Defense of the Faith - Logic & Worldviews
Randy Peterman · Jan 18, 2015
Defense of the Faith, No. 03
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492645318318

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

This is the second time my dad and I have taught this class, as most of you are probably aware. And as I was preparing for this lesson, I looked at my original handout, and this is a relatively well-modified version of that original handout. a syllogism or a logical construct about Jessica being pregnant with Evelyn, who is nine and a quarter or something now. So that was an invalid syllogism at this point in time, which is good. So it's nice that in almost a decade's time that some things have changed, but it's also good that a lot of what is in here is still true.

I have a few definitions. I always like to start out with definitions and vocabulary at the beginning of lessons, especially like this. If you're doing verse-by-verse exposition, you may be in the midst of a context that you don't need to do definitions. But anytime you're studying topics like this, it's good to run into definitions and go over them consistently so that everybody's on the same page.

We're not necessarily going to spend a lot of time talking about the first two vocabulary words on here, but it's good to know what they mean. If you go to the Christian bookstore, there's a study Bible called the Inductive Study Bible. Some of you may have seen them. I even own it. But it actually is good to know what that means.

So inductive reasoning is reasoning from detailed facts to general principles. Can anybody think of an example of going from detailed facts to general principles? If I tell you that Wayne has a train in his backyard, that is a detailed fact. Can we induce or use inductive reasoning to come up with some general principles?

Everybody has a train in their backyard. That might be a false logical conclusion, but yeah, it's possible to take a general principle and then make a generalization out of it, or make a specific principle and turn it into a generalization. So inductive reasoning, while not always false, can be interesting. He's got a model train, so it's good. But deductive reasoning is going from general to the particular, from general things to a smaller set of details and facts.

When I study the Bible, I use both of these methods. Yeah, there's reasons to use both. So what would be an example of that, just so that everybody understands? Almost every passage, there's a half dozen different interpretations at least. And so what I like to do is to look at all the details and see which conclusion I come to. And then, out of all the conclusions people have reached, see which ones I can eliminate. And if I arrive at the same conclusion, it's a cross-check.

And then you can also go to other passages in scripture, so you get the large general consensus of passages and then come to a conclusion of specific doctrine. So like identification would be a general principle? Yeah, but we can look at the verses...

So an example of inductive reasoning being misused is how the Mormons baptize people for the dead. There's one verse that talks about baptism of the dead, and so the Mormons say, ah, we'll just baptize everybody for the dead, and then everyone gets an in into Mormonism. It's maybe the wrong direction of taking things, and there's not a broader set of scriptures, but that's the way they do that. Is inductive reasoning sometimes faulty?

We're going to go into logical fallacies in the next section. Both of them can be misused. I just gave two bad examples for both of them, and we're going to try to hopefully, as we go through the logical fallacies, it will become clear how they should not be used.

So we'll look for the counterfeits. We'll say it that way. My dad mentioned that there's two ways that he uses both of those when he does Bible study. If all of us are being consistent about our study techniques, we'll use both of them. So using inductive reasoning when we're studying, we go from detailed facts to general principles.

If I look at one verse And it says that I, for example, 2 Corinthians 3.18, that we should be beholding the Lord. That one verse tells me some general principles, that my mind should be focused on things. But then I can use deductive reasoning to look at other verses and collect a broader set of verses that might say that, and then go back down into some of the facts and the details by looking at a broad set of data. You might form hypotheses more readily with inductive reasoning and then take that hypothesis and use deductive reasoning to confirm it.

Is that a little clearer? OK. The next item, and we'll talk about this in more detail this morning, is the worldview, the way one interprets life, its meaning, and how one reacts or thinks one would react to scenarios, one's paradigm with which they operate. So we'll go into more detail on that in a little bit.

And then the last one is the syllogism. And this is a very common presentation of logic. Some of us in this class are taking a Greek class as well. And Craig did some really good syllogisms. One of them that he used was, I can say that I am in Denver, and I can say I'm in Colorado. So the syllogism is that you have proposition A and proposition B, but they may not necessarily be reversible. If you say I'm in Colorado, that doesn't mean you're in Denver. Yeah? Tell me if this is a syllogism.

Okay. All fish swim. Okay. I swim. Therefore, I'm a fish. That's a false syllogism. And that's how you can use a syllogism to see if the order of things can bring equality. And we're going to go into three laws or three core rules of logic here in the next section. It has to be on. Okay, there we go. Before we do this, I have a quick logic test. This is so that everybody has a chance to smile before their brains hurt, okay? So this is my first thing. I see that and it drives me nuts because logically if you're putting that together, you wouldn't do it that way, right?

So those of you on listening to this, there's a picture that you can't see, but it's someone put something back in the wrong place. So here we ordered one pepperoni pizza, and so the pizza place brought him... Actually, the good news is that if you look closely enough, you can see there's pepperoni under the cheese, so everything is good. But the waiter had a good sense of humor.

So this one, pretend to push a ball. What happens? And the student circled, the ball stays where it is. Why did they circle C? Because you're imagining it. The ball wouldn't move if you just imagined moving it. The teacher circled C and said he was wrong. The ball would roll away from you. I disagree with the teacher.

All lions are cats. Not all cats are lions. So there's a corollary there. Okay, so let's talk about logic. Here's three core rules of logic. The law of non-contradiction, and stop me if any of this gets confusing or complicated or you want to articulate something, because sometimes going through these, you feel like you're being tricked or duped or following things is hard. This is like algebra, okay? So now that I said algebra, nobody panic, because it's not going to hurt. So the law of non-contradiction, A does not equal not A, okay? The two things cannot be equal if they're two different things. The law of identity, A is A, it binds names and definitions.

Have you ever talked with somebody? And you've used the same word but meant different things. I'm certain that if you've ever been in any close relationship that's happened, whether it's marriage or friendship, there have been times when your experience leads you to have a different definition and or a wrong definition because you're misinformed and it leads to confusion. But we want to have very specific names and values.

A word and its definition is consistent. The third one is the law of excluded middle. You'll forgive me, I use the word binary. I'm a programmer, so that made sense to me. But to explain it more clearly, something is A or not A, but not in between. This prevents two opposites from being true in their comparison with one another, just like rule number one. You know, one of the things to point out here is this is Western logic. This is Western logic, you're right. This is Western logic, and in Eastern logic, These things are all different. You can have something be contradictory. That is true.

For example, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Part of Zen Buddhism is actually the idea that you would intentionally embrace a contradiction. And I find that fascinating in a sort of hypothetical sense, but it's not very practical in my day-to-day life. It's one of the reasons that modern science didn't come out of the East.

That's true, yeah. Alright, so here are some practical examples of where we apply logic daily when we're driving. How many of you have ever, when you're driving, seen other people, certainly not you, apply a lack of logic to their driving? Like, that light is red, I think I shall go now. Really, really problematic. When we're talking, we use logic all the time. It's actually really important that we be able to take in words and understand their meaning and then derive sense to then engage in a conversation or comprehend and understand what somebody is saying.

I'm listening to a book on memory and memorization right now, and the author talks about the most forgetful man. He has two kinds of amnesia. And in his interviewing the guy and researching the guy, he literally, he'll read the newspaper, he got amnesia as an adult, he'll read the newspaper and by the end of the sentence he forgot what the first words are that he read. And often you'll have a conversation with him and you can ask him the same question over and over and over and he will have forgotten that you asked him that same question the last time. He has no short-term memory, and he has no ability to create new long-term memory. So it's pretty traumatic, but it also makes communication very difficult.

He learns about the Internet every day and forgets about the Internet every day. He reads the newspaper. What's this internet thing? And by the time he would be able to go to get a dictionary to look up what the internet is, he's already forgotten what the word was that he was going to look up. It's traumatic for him. He's married. It's traumatic for his wife. That sounds highly dangerous.

Mathematics. Obviously, we're used to mathematics. And I used the illustration of algebra earlier. Archaeology, we'd use it there. History, science, music, but definitely not politics. That'll get you in trouble. Yes? I'm being sarcastic, by the way. Theoretically, we should apply it there.

Observing from the outside, it would seem illogical, but being on the inside and being of the circle in the politics, it would seem logical to them, right? It becomes part of their whole approach or perspective, and it's tied into their worldview, that they behave inconsistently. if they're being selfish and basically I would use the word solipsistic or thinking that they're the only one that matters and selfish in the universe. But yeah, I put it in there struck out as a joke really, but politics often is very inconsistent and illogical because the pattern has been set, the trend has been put forth. Yeah, if you start with a wrong logical assumption, you'll certainly you can use it using. the inductive reasoning, you can inductively reason your way to all kinds of problems if you start with a false premise.

That's a good point there. All right, so let's look at some fallacies, and I've actually got quite a few of these, but they're ones I've run into. And as later on we go into dealing with cults and dealing with people with different worldviews, it's good to be able to identify these fallacies when they bring them up to you and they come to you and they tell you, here's a false thing. And you know it's false, but they haven't thought about where the falsehood comes from and what it is.

So the first one is the slippery slope logical fallacy. Now, this is sometimes not a fallacy, but we're going to look at it in its fallacious form, okay? The slippery slope argument is if we let A happen, Z will happen. Therefore, we should never let A happen. Okay, the fallacy form of this argument is based on presumption and not facts. Not all slippery slope arguments are fallacious or fallacies.

The example is if we let our children eat ice cream for dinner, we'll have to let them eat ice cream for dinner every day and then they'll become diabetic. So therefore, we should never let our children have ice cream for dinner. Okay, so those are, you can see that it kind of, there's some bad assumptions being made and it develops quickly. Just because you have ice cream once for dinner doesn't mean you have to have it for dinner every night.

As a kid, that would have been a dream. As an adult, I see the error of that thinking. Next one here is the straw man. Many of you have probably seen this one in real life pretty regularly. The straw man argument misrepresents a position to defeat that position. For example, and when I've talked with lots of people who are atheists or agnostic, they'll say the God of the Bible kills a bunch of people and therefore is not a God of love. Therefore I cannot believe in the Bible because I believe that God is love, or I don't believe in any God that would do that. So they have this misrepresentation of God. He did kill some people, right? Did God order Israel to wipe out certain nations? But did he just kill people? Was he just murdering people?

That's out of context. It's a misrepresentation. That's a dangerous problem. The next one here is false causality. This one you can read in the newspapers almost every day. False causality is a common sight in the media. I spelled sight wrong. It is easy to misrepresent a relationship between two things and assert that one causes the other. Two things may be a related subset of a greater set without being causal.

For example, children who eat breakfast do better in school. So, does eating breakfast cause children to do better in school? Can we prove that? Say what? Not necessarily. What if the kids whose parents make them eat breakfast before they go to school have a better home life and their parents make them do homework so they do better in school? If you look at a subset of the data, you can come up with eating breakfast causes children to... Always. Always. And so there's been big government pushes actually to have breakfast available to the kids, not just school lunch, but school breakfast, because somebody said, hey, eating breakfast, there is a causation rather than correlation.

So that's important. Stan? And Sam, they say a lot of the studies, like for vitamins and nutrition and all these other things, they would fall within that also, right? There can be, and that's the problem. Okay, so that actually gets into a whole side topic of research, best practices in medicine. One of the problems in in research, and Bob Eccle, if he listens to this, he's going to kill me. No, I'm just kidding. I think he and I have actually had a conversation about this.

It's very difficult in human beings to isolate very specific reactions. For example, let's say we want to see how does sucralose, the sugar substitute, impact human beings. Let's see what happens if we feed Stan just sucralose for a year. You know, no water or you can have some water but it's only going to be three liters or some number and sucralose for a year. Well, that would kill you.

So doing the research is difficult because you actually eat a lot of things. So the symptoms could come from the sucralose but they could also come from the other things you're eating. And that's why when you see those pharmaceutical ads and it says can cause and it's like the very thing they just told you it's going to cure. It's because when you take the pill and the first day you still have that symptom, you have to report that you have that symptom, and so they have to say it can cause it, because they don't know. It's complicated. And I'm sorry I just brought up pharmaceuticals. I worked at a pharmacy in high school, though, so I talked to the pharmacist about it.

Okay, so false causality. The next one is appeal to emotion. Sometimes the appeal to emotion is one of those things where you'll hear people say, well, don't you want to feel better or don't you want to be part of our group. The bandwagon appeal is very similar to this. It's basically manipulation, if we're honest. Most of advertising is based on that. Yeah. You deserve it, or you'll feel better. This is one of my worst favorite evangelistic moves. Here's the example.

You should become a Christian because Jesus makes you feel happy, good, and loved all the time. I wish that that never got spoken out loud, but I have really, truly heard people preach the gospel and say, you know, Jesus paid for your sins, and if you become a believer, you'll feel good. He'll make your life happy. And then somebody becomes a believer, and they run into their first trial, and they're like, well, that failed.

I must either not really be a Christian, or this must not work. And I had a high school English teacher in my junior year who said, I tried Christianity for about three months. and it didn't work. I didn't feel happy. It was not a good presentation of the gospel, but it's also not a good logical... it's not a logical appeal at all.

The next one is the ad hominem attack. This one is one of my favorites because this is where you get... when you open up the newspaper or the internet or watch the news and some televangelist or some famous preacher or some pastor anywhere has got caught in some drug scandal or sex scandal or both or something worse, then we start saying, see, Christians are all hypocrites, they're all liars, they're all fakes, they're all frauds. That's an ad hominem attack. It's to attack the personality, not the fact or the truth or the doctrine. Does Jesus represent Christianity or does Joel Osteen represent Christianity? If it's Joel Osteen, we're hosed. Because we can think of dozens of reasons why his life and doctrines are not consistent with scripture.

Next one here, and this is related, is the appeal to authority. The opposite of that. So someone appeals that this person believes it, therefore you should too. Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, therefore you should consider Scientology, because nobody that successful could be wrong. We use that also in marketing. Michael Jordan wears these shoes, and look how good he is. If you wear these shoes, you will be amazing at basketball.

It's that same line of reasoning. Arguments from silence. Now this one is a two-edged sword. So arguments of silence can be used by either side of an argument. I've seen both sides do it. So, if something is lacking in presentation or information, therefore it must be true or it isn't true, depending on who's holding the position. Here's an example.

In fact, on the 7th of this month, I was at the bus stop and I missed my bus. And a Jehovah's Witness came up to me and started talking to me, and I have never wanted a bus to get here early, more than I did at that moment. Because the next bus really, really needed to get there, or the old one needed to be late.

Either one would have worked, just as long as I got away from the Jehovah's Witness guy, because he was tenacious. But the Jehovah's Witness told me that since Jesus was never quoted as saying the literal words, I am God, that Jesus was simply just a man. He was not God, because Jesus never said, I am God.

We'll get into how you can counter that a little later on, either in this lesson or in the next one. If there's time, we'll do it this one. Otherwise, we'll do it later. Next one, loaded question. This one is one of my favorites. So the loaded question posits something that's false. in the statement to get you to buy in, and once you've bought in, you've already lost the argument. For example, have you ever heard the lawyer cross-examine the man? When did you stop beating your wife? You've heard people talk about that. It's kind of a joke, but since wife beating's involved, it's not that funny.

The issue is it already presumes a false statement, and if you begin to respond to the false statement, you've already validated it. So it kind of goes along another one that's similar. Can God make something so big that God can't pick it up? If God is all-powerful, then we'll make this logical loop. But it's a loaded question or a loaded statement. It's not actually a logical statement, other than to negate somebody's position. And we're almost done here, just in case you were worried. Ambiguity, and we briefly touched on this, ambiguity often comes in the form of word definitions being used when not agreed upon by those discussing a topic.

So when the Jehovah's Witness says, I'm a Christian too, they don't identify Christ as the Son of God, part of the Trinity, and they don't see Christ's work on the cross as securing eternal salvation. But they follow Christ, in air quotes. How many of you have run into a Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness throughout your life, and they have said, oh, I'm a Christian too? Because they love to do that, because then you go, oh, we can be frenzies, and we'll hold hands and sing Kumbaya, and it'll be great, and then you discover their doctrine is jacked up. But they use the same words. They just meant different things with those words.

Alright, any questions about fallacious logic? Because I really wanted to focus on the false. the false elements because the true elements are the ones that we kind of learn to develop over our lifetime and we become adults and we start to learn to think logically. Like when the stove has the burner on, if I touch it, it's hot. And we go, hey, that's a logical truth and we're okay with that. But what we often miss are the ways that false arguments are put out in front of us, often daily, to try to get us to to think differently and be manipulated to a negative consequence.

Is everybody ready to enter a debate? No? Morgan? Could you explain a little bit further the loaded question? Sure. Okay, so the loaded question, it presents a false statement embedded into the question that once you answer it, you've accepted the falsehood. Don't you believe something.

For example, if I talk to a Calvinist, I know that it's going to make them angry, but I always ask them this anyways. I say, don't you believe that God already picked who's going to hell, and so why do you bother evangelizing? It's a loaded question, because the truth is that it incriminates them. It puts them in a bad situation, because the truth is that scripture tells them to evangelize anyways, but the logical conclusion from their position leads them to having, but it's a loaded question. I loaded the gun, I handed it to them, I waited for them to fire it. And then they're in trouble because they just incriminated themselves or they admitted guilt or party to the situation. It may be, but it usually represents things in an extreme form or in a false form.

And so not all Calvinists are seven-point Calvinists, as I jokingly call what I just described, where God also chooses his going to hell. Many Calvinists hold the position that God chose those who believed, but they don't say that he also chose those to go to hell. But by making that extreme statement, it's now a loaded question. Now, some people will say yes, and they won't flinch, and they'll think that they're perfectly justified in that, because God made them perfectly justified in that, because they're hyper-Calvinists.

Is that better, or am I just talking a lot? Loaded questions are really often used to get people to feel awkward or to feel wrong. It's very manipulative. There's just no two ways about it. So that's a brief look at logical fallacies in dealing with logic when someone presents you with a proposition. Everybody's familiar with propositions. My dad brought that up earlier. Truth statements are propositions. Jesus is the Son of God is a proposition. It is a statement of truth, but it can be tested, right? We can look at scriptures and we can see what that is. With logic, people like to manipulate the truth statements or put them in specific ways.

Spin, when we watch politics, I try not to mention politics too much because I don't want to spend too much energy on it, but spin in politics is often a using either a loaded question, where we're going to make you look stupid, or it's going to be using something where we redefine the terms, or they're going to do something where they don't even answer the question at all, which is really good. Listen for the words, that's a good question. If you hear the four words, that's a good question, almost never does the politician actually answer it. They answer a different question that they restate, and then they go in.

So just for whatever that's worth. Alright, so the next section here we have on worldviews, and worldviews are tightly related to logic. I want to take a look at scripture. I apologize for not having spent more time looking at scripture with this logic section. In ten years, when we teach it again, I think I will add more scripture in there.

Because Paul, if you look at the book of Romans, is actually very logical. He follows things through, he makes these propositional statements, and then he uses reasoning to extrapolate. Or sometimes he will quote a broad set of things, like Romans chapter 4, where he talks about Abraham saved by faith. David's saved by faith, and he goes through, and so he'll use both those kinds of reasoning.

But let's take a look at Romans 1.26-32. This picks up from where my dad left off last week.

For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions, and their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. And in the same way, also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire towards one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to their depraved mind to do those things which are not proper. And I'm actually going to stop there for now. God gave mankind over to his depraved mind. That's a bummer for mankind in the sense that what's the consequence of living and breathing and thinking in a depraved mind? depravity. So what we end up getting, the conclusion or the result of the depravity is more depravity and more wickedness. And Paul outlines even more disobedience.

But last week, what did my dad say when he talked about, it's in Romans 1.18 where he talks about suppression of truth. Anybody remember what was said about the suppression of truth? It's that first step, but the truth is there. So, once you suppress the truth of Scripture, once you suppress the truth of our knowledge of God, then you get divergent worldviews. It was really obvious, even in the first several chapters of Genesis, that people began coming up with their own ideas about religion and about morality.

Cain killed Abel. That was against his conscience, but it was not against the law. God had not put a law in place. And so he came up with his own idea, even though it was against his own conscience, because he was worried that he would be killed, right? When God comes to him, he's like, oh no, now someone could kill me. There might be justice. It was okay for him to kill his brother, but it wasn't okay for him to be brought under the consequences of his actions. So worldview becomes a really critical issue because what you end up having is you have this idea that I'm going to define things around me in a way that is often convenient for myself.

We're going to talk about several, but there are many, many, many variations. We won't go over all of them. We would have to do 2, 3, 4, 5, 20 years. I don't know. Lots of years, because there's lots of different things. There's some common generalities, so we're going to focus on those. We already have a definition of worldview. So I want to talk about some do's and don'ts when you're observing people and getting to know people and trying to pick up on their worldview. This is really important to be able to do.

Do listen for absolute statements. Absolute statements give away a whole bunch. How many of you have heard someone say, I don't believe that there's an absolute truth? That is an absolute statement, but I've heard many many people say it over and over. As soon as you actually ask for there to be absolute morality, it actually calls into issue sin, and they don't want sin, so they don't want absolute truth and absolute morality. So listen for absolute statements that will tell you about things. There is no God is an absolute statement. Oh, okay, well, this person is probably an atheist. If they're not, they're confused by what the statement there is no God means.

The next one, listen for assumptions. Sometimes assumptions will come out and people will start to talk about things that you don't start in the middle. You got there from somewhere else or you assumed it. One of the key things is you can listen for assumptions, but many people are quite unaware of their own assumptions. Right. And that's on some of the don'ts on the other side, is to be careful with that. The next one would be to listen for authorities. Sometimes people will cite someone that they think is important.

We already talked about that as a logical fallacy. They'll say, oh, well, I read Richard Dawkins' God Delusion, and he is a famous scientist, therefore it must be true and real. And actually, I read the first four chapters of God Delusion, and I got so angry at his logical fallacies, I stopped. Other people have more patience than me, but once you make really broad sweeping statements that are dumb, I'm out. He hates religion, and so his agenda often moves forward in this idea of hating religion illogically, just because he hates religion.

We can. Very much so. If enough people go to your church, it must be true, right? I'm going to say the converse is also true. Some churches say there's only a few of us and we're persecuted, so we must be true. Like that Baptist church that goes to the soldiers' funerals and marches against homosexuality. The whole teaching inside of that is very cult-like, that it's, well, we're persecuted, so it must be true.

So authority is also a good thing to listen for. The other thing is it's important to restate back to a person to confirm their position. If you can put it in your own words and restate it back to them, you may have half a chance of actually letting them know they've been heard and be able to engage them in conversation. You laughed, so I can't wait to hear.

In Calvinism, there's the TULIP acronym, and the I stands for Irresistible Grace. So I have turned that around in some conversations as, so, grace is something God forces on you, right? Yes. There we go. You turn it in your own words. Yeah. Man, I bet you that made them very happy.

And the next thing is, and it's the last on the list here, is do use it as a starting point for conversation. But let's look at the don'ts because they play well together to kind of have a bigger picture. The next one is don't assume that a person has thought through their worldview. As my dad said, not everybody realizes the assumptions that they have. And that's really important.

When you talk to somebody and you have the mindset of I'm going to win the argument or I'm going to go in for the kill, they quickly become on the defensive and they stop listening. You no longer have a conversation, you just have verbal abuse. That's not necessarily a good strategy.

One of the things that atheistic skeptics, aggressive agnostics, like to do is to present them as the reasoning, logical ones, and we're just empty, mindless faith. And what they fail to recognize is that they exercise faith as well. Yeah, and getting somebody to the point where they recognize that they actually have assumptions and they operate under faith is really important.

So the next to last item here is don't assume that you can use a highly generic representation of that worldview. Sometimes when you go, oh, this person is an atheist, I'm now going to just trump out these old arguments against atheism, and they're just going to be like, I already know this, this is dumb, you're assuming this, and then you didn't get anywhere with them, it's not a conversation. So it's often better to ask questions and lead with questions to engage and understand their position better than it is to just pull out the old tropes that have been used over and over again. Lastly, don't assume that the worldview is not self-consistent. This is really important because scientists who are atheists often come against Christianity and they say, your worldview can explain dinosaurs. Well, that's not true. Our worldview is self-consistent.

God dealt with the dinosaurs and put the dinosaurs on the planet. Scripture doesn't reveal a lot about dinosaurs. I can say that much, and that's the argument from silence issue where we can say, well, Scripture doesn't talk about the dinosaurs in the ark. Were they there or were they not there? Well, it's silent. We don't know. So let's not have an argument from silence on that. Let's say that God handled it. That's as much as we know that's revealed, and we'll deal with that.

There may be further evidences that come down the road or things that play into that, but assuming that the worldview is not self-consistent is going to get you in trouble. Often the worldviews at least have some sort of addressing for these issues that are first the tip of the iceberg issues. And if you go for those arguments, they'll go, well, this is how my worldview sees that. That's not how your worldview sees that. And then you're back to where you were on square one again. So it's usually not a good area to spend a lot of energy.

All right, so let's ask some questions, and then we're going to take a look at three worldviews, which are also in your handout. So how would the worldview address pain or trials, sin, eternity, God, facts, and the unknown? I think it's important to actually ask about the unknown, because it's a thing in our own theology, like I just mentioned the dinosaurs on the ark. There's unknowns. How does your worldview handle that?

Humanism is one very common worldview, especially today in education. So in humanism, we've got a temple of humanism here. That's what these are supposed to illustrate. The foundation is nature. The rooftop is reason and the pillars are chance and or luck. The idea that there is no God. The idea that man is free and the idea that we must have progress. The mantra inside of the temple or their statement of faith is glory to man in the highest. Man is the measure of all things. So let's go back to our questions here with pain or trials. How does humanism deal with pain or trials?

Chance? Well, you were unlucky. You drew the cancer card. Aw, bummer for you. How about sin? There ain't no such thing. Either there ain't no such thing, or we just say, hey, we're only human. Right? Everybody does it, so it must be okay, or we just have to cope with it.

Or one of my favorite ones is the very optimistic humanist who thinks we're getting better over time. That one is always an impressive position to me, because we have such radical fluctuation over time that is very difficult to attribute to the character of people. We can point to other things, but humans are by default sinners, so that's a problem. How about humanism and eternity? What's an eternal view for a humanist?

They actually have an answer to this, and it's not just that we die, although that is part of the answer. Steve Jobs, I think, put it well in his statement as he was leading Apple. He said, we want to put a dent on the universe. We want to leave a mark. We want to do something that lasts. If I make a movie, that it's a movie that is in the annals of history as the best movie ever. Or I wrote the most important book of my generation. Or my blog had the most hits of any foodie in the year 2011. Or some random thing that they've attached to significance.

But there is no eternity as we know it in eternal life. How about God? Humanism's position is that there is no God, so that became easy. How does humanism deal with facts? You're getting more and more facts every day as more and more people do more research. Are the facts flexible? Are the facts concrete?

And you're going to run into variations on that. Some people will be very relativistic about things, and then you'll find some people who are very absolute about things as well, even within the halls of humanism. But they want mankind to be interpreting the facts and speaking the facts and holding the facts that are the facts. We're in charge of it. We write the book on facts. Stan? So the facts won't change the world view. The world view always has to call it the facts. The world view interprets the data.

That's the best way I can think to put it. And that's why as Christians, when they say, well, we've just found this thing that says the dinosaurs were 3 million years old for this species. And we say, that is your interpretation of the data. We interpret the data. to be a lesser amount of time. And so our algebra formula is different.

Then the last thing I've got here is the unknown. And this one is really important. My dad mentioned that everybody walks by faith. And when I hit this one, this one is actually the thing that I think is really critical. As an atheist, if you don't have a known piece of data, That unknown data needs to be researched, but it's OK.

At best, it's an argument from silence, which is a logical fallacy. So they're OK with the unknown data. If we have unknown information and we say God can handle it, then they pull out the magic genie argument that you believe in some magic genie or some magic fairy or some good guy in some outer space location. And they argue that against, but the unknown is really important because can you make an absolute statement about the unknown from an atheistic worldview?

You can assume it, yeah, which assumption is basically the equivalent to faith. I believe this assumption. Okay, so it's important. My favorite way to really irritate my agnostic and atheistic friends who are humanistic is to ask them if they believe in unicorns. Because it is an unknown, but it's one that everybody knows. It's an unknown. It's a known unknown. Everybody knows what a unicorn is. Do you believe in unicorns? And I usually ask it more broadly. I ask them, do you believe that there have never been unicorns, there are no unicorns, and there never will be unicorns in the universe? I make it as global and universal as possible.

And the thing is that if they answer it with anything that is a yes or a no, it's an absolute statement. And I'm not trying to ask them a loaded question. I'm asking them to recognize that they don't know everything. Once they recognize they don't know everything, then we can start talking about the assumptions and we can work through that. If you use it mischievously and evil, it can be a loaded question, but I don't ever ask it that way, and I kind of say, I'm going to ask you a loaded question. I preface it with that. Then they can think about it, and they can realize that they have assumptions. Because if they say yes or no, they've now taken a position on something that they have an unknown.

Let's take a look at the next one here, because I don't know what the time is, but I'm assuming that we're running out of it. Okay, the next one here is existentialism. Existentialism has the foundation of despair, actually. Everything is experience, and you can't always experience ecstasy all the time. So we start with despair, and we try to get up from there. The roof there is we act without hope.

I don't have hope of things being good. try my best to make a good experience and release the endorphins or whatever else makes me feel good and then the pillars are evil cannot be redeemed okay life is existence all we have is experience and there is evil we can't fix it life is experience there is no God because God wouldn't leave us to only experience but I don't believe in him so therefore there's only experience Man is condemned to be free.

That's a weird position. For the humanist, man is free. Freedom. But for the existentialist, we're condemned to be free. There is no other option. And freedom brings burden. One of the things I've read of an existentialist is you cannot determine the ought from the is. This is something that human beings wrestle with. We have things ought to be a certain way. The conscience, yeah. But existentialism that looks at things honestly says, I can't, unlike the humanist who's always trying to make things better, he just says, I give up on that because there's really no way to say how things ought to be. Yeah, which leads to the last pillar, which is the bankruptcy of human wisdom. We really can't know. We don't have a certainty.

And the mantra or the mission statement for existentialism is just simply, I am. All I know is I am and I exist. And I suffer through the trials. Let's go back to this list before I answer that one I just did. Shucks. Okay, so pain and trials. We just suffer through it. We deal with it. We experience it. If you're an optimistic existentialist, you go, wow, I got to experience this terrible thing. I had never experienced that before. I will check that off my experience list. I mean, that's really not a very positive opportunity.

How about sin? How does existentialism deal with sin? We kind of talked about that briefly. The first pillar there. Evil can't be redeemed. It exists. It is there. It can't be saved. It can't be fixed. It's just part of the experience. Eternity. Maybe they hope they will experience some eternity. Maybe. I can't explain why or how. Eternity falls under unknown. Yeah, it's definitely under the unknowns. And God. God doesn't exist. I am. I exist. Maybe I'm God. Which is terrifying, if you think about it. That scares me more than a lot of things. And then facts. Well, you might experience the facts, you might see the facts, but they're just kind of there. They don't really sway your life decisions.

An existentialist looks at things in many ways very opposite from a humanist. A humanist says, oh no, someone told me about global warming. I better drive a Prius. The existentialist says, I'm going to get two or three cars and just leave the engines running because life is experience and it doesn't matter. Maybe that's a very negative, evil existentialist, but it doesn't matter to an existentialist.

Oh, the human race is going to be wiped out by this asteroid that's coming. The existentialist movie of that is really boring. The humanist has somebody go up in a rocket. Existentialists don't care about the facts, and the unknown is mostly everything anyways. So the humanist doesn't really care.

And the last one we have on the list here, it's on the last page, page four. Christianity. Our foundation is the God of the Bible. Our rooftop in this temple is the absolute truth. We believe in our pillars that Christ is the Redeemer, or Christ as the Redeemer. We believe in revelation, that God would reveal Himself. We believe that man is sinful. And we believe in faith. We believe that faith and our beliefs forms who we are. And our statement of belief is, Glory to God in the highest, He is the measure of all things. taking that into account if we look at pain and trials.

What does it matter if there's pain and trials and suffering for a believer? We haven't taught that trials and suffering class for a long time, right? Yeah, it's been a while. We should definitely do that again in the next iteration. But the Scriptures deal with trials and suffering, and they give us a purpose. They even give us an eternal purpose in trials and suffering. That's kind of jumping the gun on eternity, but that's not a bad thing.

How about sin? How does a biblical worldview address sin? It deals with it in our position and in our condition. Okay, so both our earthly experience and in our eternal state with God, we have a dealing with sin. It also gives us explanations for things in causality and looking at the world that other worldviews don't have.

If sin is not a picture in your worldview, then murderers must have a hormonal or a psychological tick that are very hard to explain away, but it just is what it is. That's a real problem. Because it's certainly not sin. We definitely can't have that position.

How about eternity? We deal with eternity as believers. We're part of eternity. We have eternal life. Even those who don't believe have eternal death. They will live forever, and that's a thing. That's part of what motivates us to share the gospel. We have a very specific perspective of God, because He's the foundation. God reveals the scriptures.

And then, the second and last, the facts. How do we deal with facts? The scientist comes to us and says, we have these facts. How do we deal with that? This is the data. How do we interpret it? We have this principle of absolute truth, but it's in light of God's revelation. We don't take the facts and cover our eyes and ignore the specifics of the revelation.

And lastly, the unknown. And this is really key because this is again a place where the skeptic will come and try to attack. Oh, well, there's a lot of stuff that you don't know and you just wave your hand and say it's God. Is that in disingenuous way to respond to the unknown to say that God knows to say that God Has handled it if God has not revealed the unicorn Given the argument from silence. I'm gonna say I don't know and I'm gonna be okay with that just like the honest Atheist if you ask him about the unicorn All right that that is This is my last slide here, and that is to beware the blend.

It is not uncommon today to find that people try to embrace various positions from various worldviews. This creates loopholes and logical problems. Sometimes when you talk to somebody about their worldview, you're going to think, ah, I have an agnostic on my hand, or I have an atheist on my hand, or I have you know, whatever, and then you'll discover as you get into the conversation that they've borrowed a little bit from Hinduism, and a little bit from over here, from this other thing, and this person is over here, and someone like the Baha'i faith, all faiths are true or something like that, so you never know what you're going to get, and they may switch horses mid-discussion, and that's always disconcerting. As believers, we need to watch that we're not grabbing stuff from other worldviews and bringing that in and saying, hey, that's a really good idea. I think I will embrace that and bring that into my teachings or my thoughts of doctrine and what is true. But the last thing, and this is probably the most important, is do abide and let the Spirit guide and grow you in your thinking about these truths.

As we're abiding and we meditate on the truth of God's Word, He'll show us and grow us and develop us so that when we engage people that we've never even studied, this is a worldview I've not studied, I don't know anything about, we'll be able to contrast what is true with what is the lie in their position.

Alright, I think we're out of time here. Indeed we are. So we'll pray and then feel free to ask questions afterwards and they won't be on the recording. I apologize to those of you listening on the internet. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would just continue to teach us about your truth, about our faith in you, and understand that even those that that don't believe the way we do are created in your image and that they're suppressing that truth from Romans 1 18 But that it is there and we can talk with them about it and constantly be a light to them We thank you in Jesus name. Amen