A listener accuses Stand to Reason of using apologetics to prevent people from evaluating Christianity. Greg and Amy respond, emphasizing STR’s commitment to logical arguments and stressing the importance of engaging with objective reality.
Transcript
Objection: When I hear and read your material, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten closer to any truth, but like I’ve heard somebody pick the truth without me then make a profession out of cleverly keeping me from evaluating it.
Amy: So, I think what she’s saying is, “I feel like you have come up with this whole system, and now your whole profession is to keep me from evaluating that system to try and protect it.”
Greg: What’s so curious about this—and she’s speaking of our website, it’s our organization, Stand to Reason—so, what we do is make a case regarding what we think is true. We are always making a case. We are saying A, B, C, D, E, F, whatever, therefore G. If it turns out it doesn’t bring this person any closer to the truth, she must be concluding that we haven’t done a good job of linking the evidence to the conclusion, which is okay for her to decide that, but all she’s saying is our arguments have not been persuasive. However, we do give arguments. We always give arguments. If we’re talking, from an external, non-biblical view, about some biblical truth about God or morality, we give reasons—rationale. We trade on human intuition. We look at the facts of the matter—the biological facts (if those are appropriate for the question), legal facts, and then we draw our conclusion. Therefore, this is our conclusion. If it’s a biblical issue, then we’re looking at what Scripture says. You don’t have to believe in Scripture as God-ordained or God-breathed in order to be able to agree, well, that writing does teach this, like, there’s a God, even though we don’t believe there is a God. And so, we are arguing, then, based on the words of Scripture, to a conclusion that Scripture seems to teach. So, there’s another line of evidence.
Now, if she’s not getting any closer to the truth, then okay, I don’t know what I could say. We’ve done our best to give a rationale, but the other part doesn’t make sense to me at all because she’s saying, then, we’ve put this thing together so that it doesn’t allow her to evaluate it, but what we’ve done is laid out our thinking and reasoning from top to bottom about it. Why can’t she evaluate the reasons? What’s keeping her from evaluating? Actually, she must be evaluating it because she says, “I’m not getting any closer to the truth.” She’s an atheist, presumably. She has read our stuff and found it wanting, so it strikes me that she is evaluating it, which is why she holds a contrary view.
By the way, notice that in my response here, I’m laying out all the reasons for the conclusion I’m making regarding these questions. This is what we do all the time.
Amy: What’s interesting to me in this question is this idea that she feels like, “I’ve heard somebody pick the truth without me.” Now, that is really interesting to me because what I’m hearing when she says that is this idea that—and I have gotten this idea from atheists before—they don’t like the idea that you have to submit to some system of reality. I’ve had them tell me before, they don’t like the idea of my saying that they have a worldview because they want to have this sense that they are choosing every piece on their own.
Greg: That feels good at the moment. Well, how does she feel about gravity? Or insulin? She might say, “Well, gravity, I can see the effects of it right away,” but what about insulin? Somebody else chose that as a truth regarding controlling diabetes. Is that offensive, too?
Amy: This speaks to this kind of radically individualistic, relativistic society that we have—that they don’t want to be forced to accept certain ideas because we want to choose every little thing that we believe. We want to create our own reality. So, this might be an opportunity to just say, “We’re not picking anything without you. We’re actually trying to determine what the objective truth is and then make a case for it. We don’t get to pick what objective truth is, with or without anyone else.”
Greg: It really annoyed me when I went to my doctor, and they took an MRI, and he told me I need a new hip. I said, “I didn’t pick that.”
Amy: “Why did you pick that without me, doctor?”
Greg: I’m going to have to go through a lot of pain because of what you picked. And the point we’re both making here is, reality has a way of intruding into our lives without our permission because reality is. It’s not what we choose or make for ourselves. It’s what is, and that applies to all aspects of reality, whether physical or non-physical.
Now, one might say, “There is no physical reality.” Well, that’s a conclusion that you may have drawn, but the appeal there is based on evidences. It isn’t something I picked. It isn’t something Amy picked. Frankly, if I were going to pick something, I’d pick Eastern religion or something like that because it’s high in individual freedom and low on personal responsibility, and anyway, if I get it wrong this life, I got a couple of billion more I can try it out on. I’ll pick that.
Amy: So, what we’re coming down to again is this idea that we get to make up our own reality. I mean, ultimately, I think a lot of people see religion as being in a different category than anything else, because we wouldn’t apply any of these things to any other discipline. Same with the other questions. We just wouldn’t apply this view. So, there’s something going on here with the way they’re viewing religion in particular. So, if you get a question like this from someone, that’s something you have to point out. What is the nature of the claim that we’re making? We’re making a claim about objective reality. We’re trying to discover that. We’re not trying to pick something and force it on other people. We’re trying to find the truth and help other people to also understand the truth.