRESUPPOSITIONALISM
Some people will tell you that it is fairly easy to take the Chris-
tian worldview and, in terms of it, to whittle down atheistic or
materialistic worldviews to show that they are internally incon-
sistent, cannot provide the preconditions of intelligibility, and
so on. But, they’ll say, there are different religions, and they
are not so easy to address. And yet they can be dealt with us-
ing the same approach we have used with other non-Christian
philosophies.
I explained in the book Against All Opposition that the vari-
ous religions of the world can be divided into three categories.
There are religions of transcendent mysticism (e.g., Hinduism),
immanent moralism (e.g., Buddhism), and counterfeits of
Christianity (e.g., Mormonism and Islam).
Most people who think there’s an alternative to the Chris-
tian approach to apologetics will use Islam as their counterex-
ample because Islam has a personal God, is monotheistic, and
147
has a religious book that Muslims claim is a revelation from

their personal god. In these three respects, it seems that Islam is
an effective, or at least a deceptively persuasive, counterfeit of
Christianity.1
THE CHALLENGE OF ISLAM
Islam dates from almost 600 years after the inception of Chris-
tianity when the Arab world was polytheistic. Muhammad was
born in AD 570 and died in 632. As he grew up, he seems to
have been distressed by the polytheism around him. When he
was fifteen years old, he married a wealthy woman. He began
getting revelations that he believed were coming from the spirit
world. He went to a cave and tried to rid himself of these voices
in his head. He was afraid that he was being afflicted by de-
mons. But his wife convinced him that he should submit to
these revelations. Eventually, he dictated them, and in their dic-
tated form they became surahs or what we would call chapters
of the Koran.
Muhammad presented a religion that clashed with his poly-
theistic culture. He said there is one God, Allah. He had a very
fatalistic view of the world. He said Allah controls everything.
There is no free will. He taught a moralistic understanding of
how one gets right with Allah.
1. Bahnsen is making the point that most people who argue against the pre-
suppositional approach to apologetics use Islam as an example of the problems
with presuppositionalism. Islam has a personal god, is monotheistic, and has a
religious book that Muslims claim is a revelation from their personal god. The
argument is that Muslims can do presuppositional apologetics for Islam just as
well as we do for Christianity. Presuppositional apologetics can’t overcome the
challenge of Islam, and so, they say, we need a different approach in order to deal
with this deceptively persuasive counterfeit of Christianity. — Editor.
Islam, Jesus, and Presuppositionalism 149
During his life when he tried to propagate this faith, he felt it

would be good to win over the Jews and the Christians to his side.
You will find many favorable things said about Judaism and even
Christianity in the Koran. In particular, the Koran says that a
previous revelation of Allah is found in the Pentateuch, the law of
Moses, as well as in the Psalms of David and the Gospel of Jesus.
Later, when Jews and Christians resisted him, he became very
upset about that. The Koran does contain endorsements of killing
people who will not submit to the word of the prophet of Allah.
Throughout its history, Islam has been characterized by a violent
form of evangelism, what we call “evangelism by the sword.”
The Koran does contain endorsements of

killing people who will not submit to the word
of the prophet of Allah.
Some years ago, I debated a man who was probably the best-
known Islamic scholar on the West Coast. He wanted to make it
very clear that the Koran does not support violence and warfare.
This has become something of an embarrassment to those who
want to propagate Islam today. If you have Muslim friends or if
you are doing evangelism with Muslims, you will find that they
try to reinterpret or to mitigate the actual teaching of the Koran.
ISLAMIC DOCTRINES AND PRACTICES
Before we begin to address Islam’s worldview and in particular

the claim that the Koran is the revelation of the one true God,
we need to understand the five foundational doctrines that de-

fine Islam.
1. Allah is the one and only true God.

2. Allah has sent many prophets to guide men, including
Moses, David, and Jesus, but Muhammed is the last and
the greatest of these prophets of God.
3. Of the four inspired books—the Pentateuch, the Psalms,
the Gospel of Jesus, and the Koran—the Koran is the
most important. Muslims will tell you that Jews and
Christians are still “people of the Book.” They do have a
verbal revelation from God, although they have corrupted
it and the Koran has come to correct these corruptions.
4. There are many intermediary deities, angels, and de-
mons. Islam has a great emphasis on angelology.
5. There is a final day of judgment coming and everyone
will be resurrected and sent to heaven or hell, and this
judgment will be based upon their works. Heaven will
be a place of sensuous delight and gratification, primar-
ily for men.
There is also a doctrine that is not considered one of the

orthodox or central doctrines of Islam but that is found per-
vasively in Islamic theology, and that’s the doctrine of kismet.
Kismet is fate, the notion that there is no free will and that Al-
lah controls everything that takes place, from the movement of
leaves on a tree to every decision you make and every word you
speak.
In addition to the five fundamental Islamic doctrines (plus
kismet), there are five pillars of Sunni Islam (plus one) that are
required for being a Muslim.
1. You must recite Islam’s creed: “There is no God but Al-

lah and Muhammad is his prophet.”
2. You must pray five times a day, and that has to be prayer
oriented toward Mecca, their capital.
3. You must practice almsgiving as the highest form of
good works.
4. You must recognize and practice the month of fasting,
Ramadan, which entails not eating while the sun is up,
though you may gorge yourself when the sun has set.
5. For everyone who is able, a pilgrimage to Mecca at least
once in their life is required.
As there was an additional doctrine, so there is also an ad-

ditional pillar. The sixth pillar is jihad, the practice of holy war.
When a particular Imam, a particular holy man, claims to have
a revelation from Allah to the effect that his people must defend
themselves or must purge the earth of the scourge of Satanic
people like Christians or the United States or whatever a sup-
posed affront to Islam might be at any given time, then the
Imam can call for what Islam claims is religious justification for
a holy war.
A version of holy war is putting a ban on an individual. This
has happened in our day numerous times. The novelist and es-
sayist Salman Rushdie lived in hiding for a long time because
his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was seen by some to be an
irreverent depiction of Muhammad. As a result, in 1989 a fat-
wah was issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme
Leader of Iran, calling for his assassination. Any godly Muslim
that encountered him not only had permission but was under a
moral obligation to kill him.
RESPONDING TO THE
ISLAMIC WORLDVIEW
But now how do we respond to Islam? You must not be led

astray by those who say Christians have the Bible and Muslims
have the Koran and that leave us with a standoff, as if each of us
can appeal to his own revelation to try to refute each other and
Muslims can counter or turn back on us any arguments we use
against them.
When we do worldview apologetics, we do not simply look
at bare or formal authority claims. We compare the actual con-
tent of our worldview with the actual content of the worldview
presented by our Muslim friends.
When we do worldview apologetics, we do

not simply look at bare or formal authority
claims. We compare the actual content of
our worldview with the actual content of the
worldview presented by our Muslim friends.
The Koran and Previous Revelation
Let’s look at the Koran and find out something more about
it. The Koran claims to be a confirmation of the Old Testament
law and the New Testament gospel. But when Muhammad at-
tempted to appeal to Jews and Christians by making this claim,
he gave himself a huge intellectual headache to deal with. If the
Koran is the confirmation of this previous revelation and if this
previous revelation teaches (as it does) that subsequent addi-
tional revelation must conform to what God has previously

said, then all you need to refute the Koran on its own basis is to
show conflicts between what the Bible teaches and what the
Koran teaches. And that is not difficult to do.
If the Koran is the confirmation of this previous

revelation and if this previous revelation
teaches (as it does) that subsequent additional
revelation must conform to what God has
previously said, then all you need to do to
refute the Koran on its own basis to refute it
is to show conflicts between what the Bible
teaches and what the Koran teaches.
Let me give you a few embarrassing examples.

In Surah 19 of the Koran, which deals with the virgin birth,
it describes Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the sister of Aaron.
You can see how that mistake was made. Aaron’s sister in the
Bible is named Miriam, and Muhammad has confused Miriam
with Mary. But this is supposedly the revelation of the perfect
God, Allah. It is a huge historical embarrassment.
Here’s another. According to the Koran, Jesus was not cruci-
fied. He couldn’t have been, since He is a prophet of God. Ac-
tually, what took place was that Judas was substituted for Jesus
and people confused them.
Third, and perhaps more importantly, the Koran says that it
would be absolutely wrong to worship Jesus or to call Him the
Son of God. God cannot have a son.
The Koran denies the deity of Jesus Christ. Islam is a unitar-

ian religion: they deny the triune nature of God. They say that
there is only one person that is God, and Jesus is not that one
person. Jesus is just a prophet of God. According to the Koran,
anyone who says that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each
God is teaching polytheism, three gods.
Now, of course, that is not what the Bible teaches. The Bible
teaches that there is one God. “Hear, O Israel! The Lord our
God is one” (Deut. 6:4). That is what makes the development
of the worship of Jesus in the New Testament so fascinating.
It was monotheists who said Jesus is God. They didn’t give up
their monotheism, but they came to believe that this one who
appeared in the flesh is the very God they worship. Neverthe-
less, the Koran presents it differently claiming that what Chris-
tians are saying is that there are three gods. As a result, they
deny the deity of Jesus.
We have just refuted the Koran, haven’t we? We didn’t re-
fute the Koran by saying, “Hooray for our team!” We didn’t
just make an assertion that the Bible is right and the Koran is
wrong. What we said is this: “According to your teaching, Al-
lah, the living and true God, has revealed himself already in the
Law, in the Psalms, and in the Gospel, and yet what the Koran
teaches conflicts with what we read in this previous revelation.
So the Koran cannot be a revelation of the living and true God.”
Variants in the Bible and the Koran
Now if you were a Muslim, how would you try to get out of
this fix? It’s really the same thing the Mormons do. It’s an old
trick. It turns out that when they honored the Law, the Psalms,
the Prophets, and the Gospel, what they meant was the Law, the
Psalms, and the Gospel as corrected by the Koran, which means
it was rather deceptive for them to claim that the Koran is con-
tinuous with these writings, since you have to use the Koran to
go back and change these writings to make them continuous.
Now you have to ask: “Do you have any manuscript evi-
dence for your revisions of God’s previous revelation?” Guess
how many they have. You don’t even need fingers to count
them. Zero. Why? Because, they say, Christians have perverted
the original revelation of God so effectively. Now the only way
you can go back and get the correct revelation is to depend on
the Koran.
What is the first thing you look for when you are arguing
with someone who has contrary considerations or some reason-
ing against the Christian faith? You look for arbitrariness. And
that is precisely the problem here. It is utterly arbitrary to make
that claim.
But let me tell you a little bit more about their arbitrariness.
Muslims will say, “We have a superior revelation because ours
does not have any textual variants in it. Every copy of the Koran
is identical with every other copy of the Koran.”
In itself, that is simply not true. But what they are saying is
that Christians have the Bible, which has many different man-
uscripts with textual variants, which they call “conflicts.” There
are a few thousand of them. And you may hear that and think
that’s a little embarrassing. The Muslims have this perfect tex-
tual tradition and yet we have all these variants, which they see
as conflicts.
When I debated a Muslim scholar, I invited him to present
even one of those variants that entails a doctrinal conflict. Is
there one doctrine of the Christian faith that is refuted or that is

affected by some contradiction involving the various textual tra-
ditions? He wanted to remind me of a large number of variants,
but he did not take the invitation. There are no conflicts in our
textual traditions. There are only variant readings.
Nevertheless, people do say, “What do I do about that? The
number of variants does seem to be embarrassing.”
You need to know that in the fourth or fifth caliphate—
the caliphs were the leaders of the Muslims after Muhammad
died—all versions of the Koran were collected and the variant
readings were destroyed. They gathered everything they could,
destroyed the manuscripts with variants, and chose a particular
tradition to be the one that would be the perfect one. They did
that, by the way, on the pain of death. If anyone would not turn
in their variant edition, that person would be killed.
Of course, we could do that with the Bible, too. We could
require everyone to turn in variant manuscripts of the Bible on
pain of death and destroy the variants to produce a Bible that
has no variant readings.
I don’t think the variant readings shake anyone’s faith or de-
stroy the church and its life. The fact that we have variants,
though it makes biblical study somewhat more complicated,
is also a testimony to the authenticity of the Bible as a text.
We did not have the artificiality of going through and destroy-
ing alternatives that came up. We know that when people copy
things, they make mistakes—and yet for all of that, God has
done a wondrous job of preserving the biblical text.
Remember what we said earlier. Muslims suggest that Chris-
tians corrupted the text of the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets,
and the Gospel of Jesus and destroyed all the alternatives. This
means we can’t find manuscripts that support the Koran’s read-

ing, and that’s why we need the Koran to correct the teaching of
the Bible as we have it today. But I guess that is a form of what
psychologists call projection. We tend as human beings to proj-
ect onto other people our own sins and foibles, our weaknesses
and inadequacies. And here the Muslims are the ones who were
guilty of this very procedure—destroying variant manuscripts—
and they claim that we were the ones who did this. But what is
the evidence for it? None.
The Muslims are the ones who were guilty

of this very procedure—destroying variant
manuscripts—and they claim that we were the
ones who did this
Contradictions in the Koran
Here’s a second problem with the Koran. Not only are there
contradictions with previous revelation, but there are also con-
tradictions within the Koran as well. Here is the most import-
ant one: The Koran teaches that there is nothing in human ex-
perience that can be likened to Allah. Allah is so transcendent,
so beyond the daily experience of human beings, that nothing
in human experience can be likened to him.
But wait a minute. I guess we shouldn’t say “likened to him”
because him/her distinctions come from human experience,
don’t they? On the other hand, we don’t want to say “likened to
it” because personal and impersonal distinctions come from hu-
man experience, too. It’s very difficult to say anything, isn’t it?
It’s worse than that: If nothing in human experience can be
likened to Allah, then nothing in human language can be said
about him. And if that is true, what follows from that? If noth-
ing in human language is adequate to speak about Allah, then
what is the Koran? It cannot be what it claims to be. The Koran,
then, is self-refuting. No human language is adequate to speak
about Allah because all human language is based on human
experience, and so there cannot be any revelation of Allah in
human language—and yet that’s what the Koran claims to be. If
the Koran is true, then the Koran must be false.
If nothing in human language is adequate to

speak about Allah, then what is the Koran?
We are not just saying, “You have your god named Allah
and we have our God named Jehovah. You have the Koran and
we have the Bible.” We are examining the content of the worl-
dviews: “What does your worldview say? And what does our
worldview say?”
The Theology of the Old Testament
There is another great material weakness in Islam. In my de-

bate with a Muslim scholar, I was also simultaneously debating
an Orthodox Jew. It was too unwieldy to do well. But what I
thought I would do, since the Orthodox Jew and the Islamic
scholar both granted the validity of the Law of Moses, I said,
“Let’s do our debate based on the Law of Moses.” I offered a

Christian interpretation of such things as circumcision, animal
sacrifice, the temple, and so forth. And then I called on the Jew
and the Muslim to give their alternative interpretations. Inter-
estingly, neither one of them wanted to argue Old Testament
theology with me.
Perhaps that is not surprising since Muslims just tip their hat
to the Old Testament but don’t follow it. But then again, since
they claim that Moses was inspired, they had better have some
explanation for the bloody rites and the shekinah glory and so
on. When the Muslim scholar refused to do that, in essence, he
destroyed himself.
You might think that the Orthodox Jews would want to go
to the Old Testament to account for their worldview. Don’t be
misled into thinking Jews are people of the Old Testament.
They will say they honor Moses, but their actions don’t support
their confession (Matt. 23:1–3). But the problem with Jews to-
day is the same problem Jesus had with the Jews when He was
on earth. They say they follow Moses, but instead they follow
the tradition of their fathers (Mark 7:1–13). Jewish scholars are
interested in the Talmud, which is a commentary on Moses—
or actually, a commentary upon a commentary upon a com-
mentary on Moses. It’s “Rabbi So-and-So said this, which must
mean that, and then Rabbi Such-and-Such’s interpretation adds
further elaboration.” That is what Jews are committed to. They
are committed to the Talmud and Talmudic interpretation, not
to going directly to the Old Testament.
So the material inadequacy of Islam—as well as Orthodox
Judaism—is that it cannot deal with the theology of the Old
Testament. Sometimes people use the Old Testament in apolo-
getics to show how it prophesies various things about the Messi-

ah’s life and character which we then see fulfilled in the New
Testament in the life and character of Jesus. That is one of the
arguments for and evidence of the divine inspiration of Scripture.
But those who don’t want to accept that evidence can easily say,
“Those aren’t really prophecies” or “The Gospels wrote the life of
Jesus that way to fit with their preconceived ideas” and so forth.
Jews and Muslims cannot deal with the

theology of the Old Testament.
But Jews and Muslims cannot deal with the theology of the
Old Testament. They can’t explain why there was a temple, with
a Holy of Holies, where there had to be a blood sacrifice, the
giving up of animal life as a substitute for sinners. Why is it that
males had to be circumcised eight days after they were born?
These sorts of things ought to be part of the Jewish and Islamic
worldview because they claim that Moses was given direct reve-
lation about these religious rites. But when all is said and done,
they are not willing to live by the theology of the Old Testa-
ment, much less to understand it.
It is important, then, to understand that when people ap-
peal to religious worldviews, you are not on any shakier ground
in dealing with them than you are with people who say they
are materialists or existentialists or atheists or whatever. In the
end, we compare worldviews and we check for arbitrariness,
inconsistencies, consequences of these views, and whether they
provide the preconditions of intelligibility.
THEISM WITHOUT JESUS?
But there is another question that may come up that we have

not yet dealt with in this book. What about the person who
believes in God but does not accept Jesus? Such a person may
have no problem with the existence of God but does not believe
that Jesus is the Son of God.
The very setting up of the question betrays the difficulty.
When people say, “I’ll accept that there is a God, but now I
want to know if Jesus is the Son of God, if Jesus is divine,” what
they are doing is dividing the Christian faith up into a series of
different propositions, each one of which needs to be verified on
its own. But a worldview is a package deal.
We don’t accept Christianity claim by claim.

We accept the Bible as God’s revelation. That
is where we start.
We don’t accept Christianity claim by claim. We accept the

Bible as God’s revelation. That is where we start. We believe that
man fell into sin, that God took the initiative not just to offer
but to sovereignly give salvation, that God has given His Word
to accomplish that and has sent His Son and his Spirit. All of
this hangs together. Why begin with the Bible? We answer that,
according to the Bible’s own presentation, this is what has hap-
pened in history. We have this book, and that is where we start.
We don’t need to defend the deity of Jesus Christ as a sepa-
rate proposition because what you are defending is the Chris-
tian worldview as a whole, which the Bible presents. Does the

Bible present Jesus as divine? Yes, it does.
Correcting the Confusion Sin Causes
But we can approach it also from another angle. What we

have are people who come up with their ideas of God and how
they’re supposed to live. Everyone has a great deal of confusion
and that confusion entails sin. If there is truth about religion
and people have differing ideas, not everybody can be right.
Those who are not right are in error, in sin, in rebellion, in dis-
obedience. Now if men are sinful—and that is evident enough
from the confusion over religion—then how will God correct
that? How could God correct that?
If God is going to correct the sin problem and

the confusion we have, it will have to be by his
own self-revelation.
Maybe God should have an opinion poll to decide how He

should be. But of course, the opinion poll won’t work, because
the whole problem is that men, in and of themselves, are unable
to know what God is like. They all have differing opinions, and
many of them have to be wrong. Maybe all of them are wrong.
If God is going to correct the sin problem and the confusion
we have, it will have to be by His own self-revelation. The only
way there can be deliverance from this confusion and disobe-
dience is by God taking the initiative. We must know God as
He reveals Himself. And if we know God only as He reveals

Himself to those who are in sin, confusion, disobedience, dis-
agreement, and so forth, then we can know God only through
His revelation in Scripture.
Accepting Jesus on His Own Say-So
Jesus says in Matthew 11:27: “No man knows the Father

except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals Him.” You
don’t want to say that at a cocktail party, “Jesus, you’re not going
to be welcome here if you can’t get along with Buddha and Mu-
hammad and all the rest. You can’t just come in here and say
you’re the only one who knows.”
The only Jesus we know, the Jesus that’s

revealed in the pages of Scripture, is a man
who was either who he said he was—the sole
revelation of God, the only way back to God,
the Son of God, the savior of man—or a lunatic.
When people say they aren’t sure what to make of the deity
of Jesus, you have to tell them to consider the alternative. The
only Jesus we know, the Jesus who’s revealed in the pages of
Scripture, is a man who was either who He said He was—the
sole revelation of God, the only way back to God, the Son of
God, the savior of man—or a lunatic.
Imagine you were at a party and said, “You are all going to
be judged on the last day based on whether you accept or reject
my words”! But that is what Jesus said. The Jews didn’t like these
claims. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus claimed to be the
Son of God, they knew what He was saying. He wasn’t saying,
“We’re all children of God, and I am one of them.” They knew
He was claiming to be the unique Son of God and so, the Bible
says, they took up stones to stone Him.
The only Jesus that we know is the one who says “If you
know God, you know Him only through Me. I am the only av-
enue back to God.” You have to accept Jesus on His own say-so
or you have to say “This man is not worthy of my respect.”
C. S. Lewis had it right. You cannot have Jesus simply as a good
teacher. That is excluded if you know what He taught. If He
was not the Son of God, then He was a fraud or megalomaniac.
The Package Deal
Remember: We do not defend the Christian faith as a series

of separate propositions. We defend the whole package. Men
are in sin. God in His grace has pursued man and has provided
a revelation of himself. And what we are defending is the entire
Bible. There is no way around it. And in the Bible, Jesus is pre-
sented as the very Son of God, as God himself.
In a sense, we want to throw the question back on the unbe-
liever. How can you say that there is a God? How do you know
there is a God if you don’t know it through Jesus? If you accept
the Bible, how can you do that and not accept the deity of Jesus,
which is so plain on the pages of Scripture?
The unbeliever is being arbitrary. That may not be obvious
at first but look at the way he poses his question. The unbeliever
wants you to approach things one by one.
The idea that we accept beliefs one by one, coming to them

singularly, is pervasive and it needs to be exploded. The beliefs
that people hold are always connected to other beliefs by re-
lations about linguistic meaning, logical order, evidential de-
pendence, causal explanation, lexical connection, and self-con-
ception. I can’t explain every one of those connections, but
understand that the beliefs we hold are always connected to
other beliefs.
Let’s take somebody who says, “I see a ladybug on the rose.”
That looks like the sort of thing you can accept or reject all by
itself. But the person who says “I see a ladybug on the rose” is af-
firming and assuming not just one proposition but a whole slew
of propositions, many things simultaneously. Some of those
things will be rather obvious. For instance, to say “I see a lady-
bug on the rose” assumes the meaning of certain English words.
It also assumes something about one’s personal identity (“I”).
It assumes something about perception and also some things
about the categories of bugs and flowers and physical relations
and so forth.
But there are still other assumptions that are also contained
in “I see a ladybug on the rose.” There are much more subtle
assumptions about one’s linguistic competence, entomologi-
cal competence, botanical competence, the normalcy of one’s
brainstem, theories of light refraction, shared grammar, shared
semantics, the reality of the external world, the laws of logic,
and on and on.
All of these beliefs together—the network of them—encoun-
ters the tribunal of our sense experience. When a conflict is de-
tected between this network of beliefs and our sense experience,
we realize that an adjustment must be made to our beliefs to
restore consistency. But you cannot determine in advance which

of those beliefs someone will give up when a conflict arises.
I say, “I see a ladybug on the rose.” And one of my friends says,
“Oh, no, you’re wrong about that.” Now what is it that is differ-
ent between me and the person who is contradicting me? The
inclination is to think that he looked and didn’t see the ladybug
on the rose. That is one of the possibilities, but it is the simplistic
one. There are other possibilities, too. There may be some differ-
ence of opinion as to what ladybugs are or how English words are
used. There may be some problem with light refraction or some
view about the laws of logic or something of that nature.
Or maybe I look over and see the ladybug and my friend
continues to deny it and I think, “Maybe only the pure in heart
can see ladybugs and my friend is not pure in heart.” I know
that sounds unreasonable to you, but people correct their net-
work of beliefs to come to consistency with other beliefs in a
variety of ways, some that appear reasonable and others that
appear unreasonable. The point is that you cannot say in a one-
by-one fashion how people will correct their beliefs.
1. Why do some people think Islam shows the weakness of the

presuppositional approach to apologetics? Does presupposi-
tionalism leave us with a standoff where we say “The Bible
says . . .” while the Muslim says “The Koran says . . .”?
2. What are the basic doctrines and fundamental practices of Islam?
3. What are some ways in which the Koran contradicts pre-
vious revelation? What are some ways in which the Koran
contradicts itself?
4. How did it come about that there are no (or few) variations
between all the manuscripts of the Koran? Does the lack of
variants demonstrate the superiority of the Koran over the
Bible?
5. What is the problem that orthodox Jews and Muslims
have with the Old Testament?
6. How would you respond to someone who claims to
believe in God but does not accept Jesus and does not ac-
knowledge that Jesus is God?
7. What is the only way that God can overcome the con-
fusion that sin creates in our thinking?
8. Do we really accept all of our beliefs one at a time? What
are some examples of the ways in which our beliefs form a
network?
10
CIRCULAR
REASONING
One of the common objections to our Christian worldview is

that we can’t know anything about the supernatural because,
the unbeliever will say, all of our knowledge is based on our
natural experience. If you know anything, it is because you ob-
serve it, hear it, taste it, smell it, touch it, or whatever. If all of
our knowledge is based on our senses, then there cannot be any
knowledge of the supernatural, because the supernatural is not
something you taste, see, hear, or touch.
Although that is one of the most pervasive philosophical
prejudices against Christianity—and any transcendent reli-
gion—by now I trust you can tell that there is a philosophical
self-contradiction involved in this assertion. The person who
says you can’t know anything unless it is based on observation
needs to tell you how he knows that.
According to the theory the unbeliever is presenting, it can
be known only by observation. But no one can, by observation,
168
Circular Reasoning 169
know what the limits of knowledge are, much less make a uni-
versal declaration about them. On his own presuppositions,
then, the unbeliever cannot say that you know only the things
you observe and therefore you cannot know anything about the
supernatural. On his own presuppositions, he can’t even know
his own presupposition.
The person who says you can’t know anything

unless it is based on observation needs to tell
you how he knows that.
TRUST IN AUTHORITY
Another common objection to the Christian worldview is

framed this way: “I can’t accept Christianity because it is based
on authority.” Or sometimes it will be said that you just believe
these things “by faith.” However it is presented, it comes down
to this: “I won’t go along with the Christian worldview because
it requires me to accept the Bible—to accept God’s claims—on
faith, that is, on the Bible’s own authority. If you’re a Christian,
you don’t look for independent verification of what this alleged
God has said in this alleged revelation called the Bible. You just
accept things on authority. You accept things by faith.”
Antony Flew (1923–2010), a famous non-Christian philos-
opher wrote the following in his book God and Philosophy: “An
appeal to authority here cannot be allowed to be final and over-
riding. For what is in question precisely is the status and author-
ity of all religious authorities. . . . It is . . . inherently impossible
for either faith or authority to serve as themselves the ultimate

credentials of revelation.”1
That sounds reasonable. We can’t accept the authority of the
Bible on its own authority because that’s the very thing we’re
debating: Does the Bible have authority?
But even though this position sounds reasonable, consider
the alternative. Imagine that there is a God who is the creator,
who is sovereign, who is personal, and so forth, and this God
comes to man with a revelation of Himself. What is there in
the created order or man’s thinking or reasoning—all of those
things being less than God—that would have sufficient author-
ity universally to verify what God said about Himself? Upon
analysis, nothing could do that.
Suppose you have the Zucchini Book of Religion, a book I just
made up. You might say that this is the Word of God. And how
do you know that? Because it has the best zucchini recipes avail-
able. But someone else says, “I don’t like zucchini, so obviously
that book is not the Word of God.”
Someone else says that he has the book that truly is the reve-
lation of God. “How do you know?,” you ask. “Because it gives
me permission to live with my girlfriend out of wedlock, and
that’s exactly what I want to do.” But then you’re judging the
revelation based on what you like, on your preconceived ideas of
what religion should be like or what God would say.
1. Antony Flew, God and Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005), 163,
165. Flew later abandoned atheism for a form of deism or even theism after Dr.
Bahnsen’s death in 1995. See Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese, There
Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York:
Harper, 2007), which includes an appendix entitled “The Self-Revelation of God
in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus with N. T. Wright,” in which he inter-
acts with arguments for Christianity.
If you stop and think about it, you’ll realize that every hu-
man proposal is going to be subject to the same criticism. How
do we know that this book you are proposing really is the Word
of God? Whatever the person says—because I think it’s logical;
because I like its zucchini recipes; because it allows me to live
the way I want to live; or whatever it might be—the next thing
you’re going to say is: “So you’re saying that you know in ad-
vance what to expect from God, and since this book tells you
what you want, you’re going to call it divine?”
But who has it right? The zucchini guy? The guy who wants
sexual license? The guy who thinks a book is divine because of
its logical coherence? What is the mark that this book is a book
from God? If we do not accept that God alone can authorize
His revelation, then the alternative is to be left with the differ-
ing authorities—which is to say, the non-authorities—of men.
If we do not accept that God alone can

authorize His revelation, then the alternative is
to be left with the differing authorities—which
is to say, the non-authorities—of men.
The devastating moral critique of the professor who says we

can’t accept a book on its own say-so comes down to this: We
can never accept a book on the authority of God Himself. But
if God is God, whose authority could be higher or more au-
thoritative than His? The answer is—None. There cannot be
any authority higher than God’s, and human beings—whether
they like zucchini, sex, or logic—do not have the authority to
determine what God might say in advance or what God could

be like.
If someone says, “I cannot accept the Bible on its own ul-
timate authority,” what he is saying is, “I won’t ever accept a
revelation from God of any sort,” because any proposal made
by human beings to verify such a revelation, since it is not based
on God’s ultimate authority, is just one more of the zucchini,
sexual, logic sorts of options.
This is not how we are accustomed to thinking, and people
will not encourage you to think this way. But what I am getting at
is this: When someone says he won’t accept the Bible on faith—
that is, he won’t accept this authority on its own authoritative
say-so—he is saying, “I have a different worldview. I have an ul-
timate authority that is different from yours.” Antony Flew had
a different ultimate authority when he wrote the words quoted
above. Every unbeliever has a different ultimate authority. The
question is: What is their authority and what does it rest on?
When they say that our argument is circular, that we accept
the Bible’s authority based on the Bible’s authority, we ought to
say, “I hear your logic. Do you think that’s circular? What’s the
alternative? How do you accept your ultimate authority?” And
they are on the horns of the dilemma.
Either their ultimate authority will be accepted on its own
authority—they call that begging the question or circular rea-
soning when we do it, but if we have to rule that out, they
have to rule that out too, in which case they have refuted them-
selves—or their ultimate authority is going to be verified by
something other than their ultimate authority, in which case
they are guilty of contradiction, because their ultimate author-
ity is not ultimate, after all.
THE INVISIBLE GARDENER
A third objection you’ll hear from a philosophical angle against

your Christian worldview is that Christians are so tenacious in
defending their beliefs that they will not allow anything to fal-
sify what they hold to be true. No matter how much count-
er-evidence or how many counter-considerations to Christian-
ity are presented, Christians keep defending the faith.
Antony Flew wrote an article about the meaninglessness of
religious language.2 The argument of the article has become the
most popular attack not just on Christianity but on any religion,
because the point is that, since you do not allow anything to con-
tradict or falsify your Christian faith, you are not making any
claims at all. Your claims are empty, vacuous, utterly meaningless.
He tells a story of two men who are going through a forest
and come across a patch in the forest that has some flowers,
as well as a lot of weeds and other sorts of things. One of the
explorers says, “Look! A gardener tends to this part of the for-
est.” The other man says, “No, there’s no gardener. It’s just some
accident that there are flowers here. There are also weeds and all
of this other stuff.”
They pitch camp and wait overnight for the gardener to ap-
pear. But the gardener doesn’t come, and so the skeptic says,
“There is no gardener.” What is the believer going to say at that
point? He says, “The gardener didn’t happen to come today, but
he will come.”
They wait for a week. Still no gardener. Now the believer
says, “Apparently the gardener comes secretly at night when
2. Antony Flew, “Theology and Falsification,” in Reason and Responsibility:
Readings in Some Basic Problems in Philosophy, eds. Joel Feinberg (Belmont, CA:
Dickenson, 1968), 48–49. Online at https://bit.ly/3dH3PVF.
we’re asleep and tends this part of the forest.” So they set up
barb wire; they electrify the wire; they get hound dogs. But they
never hear anything from the dogs. No one gets electrified or
caught going over the fence.
Finally, the skeptic says, “See? There you have it. There is no
gardener who comes.” The believer says, “Yes, there is. But he’s
invisible and intangible.” And now the skeptic says—and this is
the point of the parable—“What is the difference between this
eternally elusive, invisible, intangible gardener, for whom we
have no evidence, and no gardener at all?”
Flew is saying that this is the problem with religious claims.
People defend them to the hilt but empty them of all content or
substance. His famous remark is “Religious claims die the death
of a thousand qualifications.” Flew looked at Christians, at what
we’ve been doing all through this book, and says, “See? You just
keep backing up, defending your position. But obviously, there
is no substance to what you’re saying because you don’t allow
that anything would falsify it.”
But notice that Flew has moved from considering the nature
of the person defending a belief to the nature of the belief itself.
Indeed, a person who holds that there is an eternally elusive,
non-tangible, invisible gardener is probably making so qualified
a statement that nothing would ever be able to falsify it, even
in theory, and so he is not making any claim at all. But that is
not what Christians do. Flew has moved from Christians being
tenacious about defending their views and not willing to have
them be falsified to the claim that the premises we defend are
themselves unfalsifiable.
The premise we defend as Christians certainly can be falsi-
fied. Paul says that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, our faith
is vain (1 Cor. 15:14). We must grant in theory that if someone

were to find the bones of Jesus, that would be it. Christianity
would be over. It would be refuted.
But the fact that we have a claim or a belief that is historical
and that, in principle, is falsifiable does not mean that we are
going to stand by and let it be falsified. Because I am committed
to Jesus as the Son of God and I believe the Bible when people
bring up their counter-evidence, I am going to defend the faith.
There is a difference between me resisting falsification and the
nature of my claims being unfalsifiable.
In the end, all Flew pointed out is that religious beliefs are
held tenaciously. That isn’t to say that they are meaningless. It’s
just to say that believers tend not to give up their beliefs. But
guess who else is tenacious about holding onto his presupposi-
tions? The unbeliever. It is impossible for people not to be te-
nacious when it comes to their ultimate authority and commit-
ment in life. That’s why it’s an ultimate authority.
If what Flew said is to be believed and anybody who is te-
nacious and who holds onto an ultimate conviction is holding
onto something meaningless, then Flew himself would have
been holding meaningless beliefs. In fact, all human beings
would be holding meaningless beliefs and then we really could
not know anything at all. If Flew’s argument refutes Christian-
ity, he has also destroyed the possibility of knowing anything.
That’s a pretty high price to pay for rejecting Jesus.
Though this sounds philosophical and maybe even dry and
abstract or academic, it is just an application of what Jesus said:
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the
Father but by Me” (John 14:6). When you reject Jesus, you
ultimately reject truth also.
Unbelievers don’t say, “I don’t want Jesus, and so I am re-

jecting truth.” They think they can hold onto truth, knowl-
edge, science, logic, morality, meaningfulness. They want to
hold onto those things and reject Jesus. In a sense, your job
as an apologist is to show that when they reject Jesus, they are
also rejecting all those other things. They can’t have them and
be consistent with their operating assumptions about how we
know what we know.
APOLOGETICS BY UNAIDED REASON?
There is another question you might be asking. When we say

that biblical theism is the only worldview that passes the tests
presented in this book and that by using this presuppositional
approach we can prove the existence of God, how is that differ-
ent from proving God’s existence by unaided reason?
Remember what we’ve been saying. When someone offers
you an argument, you want to know if the argument is going
to fly and so you check for arbitrariness, for inconsistencies,
for consequences, and for whether it provides the preconditions
for intelligibility. But then when we use this approach, aren’t
we trying to prove the validity of the Bible by unaided reason?
Aren’t we going to the unbeliever and suggesting that we set
aside our presuppositions and become neutral and then use
these four tests that we both accept to decide who is right and
who is wrong?
First, it is important to understand that as Christians we do
appeal to reason. Christians use reason to defend the faith. But
there is a great difference between our view of reason and the
non-Christian’s view of reason.
Reason as a Tool
We see and use reason as a tool. God has given us physical

and intellectual tools. He has given us hands with which we can
play tennis and slice zucchini and perform all sorts of important
and joyful things in the world. Hands are tools. God has given us
other tools as well, and one of them is our intellectual ability, our
thinking ability, which we call our reasoning. How well would
we get along in the world if we couldn’t reason? But unbelievers
don’t see reason as a tool but as the ultimate authority. Reason
stands on its own, and all men are subject to the god of reason.
When things are presented in this way, Christians can fall
into one of two errors. We can say, “If we’re going to use reason,
we have to make it our ultimate God and authority” because
that’s what the unbeliever says. Or we make this mistake: “Since
we don’t see reason as they do, then we’ll just say we don’t use
reason. The unbeliever has reason, but we have faith.” But that
is not the answer. We do use reason. They use reason, but for
them, reason is their ultimate authority; for us, reason is subor-
dinate to the authority of God.
It is not as if unbelievers follow reason and Christians follow
faith. It is not that faith begins where reason leaves off or that
to become a Christian you must go past reason into faith. We
don’t believe reason takes you so far and then faith takes over.
Rather, we believe that without faith you cannot reason at all. If
you don’t have faith, reason finally disintegrates.
Judging by the Ultimate Authority
The four evaluative tests that I have given you in this book are
not independent, ultimate, authority-of-reason considerations.
They are, in fact, a reflection of the Christian worldview. What I

am telling you is that if you want to judge anything, you must
judge it by the Christian worldview because that is the ultimate
authority. God and His revelation is our ultimate authority.
If you want to judge anything, you must judge

it by the Christian worldview because that is
the ultimate authority. God and His revelation
is our ultimate authority.
We reject arbitrariness. Why? Because we say that only God

has the authority to speak for Himself. When other people
come and say to us, “I think this” and “I think that,” we say
that’s arbitrary. They aren’t God. They don’t have the right to
speak that way.
If an unbeliever wants to be consistent—and they aren’t,
which is why we can defend the faith with them—he ought to
say, “I’m not going to buy into God’s authority. I believe every-
one has the right to be arbitrary.” “Fine,” we say. “Then what’s
the consequence if you are arbitrary?”
“Wait a minute,” he replies. “You Christians believe we live
in a world where causes and effects are connected to each other.
You believe in consequences of thoughts and actions. You be-
lieve consequences are a way of judging the things that bring
about those consequences. But in my worldview, I don’t buy
into that. There is no order or relationship between anything,
and therefore there are no consequences. Everything is random.
It’s all by chance.”
When you use consequences as a standard, you’re thinking as

Christians think. Jesus says, “You know a tree by its fruit” (Matt.
12:33). But the consistent unbeliever doesn’t think there are
consequences. Whatever happens is just random. Who knows
what the dice are going to show? If he were consistent, the un-
believer would say, “I’m not going to accept consequences as a
standard. That’s what Christians would do, and I don’t want to
be a Christian.”
When God speaks, He does not contradict

Himself, and therefore we are not allowed to
contradict ourselves when we reason.
What about inconsistencies? Why do I insist that we are not

allowed to have inconsistencies in our worldview? Because I be-
lieve in a sovereign God who does not lie. Paul says, “Our word
to you is not Yes and No” (2 Cor. 1:18). When God speaks, He
does not contradict Himself, and therefore we are not allowed
to contradict ourselves when we reason.
But if you were an unbeliever and you took your unbeliev-
ing worldview seriously, you would say, “You can’t use inconsis-
tencies as a standard for evaluation. That assumes there is such
a thing as order, that there is some absolute, abstract, univer-
sal system of thinking that reflects God. But I don’t believe in
God, and so I don’t believe in logic.” But if he doesn’t believe in
logic, you can say to him, “Then contradictions are acceptable,
and so I can contradict what you’re saying, and you can’t rule
that out.”
The four criteria I have presented are ultimately a reflection

of a Christian view of thinking: checking for arbitrariness and
inconsistencies, examining the consequences, considering the
preconditions of intelligibility.
Reasoning in a Circle
Let’s come back to what we were saying before about circular

reasoning because it comes up here. “You Christians, when you
talk about the preconditions of intelligibility, are really just as-
suming the answer to your question.” And to that, we say, “Yes,
of course.”
If we didn’t assume that God is the precondition

of intelligibility while we are arguing with
people about the preconditions of intelligibility,
then God would not be the precondition of
intelligibility, would he?
If we didn’t assume that God is the precondition of intelli-

gibility while we are arguing with people about the precondi-
tions of intelligibility, then God would not be the precondition
of intelligibility, would he? We are not saying that God is the
precondition of intelligibility everywhere except when we are
talking about God and His authority.
The unbeliever says, “But then you’re reasoning in a circle,
and we don’t allow that!” But again, when you’re talking about
ultimate authorities, what’s the alternative? You either assume
your ultimate authority is ultimate or it isn’t your ultimate au-

thority. Of course, we reason in a circle—and so does everyone.
You either assume your ultimate authority is

ultimate or it isn’t your ultimate authority. Of
course, we reason in a circle—and so does
everyone.
When people argue in favor of logic, don’t you think they

assume the laws of logic while they are arguing about the laws
of logic? When people try to demonstrate the reliability of the
human eye, do they do that while keeping their eyes closed? No,
they use the human eye even while they’re trying to demon-
strate the usefulness of the human eye, which is to say that they
assume the very thing that is in question. That must always be
the case.
Now, does Christianity provide the preconditions of intel-
ligibility? Does God have self-attesting authority? Of course,
in the Christian story, He does. Our ultimate authority is the
personal God who is speaking to us in His Word. What does
God appeal to in order to show His authority? He says, “You
accept it because I said it.” That is perfectly consistent. And He
says, “If you do not, then your reasoning will be reduced to
foolishness.”
Here is Paul’s apologetic in 1 Corinthians 1:20 that deserves
mentioning again: “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe?
Where is the debater of this world? Hasn’t God made foolish
the wisdom of this world?” Bring the wisest, most academically
competent, most intellectual unbeliever you want, and Paul

says, “God makes foolish the wisdom of this world.”
Why? Because we have the preconditions of intelligibility. In
terms of our worldview, we can explain man, God, and so forth.
We can explain why there is dignity to human life, why logic is
necessary, why the scientific method is workable, and why there
are moral absolutes. But the unbeliever, no matter what his op-
tions are, cannot provide the preconditions of intelligibility.
Since that is true, when I put “preconditions of intelligibil-
ity” down on the checklist, a sharp unbeliever ought to say, “I’m
not falling for that. I know where that’s going because I don’t
have the preconditions for intelligibility and you Christians do.
I’m not going to let you use that as a standard, because then
you’ll be begging the question.”
Well, he’s right. I am begging the question. But what is the
alternative? When he says, “I reject the argument from pre-
conditions of intelligibility,” what he is saying is, “I don’t care
whether what I’m saying makes sense. It doesn’t have to be in-
telligent or intelligible.”
Once again, the four criteria I have given you are a reflection
of our Christian worldview. You can use them because unbeliev-
ers don’t want to be unreasonable, arbitrary, and so forth. But
if they were consistent, they would say, “We aren’t going to use
those standards because we don’t want to be Christians.”
W H Y WAS N’T R U S S E L L A C H R I ST I A N?
As we bring all of this to a close, let’s consider Bertrand Rus-

sell. In his “Why I Am Not a Christian,”3 Russell listed the
3.
four reasons he could not become a Christian. First, he said, the

Roman Catholic Church is mistaken to say that the existence
of God can be proved by unaided reason. He could refute the
Roman Catholic arguments, he said. Second, serious defects in
the character and teaching of Jesus show that He was not the
best and wisest of men but was actually morally inferior to Bud-
dha and Socrates. Third, people accept religion on emotional
grounds, particularly on the foundation of fear, and that is not
worthy of self-respecting human beings. And fourth, the Chris-
tian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral
progress in the world.
Arbitrariness
Do you see any internal tension for these reasons? What stands
out about these complaints is their arbitrariness and inconsis-
tency. Look at his second reason. He says that there are serious
defects in the character and teaching of Jesus, showing that He
is not the wisest of men. But that argument presupposes some
absolute standard of moral wisdom, by which you can grade Je-
sus against Buddha and Socrates and others, determining who is
inferior and who is superior. You can’t talk about inferiority and
superiority if you don’t have a standard of comparison.
Likewise, in his third reason, he says that people accept re-
ligion on the grounds of fear, which is not worthy of self-re-
specting human beings. That presupposes that there is a fixed
criterion for what is and what is not worthy of self-respecting
human beings.
Then, in his fourth reason, his complaint does not make
sense unless it is objectively wrong to be an enemy of moral
progress. If Christianity is an enemy of moral progress and that

is a reason to reject it, then it must be wrong to oppose moral
progress. But that presupposes a moral standard. In fact, the
very notion of progress assumes an absolute standard by which
you can grade advances and regressions.
If Russell had been reasoning and speaking in terms of the
Christian worldview, his attempt to assess the moral wisdom of
Jesus, human worthiness, and moral progress would be under-
standable and even expected, because Christians have a univer-
sal, objective, absolute standard of wisdom and morality and so
on in the revealed Word of God.
But obviously, Russell was not speaking as a Christian here.
We must ask him on what basis he is making his moral eval-
uation and judgment. In terms of what view of reality and
knowledge does he assume that there is an objective criterion
by which he can reject Jesus and accuse Christians of being en-
emies of moral progress?
Russell is embarrassingly arbitrary in this regard. He simply
takes it for granted, as an unargued philosophical bias, that there
is a moral standard to apply and that he could be its spokesman.
Inconsistency
It gets worse. By assuming the prerogative to pass moral

judgment, Russell evidenced that his own presuppositions fail
to comport with each other. He is inconsistent. In offering a
condemning value judgment against Christians, Russell en-
gaged in behavior that betrays the beliefs he professes elsewhere.
In his lecture, he says that this is a chance world that shows
no evidence of design. Laws, he says, are nothing more than
statistical averages of what has actually happened. He professes

that the physical world may have always existed. Human life
and intelligence came about in the Darwinian evolutionary
way. Our values and hopes are what “our intelligence can cre-
ate.” All of this is to say that human values are subjective. They
are fleeting, self-created. In short, they are relative.
Holding to this view of moral values, then, Russell is utterly
inconsistent when he assumes an altogether different view of
values by which he judges Jesus and Christians. One aspect of
what he says in his lecture stands in blatant contradiction to
what he says elsewhere. If all values are created by our intel-
ligence, then he has no right to use what he has created as a
judgment against Jesus or Christians.
The same kind of tension in his beliefs is evident when he
talks about the laws of science. On the one hand, he says that
these laws are merely descriptions of what has happened in the
past. On the other hand, he says that the laws of science provide
a basis for predicting what will happen in the future. But he
cannot have it both ways.
What about his appeal to unaided reason? Russell did not
agree with the Church of Rome about unaided reason being
able to prove the existence of God. But Russell should have
been a little more self-critical as a philosopher. He should have
asked himself, “Can unaided reason prove anything not only the
existence of God?”
Never mind just the existence of God. If reason is not aided
by supernatural revelation, then can we use the laws of science
to project from past experience into the future? If reason is not
aided by supernatural revelation, can we assume the abstract
laws of logic are absolutely universal? No.
If Russell had been critical of his own worldview, he would

have realized that it’s not just that the Roman Catholic Church
cannot prove God’s existence by unaided reason. You can’t
prove anything by unaided reason. And that means that Russell
couldn’t prove whether there is or is not a God by unaided rea-
son either.
Are there some prejudicial conjectures and logical fallacies
in Russell’s lecture? Perhaps the most obvious logical fallacy ev-
ident in the lecture is the way he readily shifts from an eval-
uation of Christian beliefs to a criticism of Christian believ-
ers. You must watch out for that. He knows that a Christian is
someone who believes certain things. If we don’t live up to the
things we profess to believe, that is a defect in us. But that does
not necessarily show any defect in what we believe.
Christians, Russell says, enforce narrow rules that make peo-
ple unhappy. He talks about the supposed psychological genesis
of our beliefs: emotion and fear that lead us in this direction.
When he says these things, he is indulging in the fallacy of ar-
guing ad hominem, arguing against the man rather than against
the beliefs held by the man.
There are other defects in his line of reasoning, too. He pre-
sumes to know the motivations of people who become Chris-
tians. How does he know that? Does Russell know a lot of
Christians and have some psychological occult power to see into
their hearts and tell us what their motives are? Russell cannot
show how he knows anything about the world, much less some-
thing as arcane as the psychological motives of people, most of
whom he has never met.
This leaves us face-to-face with the final and most devastating
fallacy in his case against Christianity, his use of double standards
in his reasoning. Russell wished to fault Christians for the emo-

tional factor in their faith commitment, and yet if you read his
lecture closely, you will notice that Russell himself evidences a
similar emotional factor in his own anti-Christian commitment.
Indeed, Russell openly appeals to emotional feelings of cour-
age, pride, freedom, and self-worth as the basis for his audience
to refrain from being Christians. He says, “Here is why I hate
you Christians. You believe in God out of fear.” And then he
turns around and he appeals to his audience and says, “Now
all of you be free and courageous and reject Christianity.” But
if one appeal to emotion is wrong (fear), the other appeal to
emotion is wrong (being free and courageous).
Similarly, Russell blames Christians for wickedness. Chris-
tians have been cruel. They are guilty of wars and inquisitions
and so on. But he doesn’t pause for a moment to reflect on the
surpassing cruelty and violence of non-Christians throughout
history. Why doesn’t he talk about Genghis Khan or Vlad the
Impaler or the Marquis de Sade or a whole host of other butch-
ers who were not known for their Christian profession? All of
that is conveniently swept under the carpet in Russell’s disdain
for the moral errors of the Christian church. If he is going to
be honest and not engage in special pleading or double stan-
dards, he should not reject Christianity any more than he rejects
non-Christianity based on the moral faults of their adherents.
Russell’s lecture, then, reveals to us that even the intellectu-
ally elite of this world are refuted by their own errors as they op-
pose the truth of the Christian faith. There is no credibility to a
challenge to Christianity that evidences prejudicial conjecture,
logical fallacies, unargued philosophical bias, double standards,
behavior that betrays professed beliefs, and presuppositions that
do not comport with each other. Why wasn’t Bertrand Russell

a Christian? Given his weak effort at criticism, I think we must
conclude that it was for less than intellectual reasons.
GLOSSARY
Begging the Question (Circular Reasoning): Assuming the

conclusion that you are trying to prove. If your friend asks
how you know that you can trust anything Bob says and you
reply, “Because Bob told me so,” you would be answering
the question based on an assumption that what Bob says is
trustworthy, the very thing you set out to prove, and your
friend would probably not find your argument persuasive.
When it comes to ultimate authorities, however, it is im-
possible to avoid assuming the authority of your ultimate
authority in any attempt to prove its authority. For example,
the person who claims reason is his ultimate authority must
assume the authority of reason to start with.
1. “You can know things only by observation. You can’t ob-

serve God or the supernatural and therefore you can’t know
them.” Evaluate this argument.
2. If we don’t accept that God can authorize His own revela-
tion, then whose authority are we left with? By whose au-
thority can we evaluate anything?
3. Unbelievers charge Christians with circular reasoning. Do
unbelievers also reason in a circle? Is there a non-circular
argument for any ultimate authority?
4. Summarize Antony Flew’s “invisible gardener” story. How

does Flew think it shows that all religious language is mean-
ingless and pointless? How would you respond to Flew’s
argument?
5. Do all forms of argument for the existence of the God of the
Bible require us to rely on unaided reason? What is the dif-
ference between the Christian and the non-Christian view
of reason?
6. What is the relationship between the four criteria for eval-
uating arguments presented in this book and the Christian
worldview?
7. Does God have the authority to bear witness to Himself?
What does God appeal to in order to show His authority?
When we talk this way, are we arguing in a circle?
8. Why wasn’t Bertrand Russell a Christian? What is your eval-
uation of his arguments?
GLOSSARY
Ad hominem fallacy: An ad hominem argument is one that

argues against a person instead of arguing against what he
believes or the argument he is presenting (e.g., “You believe
that only because you were poorly educated”; “He’s a Marxist
and we know how bad Marxists are”; “I could never be a Cal-
vinist because Calvin did some awful things”; “Christianity
cannot be true because Christians have persecuted people”).
Apologetics: Does not mean to apologize for being a Christian.
“The application of Scripture to unbelief (including the un-
belief that remains in the Christian). The study of how to give
to inquirers a reason for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15).”1
Autonomy: To think autonomously (Greek: auto (self ) + nomos
(law) = a law unto one’s self ) means that the individual is
“subject only to his own criteria of truth, free to ignore those
of God.”2 J. I. Packer writes the following: “Man was not
created autonomous, that is, free to be a law to himself, but
theonomous, that is, bound to keep the law of his Maker.”3
1. John M. Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief (Phillipsburg,

NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2015), 289–290
2. John M. Frame, Apologetics, 48.
3. J. I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Carol
191
Begging the Question (Circular Reasoning): Assuming the

conclusion that you are trying to prove. If your friend asks
how you know that you can trust anything Bob says, and
you reply, “Because Bob told me so,” you would be answer-
ing the question on the basis of an assumption that what
Bob says is trustworthy, the very thing you set out to prove,
and your friend would probably not find your argument per-
suasive. When it comes to ultimate authorities, however, it is
impossible to avoid assuming the authority of your ultimate
authority in any attempt to prove its authority. For example,
the person who claims reason is his ultimate authority must
assume the authority of reason to start with.
Behaviorism: The psychological doctrine that says human be-
ings act as they are conditioned to act. Given a certain stim-
ulus, there will be a certain response—and people can be
trained to respond in a certain predictable way to a certain
stimulus (“stimulus-response conditioning”). The behavior-
ist says that all human behavior is the theoretically predict-
able outcome of previous conditioning, so that people are, as
it were, advanced white rats.
Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes, includ-
ing how we know or learn things.
Cultural relativism: The belief that there are no universal moral
principles, so that it is invalid for one culture to condemn
that activities or beliefs of another culture.
Deconstructionism: Deconstructionism, associated with phi-
losophers such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, is noto-
riously hard to define, not least because Derrida himself used
the term in a variety of ways. Applied to literary theory, de-
Stream, IL: Tyndale House, [1993] 2001), 91.
Glossary 193
constructionism is often taken to mean that no text has an ob-

jective meaning. Every text has more than one interpretation
and those interpretations contradict each other. Every reading
is, therefore, a misreading and every interpretation a misinter-
pretation, a failure to establish finally what the text is saying.
Dualism: The view that there are two types of reality: mind and
matter, or spirit and body.
Empiricism: The view that sense experience is the foundation
of human knowledge. Seeing is believing.
Epicureanism: Argues that pleasure is the chief good in life.
Hence, Epicurus advocated living in such a way as to derive
the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one’s life-
time, yet doing so moderately in order to avoid the suffering
incurred by overindulgence in such pleasure.
Epistemology: Theory of knowledge. What is the nature and
what are the limits of human knowledge? How do you know
what you know?
Existentialism: Nothing governs what you will be. You come
into this world as an existent and then you choose what you
will be: “Existence precedes essence.” Nothing determines
your essence from outside. Jean-Paul Sartre: “What is meant
here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first
of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only
afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist con-
ceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing.
Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will
have made what he will be. . . . There is no human nature,
since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what
he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills
himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is noth-
ing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first prin-
ciple of existentialism.”4
Genetic Fallacy: An attempt to refute or defend something
based on its origin or source or historical associations, rather
than on the merits of the case itself.
For instance, someone might argue that Christmas trees
are pagan because pagans used to bring trees into their houses
in the winter. But even if that is the origin of the Christmas
tree—a point that may be debatable historically—it does not
prove that having a Christmas tree in your house today is
somehow pagan. Why do people have Christmas trees to-
day? Not because they worship them, nor for any reason as-
sociated with paganism, but simply because they like them.
The Bible tells us that Cain’s wicked offspring were lead-
ers in blacksmith work, agribusiness, and the development
and use of musical instruments (Gen. 4), but the origins of
those practices among the ungodly did not mean that it was
wrong for God’s people to use, benefit from, and enjoy these
practices.
Likewise, the fact that a belief or practice had good ori-
gins does not mean that the belief is correct or the practice
is good. The origins or historical associations of a view or ac-
tivity do not determine whether it is true or false, righteous
or wicked.
Hedonism: The belief that the chief good in life is pleasure, so
that the purpose of life is the pursuit of one’s own pleasure.
Qualitative Hedonism (Epicureanism) emphasizes living
in such a way that you can derive the greatest amount of
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism,” Existentialism from Dosto-

yevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Meridian Books, 1989), 290–291.
Glossary 195
pleasure possible during one’s lifetime, which requires mod-

eration in order to avoid suffering that results from overin-
dulgence in such pleasure. Quantitative Hedonism aims at
getting as much pleasure—or pleasure as often—as possible:
“You only live once, so grab all the pleasures you can get.”
Induction: Taking something we have experienced in the past
and projecting it into the future. For instance, we know that
the sun has risen in the past and therefore we conclude that
it will rise tomorrow morning.
Instrumental theories of the good: Various approaches to eth-
ics that have in common the view that good is defined by the
consequences that are brought about by an action or attitude.
Actions are good if they help you reach the desired conse-
quence. These theories of good and evil are sometimes also
called consequential.
Intrinsic evidence: Evidence or proof of the truth of something
from within that thing itself. Bertrand Russell suggests that
we might accept induction on the basis of intrinsic evidence,
that is, because it is self-evident that induction works, with-
out the need of any other proof.
Materialism: The belief that there is an infinite number of bits
of reality, but they’re all made of matter. Reality is made
up of physical stuff, and that physical stuff is broken down
into smaller and smaller bits of matter. That is the view that
comes closest to the common outlook of our culture today.
It is the prevailing view in the sciences in the university, and
it’s what most people take for granted until you start pressing
them on the implications of their worldview.
Metaphysics: The study of the nature of reality. What lies be-
yond the physical world? What is the nature of the world in
which we live? Where did it come from? What is its struc-

ture? What things are real? Does God exist? Does man have
a soul? Is there a life after death?
Naturalism: Also known as “atheism, scientific materialism,
and secular humanism. . . . The most fundamental belief
from which all others flow is that nature or matter is all that
exists. It has always existed, or it came into existence from
nothing. There is nothing outside or before nature, i.e., the
material universe that is studied by modern science. There is
no God and no supernatural.”5
Pantheism: From two Greek words, pan meaning “all” and theos
meaning “God.” According to Scripture, God is distinct and
separate from His creation: “In the beginning God created
the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). If the cosmos were to
go out of existence, God would still exist. Pantheism teaches
that all is one, thus, everything is God. All things make up
what some people claim is “God.” If the cosmos ceased to
exist, God would cease to exist.
Philosophy: Technically, the love (philo) of wisdom (sophia).
As an academic discipline, philosophy is the study of the
fundamental source and nature of being, knowledge, reality,
existence, and moral standards.
Pragmatism: The approach to philosophy that watches all these
other schools of thought argue and says, “Who cares?” To
the pragmatist, what is true is what works, what results in
success in his endeavors.
Presupposition: “A ‘presupposition’ is not just any assumption
in an argument, but a personal commitment that is held at
5. Terry Mortenson, “The Religion of Naturalism,” Answers in Genesis (May

5, 2017): https://bit.ly/2UrBDxD.
Glossary 197
the most basic level of one’s network of beliefs. Presuppo-

sitions form a wide-ranging, foundational perspective (or
starting point) in terms of which everything else is inter-
preted and evaluated. As such, presuppositions have the
greatest authority in one’s thinking, being treated as one’s
least negotiable beliefs and being granted the highest immu-
nity to revision.”6
Presuppositional Apologetics: An approach to the defense of
the faith that recognizes that all people think on the basis of
foundational commitments and assumptions (presupposi-
tions) that affect how they interpret the facts and what they
consider evidence for their views, argues for the faith on the
basis of the Triune God’s revelation of Himself in Scripture
and in all of creation, and demonstrates that no other pre-
supposition provides support for knowledge, logic, science,
ethics—in short, that no system, except one built on God’s
revelation, can make sense of anything.
Presuppositional tensions: Presuppositions that don’t harmo-
nize with each other. For instance, a person may believe that
everyone should pursue as much pleasure as they can and
at the same time believe that some behavior is wrong and
should be stopped, even if it brings pleasure to the one who
is doing it. These two basic beliefs conflict with each other.
Though the person holds both beliefs, they cannot both be
true.
Problem of evil: If God is all-powerful and all-knowing and
good, why does evil exist? The problem is presented as an
argument against the existence of an all-powerful, all-know-
6. Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg,

NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1998), 2, note 4.
ing, good God. If He knows all things, including how to

prevent evil, and He is powerful enough to prevent evil but
He lets evil happen, then He must not be good. But if He is
good but can’t prevent evil, no matter how much He wishes
to, then He must not be all-powerful or He must not know
how to be.
Public approval or disapproval: The favorable or unfavorable
opinion of other people. The question raised in the book is
whether right and wrong, good and evil, are determined by
what people—or the majority of people or some commu-
nity of people—like or dislike, what meets with their favor
or their disfavor. If good is whatever the majority of people
like, then you could never say that the majority of people did
something evil.
Punctuated Equilibrium: A new theory of evolutionary prog-
ress to explain how the fossil record is devoid of needed mas-
sive numbers of transitional forms. The fossil record shows
equilibrium: stability and continuity. It does not suggest
that there was transitional development from one simple life
form so that it gradually gets more complex over time so that
it evolves from one species to another higher species or kind.
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge claimed that evolu-
tion must have taken place in short spurts, punctuated with
new life forms, rather than over long eons of time. And if it
took place in short spurts, there wouldn’t have been enough
time to leave fossil remains during these evolutionary hot
periods.
Rationalism: From the Latin ratio, “reason.” (1) The view that
human reason is the final judge of what’s true and false, right
and wrong. (2) The philosophical position that human rea-
Glossary 199
son is to be trusted above human sense-experience. Ratio-

nalism holds that something is proven when it logically uses
clear and distinct ideas.
Reductio ad absurdum: Reducing your opponent’s argument
to absurdity. Since a premise that leads to a false conclu-
sion must be false, if you can draw out the implications of
your opponent’s premises and show that they lead to conclu-
sions that are false and absurd, then you have shown that his
premises must be false, thereby refuting his argument.
Spiritual Atomism: The view held by Gottfried Leibniz that
reality is made up of an infinite number of bits of some-
thing—not matter, but energy or mind. Leibniz called these
things monads.
Subjective Idealism: The view presented by George Berkeley
that says that something exists only so long as it is perceived.
Berkeley said that things continue to exist even when we
can’t perceive them because God always perceives them.
Textual Criticism: “Textual criticism is the science and art that
seeks to determine the most reliable wording of a text.”7
There are some differences in wording between the various
manuscripts of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic
and the New Testament in Greek, many of them minor and
some more significant. Textual criticism involves examining
these differences and evaluating them in order to determine
which wording is most likely the original one.
Transcendental proof: A transcendental proof argues on the
basis of the preconditions of intelligibility: What must be
true for something to make sense? It demonstrates the truth
7. Paul D. Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible: Its

History, Methods, and Results (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 24.
of a claim by showing that the contrary—or the denial of that

claim—is impossible. For example, if denying the Christian
view of the world leaves us without laws of logic, without
morality, without science—without knowledge and without
any way to prove anything—then the Christian view of the
world must be true.
Utilitarianism: The belief that one ought to maximize happi-
ness in this world for the greatest number of people without
regard to moral commands or a fixed standard to determine
what is ultimately good or bad. The utilitarian says you
should do what is in the best interest of the most people. The
greatest happiness for the greatest number is what should
govern your free will. You should do whatever will be con-
ducive to the good of everyone, as much as you possibly can.

The Impossibility of The Contrary - Without God You Can't Prove Anything (Greg L. Bahnsen)

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THE IMPOSSIBILITY

Published by The American Vision, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

Cover design and typesetting: Kyle Shepherd

Printed in the United States of America

Paperback ISBN: 978–0–9840641–4–4

Published in the United States of America

1 Answering Fools According to Their Folly. . . . . . . .1

ing in the simplest of terms of what the fatal flaw is of making

We believe in God—and defend God—the same way C. S.

When we go to look at the different worldviews that atheists

— From Dr. Greg Bahnsen’s Opening Statement

Dr. Bahnsen made a bold and shocking statement that would

While unbelievers function within a rational and moral

[Cornelius] Van Til says the spiritually dead man cannot in

If religious skeptics have forsaken biblical presuppositions,

answer is simple. Unbelievers are philosophically schizophrenic.

Some few years ago friends whose judgment I greatly respect

2. Rousas J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press,

Anti-Christian worldviews are held together by Band-Aids

4. Robert H. Bork, “Preface,” Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction:

But who is a fool? Sometimes we get a little misled, thinking the

The fool builds his house upon sand and, as

The Bible is not using the word “fool” in a name-calling way.

The first step is to “Answer not a fool according to his folly.”

and moral values. It makes sense out of the dignity of man. It

What happens is that the unbeliever has a

The minute an unbeliever says, “You have all

In fact, the minute an unbeliever says, “You have all those

Please understand that I’m not telling you how to speak to

Until someone goes beyond mere opinion

Why do you believe that quinine relieves malaria? Why do

The second form of arbitrariness that you should be looking for

If everyone creates his own reality, then Hitler

God is not a smorgasbord. God doesn’t say,

be the age of enlightenment for you.” After you hold to your

When someone tells you that the truth is

from a college and still not know how to think, to research, to

Apologetics: Does not mean to apologize for being a Christian.

belief that remains in the Christian). The study of how to give

1. Are we being insulting if we think the unbeliever is a fool?

2. John M. Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief (Phillips-

4. Why must we not answer a fool according to his folly?

In the previous chapter, we began looking at ways in which un-

The third form of arbitrariness is ignorant or prejudicial conjec-

educated, who will take the offensive against Christianity before

Most of the arguments you hear against

For instance, the Bible was written hundreds of years ago,

To unbelievers who reason in this way, we must not tire of

LIKE ANY OTHER BOOK?

What is the prejudice of the unbeliever when he throws this ar-

THE MISSING EVIDENCE

concrete evidence that some medieval monk tampered with the

When they attack Christianity, they have to

The third indication of prejudice in the criticism of this unbeliever

Does that seem reasonable to you? The person who makes

DID JESUS LIVE?

When someone says we have no evidence for

Such criticism doesn’t show familiarity with the secular allu-

There was a time when critics of the Old Testament ridiculed it

2. Tacitus, Annals 15.44, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (1876),

You need to learn to expose the philosophical

The fourth form to watch out for is unargued philosophical