we're going to continue our study of apologetics and what we're in the middle of at this point is examining four principles of knowledge that are crucial for any sound defense of Christianity principles that are constantly under attack by those who deny the existence of God and so far we've isolated four of those what I call non-negotiable principles that are necessary to human knowledge number one and also principles that are assumed by all people and also assumed on the pages of sacred scripture and the four that we've isolated I remind you are the necessity of the law of non-contradiction second the law of causality third the basic reliability of sense perception and fourth the analogical use of language and already we've looked at the law of non-contradiction and you recall I said that people certainly can deny the law of non-contradict addiction and its validity and people do that and they do it frequently but what I pointed out was that all denials of the law of non-contradiction are forced and temporary because it's impossible to live to even survive for 24 hours if you consistently deny the validity of the law of non-contradiction you can't drive your car to an intersection see a Big Mac Truck coming down the highway and say to yourself self there's a truck there and not there at the same time and in the same relationship there though you may with your lips deny the validity long contradiction you apply pressure on the break because you know you can't survive in that contradictory World well let's move on now today to the second principle which is the principle of causality and the principle of causality is one that was used in a formidable way throughout the history of Western theoretical thought to argue for the existence of God by reasoning from the appearance of this world back to an adequate or sufficient cause that would explain this world or this universe and so thinkers in the Middle Ages and and down even Pat beyond that reasoned from a causal base back to God as the first cause in fact we go all the way back to Aristotle who argued that God is the first cause because things require a cause now however since the enlightenment since the 18th century considerable skepticism has emerged against the law of cause and effect or the law of cause out if for example you've read Bertram Russell's little booklet why I am not a Christian he gives his own personal testimony of his pilgrimage with respect to theism he said as a boy growing up he was deeply impressed by the argument for the existence of God that was based upon the need for a first cause based upon the law of causality and so as a young boy he embraced the idea of the existence of God until he read an essay written by the philosopher John Stuart Mill who raised this basic objection against causal thinking Mill said it this way if everything requires a Cause then manifestly God would require a cause and whoever caused God would require a Cause so that you can't reason back to God on the basis of the principle that everything must have a Cause now when Bertrand Russell read that essay at age 17. he said it was an epiphany for him and he realized that the law of cause and effect would not lead you to the conclusion of a first cause but would lead you on an endless regress that would get you in the final analysis not to God but nowhere and so he therefore denied the utility of arguing for the existence of God on the basis of the law of cause and effect now let me just respond to that very briefly and very simply that here's one of those classic examples where Homer nods John stortmill was an you know unarguably a brilliant philosopher very well trained in logic and skilled in analytical thought and cognition who made a fundamental foundational error in his thinking with respect to causality the primary error was an error in definition he assumed that the definition of the law of causality is simply everything must have a Cause now if that indeed were the classical law of causality then his criticism of causal reasoning back to a first cause would be valid let me put it in simple terms I heard the story of two little boys that were having a discussion and the first little boy said to the second little boy where did the trees come from and his friend said God made the trees and this then he said well where did the flowers come from and his friend said God made the flowers then this friend said well where did you come from and he said God Made Me and then his buddy said well who made God and his partner said God made himself now I remember also my mother telling me that when I was about three years old I asked our Minister who made God and my Minister was super impressed by that and told my mother you know you have a child prodigy on your hands here and this boy is going to grow up to be a theologian or a philosopher or something like that and my mother was fond of telling me that when I was pursuing a career in theology she said I always knew you were going to do that because the minister told us that when you were three years old and I said Mom let me tell you something what I said every three-year-old get asked that question where does God come from I mean that's as normal a question as any child can ever ask that doesn't show any particular Insight on my part at three years old or 10 years old I said however we somehow stop and say boy that little kid is profound when he says who who made God and he said God made himself no no no no no no no even God can't make himself and the point is we don't have to have an antecedent cause for God God as Aristotle rightly understood is an uncaused cause and you don't have to to provide a cause for an eternal being as we will see in the course of this study but just now by way of shorthand let me just say that the error is in the definition the law of causality has never said that everything has to have a Cause rather the law of causality stated properly says every fact must have an antecedent cause every effect must have an antecedent cause now had John Stuart Mill been working with that definition of causality he would never have gotten himself into the mess he did and never would have led Bertrand Russell astray into that morass of confusion which by the way that principle that Bertrand Russell as brilliant as he was adopted at age 17 he maintained till the day he died that error continued in his thinking because the definition of the law of causality again is not that everything must have on the cause it must have an effect because if everything had to have an effect had to have a cause God indeed would have to have a Cause but the law simply says every effect must have a Cause and if we could find something that is not an effect that is something that has the power of being within itself and is from eternity obviously that being would not be in effect and when we Define the character of God we say that God is a self-existing Eternal being who is independent underived not contingent but he's Eternal he is not caused because he is not an effect only things that are made are effects now if we look at this definition we see you know I get just a little bit technical here that this definition every effect must have a Cause is a statement that we say is formally true not formerly but for Mali you know that is to say it is a formal truth now what is a formal truth a formal truth is a truth and Mr makes trying to make this easier they're going to make it more abstract a formal truth is a truth that is analytically true whoops I'm going from I'm trying to simplify and I'm making it worse right if it's formally true it's analytically true what that means is that it's true by definition that if you analyze this statement every effect must have a cause just by analyzing the words and their relationship in the statement you will see that the statement not only is true but by definition has to be true an analytical statement would be one like this a bachelor is an unmarried man now in an analytical statement like that a bachelor is an unmarried man you have the subject which is the word Bachelor and then you say something about the bachelor to describe him you predicate something about the Bachelor and what you say is the bachelor is an unmarried man but what do you find out about the bachelor in the phrase unmarried man that you didn't already know with the word Bachelor see in an analytical statement there's no new information given in the predicate from what's already there in the subject if I tell you let me say a triangle has three sides is that true or not of course it's true it has to be true because a triangle by definition has three sides just like a bachelor by definition is an unmarried man now not on all unmarried men are Bachelors some are widowers right but all Bachelors are unmarried men so what we say that something is formally true or analytically true another way of saying is it's logically true it's true by definition now again let's look more carefully at the definition if we say every effect and just stop right there and we introduce the word effect what is an effect how would you define an effect what is an effect something that happened or something that or if it will happen that's true but something that has been made something that has been produced right or to use the language something that has been caused see an effect by definition is something that has been caused by something else now what is a Cause what is a Cause what does a cause do it brings some kind of result and what do we call that result and in fact that's right you can't have a cause that doesn't cause anything what a cause causes is an effect so you can't have a cause without an effect and anything that is identified as an effect by definition must have a Cause so that in in a very real sense this statement every effect must has a must have a cause it's just simply a mental extension of the law of non-contradiction because something cannot be an effect and not be an effect at the same time in the same relationship something cannot be a cause you can't have a Cause without an effect and you can't have an effect Without a Cause because otherwise you have a contradiction now the most primary answer we give to reality if I say why is this carpet here in this room the simplest answer I can say is because that's not going to satisfy you are going to want to push me a little bit further and you're going to say because why well I'm going to say well because the director of this studio wanted to construct a set that would have the look of us of a study or a den and so he went out and got this old Carpeting and he put it on the floor here as part of the set so now I'm giving you more of the complex reasons behind the presence of this carpet that is now underneath my feet okay now my director didn't cause the carpet if I said what caused the carpet then would have to go back to the manufacturer and and all of that sort of thing but we understand the use of that language at a very Elementary way one of the first things a parent learns how to say to a child when the child asks a question is because that's the answer in other words we're saying that flower has a Cause that tree has a cause something has produced it because we also understand that something cannot come out of nothing now again I'm going to ask you to put your thinking caps on because I'm going to do some close work with your minds here when I say this is a formal principle we're saying that it doesn't teach us anything directly about reality it doesn't tell us that there are causes out there in the real world it doesn't tell us that there are effects out there in the world world maybe everything in the world is eternal and uncaused I don't believe that that's the case but I'm saying hypothetically we're sitting here in this room and we're I'm saying there's all kinds of things outside of this room there are cars and trucks and planes and bees and trees and all the rest and I can say this to you for sure that if any or all of those things that I've just listed trucks and trees and cars and all of that are effects then we know for sure that they have what causes now maybe they are not effects but the principle is The Logical principle is if something is an effect it must have what it must have a Cause so that if you can establish that something is indeed an effect than you have established that it must have some kind of antecedent cause several years ago when we produced our book on classical apologetics and it was reviewed by Scholars around about the country one scholar who was a philosopher made one criticism one substantive criticism of the argument set forth in that book and he was criticizing me and he said and he said I'll never forget it he said the problem with Sproul now I'm not going to give you people the opportunity to fill in the blank there what he said was he was referring just to this book not to my whole life but he was saying that the problem was sprawl in this book is that sprawl will not allow for an uncaused effect that was his criticism no my basic rule of thumb is is that when if I receive one of my books criticized in a review I never bothered to get engaged in a debate or discussion with the reviewer I just you know that's their job is to review it and whatever they say that's fine I'm not going to argue with them but this one I couldn't pass up so I wrote to the philosopher a nice letter and I said you indicated in your review that the one one problem that you had with my book was that I wouldn't allow for an uncaused effect and I said Maya culpa you're right I won't allow for an uncaused effect but I thought that my obstinate refusal to allow not allow for uncaused effects was a virtue not a vice now I would be happy to allow for an uncaused effect if you would take the trouble to write to me one example anywhere in the universe of an uncaused effect and of course I'm still waiting for his response because I know and he knows Upon A Moment's reflection that you can't possibly have an uncaused effect because an effect by definition is something that has an antecedent cause but that's only one of the reasons why an avalanche of Doubt has been leveled against traditional causal thinking the other reason which we will explore in our next session is the critical analysis of causality that was launched by the British empirical philosopher David Hume David Humes Watershed critique of causality has led many thinkers after him to believe that that David Hume demolished causality all together and in our next session I'm going to examine that analysis of Hume and the assumption that goes with it that he in his critical fashion demolished the whole arguments of and the whole law of causality which I'm going to I hope prove to you that he did not at all but again let me just recapitulate that denials of the law of causality are frequently found in those who argue against classical theism who want to avoid the uh enormous power of causal thought that drives people to give a sufficient cause for effects that we recognize to be effects