Do you ever wonder why you can give a great explanation to someone and yet they still won't come to agree with your point?

I'm one of those people who has this kind of innate, implicit view that if I just explain something well enough, people will agree. They'll see it my way. There's a certain kind of pride that's behind that I think, that God's been working on my heart on over the years, to where I frequently now realize I don't see things the right way. I don't have the right answer all the time. That's important for all of us to recognize.

But even when I am convinced by scripture and multiple sources that I do have the correct belief on a certain issue, I still hold this view that if I just explain it well enough, people will agree. It doesn't work like that. You know this. I know this. We all know this, but sometimes we forget that in conversation.

Today what I want to do is spend a little bit of time talking about some possible reasons why, even in the face of a compelling explanation, sometimes people will still not agree. There are two categories we're going to look at today. One is that the presuppositions someone holds may prevent them from seeing the evidence the way you see the evidence. The other category we'll look at is simply hardness of heart. We'll talk about God's involvement with the heart and that aspect to.

First, presuppositions. What is a presupposition? It is a position you hold that comes before other positions you hold, hence the “pre” and “supposing,” presupposition. These are foundational beliefs. They're kind of like the things that are bedrock for how we see the rest of the world and understand evidence and interpret people's explanations and all of that.

I have the presupposition that gravity exists. Now that used to be a conclusion for me. At some point I had to be convinced that gravity existed, but now that I do, if you ever tell me that a person can just float or that gravity doesn't apply over here, I'm just going to reject that out of hand. I'm not going to go, get out of my chair, walk into the hallway to see someone who supposedly is defying the law of gravity.

Now maybe they're doing that from a hovercraft or some type of jet pack, but that doesn't suspend gravity; that's countering it. But if you were to tell me that gravity just doesn't exist over here in this place, I just wouldn't believe you.

In the same way that if you were to tell me that there's a square circle on this piece of paper across the room, I'm not going to get up. I'm not going to go look at it. My presuppositions about what it means to be circular and square, namely that you can't be both circular and square at the same time, just rule out the possibility of a square circle. It doesn't fit in my worldview. It doesn't accord with my presuppositions.

This happens when we talk about religion too. For instance, you may give great evidence for the resurrection. You may point to the fact that we have multiple sources that all independently give us details and tell us about the resurrection. You may say that it's the best explanation ever proposed, that all the other hypotheses fail, and that they're actually quite laughably silly when you analyze them. You might go through each individual step about how the church started out of the resurrection, how the tomb was empty, how people saw him after his death and were willing to die for that claim. You might go through all of that and the related embarrassing testimony about the resurrection. Someone will still say, "Yeah, but it didn't happen."

When you push a little more, you might get to a reason why. They might say, "It can't happen." When people start saying things can't happen, we're getting in the realm of presupp…