In this episode Trent sits down with Jimmy Akin to talk about his recent debate with Jay Dyer as well as to do a deep dive on issues raised in the debate related to apologetics, presuppositionalism, and the philosophy of knowledge.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, I am your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Today joining me is Jimmy Akin, senior apologist at Catholic Answers, and we’re going to talk about apologetics methodology. So we talk a lot about defending the Catholic faith, defending Christianity here on the channel, but we don’t often talk about the disagreements different Christians have when it comes to how we do that, how do we make a defense. What are the different ways we can do that? And you might have noticed that difference recently in my debate with Jay Dyer. So Jay is an Eastern Orthodox apologist, but he embraces a view of apologetics that focuses on presuppositionalism. So our debate that you got to listen to here on the channel recently was about the project of natural theology. Can we use reason to come to know that God exists? Can Christians and atheists start on an equal footing with reason and reason our way to God’s existence, or do we have to do something else in order to do that?
Trent Horn:
So I thought it would be fun to have Jimmy come on the show today to talk about the debate a little bit, talk about methodology. Because I think a lot of the concepts that came up in the debate about these differences might have … Things were kind of moving fast and furious if you will, and some of the concepts that might have been dropped here and there throughout the debate, you all may not have heard of. So that’s why I love having little debrief sessions so we can go even deeper into the topic. Jimmy, thanks for coming back to the show.
Jimmy Akin:
Hey, it’s my pleasure, Trent. Any time.
Trent Horn:
So you had a chance to watch the debate that I had with Dyer and you also have a lot of experience in studying apologetics and these different views. Maybe you can talk about both a little bit and help people understand who might think, “Wait, I thought there was only one. We just did apologetics,” and might not know about the methodology question.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. There are several different approaches to apologetics and you mentioned the name of the one that Dyer seems to favor which is called presuppositionalism, and it differs from the classical way of doing apologetics. There are about five or six different primary methodologies that get used and classical apologetics is one of them. Presuppositionalism is another one that has come up in … It’s gained some popularity in the last few decades, it’s still a minority position and I think for good reason. It has some interesting contributions to make but it also has some interesting limitations.
Jimmy Akin:
The basic idea in classical methodology is you start with proving the existence of God, which is the most … For defending the Christian faith, you start with proving the existence of God and then you begin to narrow down what you’re proving to arrive at a more specific result. So you prove theism, that God exists and that he interacts with the world. Then you move on to proving that Jesus is the Christ, and then you move on to proving if you’re Catholic that the Catholic Church is the church that Jesus established. So that’s kind of the classical methodology. You start broad and you get narrow.
Jimmy Akin:
Presuppositionalism approaches the question from a different angle and says, “Well we need to start by talking about what we’re presupposing, because every view …” I mean no view starts from the ground up. Everyone presupposes certain things, and so we should talk about those presuppositions and in order to make sense of the world, you need to presuppose either the truth of God’s word as found in scripture, that’s one common way of presenting presuppositionalism, or you need to presuppose a certain type of deity, like a triune god, but then once you’ve made that presupposition, it explains the world as we see it, and other competing claims don’t explain the world well unless you make that initial presupposition.
Jimmy Akin:
So that’s kind of an overview. Now of course apart from the issue of what methodologies should be used in presenting apologetics, there’s then the question of technique of how you present it and since you mentioned you’d like this to be a bit of a debrief on the debate you had, I thought I’d comment on that. So when I watch debates, I’m watching on multiple levels. On the one hand, I’m looking for substance, who is presenting the arguments for their position in a substantive way, who is laying good arguments and data on the table. But I am also looking at it in terms of delivery. How is this going to come across to the audience for this debate, who’s being most persuasive, who’s honoring the rules of the debate, who’s breaking them and things like that, and then also for online debates, I watch the comm box.
Trent Horn:
Interesting.
Jimmy Akin:
And I see how people are responding and most people who come to a debate … I can’t say most, but many people who come to a debate are really already convinced, strongly, of a position, and so they’re going to root for whoever is advocating their position no matter what happens.
Trent Horn:
It’s kind of like at a football game. The ref is always wrong when he rules against your team.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, exactly. So you have die-hard people who are going to cheer whichever person they’re in favor of no matter what happens in the debate. But I’m more interested when people admit things contrary to their preferences, because that tends to be more significant. If something’s happened and someone says, “Well even though I agree with this guy, I think my guy just blew it, or this other guy just made a really good point.” That’s more significant.
Jimmy Akin:
In the case of your debate with Dyer, so you both had 15 minute opening statements, and Dyer went first, he was advocating the proposition that Christians should not use what’s called natural theology. Natural theology is a way of looking at nature and reasoning to the existence of God, and this is used in the Bible itself, Saint Paul does this for example, and it’s been widely used by Christian apologists and philosophers down through the ages. Now Dyer began by saying, “I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as natural theology or that it could never be used in any circumstances,” and that’s an important admission because it makes his case more tenable since he’s not going directly against Saint Paul, he’s acknowledging there is a way you could do this, you just need to frame it correctly.
Jimmy Akin:
So then as a debater, what he would need to do is say clearly to the audience, “And here’s how that is, and here’s how you need to frame it, and if you don’t frame it this way, you’re doing it wrong.” Then he would be off and running and he could explore that position and defend it. Well, people who are familiar with my work will know how I really try to be charitable and I really try to be gentle, and I’m going to say something now that actually is charitable because it’s a message Dyer needs to hear, whether from me or from someone else. So it is charitable, it’s meant to help him, but it’s not going to be gentle because if I said it too gently, it wouldn’t have its impact.
Jimmy Akin:
As I was watching the comm box, in the middle of Dyer’s opening statement, someone said, “Wow. Trent has already won.” And it wasn’t just a flippant remark. There was a reason the person was saying it. I would have qualified it a little more. I would have said, “Well, Trent’s already won if Dyer doesn’t radically alter course later in the debate.” Because Dyer’s opening statement was absolutely incoherent. He was rushing through a prepared statement, he was using all kinds of fancy jargon that he was not defining for the audience. He was constantly namedropping other people and things they had written which were not in evidence. I mean you can say, “Oh, someone wrote in this paper that proves my point.” Great, that doesn’t prove it to the audience in the debate you’re having. You can’t just cite people that way as if that’s proof and he was in articulate in expressing his own position. He was all over the map. The analogy that occurred to me was this is like trying to drink from a fire hose. You’re going to get a little bit of it, but it is just an overwhelming onslaught torrent of information and it was just bafflegab and it was a terrible performance.
Jimmy Akin:
Now he did get somewhat better later in the discussion. So I want to give that to him, but if he’s going to debate people, the only people he’s ever going to convince are people who are already convinced of his position. Because this is not how you win people over. This is a terrible performance. You have to come down to the level that the audience is at. You don’t try to impress them by using a lot of bafflegab.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, because I think what’s actually impressive is right, when you can clearly communicate with them and that’s why I tried very hard in shaving and working on my opening statement so it would do that.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, and that’s part of the debate process. There’s always more you can say than you’re going to have time for, so you have to pare it back, you have to bring it down, you have to strip out the jargon so that it’s going to be understandable to people, and you did … Just speaking not on the substance level but on the delivery level, you did much better than that. It was night and day in comparison and I saw people in the comm box commenting on how, “Wow, this is so much easier. Trent is speaking slowly and clearly. He’s so much easier to understand. Dyer was all over the map.” And I have to say that that was an accurate assessment.
Jimmy Akin:
I am not impressed when an apologist uses big words. I am impressed when an apologist brings it down to a level where people can understand it, and that can be challenging at times, but it’s a necessary effort, and it’s a mark of actual apologetic skill to be able to talk something and make it intelligible, even if it’s heady in its original presentation, and that was simply absent in this debate on Dyer’s part. He completely did not do that.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and that’s something a bit frustrating and I was trying hard throughout the debate to help people try to understand where we were at. Especially, and we’ll talk about this more here as we continue on, about the difference between classical apologetics and presuppositional apologetics, because when you talk about presuppositions, there are many terms like jargon or technical terms that are used that I think can sound very impressive to people but then they can’t grasp what’s actually being talked about, using terms like metalogic for example –
Jimmy Akin:
That was –
Trent Horn:
Paradigms and things like that.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Those were terms that came up in the debate. Also at one point Dyer referred to JTB and the Gettier problem, and it’s like unless you’ve taken epistemology recently, you’re going to have no idea what that’s a reference to. JTB is an informal acronym that is used casually in grad school for justified true belief, which is the classic expression of Plato’s definition of knowledge. The Gettier problem or Gettier problem, depending on which pronunciation you prefer, is a recent puzzle in the philosophy of knowledge that came up in the 1960s in a little short paper by a philosopher named Edmund Gettier, and it challenges the classical definition of knowledge and says, “Hey, there’s something missing here.” But to just … In the course of a debate, casually toss off a reference to JTB and the Gettier problem, the audience is going to have no idea what you’re talking about.
Trent Horn:
Right. Right, and so that’s why I tried very hard to stay away from those kind of things and just make specific points and then really focus on … That I do feel like in this discussion because, especially with someone like Dyer and other people who follow him, I appreciate that Jay debates atheists, that his followers want to do apologetics, and so I think that that is a very good thing. The thing that I’m most concerned about is let’s try to use the method that’s going to be the most effective with the people that we’re trying to reach, especially if we’re both … Well I guess a lot of them are Eastern Orthodox and we’re Catholic. The people we’re going to reach are either Protestants or usually let’s say like atheists or non-believers, what’s going to be most persuasive to them and I hope to show in the debate that this kind of presuppositional approach, I don’t think it’s going to be persuasive on its own or if you retrofit it enough to make it persuasive, I think that to say that it’s different than natural theology, it’s like a difference without a distinction. You’re still doing the same kinds of things of saying, “Here’s stuff in the world. It can’t be explained on its own. Here’s why only a certain concept of God can explain.” At least that’s what I was trying to run through in the rest of the debate.
Jimmy Akin:
I think that thoughtful presuppositionalists acknowledge that … I mean I’ve seen thoughtful presuppositionalists say this, and Dyer seemed to even say this himself, that there is a role for natural theology reasoning. So that the views actually converge and at that point, I find myself saying, “Okay, well a presuppositionalist can say, “Sure, there is a role for natural theology,” and then a classical apologist, who embraces natural theology I think could certainly be open to the proposition that yeah, there are certain presuppositions that will make better sense of the world than others. Like if we start with the assumption or at least openness to the assumption that God exists or that God has given us his word or something like that, that will make better sense of the data we see in front of us. And so I see a convergence between these two viewpoints, and at that point, it’s really a question of, “Well, which is more useful in reaching ordinary people?”
Jimmy Akin:
Now it could happen, because people are different. It could happen that a given person needs to hear things approached from a presuppositional point of view, and so the first thing you would do with this person is say, “Have you thought about your underlying presuppositions? Let’s think for a minute. Suppose there was a god or suppose there was a Trinitarian god or suppose that God has given us his word in the Bible. Let’s think about how that would make sense of the world.”
Jimmy Akin:
For some people, that could be a constructive approach. For many people though, who aren’t yet convinced that there’s a god and aren’t open to that possibility, it can be helpful to start at the other end of the discussion and say, “Well let’s look at the world. Does the world have any aspects to it that suggest it has a creator,” and then proceed from that perspective, and at least sociologically, and historically based on the way most apologists in history have approached the question, including biblical ones, it seems that the latter is what’s helpful most of the time. Most people are not helped by, “Let’s suppose there’s a Trinitarian god,” as our first move. More people are persuaded by, “Let’s consider whether the world has a creator,” as our first move.
Jimmy Akin:
So if that’s the case, then it seems to me that presuppositionalists are making a perhaps interesting point that this set of presuppositions helps make sense of the world better than others. But that’s not of practical relevance to the case of most individuals. So it’s an interesting theoretical point to discuss and debate, but it really doesn’t tell you that much about how to actually do apologetics with real people.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I think there were … Because as I tried to understand Jay’s case for presuppositionalism as opposed to the classical view, I could really only derive maybe two arguments from everything that he put forward. One was this concern that the word god, and this was hard I think for anyone to follow, he was throwing out epistemological terms like rigid designator, flaccid designator –
Jimmy Akin:
Oh yeah, mean, dude, got to find an alternative to saying flaccid designator. Just go to. Not bad apologetics technique. Do not talk flaccid designators.
Trent Horn:
I usually don’t want to be in discussions where we’re talking about flaccid versus rigid anyways, but … So the concern here, and this deals with the problem of terms and their reference and what does the word god mean, because it’s kind of an unusual word. Like we have words like senior apologists at Catholic Answers and Jimmy Akin or another word for Jimmy Akin, the son of so and so, that you have different terms that refer to the same individual and it seemed like Dyer’s concern was just that the word god, that it’s just synonymous with a particular view of the trinity and if natural theology arguments can’t get you to the trinity, they’re not really getting you to God. It was hard to tease out what he was trying to say.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, and that’s because of how incoherent he was in presenting his case. He did talk a lot about different understandings of the term god, and he made some points that were valid but irrelevant. Or I should say that were true but irrelevant. He pointed out that just because Muslims believe in God and Jews believe in God and Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox believe in God, it doesn’t mean they all believe in the same god, and this is true. They could believe in different gods. So he would illustrate this by pointing to a fallacy, and the fallacy … I mean you can express it by different names, but the basic idea would go something like, “Well, Jimmy Akin is the son of a mother and Trent Horn is the son of a mother and Jay Dyer is the son of a mother, but that doesn’t mean they’re all the son of the same mother,” and it would be a fallacy to say, “Oh, I’ve got these three data points, therefore there must be this one universal mother of all of them.”
Trent Horn:
Yeah, another way I’ve heard it phrased is every student in class has a pencil, but it does not follow there is one pencil that every student is using.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, and so yeah. That’s fallacious reasoning. What I’ve noticed, and I should write an article about this, is often, apologists for various positions will accuse other people of committing fallacies when that’s really not what they’re doing, and in this case, yes, it’s true, hypothetically, it does not follow as a matter of logical necessity that just because Muslims, Jews and Christians all believe in a god, that it’s the same god. But the question then is what are the definite descriptions of this god? Do they point to the same one? Because I have a brother named Brian Patrick, and goes by Patrick. So Jimmy Akin is the son of a mother, Patrick Akin is the son of a mother, and it happens to be the same mother. Well why is it the same mother? Because it fits the same definite description. Our mothers both had the same name, they were born in the same place on the same date to the same parents, it’s the same person and my mother had no twin sister. So it’s the same mother. The one mother we both share fits the same definite description.
Jimmy Akin:
Well what about Muslims, Jews and Christians? Well, they all acknowledge there’s one god and that he is the creator of the world and that he appeared to Abraham. Now Muslims and Jews don’t acknowledge that he’s a trinity, but you don’t have to know everything about somebody to be able to say they’re the same person. There can be undiscovered things or things that are known to one person that are not known to another. If she was still alive you might be able to meet my mother and know my mother, but there would still be things about her that I would know that you wouldn’t, and in the same way, Christians, because they have a special relationship with God, know things about God that others don’t. Others like Muslims and non-Christian Jews can know about God, they just don’t know all that Christians know about him.
Jimmy Akin:
So Dyer was seeming to presuppose that unless you have a robust understanding of the trinity, that it’s a different god, and that doesn’t follow at all. That in itself would involve a logical fallacy.
Trent Horn:
Right, and I think this is helpful Jimmy to underscore, because this comes up a lot sometimes among Catholics, especially when they look at let’s say the catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council, in Paragraph 841, it talks about the church’s relationship with Muslim. So it says, “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims. These profess to hold the faith of Abraham,” which is a way of saying they don’t really have the faith of Abraham, but they like to say their faith goes all the way back to Abraham, even though it starts with Mohammed. But the part that’s more controversial is, “And together with us, they adore the one merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”
Trent Horn:
So some people will say, “Well it’s impossible for Muslims to adore the one god because they don’t know that God is a trinity.” But I think that you’ve made the good point, you can have a relationship with someone even if you don’t know important facts about that individual. We could say similar things of this logic, I mean if taken so far you could say that many Protestants, by that logic, wouldn’t be worshiping God since they don’t know that God is timeless or that he’s simple and has no parts. So I think your reasoning here can also be helpful to people who struggle with that description of the catechism. What do you think?
Jimmy Akin:
I think that it’s helpful for people to understand more about how it’s possible to have relations with persons even if you don’t know everything about them. I also think it’s helpful to be aware of a little bit of the history here, because what the catechism says is not at all controversial. If you go back in, I mean it is not some newfangled modern thing. If you go back to the Middle Ages, when Christendom was aggressively under attack by Muslim forces, the Medieval theologians, not only Saint Thomas Aquinas but others as well, I mean this was the standard view, would acknowledge that Muslims worshiped God. They would say they’re wrong in a lot of their theological beliefs, but there was no doubt that yeah, they worshiped the creator just like we do. This was not controversial.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Where this controversy came from, as far as I’ve been able to establish, is actually from the Protestant community. Because what happened after the Reformation was you had Protestants … Protestants had a problem of cognitive dissonance. That’s where you are torn between two different ideas that seem to be in conflict with each other. Because everybody in Western Europe knew the Catholic Church, “Oh, that’s the church Jesus founded.” And if you then want to say, “Actually no, we need to break away from that, we need to form our own churches,” then you need an alternative narrative to account for this massive church that’s been there for 1,500 years that everybody acknowledges Jesus founded.
Jimmy Akin:
The counter-narrative was to say, “Okay, the Catholic Church is not really the bride of Christ, it’s the whore of Babylon, and we are the true Christians and Catholics are not true Christians.” And in order to say they’re not true Christians, that must mean they’re worshiping a false Christ, and so they had this false understanding of God, this false understanding of Christ, that’s why they’re not true Christians, and that justifies us in being in separation from them. But then –
Trent Horn:
So at that time they would not have said Catholics and Protestants, though we differ, we both worship the one true Christ. They would say, “No, we don’t believe that at that time.”
Jimmy Akin:
Well many Protestants would agree to that, but others would not, and it’s the others that became very common, their views became very common in American fundamental Protestantism in the early 20th century.
Trent Horn:
I see.
Jimmy Akin:
And so they would then say, “Okay, Catholics are not real Christians. They don’t really worship the true Christ, they don’t really worship the true God,” and then they took the next logical step and said, “Well, if Catholics don’t worship the true Christ or the true God, well then obviously Muslims don’t, because they’re even less like us than Catholics are.” So this idea that Muslims don’t worship the true god really got from what I’ve been able to tell really got started in fundamental Protestant circles and I’m using the term carefully. There was a group of books in the early 20th century called The Fundamentals that were circulated in the Protestant community, and advocates of the books, known as The Fundamentals were called fundamental Christians or fundamentalists, that’s where the term comes from. And that group of Christians then said, “Okay, Catholics aren’t real Christians. Muslims don’t believe in the real God,” and then that view kind of back-filled into some Catholic and I gather Orthodox circles from Protestantism.
Trent Horn:
Interesting.
Jimmy Akin:
And I wonder if Jay Dyer may have a … I don’t know the details of his biography. I wonder if he has a Protestant background and may have picked it up in those circles.
Trent Horn:
Well I think he might have attended a Protestant seminary at one point, so … I’d have to go back to his bio. It’s interesting Jimmy, the point you raise about this not being controversial. When you go back to the catechism of Saint Pius X, Pope Saint Pius X, in the early part of the, I think the first decade of the 20th century, this is what it says about Muslims, though it uses language that would get you canceled nowadays, but this is what it says in Question 12, “Who are infidels? Infidels are those who have not been baptized and do not believe in Jesus Christ. Because they either believe in and worship false gods as idolators do, like polytheists, or though admitting one true god, they do not believe in the Messiah, neither as already come in the person of Jesus Christ, nor as to come for instance Mohammedans and the like.” So he makes the distinction there. You’ve got people who worship false gods, idolators. You’ve got some who believe in the one true god, but they don’t recognize the Messiah and they’re not like Jews who recognize the Law of Moses and the hopeful Messiah. But it’s interesting, even there, you see the recognition.
Jimmy Akin:
One thing that I think could be interesting to bring up, now concerning your debate, was Dyer as we said placed a great deal of emphasis on the ambiguity of the term god, and how it can mean different things, and he pointed out, and he was correct on this, that terms like hypostasis and Prosopon, which were the terms connected with the word person in the early ecumenical councils, really acquired their technical meaning at these councils, and he’s right about that, they did. And hypothetically, you could say, “Well, if you’re going to use these terms precisely, then we need to acknowledge how they were formed,” and that’s quite true. But it doesn’t mean you have to use those terms in their technical senses as your starting point for dealing with someone.
Jimmy Akin:
One of the things that you find out if you study the history of religion including Christianity and Judaism is the terms for God were widely shared. They were not unique to the Jewish people or to the early church, so in Hebrew, you have terms like el or elohim and elah, all of which mean god. In Greek, the word is theos for God, and these terms have a wide range of meanings, and Dyer even pointed some of this out, that elohim can mean different things. It can mean –
Trent Horn:
Like a judge.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, I find the case for that somewhat limited. But it certainly can mean different things. In the Old Testament, you can show that the term refers to even departed human souls for example, and the one true God that’s the creator, and the gods of all the other nations and things like that.
Jimmy Akin:
Now the people in the ancient world, prior to the Council of Nicaea, did not have a robust, precise understanding of the trinity. In fact, if you’re talking to a typical polytheist about a god, “So I’m going to tell you about my god here, he’s the true God, he’s the creator.” Well you’re giving them information they wouldn’t already have because to them, most gods were not creators. They were finite beings that were actually created being themselves and were part of creation, and so if you look at, if you are aware of, “Okay, this is how the term god was being used,” it was being used in this very broad, unrefined sense. But the natural starting point for talking to someone is using the language they’re already familiar with. So I’m going to talk to a pagan about God and I’m going to tell him about the true God, and we see Paul doing this in Acts 17 and Paul does not say, “Okay guys, we need to begin by redefining our term god. Here is what Prosopon in Latin and hypostasis in Greek mean in the context of this discussion. There is one God in three persons and now let’s start talking about him.”
Jimmy Akin:
That’s not the first thing Paul does. Paul starts with, “Oh, I saw you had an altar to an unknown god.” The Athenians had reasoned that, “Okay, there’s going to be a god that’s not part of our pantheon, but we ought to show him worship. We ought to show him reverence, so let’s do that. We’ll make an altar to an unknown god.” And they were right, and Paul says, “What you’ve worshiped in ignorance, I now proclaim to you.” So Paul acknowledges they were legitimately worshiping God.
Trent Horn:
Right, they were giving him worship.
Jimmy Akin:
Even though they knew nothing about him and certainly did not understand him as a trinity, and so what Paul then does is he takes their naïve unformed view of this God that contains elements of falsehood because they’re not assuming that this god is the creator, much less that he’s a trinity, and then he begins to purify it and refine it and give them a deeper knowledge of it. That’s essentially the strategy that is used in classical apologetics. You start with a broad understanding of God that you can prove by looking at the world, and then you progressively refine that picture and supplement it by divine revelation and so forth to give people a more accurate detailed knowledge of God.
Jimmy Akin:
So we see that in scripture. We also see the same thing in science. One of the things that occurred to me as I was listening to Dyer state his case is that there is essentially … Just off the top of my head, I immediately saw a parallel in physics. So originally, since the time of Aristotle, there was this theory that matter was made of these four classical elements, maybe with a fifth up in outer space, and that matter was infinitely divisible. That there was no smallest unit of matter, so you could just infinite … If you had wood, you could infinitely divide the wood into smaller and smaller chunks. And then after the Scientific Revolution began in the 1600s, you had a revival of this idea from some Greek philosophers called atomism, the idea that okay, atoms are the smallest unit. That was proved or something like it was proved in 1905 by Albert Einstein.
Trent Horn:
Yeah atom, doesn’t that mean like –
Jimmy Akin:
Indivisible.
Trent Horn:
You can’t cut, yeah, or you can’t cut.
Jimmy Akin:
Exactly, and then it turns out, “Okay, well we found atoms as these smallest particles beyond which it ceases to be whatever it is.” If it’s gold, there’s a fundamental unit of gold that’s an atom of gold, and then it turns out, “Oh, they’re made out of smaller things,” and we then identified electrons and protons and neutrons, which are the three kinds of particles that atoms are made of.
Jimmy Akin:
Then by the 1960s, we found, “Oh, it starts to look like protons and neutrons are made out of smaller things called quarks.” As far as we know right now, quarks are as small as it gets. There may well be smaller particles, but as far as we know, quarks are the smallest. So let’s suppose that that’s the truth, that quarks are the most fundamental particles. Well how did our knowledge of matter develop? Well, it started with a broad unreflective understanding, based on Aristotle’s views, and then we figured out, “Oh, and atoms exist,” and then we figured out, “Oh, protons and neutrons exist,” and then we figured out, “Oh, quarks exist.” So we had this progressive refinement of our understanding of the structure of matter, and suppose then, if quarks are fundamental, well the properties of quarks are going to explain the properties of all the larger units.
Jimmy Akin:
So if you could start by saying, “Okay, let’s presuppose these things about quarks, and if we do, it will make better sense of the world, the material world we see around us than if you make other assumptions, like quarks aren’t real or they behave some other way.”
Trent Horn:
I see.
Jimmy Akin:
And yeah, it’s true. Once you reach the point of quarks, you can say, “Okay, our beliefs about quarks better explain the world than an alternative set of beliefs,” so we could develop a kind of physics presuppositionalism around quarks. But that’s not how –
Trent Horn:
But you have to get there first.
Jimmy Akin:
That’s not how we got to quarks, and in the same way, how people get to God is typically not by leaping straight to the trinity level. It’s certainly not how it played out in history in God’s progressive revelation.
Trent Horn:
And that’s what I think was a controversial point in the debate and I’ve seen online some individuals, you might call them more … And I don’t know how this is cashed out in Eastern Orthodoxy, whether it’s the primary view, I suspect it’s more fundamentalist if you will, that, “Oh no, the patriarchs and possibly even any of the Jews worshiping Yahweh, they knew God was a trinity.” I thought that was a very odd … And I was very clear, I said, “Knowing that,” because you could believe in God and if God is a trinity you unknowingly believe [inaudible 00:38:05] implicitly in seeing God’s glory, you see the trinity. But I was clear, “Well no. These people did not have the same knowledge of the trinity we do.”
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, and the claims that Dyer appeared to be making regarding knowledge of the trinity prior to the time of Christ, to put it charitably would be very difficult to support historically. He at one place quoted Jesus as saying that Abraham had a knowledge of the trinity because Jesus refers to Abraham as having seen me, and that’s a misquotation, I assume he’s going by memory there, but that’s a misquotation of John 8, and what Jesus actually says in John 8 is that Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day, and that can mean a bunch of different things. Like Abraham believed in the resurrection of the dead and therefore would be alive in the future Messianic age. That does not mean Abraham believed that God was three persons, one of whom was Jesus. That’s a different claim.
Jimmy Akin:
Now you can show that there were intimations of the idea of some kind of plurality in the God head prior to the time of Christ. It would be hard to say 1,000 B.C. in the time of King David, or even further back than that in the time of Abraham that this was the case, but you can show that in the centuries leading up to the time of Jesus, there was some awareness that there may be a plurality in the God head and so you had some figures, some authors, talking about like okay there’s Yahweh and then there’s the lesser Yahweh, who can be identified with the angel of Yahweh. That actually is what Jesus is getting himself in trouble with when he’s in front of the high priest and the high priest says, “Tell us plainly if you are the son of the blessed,” and Jesus says, “Well from now, you’re going to see the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven,” and that’s a reference to the Book of Daniel and that passage in Daniel is one of the ones that was taken as applying to the second Yahweh is coming alongside Yahweh, and so that’s why the high priest, so Jesus is saying, “Yeah, I’m the second Yahweh,” and that’s why the high priest then tears his robes and says, “You’ve heard the blasphemy. Why do we need any more witnesses?”
Jimmy Akin:
This became known as the two powers in heaven doctrine and in the second century and following, it was deemed heretical in the Jewish community to hold to the two powers in heaven doctrine. But it was there, at least in the centuries right up to the time of Christ, but it wasn’t clearly formulated. And certainly not everybody had the understanding Jesus of Nazareth is the divine son of God. If Caiaphas had had that understanding, he wouldn’t have torn his robes.
Trent Horn:
Right, yeah, and that’s why I picked the patriarchs and then even just like a faithful Jew in the exile, that they worshiped God, but they did not know God as a trinity. If they did, why wasn’t knowledge of the trinity more widespread? I think I agree with you that historically it’s just [inaudible 00:41:42] –
Jimmy Akin:
You can’t support it. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
It’s an untenable position. Instead, that no, you’re right, when we understand who God is, God’s revelation is progressive, we see that through salvation history, and helping people come to know who God is. I think a strength of classical apologetics is that it really coheres with human nature that we learn things in a progressive way. It’s like how God treats us, if you look at salvation history, he took people step by step, learning who he was, what his saving plan was, instead of just dumping it on everyone right at the beginning to be grossly misunderstood. I think we can learn a lot from that as classical apologists that we kind of walk people through understanding God and his revelation in a kind of progressive way.
Jimmy Akin:
By the way, we probably … Now we focused on classical apologetics and presuppositionalism. We probably should at least briefly mention some of the other approaches.
Trent Horn:
I agree. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
So another approach is called evidentialism, and this is similar to classical apologetics except you don’t have to prove the existence of God first. So you don’t have to say, “Let’s step back and look at the world and reason our way to God.” Instead, you can say, “Let’s step back, look at the world. Do we see miracles like the resurrection of Jesus?” Or if we’re having a contest with the prophets of Baal, whose sacrifice gets burned by fire from heaven and whose doesn’t and what does that tell us about who God is? Is it Yahweh or Baal? So you could on an evidentialist approach or you could call it a miraculist approach, you look for miracles that you can then infer things about the divine. So if you see, “Oh, Jesus is raised from the dead. We have good evidence for that.” Well, then Jesus as the one who is resurrected is qualified to interpret this event for us and he says, “Well, I was raised by the one true God who is the creator, and I’m his son.” “Okay, that’s good to know, and you’ve just given us good evidence for that by rising from the dead.”
Trent Horn:
That’s similar to what you read in Acts its seems. That’s very central to the proclamation of the apostles, that Jesus’ identity is vindicated by his miracles.
Jimmy Akin:
Exactly, and particularly by the resurrection, and so this is an approach that has traction in scripture. Another approach is known as the cumulative case approach.
Trent Horn:
Before we jump to cumulative case, thoughts on that, yeah, I would say it’s interesting. Presuppositionalism and classical apologetics seem very apart, though I think we have discussed their commonalities, where they can merge together. I think evidentialism and classical apologetics share much more in common and we’ve only … Someone who would identify more as a classical apologist and that’s kind of the tack that I’m most oriented towards would find a large amount of agreement. I would especially say if you are engaging another theist, like a Muslim for example or someone else, I think miracles might be the arrow that kind of breaks the symmetry between the religions. My only concern is I think that for non-religious people or atheists, it can be difficult for them to entertain the possibility of miracles and the laws of nature being broken, if they don’t already believe there is a supreme power governing the universe that is capable of doing that, if you see where I’m going with that.
Jimmy Akin:
I do, and that kind of points in the direction of the last of the methodologies that I want to mention. But I’ll get there in just a moment. Just serving it quickly, cumulative case apologetics is the idea that the truth of the Christian faith doesn’t rest in a certain set of propositions that you prove one by one in a systematic manner, like in classical apologetics. First we prove God exists, then we prove Jesus is the Christ, then we prove that the Catholic Church is Christ’s church. That’s a kind of step-wise ordered proof, kind of like a mathematical proof. You do it one step at a time, and the cumulative case view says, “Okay, maybe that works, but that’s not what convinces most people. For most people, it’s more like a lawyer in a court. A lawyer in a court presents bunch of different pieces of evidence that each contribute something towards proving his case, but it’s not like a mathematical proof. It’s not like a mathematical demonstration.” So advocates of the cumulative case view would include people like C.S. Lewis for example.
Jimmy Akin:
My view is sort of a … So let’s see, we did classical, presuppositional, evidential, cumulative case. There’s also another one called reformed epistemology but that’s very specialized. We probably don’t want to get too far into that.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, that’s fine.
Jimmy Akin:
The view that I take is a practical one –
Trent Horn:
Ooh, the Akin view.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, is a practical one, and I call it toolbox apologetics, and the idea is what you’re trying to do, the apologist is like a workman who is trying to help a client and just like if you have a plumber or a carpenter over to your house, you have something you need doing, fixing, and he is going to have certain tools in his toolbox, and what tool he pulls out will depend on the nature of the thing you need fixed.
Jimmy Akin:
So my approach is to say, “Okay, I’m like a workman. The person I’m talking with is my client. They have something they need fixed, whether it’s a false belief or a lack of confidence or something like that, and what I’m going to approach them with is not a systematic program, unless they happen to need it. It’s not going to be a systematic program of let’s start by proving the existence of God and move to smaller things or let’s start with miracles and jump to God or let’s start by presupposing a triune god.” I mean maybe an individual person needs that approach, but I shouldn’t be thinking inside of those boxes.
Jimmy Akin:
I should be aware of them so I can use them if needed, but many people need something completely different, and the example I use to illustrate this is back in the 1990s, right after email became a thing, I got an email from a woman in a Muslim country, and the email was titled, “My heart is searching for God.” It turns out this woman had been raised Muslim but had gone to America for college, and she had seen Christian society in America and how it differed from Muslim society and what specifically spoke to her was the treatment of women in Christian culture compared to in Muslim culture, and so in writing her my heart is searching for God email to me, what she wanted to know was not does God exist or who is his prophet, she wanted to know what is the Christian view of women, and that’s what she needed addressed and it would have been stupid of me to try to back up and say, “Well let’s talk about how we know God exists and how Jesus is his son and how the Catholic Church is his church.” What she needed was an understanding of the Christian view of women, and how it differed from what she had been taught, which she was already aware of obviously.
Jimmy Akin:
So that’s an illustration of how I think apologists need to be responsive and adaptive and take this toolbox approach to the needs of individual people rather than trying to mainline everybody through one of the classical systems. As useful as those systems can be in individual circumstances.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, your approach reminds me, two scripture verses come to mind. One is 1 Corinthians 9, where Paul says to the Greeks I became a Greek, to the Jews a Jew, I become all things to all men that I might win some. So he modifies and we see this in scripture when Paul is debating other Jews, he’ll cite the Old Testament, in Acts 17, speaking to the Greeks, he makes no mention of the Messiah or the Old Testament, because that wasn’t common ground that they shared.
Trent Horn:
The other is Matthew 6:21, where Jesus says “Where your treasure is, there also your heart will be.” So like with this woman, you’re starting with what is it the person values the most and how is that better incorporated at the time?
Jimmy Akin:
At the moment.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, at the moment what do they value the most and how is that incorporated into the Christian or into the Catholic worldview? So yeah, I think that’s really helpful.
Trent Horn:
I guess one last thing that we can discuss a little bit are kind of the foundational elements. I think the only other major argument that Jay brought up, and this kind of got hammered home more in the cross-examination and Q&A, was, “Well, we have to have foundational things to believe in and the only way to have a foundation which is very presuppositional, the only way to have sure belief in anything is to start with God, even though it’s a kind of a circular reasoning that we’re doing, because we already believe in God.” It seemed like Jay was saying, “Well there’s no such thing as self-evident truths, even God is not self-evident, but there is a foundational truth, even if we get there in a circular way with God.”
Trent Horn:
So we had a disagreement about it and I mentioned a piece of jargon, I think it was called Agrippa’s Trilemma.
Jimmy Akin:
Yes. Also known as Munchausen’s Trilemma.
Trent Horn:
Right, so … And this is the question of how do we know what we know, which is also a key dispute between classical apologetics and presuppositional. It might be helpful to discuss that a little, but the mainstay of the Trilemma, I tried hard in the short time I had to explain this, that to say that I know x is true, okay, well how do you know it’s true? There’s three options. You could keep saying how do you know that, how do you know that, how do you know that infinitely, and that would be the infinite regress, but it seems like we couldn’t really know anything if we just had infinite regresses.
Trent Horn:
You could say, “Well, I know A is true because of B and B is true because of C and C is true because of A,” and you could do that which would be a circle, but circular reasoning just seems illogical too. The other option then would be foundationalism. “Well I know A is true because when I consider A, I do know it’s true, it’s self-evident to me.” That was kind of I think the heart of our kind of disagreement for Jay, saying, “Well, we can’t do natural theology because it relies on self-evident truths,” and he’s very skeptical we can have any of those without God. So I guess that’s the best way I can re-summarize that part of the debate for everyone what we were disagreeing about.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. In this case, what struck me or what strikes me is that the two of you were … Well perhaps I shouldn’t say it that way. So this is another issue where he was getting into some pretty deep philosophical waters because he was the one that brought up foundationalism, and foundationalism for people who may not be aware if a subject that comes up in philosophy in a field called epistemology, which is the study of knowledge, what knowledge is, how we know it, and so forth, and the question is … One of the questions is if you believe something, what’s your justification for that belief? Why should you believe that rather than something else?
Jimmy Akin:
Then this gets us into different theories of justification. One of the theories of justification is known as foundationalism, and the idea is that you should have a solid foundation for all of your beliefs and so let’s say I believe in electrons. Well, I should have a solid foundation for that that’s presumably based in experiments that have been run, and well how do I know those experiments work? Well, it goes back to even deeper principles.
Jimmy Akin:
The classic version of foundationalism was proposed by Rene Descartes, the French philosopher, and he said, “Okay, I’m going to use a method of doubting everything I can and I’m going to strip away anything I can possibly doubt and I’m going to get down to a set of things I cannot doubt and then that will be my foundation that I build all of the rest of my knowledge on.” He got down to I think therefore I am, and Dyer pointed out that that itself has been subject to criticism, which is true. Just because you appear to think doesn’t mean you’re actually thinking, and just because something seems to be the case doesn’t mean it actually is the case. So there have been alternate proposals like I appear to think therefore there is the possibility of a thought. And even that, you can question. But in the debate, you were advocating a version of foundationalism, and he was taking exception to that. He was saying, “No, we shouldn’t try to find undoubtable or obviously true beliefs. We should instead just presuppose certain beliefs, and it’s legitimate to do that because there’s no effective alternative.”
Jimmy Akin:
That’s a debate that can be had. Personally, my inclination is … I’m sort of a naturalist in that I start by looking at how do people actually form their beliefs, and I don’t think they use foundationalism or presuppositionalism. I think that they have … I tend to favor what’s called the coherence theory of justification. In terms of what people actually do. People have a certain set of beliefs, some of them are innate, they’re programmed into us before we’re born, they fall right out of our genome. But we have a certain set of beliefs and then we take in data and we form new beliefs based on that data and we have this kind of web of belief, that’s an image that’s often been used for coherentism, and then we modify our beliefs based on new data, and I think that’s how people actually form their beliefs, and it’s an interesting academic question, “Well, suppose we’re imagining an idealized person. How would an idealized person do it?”
Jimmy Akin:
I think if you’re asking that, well ultimately, you’re going to run into some fundamental axioms, because infinite regresses don’t work with finite human consciousness. There has to be a starting point. The question is, what’s the reasonable starting point? And I have some sympathies to foundationalism here in that I think there are certain … If we’re thinking about an idealized thinker, there are certain starting assumptions that seem very hard to deny. They are so intuitive, like law of non-contradiction. It’s so intuitive, it’s very hard to imagine thinking without a principle like that, and so I … Even though they might be doubtable in some sense, I think they so strongly recommend themselves to us that they are a logical starting point.
Trent Horn:
And I would agree with you and I didn’t want the debate to be too derailed into specific theories of foundationalism. Because there are different ways –
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, I felt like Dyer should have … Dyer, if you want to debate these issues, just have a debate on epistemology.
Trent Horn:
Right, and that’s what he tried to take to boil natural theology down just to this particular question, but I think most people, when they just start to think about it, no, there are beliefs that seem evident to me, something can’t be true and not true at the same time. A skeptic can always doubt anything, it’s just kind of what they do. But just because the skeptic makes a doubt doesn’t mean I necessarily have to entertain it or take it seriously as I’m just living my life and assembling beliefs to do my best to understand the world.
Trent Horn:
So I think natural theology plays a good role in that and I also, in that factor of pointing out, it seemed really like we both agreed, “Hey, you got to have a starting point to understand the world.” But I still think one of the fatal flaws is going to be if we try a presupposition that is only justified in a circular way, if it’s only justified in a circular way, then you have no way to know which presupposition you should choose, or at least, especially someone on the outside, looking at all the different presuppositions, how are they supposed to do that without some kind of objective way to make a decision amongst them if you see what I’m saying.
Jimmy Akin:
I do, I think that what a presuppositionalist would say is, “Well, by presupposing, by using my set of presuppositions, and then thinking through the evidence we have from the world, mine makes better sense of the world, of the evidence we have from the world, compared to other views. So my view allows coherent thought and other views wouldn’t.” Now you then got to argue that, is that really the case? Like Dyer seemed to be arguing that only by presupposing a specifically Trinitarian God could you even have coherent thought –
Trent Horn:
And that’s what I found interesting, oh go ahead, sorry.
Jimmy Akin:
And maybe that’s true, but you got to argue that. That is not prima fascia obvious.
Trent Horn:
And not just that. When he’s made the argument before, he says the God of Orthodox with a capital O or the God of Eastern Orthodox Christian faith, that for Dyer, he’s very particular that it’s not the true god unless it has … I’ll throw jargon out here but it’s not important for us to know what it means, something called an energy essence distinction, having these very particular elements of Eastern Orthodox thought baked into it, and I find that highly implausible, “So wait, you’re saying that we couldn’t have logic or knowledge or morality if God is the absolutely simple God of … ” Not simple to understand, but he doesn’t have metaphysical parts, the god of Catholic theology or the god of Protestant theology, who is Trinitarian, can’t give us knowledge, logic and morality, but only the Eastern Orthodox god of theology can do that. That I find you could make an argument [inaudible 01:01:01] but I already find it pretty suspicious that that case can be made.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, and this is another thing that I think was a failure on Dyer’s part in terms of making his case because it was not clear for much of the debate. This is something, this line of thought is something that emerged relatively late in the discussion, and what I would do, if I’m debating someone, what I do try to do is identify all of the common ground we have first, number one, to show I’m nice and to show I’m reasonable, but also to set it aside because once we have identified where we agree, we can then move on to, “Well, what do we actually disagree on,” and we don’t have to be casting our minds back and forth trying to figure out what we agree on and what we don’t. It’s much better structurally in a debate to say, “Here’s what we agree on. Now let’s put that aside and talk about what we don’t agree on.”
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and that’s why –
Jimmy Akin:
He did not do that. He was all over the map. It was virtually impossible to follow what he was saying for more than a few seconds at a time.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and that’s why I asked things like do you think we should provide evidences for particular aspects of revelation? Like fulfilled Messianic prophecy, and he agreed with that. So I think that, especially people … That’s why for me, there will be a lot of people who support Jay and maybe use this apologetic methodology, or we’ll meet Protestants who use a similar kind of methodology. I would say, “Well hey, it’s good that you’re going out and sharing the gospel and talking to people and helping them to come to know God and his son Jesus Christ.” Then the more I can find common ground, and if I could say, “Hey, give this historical argument too, it’s really helpful.” Then I think that fits into that toolbox approach you were mentioning earlier.
Jimmy Akin:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and I think … In a way, there’s something audacious and I think that my impression is that Dyer strives for audacity. But there’s something audacious into trying to say not only do you have to presuppose the existence of God, and not only the Christian god, but specifically my denominational understanding of the Christian god, and try to use it as a sort of bootstrap into Eastern Orthodoxy approach. I think it would be … Sure, as a Catholic apologist, I’d love it if I had a one stop you must be Catholic to understand anything argument.
Trent Horn:
A Catholic ontological argument would just be wonderful.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. But I think that’s a little too convenient. I think that even if such an argument existed, it would transcend the ability of most people to benefit from it and it’s just going to be better to reach people where they are and not try to prove everything all at once and to take a more piecemeal approach.
Trent Horn:
I would agree with that. Jimmy, thanks so much for coming on the show. Are there any resources you would like to recommend and also where people can learn more about you? I think one resource probably in both of our heads, if you want to learn more about different apologetic methodologies and how they differ from one another, there is a series put out, I think it’s by Zondervan, a point-counterpoint series where they have books on all different kinds of religious subjects. Usually it’s disputes among Protestant authors. There are a few cases where they invite Catholic authors to give a particular point of view. You usually see that in their books on faith and works and justification. But they do a, there’s a five views books on apologetics.
Jimmy Akin:
Right, Five Views of Apologetics, the editor was Steve Cowan, C-O-W-A-N, who was my old officemate in grad school.
Trent Horn:
Oh wow.
Jimmy Akin:
We were in the same philosophy program, and so I know him personally, I was delighted. He is an evangelical and I was delighted to see when his book Five Views of Apologetics came out and he explores … He has different people writing from the different perspectives and they debate each other on the different merits of these. Also if you’d like an assessment of the different views, there’s strengths and weaknesses, there are contributions and limitations from a Catholic point of view, check out my Introduction to Apologetics course at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. Just go to schoolofapologetics.com and it’s the Introduction to Apologetics course that you’ll want and I go through the different methodologies, as well as a lot of other stuff to introduce the topic.
Trent Horn:
Perfect, and then of course everyone, don’t forget to check out Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World podcast. Where can people go and find that?
Jimmy Akin:
It’s all over wherever you find podcasts and on the internet, so just type in Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World and it will come up. This episode is going to go out on Monday, right?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, or probably … We’re probably going to shoot for Wednesday, the first week in November, so yeah, there will be fun stuff coming up for November?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, so for Friday … For November in general, we’re going to start on the first Friday of November by talking about the reported canals of Mars that were spotted by astronomers in the 1900s and how they led to a big enthusiasm for the idea there was a civilization on Mars. Then the second Friday, we’re going to look at the scientific evidence we have concerning whether there is life on Mars, and we have more evidence than you might think. Then for the third Friday in November, we’re going to be … It’s going to be the 50th anniversary of D.B. Cooper –
Trent Horn:
Ah yes.
Jimmy Akin:
The famous hijacker who was very gentlemanly and leapt out of the plane in mid-flight, taking the money with him and was never seen again. So we’re going to be looking at the mystery of D.B. Cooper –
Trent Horn:
Until his series on Disney+.
Jimmy Akin:
Yes. So lots of interesting stuff coming up.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Oh that sounds wonderful. So everyone, be sure to check out Jimmy’s course, schoolofapologetics.com, as well as Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. Jimmy, thanks so much for being here.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Trent Horn:
And thank you guys for watching. I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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