How Do Jehovah's Witnesses Interpret John 1:1?

Bobby talks about The New World translation and the inconsistency of Jehovah's Witnesses' interpretation of John 1:1.

Are Jehovah's Witnesses a Cult?

Dr. Norman Geisler returns again and gives his knowledge to the question "Are Jehovah's Witnesses a Cult?" 

Did the Bible go through Revisions? - Mike Licona, PhD

Has the Bible been through a number of additions and revisions? Mike Licona answers this question.

Did Christianity Borrow from other Religions? - Mike Licona, PhD

Did Christianity borrow from pagan religion? What about Mithras or Adonis? Mike Licona shows how pagan religions actually did NOT pre-date Christianity. In fact, these pagan religions borrowed from Christianity once it began to expand. Unfortunately, the mainstream media and their conspirators have followed the "Da Vinci Code" route by using the arguments in this fictional best-selling book.

No Substitutions

In the last several years, the proliferation of specialized ministries and parachurch organizations has been astounding. Today there's a separate ministry for every biblical viewpoint, theological perspective, or practical interest, not to mention all the pseudo-Christian groups focused on social and political activism. It's likely that if you have got a particular spiritual itch, you can find a ministry that will scratch it, or you can find someone eager to launch a new organization to appeal to like-minded people.

The problem with the plethora of parachurch organizations is that so many of them exist outside the authority and influence of the church. The term parachurch ought to indicate a cooperative relationship, but often that's not the case. Some pay lip service to the church; others are openly indifferent to it. Few of them—perhaps very few—are actually accountable to the church, adhere to biblical guidelines for leadership, and have a strong commitment to biblical doctrine and theology...

What Must I Do To Be Saved?

Hank Hanegraaff shares the three "Rs" of salvation.

What Is Sin?

Bobby talks to Hank Hanegraaff about what sin actually is.

What Are The Secrets To Spiritual Growth?

Bobby talks to Hank Hanegraaff about the ABCs of spiritual growth.

Morality: Defining Truth

What did Jesus mean when he said, I am the Truth. People say, I love the truth! If they cant define truth, how can they know what it is? I want to teach the truth! If they cant define truth, then how do they know they're teaching the truth? I want to go to a church where truth is taught. Well, if you cant define truth then how can you evaluate if that church is even teaching truth?

How Do You Define Love? - Josh McDowell

http://youtu.be/OPsEGbpXX6M

Josh McDowell gives the definition of love. More from Mcdowell on love:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5zP2y...

Can Homosexuals Change Their Sexual Preference?

Is there hope for a transformation for those who have a homosexual orientation? Bobby brings Scripture to bear on this challenging question.

R.C Sproul: The Psychology Of Atheism - Defending Your Faith Part 25

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R.C Sproul: Vanity Of Vanity - Defending Your Faith Part 24

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R.C Sproul: Kant's Moral Argument - Defending Your Faith Part 23

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R.C Sproul: God Of The Bible Vs God Of Philosophy - Defending Your Faith Part 22

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RC Sproul : Necessary Being - Defending Your Faith Part 21

NECESSARY BEING

MESSAGE INTRODUCTION

General revelation and special revelation are both true. That which we can learn through a telescope is no less true than that which we learn from St. Paul. But while special revelation is settled in the Scriptures, general revelation is like a stream, forever changing as we scrape the surface of God's glory in creation. R.C. reports that current secular theories of surrounding creation are still woefully inadequate and suspiciously silent about the cause of their "Big Bang."

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. To be able to show the necessity of God's existence outside the universe, contra the immanentistic view.
2. To understand that philosophy and science have argued for the existence of a necessary power that has many qualities of the Christian God.

QUOTATIONS AND THOUGHTS

Logical Fallacy: Ad Hominem Abuse or Personal Attack. An argument that substitutes abusive remarks instead of evidence to prove their conclusion. An example would be, "Kim thinks homosexuals are going to hell, but she's just a know-it-all judgmental Jesus-freak. You can't believe her."
World Soul: A phrase used by pantheistic or New Age philosophers to explain that since the world creates and sustains life, it must have life itself, and a soul as other creatures. Also called panpsychism.

LECTURE OUTLINE

I. Explaining Reality

a) Illusion: Not an option
b) Self-created: Irrational
c) Self-existence: Something is self-existent, but is it the universe?
d) Created by self-existent being

II. The State of Nature

a) The Big Bang theory (not accepted as recently as the 1940s) affirms that 15-18 billion years ago, something existed. A singularity, a compaction of all matter, existed. It grew unstable and exploded, creating the universe as we know it, a movement from organization to chaos.
b) How did nature become organized in the first place?
c) The law of inertia says that things in motion (or not in motion) tend to remain as they are unless acted on by an outside force. How did the universe move from rest to activity?
d) Illustration: Golf in Motion
e) What cause the Bang? It is necessary to answer this question, and highly unusual that science would plead that this is an unimportant question. Since when did causality become unimportant?
f) Matter is mutable. It manifests contingency. Materialists will respond that the things we see are not immutable. They claim that the entity that makes matter is not transcendent, but immanent.
g) Materialists say that whatever causes matter is part of the universe or is the sum total of the universe. Some force pulsates through all things that forms a self-existent core, and this accounts for the causality of the beginning of the universe.
h) Thus: They argue that there is no need for a transcendent God. A self existent eternal power, yes. But not outside the universe.

III. The Answer to the Materialist Challenge

a) If you mean by "universe" all that is (and God is), then it is true that God is inside the universe.
c) But transcendence is not a geographical description. It is an ontological distinction. It says that God is a higher order of being, not that He is located elsewhere.
d) If there is some unknown, immeasurable, eternal being that transcends everything that is derived from it, then our argument is mere semantics. The materialist has won, but won for which side?

IV. The Unmoved Mover and the God of the Bible: What is the connection? The next two lectures will demonstrate this.


*I do not own this presentation. Used only for education purposes
All rights to Ligonier Ministries. (C) Ligonier Ministries
See the following links to purchase a High Quality Version of the presentation. Please support the ministry!
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RC Sproul : Self Existence - Defending Your Faith Part 20

SELF EXISTENCE

MESSAGE INTRODUCTION

As we look at various options to explain reality, this one has a bit of truth to it. Something indeed is self-existent; it's just not the universe. The best arguments for the self-existent universe are often too strong—they end up suggesting that the universe is more than self-existent, that it is also self-aware. At that point, we chuckle and welcome them to our side. That's what Christians have believed all along.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

1. To review and critique the argument for the self-existence of the universe.
2. To be able to show how the Bible assumes God's self-existence.
3. To be introduced to key phrases and words in this ancient discussion.

QUOTATIONS AND THOUGHTS

Philosophy is saying what everyone knows in language no one can understand. (J.F. Taviner)
Good philosophy must exist, for bad philosophy needs to be answered. (C.S. Lewis)
Aseitas: Latin. Aseity, self-existence, or autotheos (Greek).

LECTURE OUTLINE

I. Explaining Reality

a) Illusion: Not an option
b) Self-created: Irrational
c) Self-existence: Something is self-existent, but not the universe
d) Created by self-existent being: True

II. Self-Existent and Eternal: Rational or Not?

a) Some philosophers have argued that if anything can be conceived of rationally, it must be real. This is rationality gone wild.
b) Illustration: Unicorns and Ducks and Deer
c) A self-existent being is not irrational. It is not contradictory to the law of causality, because a being is not an effect.
d) But just because we can conceive of such a being does not mean that it exists. It is also rationally conceivable that nothing exists now or ever—obviously, that is not true.
e) If something exists, the idea of the self-existent being becomes more than possible: it becomes necessary.

III. Self-Existence as Necessary (Aseity)

a) Self-existent beings do not grow from anything.
b) Ens Necessarium: That being whose being is necessary.
c) If there was a time when there was absolutely nothing, then there would still be nothing because ex nihilo, nihil fit. We are arguing that there must be something that has the power of being and always has been, or nothing else (or nothing at all) could exist.
d) Ontological Necessity: Ontology is the science of being. God exists by the necessity of His own being—by His very nature, He must exist, or else He is not God.
e) Moses: "Who are you?" God: "I AM."


*I do not own this presentation. Used only for education purposes
All rights to Ligonier Ministries. (C) Ligonier Ministries
See the following links to purchase a High Quality Version of the presentation. Please support the ministry!
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RC Sproul : Self-Creation (Part 2) - Defending Your Faith Part 19

Self-Creation (Part 2)

MESSAGE INTRODUCTION

Have you ever thought about an idea so much that it made your head hurt? Concepts like eternity and the way the Trinity works and how God is thinking about you and sustaining you this very moment . . . these are ideas so large, they leave us mentally breathless before too long.

Some ideas leave us breathless because they are so fundamentally wrong. The self-creation of the universe is one of those. Like a thousand-pound weight on the shoulders, not everything that strains human capacity is good exercise.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. To critically consider the idea that the universe is self-created.
2. To analyze the common use of the word "chance."
3. To be able to show through illustration the irrationality of self-creation if ascribed to the universe.

QUOTATIONS AND THOUGHTS

When we think of anything that has origin, we are not thinking of God. God is self-existent, while all created things necessarily originate somewhere at some time.
(A.W. Tozer)
The wisdom of the flesh is always exclaiming against the mysteries of God. (John Calvin)

LECTURE OUTLINE

I. Creation by Chance: Not a Chance

a) Caveat: I am not a physicist. But the inferences that they draw from their data are often stated irrationally.
b) Arthur Koestler: "As long as chance rules, God is an anachronism." But it is necessary for chance only to exist for God to be destroyed; chance does not need to rule, only to exist, to eliminate God from our equations.

II. Physics by Illustration

a) Illustration: A Quarter and a Harvard Professor
b) Illustration: R.C., Al, and a Train

III. What is chance?
a) Modern jargon has elevated the term "chance" beyond the definition of mathematical odds. It has been colloquially given some kind of power and ontology.
b) Ontology is the study of being. Chance has no being. It is only conceptual.
c) Chance is no-thing.
d) Niels Bohr: Contraria un Complementaria or "Contrary Complementarity."
Contradictions are complementary.
e) Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty: We can't explain the behavior of some subatomic particles. But to move from this lack of explanation to inferring that nothing is producing the effect is irrational.
f) Nonsense and bad science are the result of self-existence theories.

*I do not own this presentation. Used only for education purposes
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RC Sproul : Self-Creation (Part 1) - Defending Your Faith Part 18

Self-Creation (Part 1)

MESSAGE INTRODUCTION

As we understand how to defend the Christian faith, we are often caught off guard by the incredible faith displayed by our opponents in very bad ideas. It takes a tremendous exercise of faith to believe in self-creation theories, and as R.C. will point out in this lecture, the faith of the true believer is not enough to save a very bad idea from destroying itself.
This idea's time has come and gone.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. To review the possible alternatives to reality.
2. To critically review the alternative of self-creation.
3. To understand how important this idea is to many agnostic systems of thought.

QUOTATIONS AND THOUGHTS

Dear me, the Lord got on very well before I was born, and I'm sure He will when I am
dead. (C.H. Spurgeon)
God is not in need of anything, but all things are in need of God. (Marcianus Aristides)
God is the cause of all causes, the soul of all souls. (A.H. Strong)

LECTURE OUTLINE

I. What possible alternatives are there to explain reality?
a) Illusion
b) Self-creation
c) Self-existence
d) Creation via self-existent being

II. Self-creation is the most frequent alternative offered to theists
a) This is a generic principle that subsumes many generic principles and arguments.
b) Self-creation is analytically false; it is false by definition. For something to be its own cause, it would have to preexist itself. It would be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship.

III. Past and Current Theories of Self-Creation
a) French encyclopedists such as Denis Diderot (1713-1784) were determined anti-theists, and suggested spontaneous generation as the means of creation.
b) The counter argument to this teaching is ex nihilo, nihil fit—out of nothing, nothing comes.
c. In 1953, a Nobel Prize winner said that we should replace the idea of spontaneous generation with the concept of gradual spontaneous generation.
d) The Hubble Telescope was launched on April 25, 1990. A famed physicist explained on that day that the beginnings of the universe occurred 15-20 billion years ago, when it exploded into "being." But this is more a philosophical statement than astrophysical one.
e) "Creation by chance" is the most popular way we hear this taught today. Space+ time + chance = stuff is the overly hopeful way in which this is formulated.

*I do not own this presentation. Used only for education purposes
All rights to Ligonier Ministries. (C) Ligonier Ministries
See the following links to purchase a High Quality Version of the presentation. Please support the ministry!
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