A lecture given by TE Grover Gunn on March 11, 1997, at the apologetics conference sponsored by Christ Presbyterian Church in Elkton, Maryland. All Bible quotations are from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted.APOLOGETIC KUNG FU
Before I begin, I would like to comment on some parallels between presuppositional apologetics and the art of Kung Fu. I saw my youngest brother this past Christmas, and he told me that he is taking Kung Fu lessons. He told me that his teacher told my brother to try to shove him. My brother told me that his teacher took the force of the shove and directed it back to my brother so amplified that it almost knocked my brother down. Instead of absorbing blows to the harm of the body, Kung Fu seeks to direct the force of the blow back upon the attacker in an amplified form. Too often apologists seek to absorb the blows directed against them, and their position is harmed. After that, they are fighting with the doctrinal equivalent of a broken leg.
Let me give you a specific example. Here is one of the most common atheistic arguments. A God who is good and wise and powerful would not allow evil to exist. There is much evil and suffering and pain in the world, so God cannot exist. Too often apologists try to absorb this blow. They argue that God has voluntarily limited His sovereign control of history in order to allow for human freedom. The possibility of evil was a chance God had to take if angels and humans were to be more than robots. As a result of this gamble, evil resulted. This is totally the fault of the humans and angels who misused their freedom to disobey God. God is not in control of the situation, so we shouldn't blame Him. Now what has the apologist done? In the process of defending God, he has absorbed the atheistic blow and in the process, he has broken his leg. You can't fight very effectively with a broken leg. The leg he has broken is the Scriptural doctrine of God's absolute sovereign control of history. The apologist who argues this way will soon discover that he no longer has a leg to stand on. In effect, he has abandoned the God of Scripture in order to defend Him. He has been less than honest about what Scripture says about God in order to prove that the Scripture's testimony is true.
Now, let's try that again, and this time we'll use apologetic Kung Fu. Again, someone has seen more than his share of suffering in this world. He argues that the existence of evil proves that a God worthy of his worship does not and cannot exist. We should sympathize with this person's pain over human suffering, but we should also recognize the flaw in his logic. At the very root of his argument is his value judgment about the horrors he has seen in this life. He rightly concludes that these horrors are evil. Yet how can he justify this conclusion if there is no God? Anyone who judges something to be evil also acknowledges in the subconscious recesses of the heart that God exists.
If there is no God, then there is nothing special about human life or horrendous about human suffering. Human life is sacred only because humanity is created in the image of God. Deny God, and there is nothing unique or special about human life. Human suffering becomes only a series of biochemical stimuli in a meaningless world. If the human race is nothing but an evolutionary fluke that arose from a primordial soup, if the human being is only a sophisticated biological organism, then killing a human belongs in a category with slaughtering a cow and felling a tree.
Beyond that, deny God and the very concepts of good and evil lose all meaning. If there is no reality beyond the material world of energy and matter, then any sense of morality is a naive fantasy and illusion. Deny God and all that remains of ethics is varying opinions and alternate lifestyles and cultural conventions. In such a world, who are we to impose our values on the Aztecs or the Nazis?
In contrast, acknowledge God, and evil is evil, and human life is special. Unanswered questions still remain, but they are mysteries we can live with through faith. How can God be in sovereign control of history without being to blame for the evil that occurs? I cannot fully answer that question, but then why should I expect to fully understand God? The eternal is simply beyond our full comprehension. His thoughts and ways are above our own. How inscrutable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!
One last point: no one should self-righteously presume that he is more concerned about evil than God is. The measure of God's concern about evil is the cross of Calvary. There God the Son, through His human nature, experienced infinitely greater human suffering than we will ever know. There God the Father demonstrated infinitely more concern.
Presuppositional apologetics is apologetic Kung Fu. It takes the force of the opponent's argument and redirects it back at the opponent with amplified force.
THE SCALES ANALOGY
Let me also explain this in terms of our scales analogy. The outrage over evil is one of the stamped weights which is the work of the image of God in every human heart. The opponent says,
"I have weighed the stamped weight of my outrage over evil upon my worldly scales, and the reading I see on my scales is that God cannot exist."You respond by saying,
"Yes, your autonomous scales are preset always to say that God cannot exist, but look at what else your scales say. You have placed the stamped weight of outrage over evil on your scales, and they say that it carries no weight. Its weight is zero. You know that is not true, so your scales must be wrong. You are using skewed scales. Your scales say there is no God, but you cannot trust anything they say."Then you weight the stamped weight on the Christian scales, and the scales register, "A weighty and legitimate concern." Why? Because God exists, because God establishes the standards of good and evil, and because God is infinitely more outraged by evil than we are.
What about the issue of divine sovereignty? How can God be in absolute control of history and not be responsible for the existence of evil? Your answer is this,
"I acknowledge that this question is beyond my scales' ability to weigh. My scales are a creaturely set of scales. I am created in the finite image of God, but I am not divine. Only the Eternal Lord Himself could comprehend the answer to that question. I must accept on faith His word that He is not to blame."Somehow God is in control of history without being morally to blame for the evil that happens. I accept on faith that God is perfectly and completely good, and that God has morally good and sufficient reasons for all that He decrees to happen.
WEIGHING THE EVIDENCE, BUT ON WHOSE SCALES
Our lecture today is, "Weighing the Evidence But on Whose Scales?" Why can't we just give people the evidence? They can then weigh the evidence and they will see that the message of Christianity is true. As you know, it's not that simple. Think about what happened in John chapter 11. Many people saw Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead after Lazarus had spent three days in the tomb. You won't find evidence much more compelling than that. As a result of this, many believed in Jesus, but the response of others was to inform the religious leaders in Jerusalem, who "from that day on ... plotted to put [Jesus] to death" (v. 52). This is consistent with Jesus' concluding statement in His parable of Lazarus and the rich man: "If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead" (Luke 16:31).
Ignorance of the evidence is not the only problem. The other problem is the unreliability of the scales used to weigh the evidence. The Puritan Thomas Manton said this:
"In a pair of scales, though the weights be equal, yet if the scales be not equal there may be wrong done; so, though the arguments used be powerful, yet, if the heart be biased by unhallowed affections, the scale will not be turned according to truth and righteousness."1MAN'S FALL
Let's look at the account of humanity's fall into sin found in Genesis 3:1-8:
1 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?" 2 And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3 "but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, 'You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.'" 4 Then the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. 5 "For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. 8 And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. Satan's ultimate goal was to get Adam and Eve to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit. But Satan did not begin his temptation by openly suggesting such a thing. He was much too clever and subtle for that. His preliminary goal was to get them to change their world view scales, that upon which they would weigh a temptation to assess its truth and its morality.
In their original state of innocence, what was Adam and Eve's ultimate standard of truth and morality? It was the Word of God. God's Word is the standard that is so ultimate and final that there is no standard beyond it with which to measure it. If you have found a measure with which to measure the truth and morality of God's Word, then you have found the god who is beyond the God of the Bible. By what standard will you measure your new deity? God can swear by no one other than Himself because there is no one greater to swear by (Hebrews 6:13). Similarly, God's Word can be judged by nothing greater than God's Word because there is no greater, more basic measure of truth and morality.
Satan began his temptation not by blatantly denying God's Word but by asking the question, "Has God said?" That is very subtle. These words could be interpreted as an innocent request for information coming from someone seeking truth and understanding. The devil often masquerades as an angel of light in order to take his victims off their guard and to get his foot in the door. As would soon become clear, Satan's intention in his question was not at all a quest for truth. Satan was in actuality questioning the morality of God's Word. Satan was asking, "Is what God has required of you fair?" And implicit in this question is a challenge to use some standard other than God's Word to test the truth and morality of God's Word. Implicit in this question is the accusation that God's Word is unreliable, and Adam and Eve will have to find some other standard of truth and morality with which to test it.
We clear up any doubt as to what Satan means by his question in verse 4. There he calls God a liar who is purposely being unfair and deceitful. Here we find the pseudo-gospel of Satan. Satan's good news to Adam and Eve is that they can be like God and not die.
Now what does Satan mean when he says, "You will be like God." Aren't we supposed to be like God? Didn't God create us in his image, after His likeness? Again, Satan is being very subtle. To see the real issue here, consider the relationship of students to their teacher in a school setting. There are two ways children in school can try to be like their teacher. One way is the essence of education, and the other is a formula for classroom chaos. Consider one student who faithfully absorbs his teacher's knowledge and skills in respectful submission. Contrast this with another student who marches to the front of the class, shoves the teacher aside, and proclaims, "Now I'm in charge!" Both students are trying to be like their teacher, yet their approaches differ like night and day. One student masters the teacher's scholarship, and the other usurps his authority.
God commands us to imitate Him in the respectful, submissive manner: "Be imitators of God as dear children." We should study the Bible until we think God's thoughts after Him. We should pray until God's will is our will. We should behold the Lord's glory in reverent worship until we are transformed into His image. We should be holy as God is holy, resembling Him in every grace, emulating His love and goodness.
The devil tempts us to imitate God in quite another way. He challenges us to claim prerogatives which belong uniquely to God. He dares us to blur the basic distinction between the creature and the Creator, to transgress the sacred boundary between the human and the divine. His counsel is, "Define good and evil for yourselves, and then do what is right in your own eyes." He advocates a cafeteria approach to God's Word: take what you like and leave the rest.
God, who created us in His own image and likeness, bids us, "Be holy, for I am holy." That old serpent the devil, who claims that creaturely likeness is not enough, baits us, "Be like God, knowing good and evil." Do not confuse the devil's challenge with God's command. These are both ways to try to be like God, but they differ like night and day. One approach is holy obedience, and the other is sinful rebellion.
The devil tempts Adam and Eve to be like God in the sense of knowing good and evil. Look at what God says in Genesis 3:22-24 after Adam and Eve had sinned:
22 Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"-- 23 therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. Knowing good and evil here refers to something that is possible for both God and man but which also is legitimate only for God. That can only refer to knowing good and evil definitively, authoritatively. When Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they are rejecting the word of God as their defining standard of truth and morality, and they are making themselves their own ultimate standard. In the book of Judges, this is called doing what is right in one's own eyes.
Here, for the first time, humanity began operating "according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ" (Colossians 2:8). This is the idea that humanity, not God, is the measure of all things, as the ancient Greeks expressed it. This is the philosophy so eloquently expressed in William Ernest Henley's famous poem, "Invictus":
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud:
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
Adam and Eve both want to try out their new standard of truth and morality. Eve chooses to try out deductive reasoning, and she becomes history's first godless philosopher. Adam opts for an empirical experiment, and he becomes history's first evil scientist. Eve's reasoning is basically utilitarian and hedonistic. She sees that "the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise" (Genesis 3:6). She uses the scales of deductive reasoning and weighs the word of God against human practical utility and the potential for human pleasure. The Word of God is found wanting, and she eats the fruit.
Satan has tempted Eve to change the major premise in her syllogisms of life, and she has done so. Her original major premise had been, "God's Word is truth." Her new major premise has become, "To thine own self be true," or "Man is the measure of all things," or "I am the master of my fate and the captain of my soul." In the temptation, her minor premise was, "the tree was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise." With her old major premise, the conclusion of this syllogism would have been, "Do not eat it!" With the new major premise, the conclusion was, "Eat!" She partook of the tree as the pseudo-sacrament of Satan's pseudo-gospel.
Now we notice that Adam is right there. He has abdicated his duty as head of the household. Instead of guarding the garden as God commanded him, he appears to be conducting an empirical experiment. He is no longer cherishing Eve as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. He is now using her as a guinea pig. God has said, when you eat of it, you will die. Satan has said, you will not die. Who is one to believe? Because Adam no longer accepts God's Word as his ultimate standard of truth, he must find the truth some other way. So Adam allows Eve to go first. She eats, and she continues to breath. Adam has weighed the Word of God on the scale of a scientific experiment. The Word of God is found wanting, and he eats the fruit.
Adam and Eve did not experience immediate physical death, but the forbidden fruit soon turned to gravel in their mouths. By breaking God's law, they joined Satan as outlaws estranged from God and at enmity with God. This spiritual separation from God is spiritual death, which occurred immediately in accordance with God's warning. As a result of this spiritual death, the seed of death was planted in their hearts, and it bore the fruit of corruption. They suddenly feared fellowship with God. They suddenly were ashamed of their nakedness. They eventually would experience physical death as the wages of their sin. One distinctive of the book of Genesis is that the genealogies repeat the clause "and he died", "and he died", "and he died."
God created Adam in His likeness. Adam sinned and became a sinner with the seed of corruption planted in his heart. Then Adam begot a son in his own likeness, after his image (Genesis 5:1-3), the image of a sinner with sin in his heart. By one man's disobedience, many were made sinners (Romans 5:17). We were born "sons of disobedience" and therefore we are "by nature children of wrath" (Ephesians 2:2-3). Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men (Romans 5:12; cf. 1 Corinthians 15:22). Therefore all humans are born under the dominion of sin, with an overwhelming inclination to measure life in the scales provided by Satan. The basic measure of Satan's scales is the false gospel,
"You can do what is right in your own eyes, and you will not be judged with death; you will succeed in life."Now humanity still has to deal with those stamped weights which testify to the falsity of Satan's scales of worldly principles. Romans 1 tells us how fallen man deals with the testimony of the stamped weights. Knowledge of the true and living God bombards fallen man, but he "suppresses the truth in unrighteousness" and "exchange(s) the truth of God for the lie" (Romans 1:18,25). He does not like to retain God in his knowledge (Romans 1:28). Fallen man takes the objective knowledge of general revelation and subjectively filters it through his sin orientation throughout the cognition process. Thus he is self-deceived.
THE COMPLEX SITUATION
Now we see the complexity of the situation. We share the gospel with a non-Christian and engage in apologetic efforts at persuasion. This is not just an intellectual game but a spiritual warfare with eternal destinies at stake. The non-Christian weighs the gospel on the scales of the elementary principles of this world (Colossians 2:8), and he rejects the message as false. In his heart of hearts, he senses the testimony of those stamped weights both external in creation and internal in the work of the inner divine image. And these testify that Satan's scale is skewed and God's scale is true. On God's scale, the gospel message registers as true. The inner testimony of the stamped weights is enough to hold every man accountable for rejecting the gospel, but it cannot break the sinner's bondage commitment to the Satanic scales which say, "you are the master of your fate, the captain of your soul, the measure of all things." Only the regenerating grace of the Holy Spirit can break that bondage. Therefore we not only proclaim and argue and admonish. We also pray because only God can bring the dead to life.
I have spoken about fallen man's use of Satan's skewed scales. Others have referred to these as fallen man's bottomless pit. We toss to the non-Christian a piece of evidence for the truth of Christianity, and he will simply toss it into the bottomless pit of his commitment to Satan's lie. Satan's lie is his measure of truth.
It is sort of like the situation with some people who are committed to a conspiracy theory about some group's plan to take over the world. If one tries to argue that there is not a conspiracy, then that person immediately becomes suspect and his arguments are rejected without any real consideration. Anyone who tries to deny the conspiracy must be a part of the conspiracy.
Here is a commonly told story which illustrates the same point. A man tried to convince his doctor that he was already dead. After a fruitless effort to persuade the man that he was still alive, the doctor asked if it was not true that dead men do not bleed because they have no blood pressure. When the man conceded this point, the doctor pricked him with a needle. Seeing blood come forth, the man cried out in surprise, "Well, dead men do bleed after all!"2AN EXAMPLE OF THE DOUBLE STANDARD
I want to close with an example of the non-Christian's double standard in regard to weighing evidence. Sometime in 1995 or 1996, I watched a Nightline devoted to the then recent discovery of evidence that a certain star has a planet or two orbiting about it. This star had a certain wobble that could be accounted for only by an orbiting planet or two. Ted Koppel wanted to know if this discovery makes it more probable that there is intelligent life somewhere out there in outer space. Everyone seemed to think so, because that is what they wanted to believe.
If life arises naturally and if there are billions of stars in the universe, then there must be life out there. If we can discover life out there, that will prove that life arises naturally. That will confirm our belief that life does not imply a personal Creator to whom we are responsible. So this small piece of evidence about a wobbly star weighed heavily on these peoples' scales. One scientist commented wishfully that if we ever receive an intelligible radio transmission from space, then we will know with certainty that intelligent life exists somewhere out there in the deep recesses of space.
If one of those giant antennas focused on deep space ever does receive something beyond garbled interstellar static, the Carl Sagans of this world will immediately proclaim that to be absolute proof that intelligent life does exist on some other planet. How could such a radio transmission just happen? But wait a minute. The Carl Sagans of this world believe that life on planet earth just happened. They say that long periods of time and chance are enough to account for life in all of its complexity. Through time and chance alone, inorganic matter became organic matter, organic matter became living beings, and living beings became intelligent beings. It all just happened. If that is the case, then why couldn't our hypothetical message from space have just happened? If evolution is true, then time and chance alone could account for a radio transmission from deep space that contains the entire works of Shakespeare in Morse code. Which is more complex, a living cell or a book of poetry? Which could more easily just happen?
There is a double standard here, and it has to do with what people want to believe. People who believe in atheistic evolution want there to be life on other planets. If evolution just happened here, then surely it has happened somewhere else among all the billions of stars in the universe. Discovering life elsewhere would confirm to them that their presupposed explanation of the universe is more than a Star Trek fantasy. A simple radio transmission would be enough to convince them of intelligent life somewhere out there. It would be for them the discovery of an extra-terrestrial watch implying the existence of an extra-terrestrial watchmaker.
Yet these same people don't want to believe in a personal Creator. Therefore life on earth in all its complexity just happened without any outside intervention. A world that just happened is a meaningless world, but it is also a world accountable to no one. That is just what they want: a world where they are free to do what is right in their own eyes. A world without a Creator is a world without a Judge.
What we have here is a secular version of the cosmological argument weighed on the world's scales and found convincing. They find a footprint in the cosmic sand, and it means we are not alone. We find one, and it is just a coincidence.
We are responsible to give a reason for the hope that is in us, but only the Holy Spirit can effectively persuade and enable the lost to believe through an inner spiritual resurrection. When the lost believe the gospel message, it is a miracle, a spiritual resurrection from the dead. We must take seriously our responsibility to defend the gospel to the best of our ability. We also must remember the limits of our ability, and pray for the Holy Spirit to unstop the deaf ears, to remove the scales from blind eyes, to transform hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, and to give life to the spiritually dead. As Jesus said: "No one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father" (John 6:65).
FOOTNOTES
1 C.H. Spurgeon, Flowers from a Puritan's Garden (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle Publications, 1976), 16. 2 William Edgar, Reasons of the Heart (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1996), 52.