85 min / 2013
RATING 8/10

Some Christians will try to provide atheists with reasons for why they should believe in the Bible, and for why they should believe in God. In How To Answer The Fool, Sye Ten Bruggencate teaches us to skip past this, to start with the Bible, and to instead present to the unbeliever the fact that it is only by acknowledging God, and the Bible as his Word, that the world makes any sense. Or to borrow from a C.S. Lewis analogy in Weight of Glory, this is believing in the Bible for the same sort of reason we believe in the sun. It’s not because we see it but because by it we can see everything else.

This beginning-with-the-Bible defense of our faith is called “presuppositional apologetics.” Presuppositions are the things we assume as true at the beginning of an argument. Both Christians and atheists have presuppositions, but the point Ten Bruggencate makes in this film is that only ours make sense.

He focuses on the issue of reason here, showing that while atheists will assume the existence of reason and logic (it is one of their presuppositions) they really have no basis in their worldview to believe in their reasoning – why would we expect a randomly generated universe to be a rational one, and why would we assume that any beings in such a universe would be rational, and their logic trustworthy? He makes his case so well that the university students he’s interacting with give up on reason, and start to argue that they actually know nothing. That’s a logical enough conclusion based on the atheist/evolutionary worldview they continue to cling to, but even they get how comical it is to hear a person paying thousands of dollars a year to attend an institute of higher learning deny that they can know or learn anything.

Eye-opening scenes like this one make this a must-see film for absolutely every Christian. And, thankfully, you can do so for free!

Fool vs. Collision

There is another notable presuppositional apologetics film, made just a few years before Fool, and it’s worth comparing the two. Both are fantastic, but they each have their particular strengths.

In Collision, Pastor Douglas Wilson takes on atheist Christopher Hitchens, and rather than reason, Wilson focuses his attention on the atheist’s inability to account for morality. In taking on one of the biggest, baddest atheists of our time, and doing so with a smile and a wink, Wilson demonstrates apologetics at its most winsome.

That winsomeness, if not altogether missing in How to Answer the Fool, is at least in shorter supply. That said, How to Answer the Fool is the more instructive film, because it explains for the viewer the philosophy, or the underpinnings, of presuppositional apologetics – it gives us more insight into the why behind how Sye is guiding conversations.

Conclusion

So watch the Fool to figure out what presuppositional apologetics is all about, and then follow-up with Collision to see it winsomely demonstrated.