Watchman on the Wall

Guest (Male): Welcome to Watchman on the Wall, a daily outreach of Southwest Radio Ministries and swrc.com. God is still on the throne and prayer changes things. Today, Ken Ham will begin to help us strengthen our faith, sharpen our thinking, and boldly proclaim the truth of God's existence.

Later this week, we'll hear the testimony of a Jewish man who came to Jesus, and Josh Davis will have the latest headlines from the end times. A brand new year means new opportunities for ministry, the ability to reach people around the world with the good news of Jesus Christ, and it's all made possible by you. Thank you. Thank you for your prayers and thank you for your financial support.

Your gifts allow us to be on the radio, on television, and online. Your generosity allows us to publish our Prophetic Observer newsletter and Prophecy in the News magazine, as well as produce films and events. So as we begin a new year of ministry together, all of us at Watchman on the Wall and Southwest Radio Ministries say thank you for your continued support of gifts and prayer. Time to join our host, Dr. Larry Spargimino, and his special guest, Answers in Genesis founder, Ken Ham.

Larry Spargimino: Ken Ham is our guest. He is the CEO for Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum, and the Ark Encounter. He is also with Bodie Hodge, who contributed to the writing and research for Defending God's Existence. This is a book that you will want to read and study. It's tremendous and very important.

Ken Ham: If I might say right at the start here, a lot of times we've seen people like Charles Colson, who's now with the Lord, arguing with people at universities and colleges. A lot of people think, "I wish I could argue like that."

Well, let me just say that this book will give you those sorts of arguments, but much, much more. It deals with things at a spiritual level as well as the level of logic. If you want to be equipped to be able to defend the Christian faith and argue with secularists, I think this is the most powerful book out there. Certainly, we believe that when you start from God's word, we have a basis for then logically arguing with anyone.

Bodie Hodge: It is a really powerful resource. When you research this subject, you have to think there's a lot of secularists out there, but there are also a lot of people who believe other religions and believe in other gods. We deal with that in this book as well, so it is a powerful resource.

Larry Spargimino: It is tremendous. It's a big book, 224 pages, but I read it from cover to cover and actually put together 26 questions. Let's talk a little bit about the great debate between Dr. Gordon Stein and Christian philosopher and pastor, Greg Bahnsen. Greg Bahnsen won that, no question about it. I think Gordon Stein was really surprised. Tell us about that debate and why it's so critical that we understand the arguments that were used.

Bodie Hodge: That's a famous debate called The Great Debate. Dr. Gordon Stein was an extremely famous atheist. In fact, he would do books where he was the general editor with a host of different atheists. I would say his popularity was on par with Richard Dawkins. Most people know Richard Dawkins as the high priest of atheism.

Yet today, hardly anyone knows the name Gordon Stein. That's because he went up in a debate against Greg Bahnsen and was absolutely obliterated. I say that in a kind way and a humble way. Gordon Stein used to debate Christians on the classical arguments of the existence of God, and he knew some of the problems with those particular arguments, so a lot of Christians were left struggling.

When he went up against Greg Bahnsen, Greg Bahnsen used a different tack. He went back and he said, "Let's start with the Bible. Let's use what's called a presuppositional methodology to look at this." He basically pulled the rug out from underneath Gordon Stein.

Ken Ham: What he was doing was pointing out the inconsistencies. How can you talk about logic or talk logically about anything when you have no basis for that? If you don't have an absolute basis, then where's it coming from? How do you have immaterial laws of logic if you only believe in materialism?

Bodie Hodge: A lot of listeners may not realize that atheism is built on materialism. Basically, they say everything that exists is material. Nothing non-material exists really, like no God, for example. That's why they're atheists. But logic isn't material either. When he showed up to the debate, Greg Bahnsen pulled that rug out from under him and said, "Hold it, you don't even have a basis for logic. You have to borrow from a Christian worldview just to do that." It left him stunned.

Larry Spargimino: I know Cornelius Van Til had a big question: Why are Christian philosophers giving up the Bible and using the same apologetic methods that non-Christian philosophers use to develop their philosophies? When I thought about that, that's an eye-opener. Explain the problem with the classical arguments for the existence of God.

Ken Ham: One of the things that I like to teach is that the battle in our world today is a battle between two foundations: God's word and man's word. That was obvious in Genesis when God said, "Don't eat the fruit of the tree. This is what will happen if you do." Along came the devil in the form of the serpent who said, "Did God really say? You can be your own god. You can decide truth for yourself."

So there's this battle between man's word and God's word. Our sin nature, because all have sinned, really is summed up by Genesis 3:1 and 3:5, that we would rather question the word of God than the word of man. Also, we want to be our own god in the sense we think we can determine things by ourselves.

I would also add this: I believe that we are evidentialists at heart. Instead of listening to what God said, here's God's interpretation of the tree and the fruit. "Don't eat from it. If you do, you'll surely die." Whereas Eve looked at it and thought, "Oh, it was good to the eyes. Well, the serpent said it's okay. I'll interpret it for myself."

Because we have that sin nature, we tend to want to decide things by ourselves and think that we, without God's word, can determine truth and interpret evidence as autonomous human beings. To me, that's the big problem. For instance, the classical argument to defend the existence of God can talk about design. Look at this design; it obviously means there's a designer.

But who is that designer? Because look at all the problems out there. We see mutations, death, suffering, and horrible things that are happening. Is this designer an ogre or what? Not only that, when they say man inherently has a morality because we have a sense of right and wrong, well, that's because God put it there.

The only way we would know what is right and wrong is if we listen to God's word and start from God's word. What the classical apologists tend to do is start with man's word outside of scripture to try to argue for the existence of God and a good God. You can't do that independent of scripture.

Bodie Hodge: When it comes to these classical arguments for the existence of God, their absolute starting point is not scripture. It's not the Bible. As a Christian, that should throw up a red flag right off the bat because there is no greater authority than God.

So what they're doing is starting with man's logic to try to build a case to say maybe there's some sort of deity out there, some sort of god that's out there. Those arguments are not necessarily arguments for the God of the Bible. For example, Muslims might try to use it, Mormons might try to use it, or Hindus, or someone's arguing for Zeus.

They're using those same types of arguments and then they get to a point where they have to then jump to say it's their particular god. When they do that, what they've done is shown that it's really not a good argument at all. It's been undercut. There's no foundation for it.

Larry Spargimino: What do you say to the person who objects and says, "Well, you can't use the Bible because I don't believe it"? What would you say to that person?

Ken Ham: I've had people actually say that to me. They say, "Don't give me the Bible. I don't believe the Bible." The first thing I do is I say, "Well, I do." Then I will ask them, "What's your objection to not believing the Bible? By what authority have you determined that the Bible is not true? Are you God? Do you know everything? Are you claiming to be one who knows everything and therefore you know for sure the Bible is not true?"

You can't do that. You can't make that claim. You're making yourself your own authority. You are arbitrarily determining that you are the absolute authority. But the Bible claims itself to be the word of God. It starts with, "In the beginning, God." It doesn't set out to prove God. It just says, "God is."

You can't actually use logic unless you start from that absolute authority because that's the only basis for logic and for determining truth and determining right and wrong. We have an infinite, absolute authority. So as soon as someone says to me, "You can't start with the Bible," one of the things that I also do is to say, "Look, if the Bible is what it claims, it will make sense of the world. It'll explain what we see, and observational science will confirm it."

It does. It makes sense of why there's death and suffering. It makes sense of why there's fossils all over the world. It makes sense of why we see design but we see flaws because it's a fallen world. It makes sense of all these, and observational science, like studying DNA, for instance, shows us that it's an information system and a language system, which only makes sense in the context of the biblical God.

Larry Spargimino: Your chapter on circular reasoning deals with a seemingly sound objection because quite often people say you're just arguing in a circle. Explain the two types of circular reasoning. I know you make a big point of that, but that's a common argument: "Well, you're just arguing in a circle. The Bible says it's God's word, so you believe it's God's word." How do you deal with that?

Bodie Hodge: That's a very common objection. Here's the thing: a lot of people don't understand what circular reasoning really is. Circular reasoning is unique in logic. It's actually valid. Sometimes it sounds sound, sometimes it's unsound, and that's where you come into this problem. That's where you get the two types of circular reasoning.

One is a vicious circular argument. That is an arbitrary form; that's the one that's the logical fallacy. The other type is what's called a virtuous circular reasoning. That's non-arbitrary. God, being the absolute authority on all matters, is non-arbitrary. That's where you have that distinction between those two differences.

Imagine if somebody came up to me and said, "Hey, Bodie, where do you live?" Well, I live by Ken. "Where does Ken live?" Well, he lives by Bodie. That's a circular argument. We didn't get anywhere, but I want you to understand something. Everything that I said right there was true. I really do live by Ken. He really does live by me.

Why it was a problem was because it was arbitrary. Now when we think of God revealing anything to us from his absolute mind, from his absolute being, he must do it by final authority because he is the supreme authority in all matters. So God must reveal himself in a circular but virtuous circular fashion for us to know anything about him. So it is a pretty powerful way of doing it.

Ken Ham: I sort of put it this way: all reasoning typically is circular. It's a matter of whether the circle exists or not, whether it's arbitrary or it's real. Of course, when you start from God's word, it's real because he is the absolute authority.

Bodie Hodge: You mentioned Van Til earlier. Van Til and Greg Bahnsen, they were Christian philosophers, they were pastors, they were teachers. One of the things that Van Til did, he made an extremely important point saying, "Hey, we keep arguing that the Bible's the absolute authority from God. Why don't we do our apologetic based on the Bible then?" It's very simple, and Christians should have been doing this for 2,000 years.

But for so long, Christians gave up the Bible to say, "Well, when it comes to apologetics or if we're going to try to argue for God's existence, let's set the Bible aside and let's do it the way the Greeks did it. Let's just use human logic to try to develop some sort of an argument to reach out and say maybe there's some sort of God out there." Van Til was like, "Hey, Christians, let's treat the Bible the way it's supposed to be treated as the absolute authority and let's get back to it to look at the subject." You would have thought Christians would have jumped all over it and said, "Boy, we love this," but it didn't work that way. There were a lot of people who held those.

Ken Ham: If we talk about this approach to apologetics, for a lot of people, it's sort of new. In America, for instance, many times when people have been in the pro-life movement, they try to make all their arguments without the Bible to say, "Oh, we're not being religious." But then all their arguments are just arbitrary based on man's word. You don't have an absolute authority.

That's the thing: who are you appealing to? Are you appealing to man? Are you appealing to God? Again, it's important to understand there are only two foundations for our worldview: man's word or God's word. If you don't start with God's word, you start with man's word, then man himself is the authority. But you don't know everything. You start from God's word. God exists in eternity. He's infinite in knowledge and wisdom. It's the only place to start from.

In a way, you can test that because if it is true, what God has revealed will make sense of what we see in the world and you should be able to confirm it, which we can. Secondly, it makes sense of why we can trust the uniformity of the laws of nature—the laws of chemistry, the laws of planetary motion. You can't show me a law. You can't show me the law of logic. They're immaterial, but it's only an absolute authority outside our creation who brought the creation into existence that explains the laws of logic, the laws of nature, and so on. People need to understand how to argue correctly from God's word.

Larry: If you are witnessing to someone, you need to know where they are coming from. You need to perform what you call a fundamental test to see if they are harboring false ideas. How do you do that? Explain the test. What are the questions? What are the things that you're looking for in the other person's mind and thinking?

Bodie Hodge: In layman's terms, I just call it the authority test. What is their supreme authority? What is their ultimate authority? Sometimes the best way to do that is just to ask them some questions. What do they believe? Most people are more than happy to talk about what they believe.

So you just ask them, "Well, where do you get that idea? Where does that come from? Why do you know that's true?" Sooner or later, you're going to get to a point where, well, they just believe it or they are following a professor or they read a book on it, but they're not appealing to God. That's when you say, "Ah, okay, here we are. You went all the way down. Your supreme authority is either going to be God's word or it's going to be man's word." It's a very simple test to get down to that. Just ask some questions and see where they get, and you can go from there.

Ken Ham: When I debated Bill Nye, I debated him in 2014. But then in 2016, when the Ark was opened, I took him through the Ark on a two-hour debate. What I kept doing was exactly this. In other words, I was doing the fundamental test and pushing him to the logical consequences of his wrong foundation. For instance, I said to him, "How do you determine what is right and wrong?"

He said, "By a consensus of the tribe." I said, "Oh, so that means there are different tribes that could have a different consensus and therefore a different morality and so on." I said, "So what if we decided that someone like you was dangerous and we should eliminate you?" I said, "Can we do that?"

He said, "Well, that depends." I was pointing out to him that your morality is all subjective because you don't have an absolute basis for what you're talking about. Even when I said to him, "What happens when you die?" He says, "Well, when you die, you're done." I said, "If when you die, you're done, you won't even know you were here. So there's no ultimate purpose and meaning in life. So what is the point of arguing with us as creationists anyway because you won't even know you were here to argue with us? What's the point?" You've got to learn how to point out those inconsistencies.

Larry Spargimino: How do you answer the question, "Who made God?" Doesn't the question assume that time is absolute and somehow God was constructed or made? Tell us about that because a lot of times people stumble over that. "Well, who made God?"

Ken Ham: I'll answer the question how I answer it in a conference, but I'll let Bodie talk about the statement about is time absolute.

Bodie Hodge: I actually had a student ask me this one time. It was in a public school classroom where I happened to be. A kid jumped up, "Well, who created God? Where did God come from?" I gave him an answer really quick and you could hear a pin drop. When somebody asks the question "who created God" or "where did God come from," those are action verbs.

So when somebody asks that question, they're assuming time is absolute and God showed up on that timeline somewhere. That's actually an incorrect understanding of who God is. The God of the Bible created time. He is outside of time. He is beyond it. He's the creator of time. So really, what they're asking in a subtle sense is an illogical question.

Larry Spargimino: That's a tremendous response. In fact, I actually had the privilege of meeting Dr. Van Til many, many years ago at Westminster Seminary. In fact, I got a copy of Jerusalem and Athens. That's the festschrift that was written for him. He's a fantastic person, a fantastic thinker, and he gives us hope. We're going to continue discussing your book, Defending God's Existence, on our next show. Ken and Bodie, we thank you so much for this first program. We've got another one coming up and we're looking forward to getting back to speaking about these essential and vital issues for all of us.

Guest (Male): Ken Ham's brand new book, Defending God's Existence, is today's resource spotlight. Defending God's Existence is a bold, faith-affirming apologetics resource designed to equip Christians to stand confidently for biblical truth in an age of skepticism and unbelief. This book goes beyond surface-level arguments and offers a groundbreaking scripture-first approach to apologetics.

Rather than placing human reason on the throne, Ken Ham powerfully demonstrates that the God of the Bible and his word are the only foundation that makes logic, knowledge, morality, and science possible. Be equipped to defend your faith with confidence and clarity. Understand why traditional apologetic methods often fall short of proving the biblical God. Confidently affirm that the Bible is true because without God's revelation, knowledge itself collapses.

Use evidence as confirmation of biblical truth, not as a man-centered starting point. Defending God's Existence by Ken Ham. Order your copy of this powerful book today when you call 1-800-652-1144. That's 1-800-652-1144. Or order online at swrc.com. A fresh, powerful approach for a skeptical world: Defending God's Existence, 1-800-652-1144. Time for our segment, Biblically Grounded, with myself, biblical archaeologist Clayton Van Huss. Let's talk about William Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology.

Clayton Van Huss: A lot of what we know about the history of the Bible comes from the work of scholars. In the early days of archaeology, people were more excited about collecting artifacts than they were about what those artifacts could teach us about the past. I want to read an excerpt from an article on New Creation Blog that was written by my wife, Abigail. Here, she talks about a man who took the Bible seriously and became the most influential man in the science of archaeology.

In the history of archaeological research, one man stands out. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie was as eccentric as he was brilliant. In the late 1800s, many archaeological expeditions were nothing more than glorified treasure hunts. Petrie was foremost among a growing group of researchers who treated archaeology as a science.

Petrie was born in 1853. According to his memoirs, he was an archaeologist from birth. Petrie recalled that at the age of eight, he understood the need for archaeologists to carefully peel back the earth in shallow layers rather than shoveling deep holes in search of artifacts. Petrie's father had a background in surveying and Petrie learned how to survey from him.

In his early 20s, Petrie surveyed all the ancient sites he could find in Southern England and drew over 150 site plans. In 1888, at the age of 27, Petrie set off for Egypt. After arriving in Egypt, Petrie settled into a rock-cut tomb, which became his home. He began his work on the pyramids, surveying and measuring them both inside and out.

Tourists were an annoyance and he found that he could only work inside the pyramids at night after the tourists were gone for the day. During the day, Petrie worked outside the tomb, but tourists pestered him with questions and delayed his work. He decided that the tourists might leave him alone if they thought him to be weird. So he took to wearing pink clothing. It worked. The tourists left him alone after that.

Petrie's first excavation in the Holy Land was at Tel el-Hesi, which he mistakenly believed to be biblical Lachish. Petrie's methodological work at Tel el-Hesi made this the first scientific archaeological excavation in the Holy Land. He worked to develop a typology of the local pottery.

Petrie died on July 28th, 1942. His body was buried in the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Archaeology students like to visit his grave and leave a potsherd on his headstone to commemorate his contribution to the science of archaeology. I myself have visited Petrie's grave and left a potsherd.

Petrie rightly believed himself to be brilliant. He had an idea that future generations of scientists might like to examine his brain to understand its workings. For that reason, he donated his head to the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Before Petrie was buried, his head was removed and preserved in a jar. Thus Petrie's body lies in a tomb in Jerusalem while his head in a jar in London awaits further research.

Petrie was as brilliant as he was eccentric. His meticulous work in archaeology earned him the title of father of scientific archaeology. He was able to establish a typology that is still used to this day. It is now standard archaeological method to excavate slowly, one layer at a time. Archaeologists record the earth layer in which they find each artifact and they compare the artifact to those from other sites. As each archaeological excavation adds to the typology, it grows and becomes more firmly established. This helps biblical scholars to demonstrate the historicity of scripture. You can read the entire article on New Creation Blog.

Guest (Male): The brand new book, Defending God's Existence by Ken Ham, will help you gain tools to show that logic, morality, and truth only have meaning because the God of scripture exists. Apologetics with a gospel-centered purpose, this book dismantles false worldviews with intellectual rigor. It consistently emphasizes gentleness, respect, and reliance on the Holy Spirit, recognizing that only God brings about true salvation.

Order Defending God's Existence by Ken Ham today and be equipped to stand firm for Christ in a world searching for meaning. 1-800-652-1144 to order your copy today. That's 1-800-652-1144. Or order online at swrc.com. Tomorrow, Ken Ham will continue showing us how we can effectively answer those who doubt or even deny the existence of God. Be sure to tune in by downloading our free SWRC mobile app. Watchman on the Wall is a production of Southwest Radio Ministries and is supported by faithful listeners like you. Visit swrc.com.