Matt Slick Live

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. It's Matt Slick live. Matt is the founder and president of the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry, found online at KARM.org. When you have questions about Bible doctrines, turn to Matt Slick live.

Francis, taking your calls and responding to your questions at 877-207-2276. Here's Matt Slick. Everybody, welcome to the show. It is me, Matt Slick.

And let's see, it's Friday, January 28th, 2022. Boy, if you want to give me a call, all you got to do is dial 8772072276. And I want to thank you for listening. We appreciate it. If you are interested in watching the show, which means me sitting here at my desk and headset on and all that kind of stuff, then all you got to do, all you got to do is just go to KARM.org, C-A-R-M dot O-R-G. And you can watch the show.

There's a link on the right hand side, says Matt Slick live. And all you got to do is go there and you can watch. Not a big deal, but we do have people in the chat room that's associated with that, and a lot of people really enjoy that. We have a lot of good conversation there as well. So, you know, fellowship there.

Good, good stuff. All right, if you want to give me a call, all you have to do is dial 8772072276. And sometimes I do hate mail on Friday, so maybe I'll do some today if we get a little bit slow. And if you like hate mail, call up and say, hey, do hate mail. People enjoy apparently hate mail, not because it's hate mail, but because of how I react to it. I get a kick out of hate mail.

I really do. All right. Why don't we just jump on the phone? So let's get back with Anthony from Virginia. Anthony, welcome. You're on the air. Hey, Matt, I want to continue.

And we're having about it. I don't know why all knowledge must ultimately be grounded in the existence of the Christian, transparent God. You appealed to the transcendent of what you referred to as abstraction and that they're basically not dependent on the human mind.

How would you respond to someone who asserts that abstractions are simply concepts generated by the mind based on its observations of reality, and that there is no justification for the claim that they are universal? That's stupid. OK, that's what you're talking about.

How does it help? I'll show you why. To say they're not universal, abstract thoughts is ridiculous. OK, let me show you something here.

I'll do two, three birds with one stone here. So are you familiar with the law of logic called the law of excluded middle statements, whether true or false? You familiar with that? Yeah. OK. Yeah. So I'm talking to you. True.

OK, I live in Madagascar. False. I'm on the moon. False.

I'm six feet tall. True. OK. So statements are true or false. Now I'm going to ask you, is the statement that I'm going to give you that I'm going to give you true or false?

Are you ready? OK. Mm hmm. It is always wrong for anyone to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure. True or false?

Let's just stick to the idea of abstraction, like the abstract answer to the question, what do you think that I don't have that I have in this conversation before? Of course I have. I'm going to go in here and show it to you by killing two, three birds with one stone. So is the statement true or false? It is always wrong for everyone or anyone, everyone to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure. Is the statement true or is it false? It's well, I would say it's true. OK, so if you say it's true, when we say it is always wrong for everyone, you're saying there's a universal moral obligation to everyone, right? Well, I would say I believe I believe that. Yeah, you believe that there's a universal moral obligation to everyone, right? You believe that? I believe that. I believe, yes, I do believe that.

The answer is yes, you do. So what you're believing is that there's a universal abstract principle that's obligatory to everyone. Right? Yeah, right.

Right. Now, how do you ground that universal abstract concept? Because if you just believe it, if you just believe it on yourself, about yourself, that's OK. But the statement is not about yourself, it's about everybody, everywhere, all the time. This means it's universal in place and in time, and you are affirming its truth value.

Now, how do you ground that? That's a moral law. I think there's a difference between a moral law and an abstraction. An abstraction is... Let me explain. Morals are abstractions. Thou shalt not covet.

Well, let's ask... Anthony, Anthony, Anthony, let me explain. Morals are abstractions because they occur in the mind. You don't find a moral under a rock. You don't take a picture of it. You can't weigh it. It doesn't diffract. OK, it's not a physical property.

What makes it moral is that God would punish us for doing something like that. Anthony, take your right hand, take your right hand, put it in front of your face, OK? Slap yourself upside the head, buddy.

I want you to listen. Matt, you're disrespecting me. You're disrespecting me.

You really are. If you don't like it, you can always leave. Well, I want to have a real conversation with you. OK, so I'm trying to have a conversation with him and he's going to do disrespect to me. Stop whining.

Here's the thing. I'm trying to get him to understand the concept. He doesn't want to understand the concept. It's the same problem that I have with atheists as a whole. When we get to this, when I said I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do is show that there's a universal moral absolute, but the universal moral absolute is an abstract principle. Abstractions do not occur on on. You don't grow them with seeds out of a packet.

You don't freeze them. You don't weigh them. They're not properties of the physical world.

That's the point. I've gone over this with him before. He continues to argue.

He doesn't want to listen. They are not properties of the physical realm. You don't extract moral obligation and truth from looking at rocks or seeing how tall a tree is or looking at the perihelion of a planet.

You don't do that. Therefore, they are not, so to speak, of the physical world and not properties of the physical world, since their statements that describe a moral action. Therefore, they are abstractions. They are abstract entities, but they have a universal quality, which is what he said. What I'm doing is showing him there's a universal moral truth, but it's a universal moral truth is still a universal truth, which has an abstract quality and an abstract essence. So how then does anybody have a universal moral truth, particularly in this context?

How do you have that? How do you have an abstract principle, an abstract truth, which occurs in the mind? How do you have it be universally true, always, everywhere, all the time, which is what he asserted is the case. How do you have that in an atheistic, materialistic worldview?

You can't. You can't justify it. You can't bridge the gap between is and ought. It's called the is-ought problem. Something is, well, why ought?

You do it based on what is. So, because I'm trying to show him, he doesn't want to listen, because I'm trying to show him there's a universal abstract principle. The question then becomes, how do you justify a universal abstract principle? And in the case of morality, what you're saying is, what I ask is, how do you justify that there's a moral obligation based upon a universal abstraction that everybody is obligated to submit to?

That's the ultimate question. He doesn't want to listen. I've already refuted the idea that it's a property of the universe, that it's something we observe.

When I talk to him about the issue of morality, he wants to go and forget that. But the idea of universal principles are still the same. And what I'm doing is showing him there's universal principles that are moral. There are universal principles that are true. Two plus two is four.

Here's a question. Ought, you believe that two plus two is four. Is the necessity of believing two plus two equals four a moral obligation?

And the answer is, yes, it is. Because two plus two equals four is grounded in the mind of God. And everything that God does is proper and true and morally correct. Therefore, you morally are obligated to believe two plus two equals four. An atheist will deny that.

Well, they can deny it all they want. But I can ask them, why is it that you ought to believe any moral truth? Why is it you ought to believe any logical truth? Then they're going to go into consequentialism or pragmatism and say, well, the consequence doesn't work. But that's not an ought, it's just an issue of pragmatism. And then all they're doing is just saying, they're trying to bridge the is-ought barrier.

They're trying to say, well, is that you ought to believe it. Otherwise, you get hurt. Well, why is that bad? Well, because it just is. Well, why?

Because you say so. So what we do, what I do with the atheist, I start asking these questions. When they start positing a possible answer, I dissect their answer and show that it doesn't work.

And continue to do this repeatedly. And what always happens is, they go in circles. The reason they go in circles is because they're chasing their own tails. They don't see what the truth is. They don't want to see what the truth is, because they don't rest their truth in God, who's the ultimate. They want to find an ultimate apart from God. They want to find how 2 plus 2 equals 4, and why we ought or ought not believe it, based upon secularism.

Based upon secularist ideas. But then, they can't ground them, because they can't defend universal moral principles. Because universal morals and universal ought and things like this are abstractions. How do you account for an abstraction that's universal and carries an ought with it? Both logical, necessary, and moral.

Because statements have those qualities to them. That's another discussion. So I've had this discussion countless times, as you guys can tell.

And unfortunately, Anthony is not interested in really understanding the issue. I've spent a lot of time with him, and maybe he'll do it again sometime. But so much heresy, so little time. Let's get to Rick from High Point, North Carolina. Welcome. You're on the air. Thank you. How are you doing today? Doing all right.

A little frustrated with the illogic of unbelievers. I can tell you. I can tell you. I do have a question. Did I not just hear you say an atheist would disagree that 2 plus 2 equals 4?

No. An atheist would disagree on the methodology of grounding. So let me explain something, what grounding is.

In a physical way, it's like I'm sitting in my chair. Well, why is the chair here what grounds it in its existence? Well, because somebody made it. Well, who made them?

Well, their mom and dad. Where did they come from? And you go back and you go back and you say, well, what grounds it? Because if you're going to say that, well, I sit in a chair.

Why? Because the chair is here. And you stop, you're not asking the difficult questions.

You're just saying, well, I'm going to stop here at this level. Well, why is the chair here? What's the purpose of the chair? How did it come about? Because someone designed it.

Well, what's the purpose of the design? Where did they come from that they have this ability? It's called the ultimacy of grounding. That's what I call it, the ultimacy of grounding. Where does things come from?

How do you know? When we talk to atheists, we talk to people about epistemological issues, about knowing things. They're not able to ground their knowledge. What they will say is use rationalism, empiricism. They want to go into meta-ethics. They want to go into varying things of platonic norms. They postulate all kinds of potentials. And they beg the question in the process.

I don't get into all that. And so they're not able to ultimately ground what they ultimately believe in. That's not to say they can't ground or believe that two plus two is four.

So they can believe it, but they can't ground why it's true. That's the problem. And this is what the issue is, okay?

If that makes sense. It does. Okay. Okay. Okay, it does.

Secondly, now, like I said, to me, you're one of the greatest Bible teachers I've ever heard of. That means you've heard that one, okay. No, I've heard quite a bit. But here's the point, okay. Let's just say, I'm going to post some names out there.

Tony Evans, David Jeremiah, Chuck Swindoll, James McDonough, those guys who I know you've heard of. Let's just say y'all get into a conversation. And they interpret something as spiritual different than you. Do you think that what you say is going to supersede what they say, or y'all just don't agree to disagree? I'll answer that.

We'll make it back from the break, because I've been in that situation in panel discussions with the people I'm with. Thanks. If you don't agree, I'll tell you what I do. Okay. All right. Hey, folks, we'll be right back after these messages. Please stay tuned. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

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