Dr Greg Bahnsen - Apologetics & Self-Deception: Part 1

Welcome to the James Rustin Memorial Lectures. Our speaker this morning is Dr. Greg Bonson. Greg is certainly one of the most outstanding students to have graduated from Westminster in the last few years. He earned his M. Div. Degree and his THM degree simultaneously here at Westminster, whereupon he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, writing a thesis on the subject of self deception, which is the topic of his lecture this morning. Since that time he has been a controversial and yet powerful defender of the Reformed faith. He has published books on one of them called Theonomy and Christian Ethics, another called Homosexuality. He has, I believe, two others in various stages of completion. I mentioned that Dr. Bahnsen is controversial. He may not agree with everything he says, but you can hardly question his passion to be faithful to Scripture and the substantial theological and philosophical tools which he brings to bear on all the questions which he discusses. And I would recommend him to you as an example of a thinker who is clear and cogent and profound. Let me make a couple of announcements. This lecture is scheduled to last from 9:20 to 10:20. The second Rustin lecture will be held also this morning from 11:15 to 12:15. Also Dr. Bonson will be lecturing in the ethics course, the course Doctrine of the Christian Life both Wednesday and Thursday at 12 o'.

Clock.

On Wednesday his subject will be Covenant Intrusion and Justice. And on Thursday his subject will be penology. Dr. Bonson.

Well, that's hardly fair.

I'm not sure that I can live.

Up to the introduction now. Maybe should have given that after the lecture. Appropriate. I certainly do want to express my gratitude to the faculty of the seminary and to the student association of the.

Seminary as well for the privilege of speaking in this lectureship series.

I'm especially happy to deliver a lecture in the Rustan Lecture series because Jim.

Rustan was a fellow student during my seminary days and his family and my family were friends. And I'm happy to deliver this lecture in this institution, of course, because of.

My gratitude to the faculty for its.

Forming and its maturing of my theological.

Outlook and I trust the disciplining of.

My mind and abilities. And I'm happy to deliver this lecture.

In this area of thought in this institution, because of my great esteem for.

Dr. Van Till and his reforming efforts.

In the area of Christian apologetics and.

The presuppositional approach to it.

And then I'm especially happy to deliver.

This lecture and this series and this.

Institution and in this general area on this particular subject, because, as it turns out, it began many years ago in embryonic form. As a graduate paper for a seminar with John Frame, and then evolved full.

Blown, with a great deal of change.

Into my doctoral dissertation in epistemology. And so I am happy for many reasons to have the opportunity to bring this paper today, and I hope that it might, as you hear it, be in some measure as helpful to your thinking as it turned out to be.

Beneficial for mine in its preparation.

The subject is apologetics and self deception.

There will be an outline available.

The two lectures that I'll be delivering this morning are both on the same subject. They run together. Part one will deal with this as a vital concept for presuppositional apologetics, and we'll be looking at the familiarity of the notion, the apparent philosophical paradox that arises from the notion of self deception.

And then the initial search for a solution. And in part two I'll be delivering.

What I hope is a Christian answer to the problem of self deception and making application of it. But first of all, I think this is a vital concept for presuppositional apologetics. That self deception, which is practiced by.

All sinful men, according to the Apostle.

Paul's incisive description in Romans chapter one, is at once religiously momentous and yet philosophically enigmatic. Paul asserts that all men know God inescapably and clearly from natural revelation, so that they are left with no defense for their unfaithful response to the truth about him. In verses 19 and 20, Paul says, what can be known about God is plain within them because God made it plain to them, being clearly perceived from the created world, being intellectually apprehended from the things that have been made, so that they are without excuse. Nevertheless, even as they are depicted as categorically knowing God in verse 21, all men are portrayed in their unrighteousness as holding down the truth, verse 18. That is, they are suppressing what God has already successfully shown them about himself, as a result of hiding the truth from themselves, unbelievers neither glorify nor thank God, but instead become futile in their reasoning, undiscerning in their darkened hearts, and foolish in the midst of their professions of wisdom. So, according to God's word, through Paul, unbelievers suppress what they very well know, only confirming what Jeremiah the prophet so aptly declared when he said, the heart is deceitful above all things. Now the apologetical importance of such self deception should be quite evident. Throughout the history of apologetics we find Romans 1 has repeatedly been of guiding interest to biblically oriented apologists and indeed the self deceptive character character of man as presented there has itself been stressed.

Periodically anyway by scholars of Reformed persuasion.

However, no apologist has drawn more consistent attention to this characteristic of the natural man or made it more pivotable for his system of defending the Christian faith than as Dr. Cornelius Van Til. It is an indispensable concept in his epistemology, as one will see in systematically studying Dr. Van Till's writings or analyzing his apologetical perspective. Now, my point is not simply that references to the unbeliever's self deception as taught in Romans one are conspicuous and common in Dr. Van Till's books, but that this notion functions in such a.

Crucial manner in his argumentation that without.

It, presuppositional apologetics could be neither cogent nor appropriate as a method of defending the faith. A short rehearsal of a few basic points and Dr. Van Till's apologetic shows why this is so. In the survey of Christian epistemology, Dr. Van Till claims that there can be no more fundamental question in epistemology than the question whether or not facts can be known without reference to God, and so whether or not God exists. That's interesting. The apologetical question forces then Dr. Van Till to the metaphysical question. Dr. Van Till's apologetical argument for the metaphysical conclusion that God exists, however, is in turn epistemological in character. It is characteristic of Dr. Van Till's writings that epistemology and metaphysics mutually support each other and require each other. Now, far from being a species of feteism, as it's so often misconstrued by men like Montgomery or Geisler or Sproul, Dr. Van Till's approach to the question of God's existence offers, I think, the strongest form of proof and rational demonstration, namely a transcendental form of argument. He writes, now the only argument for an absolute God that holds water is a transcendental argument which seeks to discover what sort of foundations the house of human knowledge must have have in order to be what it is. To put it briefly, using Dr. Van Til's words, we reason from the impossibility of the contrary in the defense of the faith. He explains that this is an indirect method of proof whereby the believer and the unbeliever together think through the implications of each other's most basic assumptions so that the Christian may show the non Christian how the intelligibility of his experience, experience, the meaningfulness of logic and the possibility of science, proof or interpretation can be maintained only on the basis of the Christian worldview, that is to say, on the basis of Christian theism. Taken as a unit rather than piecemeal, Dr. Van Till writes, the method of reasoning by presupposition may be said to be indirect rather than direct. The issue between believers and non believers and Christian theism cannot be settled by a direct appeal to the facts or laws whose nature and significance is already agreed upon by both parties to the debate. The question is rather as to what is the final reference point required to make the facts and laws intelligible. The Christian apologist must place himself upon the position of his opponent, assuming the correctness of his method merely for argument's sake, in order to show him that on such a position the facts are not fact facts and the laws are not laws. He must also ask the non Christian to place himself upon the Christian position for argument's sake, in order that he.

May be shown that only upon such.

A basis do facts and laws appear intelligible. The method of presupposition requires the presentation of Christian theism as a unit. So, taking Christian theism as the presupposition which alone makes the acquisition of knowledge in any field intelligible, the apologist must do a critical analysis of the unbelievers epistemological method with the purpose of showing that its most consistent application, says Dr. Van Til, not merely leads away from Christian theism, but in leading away from Christian theism leads to the destruction of reason in science as well. Now this point which Van Till drives home, I think persistently throughout his large corpus of publications is expressed with these words. In a Christian theory of knowledge. Christianity can be shown to be not just as good as or even better than the non Christian position, but the only position that does not make nonsense of human experience. Because the unbeliever's commitment to random eventuation in history, or if you will, a metaphysic of chance. Because of that, the unbeliever system renders proof impossible, predication unintelligible, and a rational irrational dialectic unavoidable. Dr. Van Till claims repeatedly in his writings that the truth of Christianity then is epistemologically indispensable. And in this sense we reason from the impossibility of the contrary. Dr. Van Till says the argument for the existence of God and for the truth of Christianity is objectively valid. The argument is absolutely sound. Christianity is the only reasonable position to hold. It is not merely as reasonable as other positions, or a bit more reasonable than other positions. It alone is the natural and reasonable position for men to take. Christianity is proved as being the very foundation of the idea of proof itself. Well now admittedly those are rather strong claims, and I think they do constitute the most rigorous apologetical program of intellectual defense being advanced in our time. I trust even non presuppositionalists will grant that. They may not think that the program can be fulfilled or successfully followed, but it certainly makes the boldest claims of any of those who are writing in the field today. It is, moreover, just in the all or nothing epistemological boldness of transcendental presuppositionalism that Dr. Van Til finds the distinctiveness of Reformed apologetics what he calls the basic difference between it and other types of defense. He writes in the Defense of the Faith. The Romanist evangelical type of apologetics assumes that man can first know much about himself in the universe and afterward ask whether God exists and Christianity is true. The Reformed apologist assumes that nothing can be known by man about himself or the universe unless God exists and Christianity is true. Ironically, those who are uneasy with the presuppositional approach include not only those who think that it being fidistic does not prove enough, but also those who, hearing the claims that we've just cited, say that it proves far too much. The charge is made, you see, that presuppositionalism implies that unbelievers can know nothing at all and can make no contribution to science and scholarship, since belief in God is epistemologically indispensable according to the presuppositionalist. And it's right here, right at this crucial point in the argument, that the notion of self deception by the unbeliever enters the picture. Dr. Van Till has always taught that the absolute contrast between the Christian and the non Christian in the field of knowledge is said to be that of principle. He draws the distinction between the regenerated consciousness, which in principle sees the truth, and the unregenerate consciousness, which by its principle cannot see the truth. If unbelievers were totally true to their espoused assumptions, then knowledge would indeed be impossible for them since they deny God. However, the Christian can challenge the non Christian approach to interpreting human experience only if he shows the non Christian that even in his virtual negation of God he is still really presupposing God. So Dr. Van Til says he puts the point succinctly. Anti theism presupposes theism. The intellectual achievements of the unbeliever, as explained in the Defense of the Faith, are possible only because he is quote borrowing without recognizing it, the Christian ideas of creation and providence. And so, you see, the non Christian makes positive contributions to science in spite of his principles because he is inconsistent. And so Dr. Van Til replies directly to the charge that we're now considering with these words. The first objection that suggests itself may be expressed in the rhetorical question, do you mean to assert that non Christians do not discover truth by the methods they employ? The reply is that we mean nothing so absurd as that. The implication of the method here advocated is simply that non Christians are never able, and therefore never do employ their own methods consistently. The best and only possible proof for the existence of such a God is that his existence is required for the uniformity of nature and for the coherence of all things in the world. Thus, there is absolutely certain proof for the existence of the God and the truth of Christian theism. Even non Christians presuppose its truth while they verbally reject it. They need to presuppose the truth of Christian theism in order to account for their own accomplishments. The sense of deity discussed by Calvin on the basis of Paul's doctrine in Romans 1 then provides Dr. Van Till not only with an apologetical point of contact, but also with an account of how those who disclaim any belief in God can know much about most subjects. The knowledge of God which every man has as the image of God and is surrounded by God's clear revelation, assures us that all men are in contact with the truth. Not even sin, in its most devastating expressions, can remove this knowledge. For Dr. Van Til says, sin would not be sin except for this ineradicable knowledge of God. In this knowledge of God which Paul speaks in Romans 1, Dr. Van Till identifies the knowledge which all men have in common, contending that this common knowledge is the guarantee that every man can contribute to the progress of science and in some measure to the unity of that task between believers and unbelievers. Because he's convinced that self consciousness presupposes God consciousness. The presuppositionalist can assert then, in the most important sense, as Dr. Van Till says, there are no atheists. And I think Dr. Van Till relies very heavily on Paul in making just that surprising claim. He writes, the Apostle Paul speaks of the natural man as actually possessing the knowledge of God. The greatness of his sin lies precisely in the fact that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God. No man can escape knowing God. It is indelibly involved in his awareness of anything whatsoever. We have at once to add Paul's further instruction to the effect that all men, due to the sin within them, always and in all relationships, seek to suppress this knowledge of God. Deep down in his mind, every man knows that he is the creature of God and responsible to God. Every man at bottom knows that he is a covenant breaker. But every man acts and talks at as though this were not so. It is the one point that cannot bear mentioning. In his presence, Dr. Van Till speaks of the unbeliever sinning against his better knowledge. And just because knowledge is a category of belief, namely knowledge being justified trivially, and because it can reduce unnecessary philosophical complications throughout the rest of the lecture, we could as well speak of the unbeliever's suppressed belief in God as we could speak of his suppressed knowledge of God. In fact, Dr. Van Till makes his point in just that way also. In his writings he says, to be sure all men have faith. Unbelievers have faith as well as believers. But that is due to the fact they too are creatures of God. Faith, therefore, always has content. It is against the content of faith as belief in God that man has become an unbeliever. As such, he tries to suppress the content of his original faith. And thus there is no foundation for man's knowledge of himself or of the world at all. When this faith turns into unbelief, this unbelief cannot succeed in suppressing fully the original faith in God. Man as man inherently and inescapably is a believer in God. Thus he can contribute to true knowledge of the universe. Now our brief rehearsal of presuppositional apologetics has brought us then, step by step, to the realization that a crucial component in that perspective, one that is necessarily contained in any credible account of its functioning, is the conviction that the non Christian is self deceived about God, that the one who does not believe in God actually believes in God. Now the cogency of presuppositionalism is tied up with the intelligibility of this notion of self deception. If we do not find our point of contact with the unbeliever and his suppressed knowledge of God and reason with him in such a way as to distinguish carefully, Dr. Van Til says, between the natural man's own conception of himself and the biblical conception of him, that is, if we do not proceed on.

The firm premise that the unbeliever is.

Engaged in self deception of the most significant religious kind, then according to Dr. Van Till, we cannot challenge his most basic epistemological assumption that his reasoning can indeed be Autonomous. And immediately, Dr. Van Till says on this, everything hangs. And so, step by step we come to the point where it's not the the only indispensable notion to the method. It is at least one indispensable notion to the method of presuppositionalism. On this everything hangs. If there should be something suspect or unacceptable about the notion of self deception here, then the entire presuppositional system of thought is suspect and unacceptable as well. Its key argumentative thrust relies completely on the truth of the claim that unbelievers are suppressing the what they believe about God the Creator. And that is why earlier I stated that self deception, as depicted in Romans 1, is religiously momentous, and also why I said that the unbeliever self deception is a pivotal notion for the presuppositional method of defending the faith. However, it was also stated at the outset of our lecture that this notion of self deception as it's found in Romans one is philosophical enigmatic. It is more than just a bit odd, isn't it, to say that someone believes what he does not believe. Indeed, it sounds downright self contradictory. At just the crucial point where the presuppositionalist must make reference to clear and compelling considerations in order to give a justifying and credible account of the very heart of this apologetical method, he seems to be taking an unsure step into philosophical perplexity. Indeed, it hardly seems to the critics of presuppositionalism that its account of itself explains the unclear in terms of the clear. It appears rather to move from the unclear to the even more unclear. For now the obvious question, if not challenge, is going to be what could it mean for an un unbeliever to simultaneously be a believer? Is the notion of self deception at all cogent? Now the quite enigmatic character of his conception of the unbeliever as self deceived is made very plain in Dr. Van Till's writings, where he admits that the problem of the unbeliever's knowledge has always been a difficult point, often the one great source of confusion on the question of faith in its relation to reason. Dr. Van Till insists that we must do justice to the twin facts that every man knows God, and two, that the natural man knows not God. If, like Romanists and are many an apologist, we do not, then he claims, we will necessarily follow a compromising apologetic. Dr. Van Till is aware of the countercharge, however, that is likely to be made. And so I quote he he says it is ambiguous or meaningless, says the Arminian, to talk about the natural man as knowing God and yet not truly knowing God. Knowing is knowing a man either knows or he does not know, he may know less or more. But if he does not truly know, he knows not at all. In reply to this, the Calvinist insist that the natural man does not know God, but to be thus without knowledge, without living, loving, true knowledge of God, he must be one who knows God in the sense of having the sense of deity. End of quote. So you see, being appropriately sensitive to the charge of self contradiction, Dr. Van Til does want to draw a distinction to indicate that he with Paul is not taking away with one assertion what he gives in another assertion. And so he qualifies his statement. Let me give you a few of them from his writings. He says non Christians know after a fashion, as Paul tells us in Romans. Elsewhere he writes that there is a sense in which all men have faith and all men know God. All contribute to science. Therefore he teaches there are two senses to the word knowledge used in Scripture. Now the common way in which Dr. Van Till denominates these two senses is, and the difference between them is by saying that unbelievers know God but not according to the truth or they do not truly know him, or they do not have true knowledge.

Now the situation is construed in the following.

Unbelievers presuppose and hence mentally believe the truth of God in Christianity, while they verbally reject it. The non Christian acts and talks as though this were not so, for he cannot bear the mentioning of his knowledge of God. Why not? Dantil says all sinners have an axe to grind. They do not want to keep God in remembrance. They keep under the knowledge of God that is within them. That is, they try as best they can to keep under this knowledge for fear they should look into the face of their judge being troubled in conscience. The unbeliever must make an effort then to hide the facts from himself, somewhat like a cancer victim who in distress keeps the truth at a distance from himself. Some students of presuppositionalism have made, I think, the hasty error of conceiving of this situation as a simple matter of lying. The unbeliever at his thought knows God, but simply says that he does not know God. But Dr. Van Till has not taken this artificial and simplistic route. He recognizes that the unbeliever situation is epistemologically strong, strange. It's very hard to describe accurately. On the one hand, Dr. Van Til portrays the unbeliever as holding this knowledge of God subconsciously. The non Christian is said to borrow Christian ideas without recognizing it. He knows deep down in his heart or deep down in his mind, so that the natural man's knowledge of God is taken as beneath the threshold of his working consciousness. And yet, on the other hand, Dr. Van Til wants to find contend unequivocally for the sinful guilt of men who suppress the knowledge of God. Thus they are also portrayed by him as somehow conscious of what they are doing. Knowing that it cannot successfully be done, says Dr. Van Till, the unbeliever pursues the impossible dream of autonomy, seeking out the suppression of what he knows about God. Van Til says he knows he is a liar all the time and accordingly his denying of the truth is a self conscious act. And yet in saying this, Dr. Van Till wants to insert immediately a necessary qualification on his claim.

In fact, you'll note if you look.

Up this quote that the word liar in that quotation is placed conspicuously in quotes. Dr. Van Till wants to say it with some measure of reservation. Elsewhere he explains that the unbelievers hostility is not wholly self conscious. And so please notice what's happened to his qualitative distinction knowledge, true knowledge and to his spatial distinction knowing, knowing. Deep down he now adds a quantitative distinction. Wholly self conscious, partially self conscious.

And I quote again, it must be.

Borne in mind that when we say that fallen man knows God and suppresses that knowledge so that he, as it were, sins self consciously, this too needs qualification. Taken as a generality and in view.

Of the fact that all men were.

Represented in Adam at the beginning of history, we must say that men sin against better knowledge and also self consciously. But this is not to deny that when men are said to be without God in the world that they are ignorant. There is therefore a gradation between those who sin more and those who sin less self consciously. One way or another, however, Dr. Van.

Til teaches that the natural man is.

Ethically responsible for his suppressing of the truth. He states that the Scriptures continue to hold man responsible for his blindness. And he calls the result of the unbeliever's self deceptive efforts culpable ignorance. The reason for his failure to recognize God as he should lies exclusively in himself, says Mantilla. It is nothing less than willful transgression.

Which accounts for his refusal.

So again, Dr. Van Till has indicated.

How awkward it is to speak of.

The unbeliever as self deceived. On the one hand his knowledge is considered subconscious and he does not recognize his utilization of it. And yet on the other hand he is seen as actively seeking to suppress it. And in some measure he self consciously.

And willfully works to hide it from himself.

So we seem to be wanting to run from pole to pole. On the one hand, we don't want.

To say that he's a bare liar, and yet on the other hand we do want to say that he's fully culpable, just like any liar would be turn tape over at this time. So we seem to be wanting to run from pole to pole.

On the one hand we don't want.

To say that he's a big.

And.

Yet on the other hand we do want to say that he's fully culpable, just like any liar would be. And so from the preceding short review of Dr. Van Til's discussion of the apologetical situation, I think we have learned one that a recognition of the unbeliever self deception is indispensable to presuppositional apologetics, and 2 and yet that its recognition is fraught with obscurity. We must recognize something which apparently is quite obscure to begin with. As long as the notion of self deception appears uncertain, awkward or unclear, I think that the cogency of the presuppositional method will remain in the balances. We must say in conformity to Romans 1, that in some sense the non Christian knows and does not know God. In some sense he believes but disbelieves in God. In some sense he is unconscious of suppressing the truth, but still responsibly conscious of doing so. So then, what might prove especially beneficial would be for us to give some sense to these apparent paradoxes. And if we can do so, the philosophy of presuppositionalism will be noticeably advanced and I think more readily presentable to struggling defenders of the faith who I think need it so intensely.

So let me move on then to.

The familiarity of the notion, noting why it is we're going to make this study this morning in our working toward a solution to the problem of self deception, I think we can pause at the outset to observe that Paul's use of that concept was certainly not esoteric. Portraying men as self deceived has been a virtual concept commonplace in Western literature, and thus the apparently paradoxical nature of the concept cannot be thought to be a uniquely religious matter. Popular cynical platitudes about man's proclivity to self deception have been continually published by men from Demosthenes to Benjamin Franklin, who once quipped, who hath deceived thee so often as thyself? The Puritan preacher Daniel dyke wrote a 400 page treatise published in 1617 entitled the Mystery of Self Deceiving and a century later, the Anglican apologist Bishop Butler included his famous Sermon upon Self Deceit in a published collection of his sermons. An entity correctly recognized, a man may be entirely possessed of this unfairness of mind without having the least speculative notion what the thing is. It has certainly been common for mention to have been made of self deception, even though it may be uncommonly difficult to explain what it is philosophically. Of course, among philosophers the notion has been common stock. From what was said about it by Plato and Rousseau and Goethe and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, one would learn how dubious it is that men really want the truth when the truth is uncomfortable for them. Special attention is given to the concept of self deception in Hegel's theory of unhappy consciousness, in Kierkegaard's discussion of purity of heart, and in Sartre's view of bad faith. According to Sartre, by the way, men evade responsibility for their existential freedom through intentional ignorance of the human reality. Apart from the obscure works of the philosophers, however, not many of us will have read all of that which I've listed. Self deception is one of those human realities on which great works of Western literature have been richly sustained over many years. One thinks of the classic portrayal of it in Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, or Shakespeare's the Tragedy of King Lear. We remember the soliloquy of self swindling in Dickens, Great Expectations and Emma's intrigues with lovers and Flauberts. Madame Vauvere are Strether's efforts to remain oblivious to unwanted evidence, and Henry James the Ambassadors. The tragic condition of self deception is discussed and depicted in great Russian literature of the past. One thinks of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Father Sergius, and the Death of Ivan Ilyich. Indeed, one of the most graphically accurate depictions of self deception is found in Tolstoy's War and Peace, where, you'll recall, when Count Rostov returns home from a business trip to discover that something has happened to his daughter, we read these words. The count saw clearly that something had gone wrong during his absence, but it was so terrible for him to imagine anything discreditable occurring in connection with his beloved daughter. And he so prized his own cheerful tranquility that he avoided asking questions and did his best to persuade himself that there was nothing very much wrong or out of the way. The illustrations from literature could be multiplied many times over. We could mention o' Neill's the Iceman Cometh, Andre Gide's pastoral symphony, Camus, the Fall, or any number of other entertaining but perplexing accounts. But we still would not be fully aware of how common the notion of has been in human thought until we supplemented this survey with those sociological and psychological approaches to man which have so profoundly affected Western culture in the last century. One thinks here, of course, of the discussion by Marx of false consciousness and collective illusion causing an entire social class to obscure the motives of its thought from itself. We recall the sociology of knowledge presented by Karl Manheim, who pointed to the tenacity of commitment to theoretical formulations which, although impractical, have been acquired in the cooperative process of group life. And finally, we couldn't possibly overlook Freud's psychoanalytic study of subconscious maneuvers and defense mechanisms by which men cling to their cherished illusions. So whether we turn to works in religion or philosophy or literature or sociology or psychology, or what have you, we cannot come to think that the notion of self deception is somehow an unfamiliar one. We have ample evidence that men identify something in their experience as self deception. The notion is readily utilized in everyday conversation as well, not simply in published works of the scholars. The vocabulary of self deception is recognizable even by children. It's mastered by people and indeed it's taught to others. And so when the son of Mrs. Jones has been caught red handed stealing money, lunch money out of the students desk at school, and when Mrs. Jones continues to protest her son's innocence, despite this being the third time such an incident has taken place, despite her discomfort and red face, when the subject of dishonesty comes up in casual conversations, despite the fact that she does not trust her son around her purse any longer, and when she continues to protest his innocence with strained explanations like the school officials have a vendetta against little Johnny, they were framing him. Nobody finds it awkward to say the poor lady is deceiving herself. You see, self deception is simply part of our common experience and familiarity with it breeds acceptance of it as a genuine reality of life.

Life.

But there is an apparent philosophical paradox that we have to deal with nonetheless. Our ready acceptance of the reality of self deception has been challenged over the last 20 years by the philosophical interest taken in conceptual questions about self deception which have arisen in the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of mind. The analytical epistemological approach to the subject was somewhat anticipated in Bertrand Russell's critique of Freud and the analysis of mind and in Gilbert Ryle's criticism of mind body dualism. In the Concept of Mind, Russell spoke of desire motivated beliefs, that is of wishful thinking. And Ryle pointed out that the practice of self deception challenges the common assumption of dualism, that man has some direct introspective knowledge of the workings of his own mind, a knowledge free from illusion and doubt. However, while it was anticipated by Russell and Ryle, the critical, intense and thorough philosophical scrutiny of the notion of self deception was inaugurated by raphael demos in 1960 in a pioneering article published in the Journal of Philosophy entitled Lying to Oneself. A long series of reactions and counter proposals have developed in the Philosophical Journal since that time. And despite the common mention made of self deception previously, there had been little inquiry into just what self deception must involve to qualify as such, and into whether it is a feat which can literally be accomplished. Analyses of the notion always seem headed for some form of paradox. You see, the natural thing to do is to model self deception on the well known activity of other deception. Now, throughout the lecture I'm going to be using these two expressions, and so let's get used to them. Self deception, deceiving yourself, or if you will, intrapersonal deception, and then other deception, deceiving somebody else, interpersonal deception. Now, the natural tendency is to model self deception on other deception. Deceiving oneself is thought of as a version of deceiving someone else. A problem here, of course, is that in other descent, the roles of deceiver and deceived are incompatible. Yet in self deception, a person is thought to play both of these incompatible roles himself. Sartre put the matter plainly in his book Being and Nothingness. He said, it follows first that the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person. Which means that I must know in my capacity as deceitful deceiver, the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity is the one deceived. Better yet, I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully. And this not at two different moments, which at a pinch would allow us to reestablish the semblance of duality, but in the unitary structure of a single project. How then can the lie subsist if the duality which conditions it suppressed? Let us stop and analyze the situation. In a case of other deception, Jones is aware that some proposition is false. But Jones intends to make Smith believe that it is true, and he succeeds. Now, if we take Smith out of the picture altogether and substitute in Jones everywhere we mentioned Smith just a moment ago so as to gain self deception, we end up saying Jones, aware that P is false, intends to make himself believe that P is true and succeeds in making himself believe that P is true. Such a statement is surely puzzling, for it suggests that somebody could try to make and succeed in making himself believe something which ex hypothesis at the same time he believes not to be true. It would be easy to conclude, then, self deception is an incoherent enterprise which cannot be fulfilled. And so we're forced to ask whether there actually is such a thing as perpetrating a deception on oneself. How could it occur in practice? How could it be described without contradiction? How can someone, after all, believe P as deceived, yet disbelieve P as deceiver? It now appears that self deception, despite the familiarity of the notion, is about as difficult as presiding at one's own funeral. When we introduce the element of mendacity, dishonesty or lying into the picture, you see, the problem is even further complicated. Here we move from epistemic notions about belief into philosophy of mind and questions of consciousness and purpose and intention. Now there have been weak models of self deception proposed by some philosophers intending to take the sting out of the paradox by maintaining that an agent does not know what he is up to in self deception. In strong self deception models, the enterprise is purposeful, however, and not so innocent. And it is this strong version of self deception which is usually thought necessary to for moral culpability and self deception. But that only intensifies the philosophical perplexity with the notion. For the kind of thought that goes into planning and executing what you are doing and purposefully deceiving someone else makes doing it to yourself seem absolutely impossible. Self deception is not a matter of mere stupidity or carelessness in thinking. It is a craftily engineered project. And this is why it seems pointless and self contradictory. So then, the analytical epistemological approach to the literature on self deception over the past two decades makes us hesitant to speak of it confidently and clearly. In the maze of philosophical treatments which have been given, the paradoxical notion will only intensify your confusion. If you want to do some reading, Herbert Fingert, in the only full book published recently on the subject subject, summarizes our problem nicely in these words, he says, were a portrait of man to.

Be drawn, one in which there would.

Be highlighted whatever is most human, be it noble or ignoble, we should surely place well in the foreground man's enormous capacity for self deception. The task of representing this most intimate secret gesture would not be much easier were we to turn to what the philosopher have said. Philosophical attempts to elucidate the concept of self deception have ended in paradox or in loss from sight of the elusive phenomenon itself. We are beset by confusion when once we grant that the person in question is in self deception. For as deceiver, one is insincere, guilty, whereas as genuinely deceived one is an innocent victim. What then shall we make of the self deceiver, the one who is both the doer and the sufferer? Our fundamental categories are placed squarely at odds with one another. The one who lies with sincerity, who convinces himself of what he even then knows is not so, who lies to himself and to others and believes his own lie, though in his heart he knows it is a lie. The phenomenon is so familiar, the task so easy, that we nod our heads and say, of course, of course. Yet when we examine what we have said with respect to its inner coherency, we are tempted to dismiss such a description as utter nonsense. Well, what can we do to find a solution to this paradox and rescue presuppositional apologetics along the way? At this juncture, we can take the route of denying the reality of self deception, or we can take the route of resolving the apparent paradox involved in the notion. My procedure will be to take self deception as a datum, and thus I am committed to saying that at best, it is only apparently self contradictory. Now, while it is not inconceivable that those many people who have made use of the notion of self deception over the centuries have been unwittingly contradicting themselves, not inconceivable. But it's still not very likely we resist the conclusion that self deception is actually impossible. Because, you see, we know that people do not merely play at self deception. They engage in it in tragic ways, and very often they later come to realize that fact. I think here, for instance, of that devastating book spears inside the Third Reich, given Paul's teaching in Romans 1, not to mention the actual use of the phrase to deceive oneself, as you find it in James 1 and 1st John chapter 1, the Christian will especially want to resist dismissing self deception as an incoherent impossibility, Most people then will be surer that self deception occurs than they would be of any explanation which renders it only apparent. So whenever we confront an account of self deception which makes it appear contradictory, our assumption is going to be that the confusion lies not in the notion of self deception, but the confusion lies in this person's philosophical account of it. Accordingly, our work is cut out for us. As elusive as it may be, we are committed to finding an adequate and coherent analysis of self deception. What will be required of us if we're going to succeed? Well, I think the basic requirement for an acceptable analysis of self deception is simply that it must, as we say, save the phenomenon while at the same time respecting the law of contradiction. Thus, our account must be descriptively accurate and must be true to paradigm examples of self deception. Now, I realize it's useful here to recall Wittgenstein's warnings against the reductionistic craving for generality which is contemptuous of the particular case. We must admit at the outset that the many and varied uses of the term self deception bear what is called a family resemblance to each other. There will be borderline cases where ambiguous evidence makes it difficult to tell if all of the usual elements of self deception are present. There will be extreme cases where some element in self deception is accentuated out of proportion, even as the colloquial expression and explanation that's insane is an exaggeration of the literal and proper use of the concept of insanity. There will be analogous cases, deficient cases, peculiar cases, and we could go on and on. Nevertheless, there are typical and what I call paradigmatic cases from which we learn the words self deception and how to apply them further to diverse cases. And our use of this vocabulary, I don't think, is so ad hoc as to preclude the possibility of our picking out genuine cases of self deception. And so I'm going to aim to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of the assertion. S throughout my lecture, S will be the person we're talking about s deceived himself into believing that P P being a proposition of your own choosing. And we'll take this in the full fledged and paradigmatic sense. In order to be descriptively correct, our analysis must not radically depart from ordinary language, of course, nor must it confuse or merge self deception with related and similar phenomena in human experience. We mustn't confuse self deception with ignorance or wishful thinking or change of belief. And beyond being accurate and exact, our account must also be completely rid of incoherence, which requires using clearly defined notions in the analysis so that self contradiction or its absence is detectable. We do not want to explain self deception, moreover, by appealing to concepts which are even less clear than the one we are attempting to understand, for example, by an ambiguous and misconceived distinction between psychological knowing and epistemological knowing, which is easily faultless, as obscure, if not simply wrong. Yet, on the other hand, we do not want to make the analysis so pat and easy that the perplexing element in self deception is dismissed altogether, causing us to wonder why it should ever have appeared problematic. To begin with, for instance, by drawing a trivial distinction, as some, I think, popular exponents of Dr. Van Til's writings have done, drawing a trivial distinction between what someone ought to know and what he actually does know, though a strategy which you will notice brings self deception down to the level of any mundane oversight in your thinking, such as not knowing your father's age. I ought to know what my father's age is, but as a matter of fact, I don't. Within the guidelines we have rehearsed here, then, we need to formulate an adequate analysis of self deception. And because time will get away with this, if I complete my survey for you, let me simply say, say that in the philosophical journals you'll notice three basic strategies for resolving the paradox. The first strategy is to deny that there is a parallel between self deception and other deception, to deny that parallel and then to do your best explaining self deception as a special form of belief, belief under certain conditions. And then secondly, there are philosophers who, instead of denying the parallel, affirm the parallel and say that self deception must be a conflict state of incompatible beliefs. And yet they resolve that paradox by then drawing a distinction. Draw a distinction within the person himself. One part of the soul believes, the other part doesn't. Or draw a distinction as the time he believed it then but now he doesn't draw a distinction as to consciousness. He's not fully aware of it, he's only vaguely aware of it, or it's subconscious, over against fully conscious, and on and on. And then in the third place, there has been at least one major school of thought which says instead of paralleling self deception to other deception or denying such a parallel, let's forget epistemic notions in our account of self deception altogether. For you see, it's just the use of terms like knowledge and belief and perception that gets us into trouble. And so Herbert Fingarrett, in his recent book Self Deception, proposes that we use a volition action model whereby one spells out his engagements in the world in a willful and purposeful way, and in a way that I'll describe at the beginning of next hour, tries to resolve the paradox. Now, my evaluation in closing is that none of these three major strategies for resolving the apparent paradox will pass the test of adequacy that we've prescribed. In some cases, we find necessary but not sufficient conditions of self deception. For instance, adverse evidence and the influence of desire on one's belief. Those are necessary but they aren't sufficient. In other cases, necessary conditions are dismissed altogether. People say that belief is not involved, that incompatible beliefs are not involved, and I think that's not right. Some proposals merely state all over again that the need for a resolution to the problem. I think here are those proposals that want to use the epistemic vocabulary in a new way. Well, the very fact that they're forced to use it in a new way only reveals to us that they have some kind of problem they're trying to get around, or else they reintroduce the paradox at a different point, such as having a policy of not spelling out an engagement in the world. Some suggestions end up reducing self deception to something else, reducing it to a change of belief, or to ignorance, or to cognitive error, or to pretending and thereby render the notion dispensable. And another group of attempted solutions rely on notions which are even more obscure or problematic than self deception itself. For instance, diverse kinds of consciousness escaping the appearance of paradox at the price of equivocating on just what the self believer believes or is aware of. Other analyses confuse or merge self deception with one of many related states, with wishful thinking or delusion, or simple trust or vacillation of opinion or obstinate or motivated belief. Now, virtually all of the authors who have written on the subject have contributed some helpful insight into the difficult issue of self deception, and I will draw from many of them and my own proposed resolution to the apparent paradox. However, I'm not convinced that these writers have been fully true to the phenomenon or have escaped the paradox. And therefore, because the concept of self deception is vital to presuppositional apologetics, and despite the obscurity and problems surrounding a philosophical understanding of it, we must make a renewed effort to analyze the notion adequately and resolve its apparent paradox. Being confident that our labor is not in vain in the Lord, we can turn to the task of constructing just such an analysis in the second part of this paper.