If we're going to have a Christian life and worldview, The first thing we have to have, beloved, is a Christian. God view. Because how we think about God. will determine how we think about the world and how we think about our lives. How do you know that the world that you see through your eyes is really there?
This question has puzzled secular philosophers for centuries. Thank you for joining us on this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your weekend host, Josh Mann, and I'm so glad to have you with us today.
Well, we'll be continuing our study in Dr. R. C. Sproll's series, A Blueprint for Thinking. This is such an important series for Christians today because it's designed to help us develop a Christian worldview.
When you donate today, you can receive lifetime access to this five-part series. And we'll also send you the DVD copy of another of Dr. Sproll's series, The Consequences of Ideas. We'll also give you lifetime digital access to all 35 messages from that series, along with a digital study guide. Just go to renewingyourmind.org to make your donation today and we'll send you all four of these resources.
And now, here's Dr. Sproll on the importance of knowing who God is. As we continue our study of the elements and structures of a worldview, I'd like to start by asking you a question. Those of you who are here in this room, how many of you have photo albums at home that include pictures of yourself? From your childhood.
Let me see. Those things are kind of interesting. We almost all keep those keepsakes, don't we? Yeah. One of my favorite pictures.
that I have at home. is a picture of myself. and my best friend. at age three. In fact, this boy was my first playmate.
And the picture was taken where the two of us were standing on a log at the public park called South Park in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This fellow's father took us out there one Sunday afternoon and snapped our pictures, and I still have the photograph. And both of us are standing there on the log holding hands. And we're wearing short pants and jacket, you know, white shirt, little Lord Fondle Roy, and the whole bit. And this fellow's name that appears in this keepsake.
is Donnie Wurlow. Donnie lived two doors up from me. when I was growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania. And we were inseparable buddies. when we were three.
and four and five and six. We began to drift apart a little bit after that because we had such diverse interests. I remember that every Christmas morning, as soon as I opened up my presents and accumulated the toys that were there, when that rite and ceremony was over, first thing I did after I left the house was go straight up to Donnie's house to see what Donnie got for Christmas. And likewise, you know, then he'd come back on down to my house and I'd show him what I got. When I was six years old, I'll never forget, I opened up the Christmas presents and there was a complete football uniform, a child's version of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
I said, shoulder pants, helmets, you know, the whole thing. Yeah. I couldn't wait for Donnie to see it. I went up to Donnie's house dressed in my football uniform. And Donnie was as excited as I was for the present that he got.
He got a microscope. And that's sort of the way it went. Every year I'd get a basketball or hockey stick. Donnie get a medical encyclopedia. And as we went a little older, Donny distinguished himself in grade school and in junior high school and high school as being extremely brilliant young fellow.
He didn't care that much about football and basketball and the things that real people care about. And he earned for himself a nickname, borrowed from the annals of Donald Duck. We called him Gyro Gearloose. Do you remember the character Gyro Gearloose from Donald Duck Stories? He was the crazy inventor.
Because Donnie was one of those kids. that couldn't leave anything that man had put together intact. If it was a clock, he had to take it apart, and he had this insatiable curiosity to discover how things worked. And I used to think that was strange. But Donnie was preoccupied with questions.
Just like the thinker over here. Remember, let's not forget our guest here. I don't want to ignore you. You know, what are you thinking about at this time? He's obviously pondering questions.
But there are different kinds of questions. Aren't there? The question that preoccupied my friend Donnie Worlow. who's now Dr. Donald Borlow, of course.
A scientist. His whole life He was engaged with asking this question. How? How does it work? Yeah.
How is the human body put together? How are cells constructed? And his curiosity. was never ever Filmed. And so even as an adult, He's still spending his life.
asking the question, how? I remember as a child I could have cared less. About how? When it came to how machines work. When I got my driver's license.
And I drove my parents' car, and the car broke down. I would unlatch the hood of the car, open the hood, and look in there, and all I could say was, well, There's still a motor here. And I closed it. The only reason I really opened the hood and looked in there in the first place was that that was expected of a male whose car broke down, that he was supposed to at least open the hood and look. I don't know what he was looking for because I didn't know the difference between a cam and a rotator cuff.
Okay. I still don't. Because I just never was interested in the how questions. But I ask questions too. The question that haunted me from the earliest days of my life.
In fact, I can remember walking down another pathway on the way to school. We walked about a mile to school like Abraham Lincoln used to do through the snow. The last quarter of a mile was in front of this large building, and their parking lot was protected by telephone poles that were rolled up at the end of the parking space. And we used to balance along these poles that were lying on the ground there. And as I used to do that, I used to think a lot, and I would be balancing my way across there, thinking about.
Why do I have to spend five days of the week doing what I hate to do?
so that I can have two days doing what I like to do. Because I hated school. And I couldn't understand why. I had to go there all the time. And that was my question.
My question during the war when my father was away fighting in Europe. And the pictures of Mussolini and of Stalin and of Hitler were appearing on the covers of Life magazine and Look magazine and Time magazine. I was asking the question of my mother all the time, why? Does he have to be gone? The dog dies.
Why do dogs die? Why deaths? Two doors up for me, Donnie. was taking the alarm clock apart to see how it worked. I'm asking.
Why do we have clocks? Yeah. Why is there such a thing? as time. And from the earliest part of my life, I was, as I say, preoccupied with this question.
Why? And I stole it. The question why? took me In my own pursuit of understanding my life and my world, Beyond the mere examination of objects as they appear to the naked eye. That question inevitably drives you beyond physics.
to what we call metaphysics. We know the academic discipline that we all forced to take an introductory aspect of in high school called physics. Matter physics. Searches for That which lies above and beyond the scope. of the physical.
Metaphysics is not something that is indulged in simply by. quacks or mystics. But it was the science of the ancient world. People like Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, whose thinking shaped the structures of Western civilization. We're very much interested in the question of metaphysics.
In fact, the original quest. of philosophy Was a metaphysical. Pursuit. The ancient philosophers, though they disagreed, on various points of philosophy. All were engaged in the quest for what we call ultimate Reality.
Do you think this rug is blue? Sure. Why? It appears to be. Do you believe that something is as it appears to be?
My eye appears to be delivered.
So your eye appears to be blue. Why? What? Here I told you that. Why?
Yeah. That's just you're getting frustrated. Do you know that we can exhaust anybody's knowledge with eight questions? It's the same question each time. Why?
Because why just keeps pushing us backwards, further and further and further. Or we might say deeper and deeper and deeper into our quest. Nobody can go beyond the eighth why. and still be speaking intelligently. You finally say, after seven times, and you get to the end of the time, you go, I don't know why.
You throw your hands up. Because The why question pushes us to the question of ultimate reality. We can talk about this rug as a proximate reality. But even as we speak, we know that this rug is not as it appears to be. That there's no such thing as blueness residing or inheriting in this rug.
Don't we? We know that colors come from light. And whatever light is reflected from this rug. As the spectrum is separated and the light waves are separated, then the blue shade or the blue tone is reflected and it strikes the iris of my eye and so on. And I perceive blueness.
But without light, there's no color in that rock. In fact, when I'm on the golf course and I'm stymied by a tree and I have no shot, you know, some not always says to me, go ahead and hit it, R. C. Trees are 90% air. They don't look like 90% air.
And every golfer that's tried to hit a shot through him knows that he's not going to get through it 90% of the time. But when somebody says that to me, that tree is 90% air, I really have an urge to correct him. Say it's a lot more than 90%. I said, what do you mean? I said, well, that tree's made up.
of molecules. And the molecules are made up of atoms. And the atoms are made up of subatomic particles. And you realize that between The nucleus of an atom And the subatomic particles The neutrons and protons and so on, they're supposed to be flying around outside. There's space.
What's the proportionate ratio between the nucleus, the stuff, the essence of it, and that space?
Well, the best analogy I've heard on this is if you would go to downtown Los Angeles, to the city of Los Angeles. And put a Volkswagen in the exact center of Los Angeles. And then drive to the extreme edge of the city limits of Los Angeles. You would get an idea of the space ratio that exists between the nucleus. and the particles of an atom.
All that area from the Volkswagen out to the perimeter would be empty space.
Now why doesn't my golf ball Go through there with ease. If it's so much space. When we're talking about atomic theory and so on, we're trying to get beyond what we perceive physically And get down to the ultimate source and stuff of reality.
Now, the science of metaphysics, maybe that's what He's thinking about. He's sitting here thinking Why am I doing this? Why am I sitting like this? Maybe he's asking questions about why he is at all. Maybe he's asking questions about the meaning.
of his existence. Which is one of the most important questions. anybody can ever ask. as they're constructing Their world view. The question, why am I here?
Well, let's again go back to this concept. of metaphysics. In the sphere of metaphysics, we can talk about Subheadings under metaphysics that philosophers have been concerned with historically. One I've already alluded to. is the science of ontology.
Another aspect is the science of teleology. Let me just take those two for a moment. as important aspects of our study of metaphysics. The science of ontology, how many of you, let's be honest, don't know what that term means? It's a new term to you, ontology.
That's fine, that's good. There's nothing to be embarrassed about there. This is language peculiar to a particular discipline. Ontology. is the science or the study of being.
Ontos is a participial form of the verb to be, and so it just simply means being. And ontology is the study of being. We have all different kinds of being, we have human beings. Divine beings.
Well, the philosopher who's engaged in metaphysics is asking the question of ultimate being. That's an ontological question. Let me give you an example of this. I've used this example before, and I hope I'm not boring you with repetition, but I had a conversation with a professor of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a professor of physics. Yeah.
And I was about to give an address that night on the adequacy of human language To speak about God. And this gentleman was there something as a skeptic and was being cynical. And we had dinner beforehand, and he said to me, I don't envy your task. And he said, What's that? He says, Having to get up there and talk about God.
He said, Because you can't say anything meaningful about God, because God is beyond the scope of science and beyond the scope of real language and so on. He said, this is a tough thing to do, isn't it? And I said, well, yes. I said, but surely you can understand. My dilemma.
And he said, Why? I said, Well, because you have the same problem with categories that you guys use in physics. And he says, Like what? And I said, Well, like energy. They said, what do you mean?
I said, well, what is energy? And he said, well, everybody has with energy. I said, well, what is it? He says, it's the ability to do work. I said, I don't want to know what it can do.
I don't want to know its function. I don't know what it is because you people keep telling me that ultimately the world is made up of energy. You speak of energy in terms of amounts.
So what is it? And he said, oh, she's. MC Squared. I said, I don't hear its mathematical equivalency. I wanna know what it is.
It's isness. See, what I was pushing for was an ontological definition. of energy. And calling my friend to task, and the fact that people ascribe being to energy all the time. I want to know what kind of a being it is.
if it has Bing or if it is Bing. It's difficult really to speak meaningfully about such concepts. As it is to speak about God, I think it's far more difficult to speak about energy than it is to speak about God. But in any case, Ontology asks the question: What is ultimate reality? And it asks questions like this.
Why is there something? Rather than nothing. Did you ever ask that question? Not why am I here. But why is anything here?
When the Hubble spacecraft was launched, it was the hopes of the scientific community that this most sophisticated telescope of all time was going to give us a quantum leap in our knowledge of outer space. I heard one of the newscasters Speak. on television saying that 15 billion years ago The universe Exploded. into being. And he made reference to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.
I just wanted to go right to the television set. I want to grab the guy by the throat and say, what? Are you talking about? Are you out of your mind? What do you mean that something exploded into being?
What was it before it Exploded into being. Huh? If it wasn't being... Who was it? Non-being.
If it had no being, it was nothing. And nothing doesn't explode. Yeah. You can talk about this singularity. That explodes, then you're talking about a change in the form and in the structures of being.
But you're not talking about movement from nothing into being. That's so crucial to our understanding. of reality. One of the first laws in anybody's worldview should be Axe knee hello, knee hell fit. Out of nothing nothing comes.
That's an ontological law. The second law you should have is that if something exists. If anything participates at all in being, Then somewhere, somehow, Something or someone. must have the power of being. within itself.
Or nothing could possibly be. Ladies and gentlemen, that statement I just made, I'm convinced. is epistemologically compelling. That the only way to deny it is to deny reason and to deny science. If something exists, something has the power of being.
In and of itself, and I know it's not me. And I know it's not the thinker. I think they're maybe sitting there saying, hmm. Wonder why.
Something is. I wonder if there is anything that is. Why would Descartes, like this man here, be so intent of crawling into this Dutch oven to ask himself all the questions he can muster with all the critical tools he can bring to bear to come to this simple, basic conclusion, Cogito ergo sum? I think, therefore, I am. Eureka!
I know something for sure. I am. And the grocer down the street says, what's wrong with that guy? You know, I know that I am. I've been aware of that since the first moment of self-consciousness.
You don't have to be Popeye the Sailor Man, I am, I am, to be aware of your own existence. But they card said, hey. I'm not just talking about self-awareness. I'm talking about the certainty. Of my existence.
And from there Descartes says, If I am. Then something Must have being. Or I couldn't be. And Eckhart went Like that. to the concept of God.
Based on the compelling logical conclusion. derived from his own existence. If I am, Descartes was saying. God must be That's metaphysics, ladies and gentlemen.
Now the second dimension. of metaphysics that the ancient Greeks and modern Thinkers are still always concerned with teleology. It comes from the Greek word that appears often in the New Testament in various forms. Tell us. Palas Talos means end.
Purpose. Or goal. And the science of teleology. is the science of purposes. and goals.
When I was taking freshman biology in college, the teacher told us in the opening day of the lecture, she said, we're going to study biology, but don't anybody ever ask me any questions of teleology. They're out of order. They're beyond the scope of the scientific enterprise. And I wanted to jump up and say, then science has become a prostitute. And not a means to pursue Knowledge.
Because what more important knowledge. Can we discover? Then the question is why? We are here. What is the purpose?
of these things. It's when a nation abandons teleology. that its laws become confused to the extent that it's a federal crime to destroy the eggs of fish. while the embryos of human beings can be slaughtered. Because people aren't asking why.
Metaphysics is not simply for the ivory tower scholar or for the thinker. How we perceive metaphysics, how we perceive being. and how we perceive purpose. Touches the very heart. Of our locks.
Ladies and gentlemen, we need to think about these things. And we need to think Deeply. intently. Pondering. Knowing God is the end of the Christian life.
Everything God has done to reconcile sinful people to Himself in Christ. is ultimately so that we can know and enjoy him forever. You've been listening to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. And as we think about the importance of knowing God's character, I want to invite you to join Ligonier Ministries for our 2027 National Conference in April. I'm so looking forward to this event because we'll be gathering with Christians from around the world to study God's glorious attributes.
You can register today to join us for this event in Orlando at ligoneer.org slash 2027. You can also find the registration link, along with today's resource offer, in the podcast show notes. What is the basis for human dignity? Many people would like to believe that our lives have inherent worth. But apart from a foundation to support that idea, it's nothing more than wishful thinking.
Join us next week as Dr. Sproll shows the only reliable foundation for our worth here on Renewing Your Mind.
