Six Points for Building a Worldview:
1. What is the goal of apologetics? (To communicate who the triune God is - see Acts 17:16-28: Paul is reasoning, dialoguing with the Athenians)
2. How do you communicate the truth of the existence of God? (Correspondence and coherence are incontrovertible methods of establishing truth in a court of law)
3. How do we unpack a worldview and connect it with reality? (A) Logical consistency; (B) Empirical adequacy; (C) Experiential relevance
4. What are the questions that form a worldview? (A) Where did I come from? (Origin); (B) What is my life's meaning (Meaning); (C) How do I separate good from bad? (Morality); (D) What's going to happen to me when I die? (Destiny)
5. How does the test for credibility come? (A) The Pragmatic Basis: Does it really work? (B) The Experiential Basis: Can I sense it in my experience internally, or is it purely cerebral? (C) The Cosmic or Metaphysical Basis; (D) The Historical Basis; (E) The Community Basis
6. What must a worldview have in order to be persuasive? (A) A strong foundation in correspondence (factual support); (B) A high degree of coherence (internal consistency); (C) Explanatory power (the integration of facts and deductions - can it explain reality?); (D) Avoid two extremes (neither two complicated nor too simplistic) - We as Christians have don miserably in this area: (a) We need to understand the hurt of a culture before we can get through to that culture; (b) We cannot speak until we understand; (c) We do not give simplistic answers to cultures with deep-seated anguish and hurt; (d) Most of the evangelism we will do with the tough people is preparing the wineskin; (E) More than one line of evidence; (F) Able to refute contrary worldviews.

Four Steps in Communication:
1. Identification: How can you identify with your listener?
2. Translation: How can you translate your message into their idiom?
3. Persuasion: What about your story is persuasive?
4. Justification: Why do you believe what you believe?

What is the dilemma in all of this?
1. The human problem is not finiteness or smallness, but fallenness and sinfulness.
2. You can expect a sinner to insist on his own view of things.
3. Sin involves an evasion of the truth.
4. Sin has ultimately contributed to intellectual confusion and moral evil.

In Apologetics, we will deal with three "-ologies."
1. Ontology: What is.
2. Epistemology: How do you know it is true?
3. Axiology: How it impels you to live.

Quote (Ravi Zacharias): "Assumptions and presuppositions are the guiding factors in decision making."
Quote (Alvin Toffler): "Every person carries in his head a mental model of the world."
Quote (James Olthuis): "It [one's worldview] is the standard by which reality is managed and pursued. It is the set of hinges on which all our everyday thinking and doing turns."
Quote (Ravi Zacharias): "A worldview is a set of beliefs that underlie and shape all human thought and action."

The Laws of Logic: (1) The Law of Identity: An object is identical to itself. (2) The Law of Non-contradiction: Two contrary statements cannot be true in the same sense at the same time (To deny the law of non-contradiction is to talk of a one-ended stick). (3) The Law of the Excluded Middle: Just because two things have one thing in common does not mean they have everything in common (This is the most important violation of logic today). (4) The Law of Rational Inference: Inferences can be made from what is known to what is unknown.

A pragmatist is one who values knowledge purely for the sake of its consequences.
A relativist is one who believe that truth is relative rather than absolute.

Apologia is an explanation.
Apologetics is "bush clearing" so others can see Christ.
Immanuel Kant was the first to use the German word, "Weltanschauung", which means "a way of looking at the world."

Revelation 3:14-18 -- Christ's prescription to the Laodiceans was relevant to what the Laodiceans valued -- (1) hot springs > would that you were either cold or hot; (2) wealth > buy gold and white garments from me; (3) eye salve > buy my salve that you may see. ( )