He's not infallible, but he's really pretty good. You'd say, you know, wow, this person,

if he makes a mistake, it's going to be an understandable mistake.

That's historian and New Testament scholar Lydia McGrew. I'm Nate Hansen, and this is Faith Lab.

A lot of Christians were taught to treat the Gospels as spiritually meaningful without ever being

shown why they should count

as historically reliable. So we asked Lydia McGrew a basic question, what kind of trust do these

books actually deserve? And why? But before she got into the evidence, Lydia wanted to clear

something up, because the way a lot of Christians were taught to think about this actually gets in the way.

Presuppositionalism is an approach to Christian apologetics. It's very popular in reformed circles, tends to be popular there.

The presuppositional slogan is something like, if you don't

start with God, you won't end with God. So the only sort of argument that tends to be allowed

from that perspective is that you can't even have reason at all if God does not exist. Now, I think

there's value to the argument from reasons. C.S. Lewis

gave an example of that where did human reason come from and that kind of thing. But a version of

that is kind of the only type of evidential argument that a presupposition list will use,

whereas an evidentialist will say you have to be able to start and give a case that doesn't

simply assume the existence of God or the truth of Christianity or the truth of the Bible,

because if you literally just assume that, that's circular. And so the evidentialist is really

pushing for something that's really robustly evidential that at least should, it may not actually, but at least should convince someone who starts from a more skeptical point of view.

This is my understanding based on what you're saying, and you can correct it as need be.

Would a pre-suppositionalist view essentially be you,

you kind of have to believe it in order for it to make sense? And then an evidentialist would say

...