2. Apologetics: Part II (Remastered)

Apologetics, II

R.J. Rushdoony

[Introductory Speaker] One thing I wanted to mention in opening with with the class today Doctor Rush’ doing one of the questions I think that I have the greatest trouble in answering students is a question that you were had put to your last hand is the matter of if we really believe in the inability and the unregenerate. The mind is not the same as our mind. How can we appeal to it? You know, that's the question that there's a great deal of difficulty with, right. I think that if you could elaborate some on that, perhaps as a starting point and then go on with your however you'd like to conduct the glass there.

[Rushdoony] The question basically has to do with common ground. What common ground is there between the unregenerate man and the regenerate man? Now in terms of what Scripture teaches us. And very definitely in terms of what Saint Paul declares after Moses and the Song of Moses, Romans 1:18 following. The natural man, every man, knows the things of God; visible and invisible, that God is the maker of all things, and he holds this truth, he suppresses it in unrighteousness. Everything in him witnesses to the truth. So that when you speak, though he resists you because of his sin, he still knows that you are telling the truth.

One of the fundamental principles of apologetics that we must hold to is the noetic effect of sin. Now, in the Aristotelian - Hellenic - Scholastic tradition it is held that the mind of man is not tainted or affected by the Fall, so that the mind of man can reason impartially and objectively in terms of all facts that are given. As Christians, we cannot hold to this without denying the faith. We must hold that the Fall of man, that sin has tainted every aspect of his being so that man as thinker refuses absolutely refuses to think as he should. His mind is depraved, it is twisted, so he rejects that thinking which leads to God, he suppresses the evidence in his own being that points to the Lord. However, this is a catastrophe for the natural man. The only kind of thinking that brings a focus to his being is that which points the Lord. Let me illustrate with a very homely illustration.

My son had some car trouble not too long ago. And had a new motor put in his car. He is a student, he's working his own way through college. He's in his first year, he works four nights a week from 11:00 o'clock at night to 7:00 in the morning at a grocery store, goes from there to class. So he is working hard and getting good grades. He got this new motor, and the car just did not work. It would sputter and cough and choke - it wouldn't go anywhere. Well, when we drove back to the shop, and they lifted up the hood and looked at it, it was obvious that whoever had assembled that new motor prior to its installation must have had a few drinks because they had put the wrong carburetor for the wrong car on his car. Naturally, it didn't work. Now this is the way the mind of the natural man functions. Sin has deformed it, it cannot function properly. But when he thinks in terms of scriptural thinking, suddenly everything works, it purrs! And the natural man knows. And so when he resists, he is resisting everything that points to God, everything that points to his own health.

This is why in one of the greatest texts of Scripture, I think one of the most powerful is when our Lord, speaking as wisdom, long before his incarnation in Proverbs 8:36 said

But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul:

All they that hate me love death.

So that the natural man, when he rejects the witness of the gospel, is rejecting, he is choosing death, he is wronging his own soul, he is unable to function. Everything in him, therefore, witnesses on your behalf. So that the proper apologetic approach is not a rationalistic one, it is in terms of the whole Counsel of God, it is in terms of the kind of apologetics that Van Til has developed. You cut out the ground from under him, you demonstrate to him that his mind, his being, could only function in terms of the law of God.

[Student] Do you think that the natural man has the ability to think rationally?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I don't like the term ‘natural man,’ I don't think it's biblical, really. Fallen man, the ‘natural man’ was the man God created. Sin is not natural, sin is a deformation of man. God created man wholly good, sin comes in as a deformation. And we are restored by God's grace to that  estate in which we were created, and we find the fulfillment of that in the new creation, you see?

[Student] Dr. Van Til maintains that the noetic effects of sin affects the sinner’s logic.

[Rushdoony] Yes, he does go into that at one point where he deals with the laws of contradiction and so on. It has affected his logic. Because as he develops his logic, he develops it in terms of his own autonomy and his sovereignty. The Aristotelian laws of logic presuppose the natural man as the ultimate judge, so that the law of contradiction in terms of Aristotle says, in effect, what my net catch does not catch is not fish. What I say is a contradiction is a contradiction, you see. And we must not be bound by the Aristotelian laws of logic, because the Aristotelian laws of logic. Presupposed the autonomy of fallen man as judge as God, as his own principle of occupancy.

Now, Carnell, of course, is emphatic on using the Aristotelian laws of logic and he says, bring on your revelations if they do not meet the standard of Aristotle's logic, then we will have none of them. But he says they pass. Oh, but says another Aristotelian who isn't a Christian, I say they don't pass, and my mind is just as ultimate as your mind, and where are you?

[Student] I'm having some problems with when you say it ‘doesn't function,’do you mean that it can't function in line with Christian man?

[Rushdoony] Let's say it malfunctions. Now my son's car was sputtering and going along, but it was not functioning in any true sense. So the fallen man is able to function in the sense that he works. He thinks he produces a science he invents, does some very remarkable things, which is a witness to the fact that he is made in the image of God. But in spite of all this, he continually frustrates himself and he denies the validity of what he does. We will deal with Einstein denying the validity of what he has done this afternoon at 4:00 o'clock in epistemology. He has to, logically, you see, he cannot say that there is a truth apart from man. Well, that's not functioning properly. If you discover something of very great importance and then say that it isn't true because it can't be true, otherwise there's a God.

[Student] So we're we're talking about spiritual matters?

[Rushdoony] No, we're talking about matters of science. Einstein had no concern with spiritual matters, but Einstein could not say that the work he did was true, he had to say it was false.

[Student] Still behind behind this is the spiritual aspect, is it not?

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes, you're right. Up to a point, he functions on the assumption there is a God, there is a truth to nature, a law and nature, a God-given order. But when he comes to the point where he must say, indeed there is an order and that's why I can produce scientifically valid work, he says there is no order, there is no God, I have done nothing, it's all a work of the imagination, it has no truth.

[Student] And yet man, and scientific men, go about their work and do good.

[Rushdoony] They are good, but they are built on presuppositions he cannot have. I'm glad you mentioned Ayn Rand because Ayn Rand you see begins with the self, the ego. That's her. Basic premise. But she calls her philosophy ‘Objectivism.’ Why? Because she knows the epistemological problem we've been talking about in the epistemology class. Well, we've been dealing with the epistemological problem - the inability of man to demonstrate, in terms of his own belief that there is a real world outside of his mind, he cannot prove it without admitting there's a God. Because then he would have to say there is a pre-established order, a pattern in the universe, a God-given eternal decree. So the natural man in terms of his epistemology, denies all this. And he would rather say there is no order, I don't know whether the outside world really exists, I can't prove it intellectually, there's only brute factuality in order to deny God. And yesterday in the epistemology class I quoted Vladimir Lenin the Marxist. And Lenin, of course, as a modern philosopher and epistemologist who is in this tradition, does not want to admit that there is a real world out here with order and law on it, because then he would have to admit God. Of course, he says, nobody except some kooks like a Christian scientist or somebody in an insane asylum will deny that there is a real world out there, but we cannot prove it in terms of our atheistic premises. So what will we do? We will operate on the premise of ‘naive realism.’ We will take it by faith.

Plato posited it on faith, realm of ideas in universals and a realm of matter, on faith. So they took instead of God on faith, the material world on faith, Lenin and Plato. They cannot account for the world, they cannot account for it. So they either deny us there or they will accept it in terms of ‘naive realism.’

[Student] Would you mind telling us what the ‘noetic effect of sin is?

[Rushdoony] The noetic effect of sin, (I have a section on this in my book, The One And The Many, this is a little plug) is the effect upon knowledge of man's fall. In the Hellenic, Aristotelian, Scholastic, Armenian tradition man's mind, and sometimes man's will, with a few thinkers, has not been affected by the Fall. The rest of man has been, but his reason is immune to the Fall, therefore, he can think just as good since the Fall as before the Fall. And therefore, if you present man with the right kind of reasons, you will make a Christian out of him in effect. In other words, he can be saved by knowledge, this is what it amounts to.

We will be dealing with this point precisely in epistemology this afternoon. Faith and knowledge. Now, faith and knowledge in terms of scripture are inseparable, but no man is saved by knowledge, no man is saved by reason. Man's reason is as fallen as the rest of him. In fact, man's reason is at work to subvert the knowledge of God, to hold it down, to deny it, to suppress it. So this is what the noetic effect of sin means. The fact that knowledge is tainted, that knowledge is perverted by the fact of man's fall. If you deny that sin has a noetic effect, you're saying in the Aristotelian, Thomistic tradition that sin has not hurt man's reasoning, and man can reason just as clearly when he has fallen as before his fall.

[Student] Yes, periodically you hear people say that human responsibility and the sovereignty of God run in a parallel line which cannot be brought together. In your book you say that both exist within the framework of the eternal decree of God. Can you elaborate on that?

[Rushdoony] Yes, that's a good question and a very important one for us to understand. The greatest statement of this is in The Westminster Confession of Faith on God's eternal decree now God is the first thought. God also has primary and absolute freedom. Everything that God possesses is absolute. This is why - because God is God, He predestines all things that come to pass. Now man is created in the image of God. He is the image-bearer. Man is a secondary cause, not primary. Man has a secondary freedom - the freedom of a creature. Now, I do not have the freedom to say “go to now and next year I think I shall be twenty-nine again. I don't have that freedom, nor do I have the freedom to say, or to have said, I would like to be born at such and such a time, or to postpone my life since I don't like the prospect for the next couple of years and that step back into the picture again at such and such a time. Or to say “why wasn’t I born into a millionaire family? It would have solved a lot of problems for me.: You get the point. I can't do those things. There's a whole world of things I cannot do.

Now, this is no inhibition on my freedom, is it? Do you feel inhibited and unfree, and a slave, because you cannot be sixteen again? If you were to ask my wife she would also tell you that I'm no plumber. But it's a problem if anything goes wrong with the plumbing, a real problem. It's an expensive problem because we call someone in. I'm not free to do a lot of things that I would rather do than pay somebody else to do them. I am free to be only what God created me to be. It's a secondary freedom. There's no violence upon me, you see.

Now, if you were to tell me “quit speaking now” and pull a gun on me and tell me you're tired of hearing what I'm saying, you don't agree with me? This would be an imposition on my freedom because I want to speak. But I am free to do that which God created me to do. And even though everything that I am, He predestined to the very hairs on my head, there is no violence done to me. I am free to be that which I was created to be. I have responsibility, I have a moral accountability.

Now, there's a mystery here. And we'll never understand it unless we have the mind of God, which we will never have. But the fact is that mine is a secondary causality and a secondary freedom. And the only way you can have any kind of freedom on the created area is on a secondary basis. To illustrate, Greek philosophy could not accept this. Greek philosophy held to a very different picture, it believed that man was his own God. And, as a result, Greek philosophy set out to exalt the man-God - a primary freedom, primary freedom as essential to him. And the great thesis of Greek philosophy was ‘know thyself.’ Not know God, but know thyself. After all, if you are God the most important thing for you to do is to study yourself. But the tragedy of brief thought was that it ended up with total pessimism and cynicism and despair because man very quickly felt that. “Well here I am, the free God, the Lord of Creation, God over all but my environment limits me so I'm not entirely free. The stars, because they came to believe in astrology, limits my heredity, it limits me, my wife limits me, my children limit me.

Now, I'm not joking, this is the way they began to think. And so there was nothing but pessimism and cynicism and despair. There's a very interesting book on this subject contrasting these two. It's written by a man who's not a Christian, he's a classical scholar, I think he died recently. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture. It's now available in an Oxford University paperback for $2.45, the book may be in your library. It's quite a remarkable book because what this scholar does is to say. “Here's a strange thing, when the church fathers came to do battle with the philosophers of Greece and Rome were defending the freedom of man. The church fathers were defending the freedom of God and we're saying that man is totally predestined by God.” And he said “What happened? As it wound up, it was these men (the Church fathers) who were producing free men who are standing up to the world. And these men  (the Greek philosophers) who are winding up, saying man is nothing but a slave. And all began by exalting man to the place of God, and here only as man was put under the predestination of God, and made a secondary cause, and given a secondary freedom, that he had any freedom at all, and that's why they (the Church and Church fathers) won.” So as he traces the matter intellectually, he says “it's no wonder the Christians won, they were the only ones with the doctrine of freedom, they had a doctrine of freedom because they believed in predestination.” Now, if you want a good popular statement of that. Concerning what's happened since the Reformation, Boettner’s Reformed Doctrine Of Predestination gives you a good statement. But here you have it, philosophically presented by a brilliant classical scholar, yes.

[Student] How would you respond to someone who says that predestination makes man a puppet and a slave?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I would say, on the contrary, it makes him a free man and your attitude makes man into nothing. Because when man tries to be that which he is not - the first cause in the universe, his own God - it's a pretension that is the same as insanity. So when you tell me that you are not predestined by the absolute God, you are saying that you are sovereign. And I say, if you feel that you are God, you belong in an institution. I'm not asking that you be snotty to people unless they get impertinent and then pin their ears back, do it kindly and firmly, but tell them off. We must get over the idea that we are going to bring people into the Kingdom of God by being nice. It's not niceness that wins people to Christ, it's the Holy Spirit.

One of the first things I learned in the ministry was a tremendous blow to my ego and then a tremendous comfort to me. I had a situation where this one family called me in, they had a problem with their daughter. And they asked for my counsel and they were ready to follow - they were desperate. And everything I counseled backfired, it was one mess after another. I can't begin to tell you what a horrible series of blunders it was. I thought the counsel was good, it was the kind of counsel I had given again and again, I thought it was good, godly counsel, but everything backfired. Everything turned out horribly, monstrously wrong. The ironic part of it was that out of that horrible mess that I just don't want to go into, it's painful to recall now twenty years or more later. The girl is a Christian, and the parents became Christians almost immediately, and all I could say was it was of the Holy Spirit. Well, you know, that was a tremendous lesson to me because I was in so many other situations. I had felt I'd really contributed my nickel’s worth. Every nickel's worth I contributed in that case was a slug. So, just proceed in terms of the Word of God and a plain-spoken reckoning with our realities of the situation, it's the Holy Spirit who's going to do it, not you.

[Student] Yes, along this line, I think there has been a hesitation many to bring up the subject of the sovereignty of God because it's offensive to those that you talked to. The idea has been well, I don't want to offend him. And yet this is the very heart of the presentation or defense of the faith is that God is self-sufficient. And their reaction, and their recoiling from that is only that which the fallen creature will do. I've just come to the Reformed faith in the last few years, and it was offensive to me. But when I saw who God was, I mean it made a difference, and  I noticed in my evangelism, presenting God as sovereign that people have come to know Christ, and I mean they've been genuinely converted through the Holy Spirit.

It may be even after I talked to them, and they were mad, and they went back and studied about it, and found out who God really was.

[Rushdoony] Right, you are so right. We must always begin with the sovereignty of God, because if we don't, we are really falsifying the picture. Of course, it's offensive to them. I'm a Christian to whom the doctrine is very dear. But I still must confess, because I'm far, far from perfectly sanctified there are times when it's offensive to me when I'd like to nudge God a little bit and say, “couldn't you let me run things for about five minutes, I could straighten out a lot of things?!” That's the sinful urge in men.

But, with regard to the sovereignty of God, if I may take a little time to tell you a couple of incidents that can go from apologetics to witnessing. When I first went to the mission field after finishing seminary to an Indian Reservation, the most isolated reservation in those days in the country, a hundred miles from any paved road in those days, there's a paved road in there now. I was the only missionary in the area. And, as a result, I had more funerals than those eight and a half years in most ministers having a lifetime. I had five-hundred some funerals; every Indian, every rancher. I helped lay out the bodies, and store them often in the house until we could take care of them and shovel them under. I had everything to do besides performing the service. And I called on hundreds and hundreds of people who were sick and dying. Well, I believed in predestination, but it was something of a problem. Well, that's a notty, a hard doctrine to talk about, that was my attitude. But I found as I was dealing with the sick and the dying, it was the only doctrine, ultimately, that I could talk about. Because as they asked me about. “Why? Why am I going through this long period of agony and suffering? Why is this happening to me?” I could only appeal, and the only argument that made sense was the sovereignty of God - His eternal decrees and Romans 8:28. That's why I was so deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply grieved by that horrible Arminian article in the journal not too long ago on Romans 8:28.

And I am very happy and at the witness to the church that they had more letters of protest about that article than any other article they've ever published. Thanks be to God! At any rate? So I was telling them. “I don't know the reason for it, you can't feel it as joy, but we are told in Scripture that we can count it all joy.” Why? Because God makes all things work together for good to them, not him, to them, who are the called according to his purpose. So I said: “you may not know why in time or you may, but you will surely know an eternity the purpose for it. And you will see that since the very hairs of your head are all numbered, there is nothing purposeless.” Well, the joy they felt at knowing it wasn't senseless, you see. They were suffering, but their suffering would have been twice as great if it were meaningless, if it were senseless, if it were pointless. But to know that in the Providence of God it was going to add up to good, that was joy. I understood why Calvin said it was “for the comfort of the Saints,” this doctrine.

The other incident was a very, very dramatic one. I went to the hospital, I was told that there was this woman, a very wealthy woman, a spoiled woman, who was dying, and somebody ought to witness to her before she died. So I went there, it was to a Catholic hospital, the sisters were very cooperative, always, with me. And I was told she was in a coma, but I had learned by that time people were in a coma very often are still able to hear. I've had enough of them recover and tell me so. So I went in, and I read some Scripture and I said: “I don't know whether you can hear me or not, but this is what the Word of God declares, and this is the way of salvation.” And I prayed and left a time or two eyes flickered open. I went back the next day and she was in bed sitting up, ready to greet me. She knew I'd been there, and she said as she heard me pray, she knew the Lord was going to hear me. Well, within a week, the only problem that was keeping her from going home was that there was no-one to take care of her when she went home. And as soon as they found a companion and a nurse, she was to go home. So I was reading some other passage of Scripture, and I don't recall what it was, and it had to deal with the sovereignty of God. And she objected to it, and I tried to explain it to her, and she said: “I don't like that, do you mean to say that God could have healed me, and had have said ‘no’ to me!?” And I said, of course. God can say no to us in spite of anything we may want, she said: “Well, I don't like that kind of a God.” And I said: “there is no other God,” and she turned her face to the wall and wouldn't listen to me anymore. So I left, I came back the next day, she was in a coma and dead by night, it was that dramatic. It is a remarkable doctrine, it's something we've got to promote first and last because people can experience a lot of things, they like what they get from the Lord, but they haven't taken the Lord, just His gifts. And the doctrine separates the wheat from the chaff.

[Student] And this is the part that always bothers me “the comfort of the Saints,” and the first story, that is beautiful. But the second lady and others who are laying dying know the Word has come to them time and time again through the years with no effect. How do you go to those persons, and you offer again the Christ, and there is no response.

[Rushdoony] Oh, she died unregenerate, there isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind, and I think particularly guilty before God, because she had been really miraculously snatched back from the grave for a time. Well, the thing is, the results are not ours to worry about, the duty is ours. And I think one of the weaknesses we have is that we feel we have failed if we haven't won everybody we witnessed to, and that's not our business. So, whether it's in apologetics or an evangelism, whether it's from the pulpit or whether it's on a campus, you make your witness in terms of the sovereign God in His Word, and you leave the results to God. That’s His province, not ours. It isn't that you have failed, it's what God has determined.

[Student] The Arminians have a different God in the sense that their God isn't really the absolute God. Would you say that those who are Arminians are not trusting in the true God?

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, “by their fruits shall you know them.” To cite an example, some years ago, in a California city I had the misfortune, I had to take part in the ministerial association, I didn't want any association with them, but it was a part of the requirement when I first went to that church that I was to try to cooperate for a while. So, I was made President of the Ministerial Association. And there was this city-wide campaign, and it was a horrible thing, I won't go into the evangelist, he has since died, and it was a mess from start to finish in terms of the financial operations and so on. I made a study of all those who ‘came forward,’ and followed through in all the churches that they had gone to or had any connection with. And it was an Arminian campaign, and what we saw was that these were people who went forward every time there was an evangelist that came into the community. Some of them had been saved ten, fifteen, times. I don't think they were ever saved. Now, there are people who are at this point schizophrenic.

Now, Wesleyanism; there's no question that Wesleyan theology is humanistic at critical points. There's no question in my mind that John Wesley had some horrible, horrible, things to say. He was so hostile to the doctrine of the sovereignty of God and predestination. And you can read the debates there. Toplady who wrote Rock of Ages was the great opponent of Wesley. Incidentally, there's a marvellous, marvellous story about Toplady. Once when he was preaching the sovereignty of God in salvation one woman collared him after the meeting (I believe it was a woman) and said “Mr. Toplady, do you mean to tell me that if you were God you would send people to Hell just because you had decided before all eternity that they were going to Hell? Would you do that, would you be a merciful God, if you did a thing like that?” And he said, “Madam, when I am God, then I will tell you.”

Now, all the same, the interesting thing is that the sovereignty of God is in Charles Wesley's hymns. So there is a deep cleavage there in original Wesleyanism. But the fact is that in Methodism, it has gone to seed in the social gospel - the humanism has come to the fore. And in Wesleyan fundamentalism, the whole emphasis is on the salvation of man. Well, that's humanism! And if your preaching is primarily geared to the saving of men, you're putting your emphasis in the wrong place. It has to be primarily on the sovereignty of God, secondarily on man. And I think that will give you far more zeal and far more power in your ministry.

[Student] I just thought about in regards to Romans 8:28. How can the Arminian say, “well, everything is going to be all right,” and yet deny God’s sovereignty and predestination?

[Rushdoony] He's very inconsistent, as I believe it was Warfield who said long ago: “every Christian who prays believes in the sovereignty of God when he prays, otherwise he would not pray.”

[Student] Could you talk more on the first point raised, about Van Til and the starting point in interacting with the unbeliever?

[Rushdoony] The starting point, what is the starting point? Well, the Scholastic philosopher says the common ground, the starting point with the natural man is reason, you appealed with reason. The implication of that is, then, that reason is the means of salvation, which we cannot accept scripturally - that's impossible, utterly impossible! Now, there are others who say that the starting point is to appeal to the self-interest of man. Now, in the economic sphere, there have been some who have built a doctrine of economic and political salvation on the concept of self-interest. And in the religious sphere, there are those who built a whole doctrine of psychological salvation, that is man being saved because, psychologically, every person has an impulse to wholeness, to health, this is their thesis. And therefore by appealing to their self-interest to develop themselves, and Christ as the means to their development, you can redeem them. So you say this is the common ground. And we could go on and list means of establishing a common ground, or a starting point.

What Van Til says is that the only common ground is that God is our creator and He has made all things. So that, when I talk to you, I'm not talking to someone who has no connection with God. The one thing that ties us both together, supposing we were total enemies, totally alien to each other, totally hostile. We're still bound by the fact that we're both made in the image of God, that God's law is written on the fibers of our being, and that we can, as we talk to each other as that as our starting-point - that God made us, that God, His being everything about Him is witnessed to in every fiber of our being. So that the knowledge of God is inescapable knowledge, we're suppressing it, we're holding it down in unrighteousness. So, what van Till says is we must bring men to epistemological self-consciousness. We must make them aware of that fact in them. The stones shall cry out, even the stones, our Lord said. And Saint Paul declares that the creation is so totally God’s that the very creation around us, underneath us, groans and travails waiting for our redemption for the new creation.

Now, of course, some say that's impossible! But if the ground beneath my feet responds in terms of the law of gravity, it certainly responds in terms of God's Word here. And if the flower turns when I put it near the window, it doesn't show its flower to me, it shows it to the sun, I keep turning the pot around and the flower keeps turning the other way for me. I want to see it, but it turns the sun. The whole creation, everything in you and me and in the unregenerate man, in spite of himself, turns to God. And it requires everything in man to hold it down in unrighteousness.

Now, when the unrighteous forsake the Lord, what happens? It's not that they just leave God and they have everything else. The greatest poem here that illustrates this point, which is scriptural, which Saint Augustine developed in the first book of his Confessions, and which then a great Catholic law developed in one of the greatest single Christian poems ever written, Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven. How many of you know it? Good. I'm glad that a fair number of you do. And what Francis Thompson does there is to describe his own experience.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

And he describes himself forever, hiding, running away from God, and everywhere he feels God pursuing him. He tries to find refuge in friends, but everything in the world of nature, of friends, of man, of Children, of the dust under his feet witnesses to God so that the witness of God is everywhere.

'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.'

So, when man denies God, ultimately he denies the whole world. So, the picture of Hell that we have in Scripture is very important, very important. Hell is total isolation, there is no community in Hell. When you deny God, you also deny the world of friends and of man and of people, you live in an existential world, you are your own universe, there's no one else. There is weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth and gnawing of worms. the fire. What does that all signify? That's imagery for total isolation, the total burning of conscience, the total gnawing of guilt. So that man in Hell is totally, eternally alone. Having abandoned God, he has abandoned all things, all things. He is his own God, his own world forever. C.S. Lewis has a good sentence. I believe it's in The Great Divorce in which he says:

“Heaven is the habitation of those who say to God: ‘thy will be done.’ Hell is the habitation of those to whom God says ‘thy will be done.’” 1

[Student] What are your views on theistic evolution?

[Rushdoony] Well, I'm trying to phrase them without being profane. I believe in literal six-day creationism. I see no ground exegetically for saying it's anything but a twenty-four hour day. Now, I have fairly close contact with the man who put out the Creation Research Journal, are you familiar with that? It's put out by a group of scientists and it was founded by Doctor Walter Lammerts, a geneticist formerly at the University of California at Los Angeles, and then Chief of Research for the Germaine Laboratory.

And here is a man who has won eleven international prizes in genetics, he's the top man in the field. And the interesting thing is, he says, it is impossible, absolutely impossible. It has to be six days, a sudden dramatic thing, there's no other way of accounting for it. If I may take just one minute more. A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of having very close contact with a research scientist for Rocketdyne Inc. He is now working on a federal grant the whole purpose of which is to study the origin of the oceans, which he said took place almost overnight with the flood. And he has produced such dramatic evidence of it, and he holds to six day creationism that Scripps Laboratories in a number of the top scientific agencies, have asked the Federal government, which has given it, a big graph to enable him to pursue his research. And he says it is impossible to account for anything except in terms of something happening dramatically, as Scripture describes it, he was not a Christian a few years ago, it's well worth reading.

1 “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” C.S. Lewis. The Great Divorce. New York, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972, 72.