1. What is philosophy? 
The objects of philosophy are to ascertain facts or truth, and the causes of things or their phenomena; to enlarge our views of God and his works, and to render our knowledge of both practically useful and subservient to human happiness. Webster’s 1828 Dictionary
2. Why would philosophy be important to a Christian?
Helps us understand what has taken our culture
…………..captive 
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. Col 2:8
3. Col. 2:8 is a warning to who?
Christians. The unbelieving world is already in bondage, but Christians can allow themselves to be deceived and become captive to ungodly thinking.
4. What might be considered examples of Christians believing the lies of the world.
5. What would be examples of assumptive statements we hear every day?
The dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago after an asteroid hit the earth.
Global climate change is the greatest existential threat to America.
Police systematically target minorities.
The NY Yankees are the greatest baseball team in history.
The gospels were made up stories written hundreds of years after the time of Christ.
6. What is the problem with Carl Sagan’s Cosmos?
Cosmos
13 part mini series which came out in 1980.
13 part mini series which came out in 1980.
The brainchild of the late Carl Sagan was broadcast on PBS and shown in thousands of high schools and colleges across America. It was revised in 2014 and has been watched by at least 400 million people across 60 different countries.
Cosmos is presented as fact to school children with no opposing viewpoints or opportunity for rebuttal. It is illegal to advocate religious perspectives but obvious atheism is promoted.
7. What are some of the subtle implications in this Cosmos intro, the assumptive statements.
The cosmos, all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be.
Implication: All reality is defined by what we can observe. Nothing exists outside of the box. All that we see came to be from within the material world. No spiritual, No Creation, No God.
A distant memory. A fall from a great height
Implication: Man in the past believed he was created in the image of God, but now is aware that he evolved from the stuff around him. We are made from star stuff.
The immensity of the size and age of the cosmos….
Implications: We are insignificant and alone in the cosmos. We must take our fate into our own hands.
For the first time we have the power to decide the future of our planet and ourselves.
Implications: Man must fend for himself in an absurd world. Existentialism
“You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Gen 3:4-5
Evolving………….goo man.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads…….except if it leads to a creator God.
We will need imagination……..we imagine, we advance theories even when we have no actual scientific evidence.
We float like a mote of dust in the morning sky…………insignificant.
8. Why would God create an entire universe just for us?
The world says all the stuff is in the box
Nothing exists outside of the box
Man is a product of the box (cosmos)
All time, space, matter and energy is in the box.
Any gods would also be confined by the box (pantheism) or have no interaction with the box (deism)
9. Can we find reality and answers to life’s questions in the box ?
Where did we come from?
Why am I here?
Is there purpose to my life?
What is going to happen to me?
Where do I find the answers?
Aristotle said we need to look at all the stuff in the box, the particulars, to find the answers to life’s questions. This is modern science.
Plato said the answers are at a higher place in the box. He theorized about the ideals or “forms”.
“ The Greatest Good” being the highest ideal or form, but that was as far as his understanding would take him. His concept of God was a philosophical concept, not a person.
Plato looked at apples and reasoned that the concept or Form of apples existed outside of the material world and that apples in our world were just imperfect copies of the ideal apple.
Appleness begins as a concept.
Aristotle examined as many apples as he could and tried to find a unifying theory of apples based on observing the Particulars of apples, their shape, colors, taste, etc.
Appleness begins with observation.
Both were looking in the box
10.The ultimate question still goes unanswered. How did the box come to be?
William Lane Craig lays out the problem like this: Imagine that you’re hiking through the woods one day and you come across a translucent ball lying on the forest floor. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there.
Now suppose you increase the size of the ball in this story so that it’s the size of a car. That wouldn’t do anything to satisfy or remove the demand for an explanation.
Suppose it were the size of a house. Same problem.
Suppose it were the size of a continent or a planet. Same problem.
Suppose it were the size of the entire universe. Same problem.
Merely increasing the size of the ball does nothing to affect the need of an explanation.
Those who think only within the box run from this question because:
It requires “out of the box” thinking which inevitably leads to………………
The Creator
As Plato believed and taught, “Follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
The world cannot go there…………………….
We are forced by our adherence to material causes …. a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” – Richard Lewontin, ‘Billions and billions of demons’, The New York Review,
How we answers these philosophical questions determines:
How we live our lives.
“If there is no God, then everything is permitted” … Dostoevsky
Postmodern worldview
A worldview with no absolute objective truths is a nonsensical and impossible life. It makes no sense.
It leads to stress, addictions, frustration, murder and suicide.
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