The Unbelievers Biggest Error - Greg Bahnsen #lawsoflogic #apologetics #bahnsen

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]One of the two great intellectual sins [music] that men commit, no matter what field of study you're in, is arbitrariness. The other one is inconsistency. [music] No one is allowed to be arbitrary if you're trying to present a rational basis for what you believe. And no one is being rational and presenting a basis for what they believe if they contradict themselves, [music] if they're inconsistent.

[00:00:27]And so arbitrariness is something you need to be on the lookout for.

[00:00:33]Believe it or not, I don't know if I could justify [music] this statistic, but subjectively it seems to me probably 80% of your work in apologetics is taken [music] care of if you'll just be on the lookout for people saying anything they want to say.

[00:00:49]80% of what the unbeliever ends up doing turns [music] out to be totally unfoundly giving of his own opinion to which you should say so what? [music] So that's your opinion now? Why do you believe that?

[00:01:05]It distresses me to see Christians get into apologetical debates with unbelievers [music] and when they're going back and forth, the unbeliever is pressing the Christian for a reason for this and a reason for that. And when the Christian gets answered back, the unbeliever, you know, parries them off with this or that opinion. You'll need [music] to say, "Oh, what do we do now?"

[00:01:26]Well, you should press the unbeliever for some reason for the way in which he's responding to the evidence. [music] He cannot, she cannot, may not be, if you're going to be rational, arbitrary.

[00:01:39]Believe me, this is the biggest problem in in witnessing to people is that they think they have the right to just believe whatever they want when it comes to religion. They can just be arbitrary.

[00:01:49]But if you want to get into an apologetical dispute, as I indicated in my earliest lectures, that assumes that people are seeking to be rational and seeking the objective truth. They're seeking to be rational as they seek the object of truth. And it's not a sign of rationality to be arbitrary to believe anything you wish.

[00:02:10]And aversion of arbitrariness is found in the conjectures which are completely arbitrary or unfounded um or prejuditial as I've said up on the board on the part of the unbeliever.

[00:02:26]One sometimes [music] finds unbelievers, both educated and uneducated, who take offense against Christianity, before they're familiar with what they're talking about. And in the place of honest research and assessment of the available evidence concerning some aspect of the Bible, many unbelievers simply substitute personal conjecture for what seems likely to them, the place of argumentation and reasoning.

[00:02:57]For instance, [music] since the Bible was supposed to be written so many years ago, it just [music] seems likely to many unbelievers that we cannot trust the text of the Bible which we have in our hands today. Surely, they'll say, scribes have altered and supplemented the original text. So that we can't be sure that what we have in front of us is actually what Moses or Jeremiah or John or Paul