And In This Corner....Weighing In At....

Imagine fighting in a league where you kicked butt every time you got into the ring.

You figured out that your opponents had serious defects in their fighting style.

Because of their defects, you could always find the weak spot and either knock them out with your power or submit them with your style.

Now imagine the league begins to allow new fighters into the ring.

Guys who don't follow the fighting techniques of the other guys.

You find that these new guys don't fall for your moves and at the same time you can't figure out their moves.

Soon you are calling them "cheats" and telling them that they have to fight according to the same style as your other opponents.

But you can't actually prove they are "cheats", you just can't beat them.

For centuries Christians have been using faulty techniques to defend the faith.

In their trying to defend the faith they have actually gone against the faith they were trying to defend.

They acted like the unbelievers mind was not fallen and under the grips of sin.

They acted like the unbelievers mind was not against God and was not actively suppressing the truth.

These apologists came up with philosophically weak arguments for the existence of God...pretending to be neutral [so why were they arguing] and asking the unbeliever to also be neutral, and they began to defend the faith with these weak arguments.

Philosophically "keen" unbelievers saw these "weak" spots and began to pound these Christians arguments down to the canvas.

For the philosophically simple, the cosmological, and teleological arguments seemed very powerful indeed, but for someone who had further philosophical training it didn't take long to bring down these fighting techniques.

But what we need to understand is that Christians who used these arguments...and still use them...are not being honest.

They have "pretended" to be neutral but weren't.

They treated the unbelievers reasoning abilities "as if" they were normal and unfallen even though the Bible says they are neither.

And in the end they keep taking a beating...all the while the confidence of the unbeliever grows and grows [to very arrogant proportions].

The Bible tells us not to be neutral...its says we can't be neutral...neutrality is a myth...a lie.

Another school of defending the faith says if we have presuppositions why try and hide this fact?

If God's word is our ultimate authority why not treat it as such.

God's word just won't be the conclusion we try to bring the unbeliever to, it will also explain to us the "method" we use for doing so.

The Transcendental Argument for the existence of God says that God's Word is the precondition for intelligibility...without it you cannot "consistently" prove anything.

Note that I say "consistently".

Unbelievers do use logic, they use science [which can only work being founded on induction or the uniformity of nature], and they use moral standards...but they do so because they are borrowing from God's world [without asking and giving thanks] and then using these things to try to discount the very thing that makes sense out of them...the Triune God of Scriptures.

The Presuppositionalist Apologist isn't going down for the 8 count because he has learned not to follow the destructive techniques of the Evidentialist Apologist.

The unbeliever doesn't like these "new" techniques [even though they aren't new] so he calls "cheat"...he wants the Presuppositionalist to go back to the old fighting techniques that he has learned to undo.

Those days are over...