The argument for God you’ve never heard

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Rhetro

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partly correct . Yes we sure are to use sound doctrine to exhort and oh yes CORRECT the gainsayers .
that is true .
As far as our own efforts , worry not what to say , Rather lean and trust on GOD
to give you the words . And beleive me HE WILL .
I dont worry what to say at all . I just pray to GOD to give me the unction to speak as i should and walk as i should .
And the more we read that bible the far better off we had been .
Did you know that we are to stir one another up by such reminders . We should .
Heretofore i want every one in that bible .
You would be amazed at how different their approach towards sin and error in the church
WAS compared to todays judge not god is love generation that wont correct squat .
UNLESS its a man with a bible brining sound doctrine to exhort , to correct sins , THEN they holler
judge not GOD is love . What people dont realize is satan can say that line . and many of his co workers
have been . ITS JUST TWISTED . his verison of LOVE and his version of judge not , IS BAD NEWS .
So i advise all to get in and to stay in the bible and be in prayer .
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that intellectual refutation is a carnal effort, right?

What I’m saying is that intellectual refutation is not a 'carnal' effort, but the manifestation of the Holy Spirit weaponizing a submitted human intellect to take every thought captive to Christ, just as He did through St. Paul

The intellect and Holy Spirit are not enemies, because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth. The Holy Spirit can work through human effort

1 Corinthians 15:10 "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain, but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me."

Paul worked very hard, but he knew God gave him the strength. His hard work and God's grace worked together as one.
 
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RandyDawson

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No, I am telling you to follow Titus 1:9, not disregard it.

Yes and then weren't you saying you are unable to correct and to convince the gainsayers through sound doctrine?
Maybe try using sound doctrine next time. That might help.

You also said "Our job, as Titus 1:9 says, is to use sound doctrine to 'convince the gainsayers'..which literally means to silence and refute their logical contradictions" so it sounds like your goal is to make them shut up rather than win them to the Lord.

Winning arguments does not equal winning people to the Lord.


You are accidentally attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to human effort.

No, the Holy Spirit works through people. Weren't you aware?

Romans 10:14
How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?

1 Corinthians 3:6-8
I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.


Paul did not 'get' anyone to believe, God did.

Well then the Lord shouldn't have called anybody in to ministry since He can just do it Himself right?

Oh wait, He did actually call people in to ministry and even said man is co laborers with God - 1 Corinthians 3:9-11
The Lord works through people. Christians are part of His Body you know.



Noah preached for 120 years and converted zero people outside his own family, yet he was entirely faithful to God.

Yeah that was before Jesus went to the Cross and before the grace that brings salvation had come upon all men - Titus 2:11
You might want to keep your focus on the new covenant which is where we are at now since Jesus came to do God's will and take the old covenant away so He could establish the new covenant - Hebrews 10:9
 

markalan

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Them switching the word from 'sense data' to 'reproducibility of results' is just a semantic dodge that doesn't solve the problem. They still have to use their physical senses to observe a reproduced result, meaning it is still bound to empiricism. You see?

More importantly, the rule still destroys itself, you cannot run a scientific experiment to 'reproduce a result' that proves all knowledge must be reproducible. It is a philosophical claim that cannot meet its own standard, proving that the secular worldview must borrow unprovable, non-empirical rules just to try and argue against God.

The core of all secular worldviews is intellectual theft.
What is the God given mechanism whereby we learn about the world from the moment we are born to the day we die?
 

Rhetro

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What is the God given mechanism whereby we learn about the world from the moment we are born to the day we die?
The God given mechanism is the human mind being created in the image of the Logos (Christ), which allows us to recognize the logical, orderly principles (logoi) that God embedded into creation.
 

Rhetro

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Yes and then weren't you saying you are unable to correct and to convince the gainsayers through sound doctrine?
Maybe try using sound doctrine next time. That might help.

You also said "Our job, as Titus 1:9 says, is to use sound doctrine to 'convince the gainsayers'..which literally means to silence and refute their logical contradictions" so it sounds like your goal is to make them shut up rather than win them to the Lord.

Winning arguments does not equal winning people to the Lord.
I actually never said I am unable to correct and convince the gainsayers, that would be a strawman. I said "no human can make someone a believer"....because changing a heart is the work of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:6)

And I am using sound doctrine, you are confusing the delivery of truth with the free-will response of the listener. In Titus 1:9, the Greek word elenchein (translated as "convince" or "refute") as I said...means to lay bare, expose, and convict an opponent's error through sound teaching, which is exactly what a transcendental defense does. Sound doctrine leaves the skeptic without an intellectual leg to stand on, but it cannot force a proud heart to surrender to Christ.

No, the Holy Spirit works through people. Weren't you aware?

Romans 10:14
How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?

1 Corinthians 3:6-8
I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.
The Holy Spirit works through people by using them to declare truth, not by forcing the listener to accept it, and measuring faithfulness by immediate conversions reduces ministry to human salesmanship. Your citation of 1 Corinthians 3:7 would defeat your argument: if "neither he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase," then the duty is simply to plant the truth by dismantling intellectual idols, while the harvest belongs entirely to God’s timeline and the listener’s free will. And Romans 10:14 states that a preacher is needed to deliver the message so people can hear it, it does not state that the preacher is responsible for forcing the listener to believe.

Well then the Lord shouldn't have called anybody in to ministry since He can just do it Himself right?

Oh wait, He did actually call people in to ministry and even said man is co laborers with God - 1 Corinthians 3:9-11
The Lord works through people. Christians are part of His Body you know.
It would be a false dilemma to assume that the only 2 possibilities are human effort completely causes the conversion or that human effort is completely useless and God does everything alone without us.

God calls us to be instruments of truth, but being a "co-laborer" does not mean we possess the divine power to force a proud heart to surrender, meaning our duty is measured by fidelity to truth rather than conversion statistics.

Yeah that was before Jesus went to the Cross and before the grace that brings salvation had come upon all men - Titus 2:11
You might want to keep your focus on the new covenant which is where we are at now since Jesus came to do God's will and take the old covenant away so He could establish the new covenant - Hebrews 10:9

The New Covenant brings a greater fullness of grace, but it does not strip human beings of their free will to reject the truth, which is why even Jesus and the Apostles routinely faced mass rejection despite operating under that exact same grace.

If we judge the truth or success of a ministry strictly by how many people it convinces or how fast it grows, then cults, heresies, and false religions would be the most successful ministries on earth.
 
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ScottA

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The most common question from nonbelievers: “What is your evidence?”

The reply: You don't get to ask for evidence without first demonstrating what grounds logic in your worldview to even evaluate evidence in the first place.

Also, empiricism holds that all knowledge comes from sense data. Because the proposition itself cannot be verified by sense experience, it violates its own rule. By the logic of empiricism, if a proposition cannot be verified by sense experience, it cannot be known to be true.

At the end of the day, debating the existence of God comes down to worldviews and paradigms. Simply throwing verses and dabbling in empirical data isn’t very effective. You don’t need to do any of that, you only have to merely point out how a worldview falls into absurdity without God. It’s a proof via reductio ad absurdum, that God exists by the impossibility of the contrary.

All secular worldviews no matter what label they carry, in some way shape or form, participate in intellectual theft. Whether they swap God out with another label, attempt to reduce God to some impersonal force, it’s all borrowed capital because secular worldviews are inherently, rationally bankrupt. People using logic or believing it is useful, is not a justification for logic. Logic requires a justification for a coherent worldview, because every argument presupposes rational thought. Secular worldviews love objectivity when they’re attacking God, but they immediately flee to subjectivism the moment they are asked to explain their own foundation.

The laws of logic are invariant, immaterial, and universal. Therefore, they can only be grounded in God, not localized to a human mind or object, because logic is a reflection of God, rather than bound by it. This is why Christ is referred to as the Logos.

If logic is descriptive rather than prescriptive, it would inevitably become localized, shifting, and ultimately arbitrary. If the laws of logic are not immaterial, invariant, and universal, then what material are they made of, what geographic location are they limited to, and what day of the week is the Law of Non-Contradiction scheduled to change?

To object to the existence of God strips you of the logical right to form an objection against God because any rational objection requires the tools that an argument against God would destroy. All rational thought goes out the window and with that, science itself.

Once this is established, the reason God would be the Triune God is because the Trinity accounts for the One and the Many, reality is both. If you have "many gods" without an absolute, cohesive singular mind, you have chaos. The gods will have differing wills, distinct natures, and clashing authorities, Absolute Truth is lost. If you reduce everything to just a generic "One" where individuality is an illusion, diversity is lost, and personality disappears into a blank slate.

You don't prove the Resurrection by using human history. You use the Resurrection to prove that human history has any meaning at all. You aren't putting Christ on trial before the judge of secular history. You are putting secular history on trial before the Resurrection.

There is no better and more coherent worldview, than the Christian worldview.
It's okay for those who do not believe in God to render unto the world the things that are of this world...but the matter of God is simply beyond that. Higher. And why should anything higher actually need to "prove" anything to anything lesser? The very notion is absurd--the lesser should want to know and learn, and if they do not, they've made their choice. For the darkness not to believe in the light, the morning comes soon enough. No interest, no penthouse view, no desire to know more, to be more--very well then--bid them good day!
 
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Rhetro

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It's okay for those who do not believe in God to render unto the world the things that are of this world...but the matter of God is simply beyond that. Higher. And why should anything higher actually need to "prove" anything to anything lesser? The very notion is absurd--the lesser should want to know and learn, and if they do not, they've made their choice. For the darkness not to believe in the light, the morning comes soon enough. No interest, no penthouse view, no desire to know more, to be more--very well then--bid them good day!
I agree with this to some extent..only after spending enough time with a particular nonbeliever when it’s time to move on.

The issue is that overall this would abandon the intellectual battlefield and cede the world to secularism. Christ is Lord over the intellect, not just our feelings.

When we engage in apologetics, we aren't putting God on trial before a 'lesser' human judge. We are doing what 1 Peter 3:15 commands: providing a defense. We are exposing that the skeptic cannot even use logic, science, or reason without implicitly borrowing from the Christian worldview to do it.

Saying 'bid them good day' might sound pious, but it treats logic and science as 'things of this world' that belong to nonbelievers. They don't. Truth belongs to God. If the early Church Fathers had adopted this view, the Gospel would have never transformed the Roman Empire.
 
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markalan

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The God given mechanism is the human mind being created in the image of the Logos (Christ), which allows us to recognize the logical, orderly principles (logoi) that God embedded into creation.
Isn't that an argument for trusting "sense data"?
 

Marvelloustime

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partly correct . Yes we sure are to use sound doctrine to exhort and oh yes CORRECT the gainsayers .
that is true .
As far as our own efforts , worry not what to say , Rather lean and trust on GOD
to give you the words . And beleive me HE WILL .
I dont worry what to say at all . I just pray to GOD to give me the unction to speak as i should and walk as i should .
And the more we read that bible the far better off we had been .
Did you know that we are to stir one another up by such reminders . We should .
Heretofore i want every one in that bible .
You would be amazed at how different their approach towards sin and error in the church
WAS compared to todays judge not god is love generation that wont correct squat .
UNLESS its a man with a bible brining sound doctrine to exhort , to correct sins , THEN they holler
judge not GOD is love . What people dont realize is satan can say that line . and many of his co workers
have been . ITS JUST TWISTED . his verison of LOVE and his version of judge not , IS BAD NEWS .
So i advise all to get in and to stay in the bible and be in prayer .
@amigo de christo
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