Jay Dyer (6:57)
Yeah. I want to start by saying that the argument here is about the coherency and the worldview that makes the best sense of reality. And between us, we will be arguing two different paradigms that have radically different accounts of the nature of reality. For my argument, I will be arguing from a divine revelation position that I believe sets forth what I would say is an orthodox Christian paradigm, namely that the basic fundamentals of a worldview, my worldview, anybody's worldview, would be metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. And those fundamental categories would point us in the direction of a worldview that makes sense of and gives an account of those things. It just so happens that within the Christian paradigm, specifically the orthodox Christian paradigm, all of those three elements of philosophy or of a worldview make sense with the God that created this world, that providentially guides this world, that gives this world a telos or a purpose, and has also structured this world with a kind of logos or a logi that is a foundational organizing principle. The Greek philosophers talked about the Logos. And if you go back to those Greek philosophers, even all the way back to the pre Socratics, they spoke about this logos as a universal organizing principle. Other philosophers, like Plato, Or Aristotle talked about the logi or the Logos being something that is an explanation or a definition. When we work through these ancient philosophers, we notice that they don't really give much of an explanation other than conflicting amongst themselves as to who or what this actually is. It's fine to say that it's a law, it's a principle, but that doesn't tell us very much. And also it conflicts the Stoic idea conflicts with later Neoplatonic ideas as to what the Logos actually is. The Hebrew wisdom tradition, and I can give many scholars if we need to here, was not primarily drawing from the Greek ideas. Certainly Philo and other Jewish scholars were influenced by Hellenism and they used the terminology of the Logos that was coming out of the Septuagint, other translations of the Old Testament text during the second century. But the idea, according to a Hebrew scholar, or excuse me, a biblical scholar, the Orthodox, excuse me, from the Oxford Guide to the Bible. It notes that the Johannine Logos is strongly parallel to the concept of wisdom and Hellenic Jewish thought. But wisdom was already associated with the attribute of God in Wisdom of Solomon 9, 1, 2. In the Hebrew Bible the word of God is both creative and active. Genesis 1 and Isaiah 55, 10, 11. And in Greek, Logos meant spoken word or pervading principle. Stoic philosophy saw this as the guiding meaning or layer that ordered the universe. However, this meaning is not a direct background for John's Logos that was already drawn out of, as we're saying, the Hebrew wisdom tradition. In Genesis 1 we have God's word there present as an active means by which the world comes to be as we progress throughout the Torah and we're going to probably get to that later, I'm going to stick to the Torah, although there's many examples in the Psalms and the minor prophets and historical books, there's many examples of this voice, this angel, this form, this theophany, having a personality being distinct from Yahweh, but also being Yahweh, also being divine, also having the same characteristics to redeem, to save, etc. The reason this is important, important is that as I understand, he tends to argue my opponent, that the idea of the Trinity, these ideas are cribbed from Greek philosophers. They don't exist in the first three centuries of Christianity. I've heard him claim, well, I'm ready to counter all of those claims and we'll get to those later, but there's about 20 pre nicene References that I have amongst dozens more ready to go to prove the known fact. The early church Fathers, the first, second and third century were consistent not just with the New Testament passages about the deed of Christ and the Trinity. For example, in the Gospel of John, every chapter refers to either the deed of Christ or to the triad. And some passages have both in that chapter. And that's in continent, in continuity with the Old Testament, where you have all of these Old Testament passages, again, not just in the Torah, but we're going to focus on the Torah when we get to that in some of the rebuttals. The point there is that the Bible teaches this God, this theology, Old and New Testament. It's not cribbed from the Greeks, even though they're similar terminology. The terminology of Logos is really dependent upon the system and the person using it. So for example, Logos used by her, by Marcus Aurelius as it comes up in his Meditations, is all over the place and what it means. It's a universal guiding principle. It's something innate within him. It's all reality. It's a pantheistic conception. It's the embodiment of the Roman Empire itself. So it's so elastic as to be almost everything and nothing. And that's really nothing in common with what John is doing in John 1 when he argues that the Logos is actually the parallel to the voice of Genesis 1. John 1 is a parallel to Genesis 1. Genesis 1 is a creation of the world and created light. John 1 is a parallel that that plays on that with uncreated light and the person of the Logos identified as the second person of the Godhead. But I want to go back to philosophy for a second because what's really at root between he and I will be conflicting and competing worldviews. What I laid out is the revelational position of my theology in general and some of the sources and texts. I understand that he doesn't believe these texts and many of the audience don't believe the text. And when we have competing ideas about the text, that means we have to go to other areas where we find common authority or common ground. And that would be the realm of debate. Debate functions around principles like logic, the laws of logic. The three basic laws excluded middle non contradiction law of identity. Those basic laws lay out how we would argue and then suss out contradictions between worldviews. If his worldview is unable to give a fundamental account of those three basic areas of philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, then it's going to be undercutting his ability even to debate. So that he showed up shows that he has to recognize the laws of thought, critical thinking, or to not engage in fallacious reasoning. And we're going to be having to pay a lot of attention to make sure that he doesn't engage in and rely on a lot of fallacious argumentation. Now, how do I get from what I'm arguing to my Christian conception? Well, as I said, if the world was created by God and it's the God that I'm arguing for, then it would make sense. Why there's regularity in nature, because God is providential. He providentially guides history. History has meaning. History is not something to flee from, as if we were agnostic or perhaps even a Neoplatonist to try to return to the one, or whatever his view might be. It's not something to go away from. It's actually a good thing. So history, it's reality itself, is fundamentally declared to be good. And it's good because it has this logos, organizing and structuring principle within it. It's not identical to the world. And we're going to see, I think, many fallacies and kill shots with his position of priority monism. And that's compared to a position where we don't have priority monism or any of these weird ideas about metaphysics with no justification. We have justification for the idea of an external world, or the idea of regularity in nature, the idea of objective ethics, because we're made in the image of a good God, a holy God who has a requirement, Allah, the ten Commandments of how we ought to live.
