Today, we're going look at five common claims that can often stump Christians who are trying to be faithful to Christ in conversation.

If you talk about your Christian convictions, I almost guarantee you that you will have heard or you will hear one of the objections we're going to look at today. Before we look at these arguments, I want to quickly teach you two things. The first is what a self-refuting statement is, and the second is how to spot arguments or positions in the person you're talking with that prove too much.

Self-refuting statements: Simply put, a self-refuting statement is a statement that applies to itself and contradicts itself. For instance, if I were to tell you I can't speak a word of English, that statement contradicts itself by its very existence. I am telling you in English that I can't speak in English, or I could tell you that there are no English sentences longer than two words, but that's an English sentence longer than two words. That's how we spot a self-refuting or self-contradictory statement. It's a statement that applies to itself and contradicts itself. You could say something like, "My wife is single." Well, there's another one. To be a wife is to not be single. That's our first tool, the way to look at self-refuting statements.

The next thing I quickly want to teach you is something called “taking the roof off” or taking an argument or position to its logical conclusion. Some people will make statements that, on the face of them, sound pretty good, but if you actually consistently applied that, it would do far too much. It would actually do more than the person intends to do. What we're going to do is determine the claim the person is making. We're going to distill that claim down, and then we're going to see where does the claim leads. It's kind of like a car. Let's hop in the car, take it for a test drive. How far can we go?

For example, people who want to say with regards to marriage that “love is love,” we shouldn't restrict who can get married. Well, the question I would ask (if we're going to apply this idea of getting in the car and seeing where this view actually take us) is what about groups of 10, should they be able to get married? What about your neighbor and your two year old daughter, should they be able to get married? What about your wife and myself, should we be able to get married? Love is love, right?

You see that principle goes way too far. It opens the door to way too much and, in fact, much more than the person who's using that principle actually intends or would even agree to. We distill down what they're saying to a principle, and see what all we can apply that principle to to find out if it's a good principle, if it's a principle that can be consistently applied.

With those two tools, let's look at some common assertions today. Some people will say, especially feminists, that men can't speak out about abortion. Their opinion does not matter because they're not a woman, because they don't have a uterus. The question is: is this a good point of view?

The first thing to point out is that we should really judge what people are saying based on their ideas, not their gender, or the color of their skin, or things like that, but, more than that, arguments don't have genitals. Arguments don't have genders. A point is valid because of what the point is, or it's not valid because of what the point is. It has nothing to do with who makes the claim.

More than that, to apply our second little tool we looked at (getting in the car, taking it for a test drive) if men can't say what women can do with their bodies and they can't speak about abortion, then should Roe v. Wade be overturned? It was decided by the majorit…