Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Problems with Presuppositionalism (Part 26)

This message is a continuation of the previous tape. When you object about miracles, or you object about evil in this world, or you object about this, that and the other, you can understand why that objection doesn't have any force with me. The reason it has no force with me is not because I'm an obscurantist and I'm not listening. It's like you say all these things and I go, nya, nya, nya, I can't hear you. The reason your objections have no force with me is that if you'll step within my worldview, you can see that if there's evil in this world, given the sovereignty of God, that too is part of his plan and he must have a morally good reason for it. So I can understand why you don't want to accept that because he won't tell you what that reason is. But within my worldview, Christians don't have the right to demand that reason from God. They're supposed to trust Him. But there's no logical problem with that. Provided we do believe he has a morally sufficient reason, then there is no problem of evil. I want you to understand that in terms of the story I told you, there's no problem with miracles. Granted, I can see why you, on your worldview don't want to accept miracles. But you know, if you believe in God, who created the world and controls it, miracles are no problem. Now, what's going to happen if you do this consistently and do it well, do it with clarity and effectiveness, if nothing else, the unbeliever is going to have to leave saying, well, given what they believe, they have the right to believe it, I guess. But given what I believe, I just can't go with them. Now, if you've already done the internal critique, you shouldn't walk away saying that I have the right to believe what I'm going to. But minimally, if you present things in terms of the Christian worldview, he can say, well, I see that you've got a worldview that handles all these things, but I'm unwilling to go with that worldview. That's really what's going on anyway. He will not have a change of heart. He will not have a change of mind. But apologetics should vindicate, give a reason for the hope that is in us by saying, listen, given what we believe about God, man, the universe, so forth and so on, the problems you're raising are not problems. Secondly, you set forth the Christian worldview as the precondition for the intelligibility of human experience. We're Back to our language here. Given the Christian worldview. Don't you see, Mr. Unbeliever, given the Christian worldview, I can account for human freedom and the use of logic and the uniformity of nature and dignity, individuality, limitations, sin, redemption. All of that has a place in my worldview. Thirdly, we set forth the Christian worldview as the context for conflict and redemption. Conflict meaning, well, minimally, the conflict I'm now having in this argument. Remember how Van Til says to the hypothetical opponent that he's talking to in the pamphlet why I Believe in God? He says, you have to understand within my worldview, I can account for your opposition to my worldview. You're not on speaking terms with God, he says. And so it doesn't surprise me that you don't want to accept my worldview. But your worldview can't account for anything, much less the conflict we have. And as I've already explained, and I'll stop here because I'm not going to have enough time, the worldview must be a redemptive worldview. We don't just talk about the positive features of human life, but we have to be able to account for the fallenness, to use Christian terminology, of man and how man can be saved from. That fall when I debated an Orthodox Jew and a Muslim at Orange Coast College College out in Southern California, debated them simultaneously. That's a big mistake as a strategy because as I've already said, they just wanted to argue with each other about Palestine, and I couldn't really get them into the sorts of things I wanted to argue about. But when I debated them, I addressed to both of them this problem. Both of you maintain the law of Moses, and the law of Moses tells us that we're sinful and under the wrath of God, and the law of Moses tells us what God requires of those who are under his wrath. There must be the shedding of blood. There must be substitution. And yet neither one of you have the shedding of blood or substitution in your religion. I want you to explain that. How do you account for redemption given your worldview? So then it's only the specific critic Christian form of theism, only the Christian worldview in its entirety, with all of its details. It really does the job as we compare the worldview provided by God in His revelation and the worldview of the autonomous man. I'm going to move ahead now. I've taught you how to do presuppositional apologetics. We'll give you some more illustrations later today when we get into the ring, finally. But at the theoretical level, we can imagine two ways of objecting to this approach or this procedure, this theory of apologetics. And so we're now at F in our outline two theoretical problems with presuppositionalism. Why don't we take a two minute break? All right. As we continue our lecture, I'm going to take up another question or two that you have asked and fitted into what I've said previously. One of you wrote, all men are finite outside of knowing the infinite, which is to say, knowing God, can man have any certainty? And then you ask, should this be an issue in our apologetics? Well, I guess you can see from the list of things that I've just given you that yes, it should be an issue in our apologetic. But now notice what happens. You compare worldviews within the non Christian worldview. Is man necessarily finite? Necessarily finite? No. Some worldviews would say that he is. Some might have different views of man. Plato thought man was eternal because what is man is his soul, and it always exists and always will. But. Well, not but, but. So you see that in granting that man is finite, if the conception of man as finite is correct, you're dealing with somebody who's already working surreptitiously within the Christian worldview. Right? But in the discussion, if the guy grants that man is finite and the mind of man is finite, then you're going to press him by saying, well, then how can you have certainty about anything? Given the limitations of the human mind, how could you be absolutely sure of anything? So the unbeliever says to you, well, I guess we can't. Can't be absolutely sure of anything. What are you going to ask him? You'd be absolutely sure because we can't be absolutely sure. Given the limitation or finitude of your mind, you're not in a position to declare even the finitude of your mind, are you? That is its inability to be sure of anything. You have no right to be sure that you can't be sure. Now, the Christian doesn't have that problem because the Christian. Now stand over on this side. The Christian understands that God is infinite. God is absolute, God knows everything infallibly. I am not infinite or absolute. Nevertheless, God the infinite can tell me the finite things which, because he has told me them, they're infallible for me. So you can have fallibility and infallibility within the Christian worldview because of the creator creature distinction. But that's a real conundrum philosophically outside. So thank you for this question. I hope you see it as part of the list of questions and problems that I think are valuable for comparing these two worldviews. Now let's move on to F2 theoretical problems with presuppositionalism. I emphasize they are theoretical problems. We're not now talking about difficulties and actually working it out in practice in a dialogue with somebody. But if you stand back and you want to be kind of abstract and theoretical, there are a couple of things that may bother you about what I've been telling you. The first theoretical problem is that presuppositionalism proves too much. What do we mean by that? Well, according to presuppositionalism, unbelievers who do not profess the Christian worldview do not have the preconditions for the meaningfulness of everything. What I've been calling the intelligibility of all human experience. Unbelievers who do not profess the Christian worldview can't really justify anything they know, and therefore they don't know anything. It would seem to prove that unbelievers could have no knowledge at all. Early on, when Van Till was an apologist at Westminster Seminary, his critics often voiced or expressed this kind of criticism. They say, well, now, what a ridiculous point of view. Because what you're saying in terms of the way you present this antithesis of the worldviews is that unbelievers don't know anything, but obviously they do know things. Vantil argued over and over again against that misrepresentation of his position. Basically, what is the way in which Van Til answers this problem? I'm going to tell you that I'm going to be reading from another lecture here for a few minutes. But then the problem is the way in which Van Till gets around this difficulty creates an even bigger one, or so it appears. The charges made 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 analysis, that Van Till is going to call in the concept of self deception. The concept of self deception. Van Till always taught, and I quote, that the absolute contrast between the Christian and the non Christian in the field of knowledge is said to be that of principle. And then he goes on to draw, quote, the distinction between the regenerated consciousness, which in principle sees the truth, and the unregenerate consciousness which by its principle cannot see the truth. End of quote. If unbelievers were totally true to their espoused assumptions, then knowledge indeed would be possible. Since they deny God. However, the Christian can challenge the non Christian approach to interpreting human experience, and I quote Van Hilt only if he shows the non Christian that even in his virtual negation of God he is still really presupposing God. Van Til puts the point succinctly in saying anti theism presupposes theism that settling into your minds by now. Have we said it enough times? The intellectual achievements of the unbeliever, as he explains in the defense of the faith, are possible only because he is borrowing without recognizing it the Christian ideas of creation and Providence. The non Christian thus makes positive contributions to science in spite of his principles. Vanthel Fifth, non Christians, if they were consistent with what they say their worldview is, couldn't know anything. But because they're not consistent and they're really borrowing our principles of creation and providence and so forth, they can make contributions to science. So Van Till replies to this charge that has been made against them. With the following words he says 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. Is that categorical enough to indicate people who say this in this Red man tilt? The implication of the method here advocated is simply that non Christians are never able and therefore never do employ their own method consistently. They're never able to employ their philosophy 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 God and the truth of Christian theism. Even non Christians pre 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. So the sense of deity that was discussed by Calvin in the Institutes on the basis of Paul's doctrine in Romans Chapter one provides Van Til not only with an apologetical point of contact, but also with an account of how those who disclaim any belief in God can nevertheless know many things about many subjects. The knowledge of God which every man has is the image of God, and is surrounded by God's clear revelation assures us then that all men are in contact with the truth not even sin in its most devastating expression can remove this knowledge. Mantle says, sin would not be sin except for this ineradicable knowledge of God. It is this knowledge of God that Paul is speaking of in Romans 1. And it's this that Dantil identifies as the knowledge that all men have in common and which guarantees that all men can make progress in science. And there can be some measure of unity between the scientific work of believers and unbelievers because he is convinced that self consciousness presupposes God consciousness. The presuppositional apologist can assert, in the most important sense, and I quote Van Till, there are no atheists. Van Till 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 a creature of God and responsible to God. Every man at bottom knows that he is a covenant breaker. But every man acts and talks as though this were not so. It is the one point that he cannot bear mentioning in his presence. Van Til speaks of the unbeliever sinning against his better knowledge. And I quote, it is of the greatest possible importance, he says, to acknowledge that man knows God in some original sense. Now then, Van Tuil says, all men know God in some sense, some original sense. Deep down, what does all that mean? We know that knowledge is a category of belief. You've been through this, so I'm just going to take it for granted. Knowledge is justified, true belief. To say that all men know God is to say that all men believe in God, the living and true God of the Bible. In fact, Van Till makes his point in that way, using belief rather than knowledge. He says, to be sure all men have faith. How does he say belief? Unbelievers have faith as well as believers, but that is due to the fact that 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 is inherently and inescapably a believer in God. Thus he can contribute to true knowledge in the universe. So Van Til says, of course, unbelievers are able to know things. And that's because though they say they don't believe in God, if they didn't believe in God, they wouldn't be able to know anything. Though they say they don't believe in God, in fact they do. All unbelievers are believers. Really, in some deep original sense, all unbelievers are believers. You need to write that in your notes. Mantill escapes the problem. That presuppositional proves too much, proves that unbelievers are completely ignorant, blithering fools. In actual fact, he escapes that by saying, well, unbelievers aren't really unbelievers in some original sense, they're believers. And so it's a crucial component in the presuppositional perspective, one that's contained in any credible account of how it functions to hold that the non Christian is self deceived about God, that the one who does not believe in God actually does believe in God. And if presuppositionalism is to be deemed cogent, it's the intelligibility of that notion of self deception that we must defend. If we do not find our point of contact with the unbeliever in his suppressed knowledge of God and reason with him in such a way as to distinguish carefully between the natural man's own conception of himself and the biblical conception of him. That is, if we don't proceed on the firm premise that the unbelievers engage themselves, then according to Van Till, we cannot challenge his most basic epistemological assumption that his reasoning can indeed be autonomous. And then Van Till adds, on this everything hinges. I don't know how careful a reader you or all of you may be, but you know, when a, a philosopher, a serious scholar is laying out his position and he gives you a sentence like that, boy, the flags better go up right. Pay attention to this, he says. On this everything hinges. So Van Till is willing to acknowledge that his whole system would completely be disintegrated if he couldn't say that the unbeliever is nevertheless a believer in God. The concept of self deception is critical. Van Til recognized that everything hangs on it. If that's a muddled idea, then the entire presuppositional system of thought is suspect and unacceptable. However, the Concept of self deception certainly looks enigmatic. The unbeliever is a believer. It would appear that we've really stepped into philosophical perplexity now. Aren't we violating the law of contradiction? The unbeliever is a believer. There's a man who doesn't believe in God, but it's the case that he believes in God. Well, the first thing I'm going to do is indicate for Van Till's sake, for the honor of his reputation. Van Till openly admitted there was a problem there. He didn't think it was insurmountable. But Van Till said, well, this is a difficult notion, isn't it? He admits the problem of the unbeliever's knowledge, quote has always been a difficult point, often the one great source of confusion on the question of faith in its relation to reason. Now Van Till insists we have to do justice to the twin facts that every unbeliever knows God and yet the natural man does not know God. If we don't stress these two points as Romanists and Arminian apologists do not, we will necessarily have a compromising apologetic, he said. But Dantil was quite aware of the counter charge that would be made. And I quote him. 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. So as we see, Van Till was sensitive to the charge of self contradiction. He wanted to draw some kind of distinction that would indicate that along with Paul, he was not taking away with one assertion what he was giving with another. And so Van Til qualified his statement. Let me quote. 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 said, quote, there are two senses to the word knowledge used in Scripture. A common way in which Van Till denominates these two senses and the difference between them is by saying unbelievers know God, but not according to the truth or in other places he says they do not truly know him. Elsewhere he says they do not have true knowledge. How is that to be construed though Unbelievers presuppose and hence belief the truth, God and of Christianity, he says, 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. And why not? Van Till says all sinners have an axe to grind and do not want to keep God in remembrance. They keep under the knowledge of God that is within them, that that is why they try as best they can to keep under this knowledge for fear they should look into the face of their judge, he says, being troubled in their conscience, unbelievers, quote, hide the facts from themselves like a cancer victim who in distress keeps the awareness of the truth at a distance from themselves. Okay, we have a problem. Presuppositionalism suggests unbelievers are totally ignorant. Vantville says, no, they're not, because they really do know God. Oh, now we have another problem. And you're saying unbelievers believe. He says, well, but we have to draw a distinction. They believe, but not truly they believe. Deep down he wants to draw some kind of distinction. They believe it, though they won't talk about it or admit it. Now, some students of Van Till have made the terrible mistake of thinking of the situation here as that of lying. The advanced tool saying the unbeliever is just lying. You know how to self consciously lie. You people didn't realize this, but I played for the Lakers last year. In fact, that's the most valuable player in the kingdom. That's a lie, isn't it? It's a lie because first it's not true. But conceivably, if I'd taken drugs before class or I was in the middle of a dream sequence or I was just wishing out loud or something, I might have said those words, but not be deliberately stating what I know to be false. When a person lies, the person self consciously deliberately tries to mislead the person he's talking to. Man, Till is not saying that. Unbelievers, when they say they don't believe in God are just saying, I know I wasn't the most valuable player in the Lakers, and then saying it. He does not think they are self consciously deliberately trying to mislead you. Because I like to think, oh, I know I really believe in God, but I'm going to hide it from everybody. Oh, I don't believe in God. That's what they say when you get into the conversation. He is not claiming that and I'm glad he's not, because that's just not True unbelievers do not. Some might. But it's not categorically or universally true that unbelievers self consciously say to themselves, I believe in the Christian God. And then they say to Christians, I don't believe in your God. It's not that the unbeliever knows God and self consciously acknowledges that knowledge and then denies it verbally. Van Til did not take that artificial and simplistic route. Van Til on the one hand portrayed the unbeliever as holding this knowledge of God, and I quote him subconsciously. Elsewhere he says that unbelievers borrow Christian ideas without recognizing it. Elsewhere Van Til says the unbeliever knows deep down in his heart or elsewhere deep down in his mind. Van Till speaks of the knowledge of God being beneath the threshold of his working consciousness. And yet, on the other hand, Van Til wants to contend unequivocally for the sinful guilt of men who suppress the knowledge of God. In that sense, they need to be conscious of what they're doing, right? They're not guilty of doing things that you're not even aware you're doing. So Bantio writes, he knows he is a liar all the time. And accordingly, for Van Till, this denial of the truth in some sense is a self conscious act. But then Van Till immediately feels the need to place a qualification on the claim. When I said Van Till says he knows he is a liar. If you read it in the book, the word liar is in quotes. You know what that is? What we call scare quotes. It's like he knows he is a liar, but we're quoting. There's some sense in which that word's being used, but not in the ordinary sense, in which case you wouldn't have to have quotes around it. Mantilla wants to say with some measure of reservation that men are lying. Elsewhere he explained that the unbeliever's hostility is not wholly self conscious. And so to the qualitative distinction that we've seen him drawing between knowledge, true knowledge, and to the spatial distinction, knowing, knowing deep down. Van Til now adds a quantitative distinction. Wholly self conscious, partially self conscious, as the way to talk about the two kinds of knowledge, I quote him 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, they are ignorant. There is therefore a gradation of those who sin more and those who sin less self consciously. One way or another, Van Till teaches that the natural man is ethically responsible for suppressing the truth. He says the Scriptures continue to hold man responsible for his blindness. He calls it culpable ignorance. The reason for his failure, according to Van Till, lies exclusively in himself. Van Till says it's nothing less than willful transgression. And so Van Till has indicated how awkward it is to speak of self deception. On the one hand, the unregenerate's knowledge is considered subconscious, and he does not recognize he is utilizing it. Yet on the other hand, the unregenerative is portrayed as actively seeking to suppress it and in some measure, consciously, willfully working to hide it from himself. And so Van Till ends up running his reader from pole to poll. On the one hand, he does not want to say the unbeliever's a bear liar. And yet, on the other hand, he does want to say the unbeliever's fully culpable, just like any liar would be. So, given this short rehearsal of how Van Till deals with this theoretical problem, that he proves too much, I want to suggest, though he has taken the right move, I agree with him, nevertheless, when he says, oh, I can explain why on my system unbelievers know things because they really do know God. I mean, Paul says that. But then Van Till says, this is a very difficult notion. And as I've traced out through his various writings, Van Til had trouble speaking. He didn't really know how to portray this, to give an intelligible account of it. Please turn the cassette over at this time. And it's not as though I think I'm the Lone Ranger coming to the rescue here. But that is why, when I went to graduate school in philosophy, I said, that's the issue I've got to write on. That's the thing on which everything hinges. Van Till says, and so I did my dissertation on self deception. Can we make sense, philosophical sense, out of the notion of self deception? In 1960, an article by Raphael Demas entitled Lying to Oneself appeared in the journals. And that kicked off, by the way, a long and now very complicated debate over this very notion of self deception among philosophers. Nothing to do with apologetics or Christianity or Van Till, but philosophy from the 60s on was getting into this whole issue in epistemology and psychology. Can someone deceive himself I come along about this time reading Van Til, saying that's the crux issue. It just seemed obvious that I should take up this philosophical issue that's so brand new and try to apply it to Van Till. And that's why I'm inviting you all back for 10 hours tomorrow so I can read my dissertation to you. No, I know I can't do that. I do recognize tongue in cheek and with a little bit of humor, how people think their dissertation has got to be the most important thing that's ever been done. But with humility, I do think it's crucial that this issue be addressed. And I'd like to tell you how I resolved it. And then we'll have to go on to a second theoretical problem with presuppositionalism. So let me give you just a brief presuppositionalist attempt to account for what Van Till is saying here and to advance the cause of what he was teaching. Since Van Till himself was in some perplexity about it, and yet he found it crucial to speak of it. Self deception now needs some kind of explication. If we're going to escape the proves too much criticism. We now need to make sense out of self deception. And here's the analysis that I'm going to offer you. You have to remember you have over 150 pages of discussion back and forth, various views, you know, advances, setbacks and so forth. And you're not hearing any of that. I'm jumping to the end of the story. So it may take a little while for it to set in for you. But the bottom line, I think, is that self deception can be analyzed without contradiction. That is, you can account for somebody believing something but not believing it in the following way. In any situation where we have self deception, the following things are taking place. S believes P. Where S is the subject, we'll call him Sam. And he believes any premise P. In our case, as presuppositionalists, we're going to say the unbeliever believes God exists, the Christian God. The hole's shooting at you. S believes P. But secondly, S is motivated to ignore, hide, deny his belief that P. So S is motivated to deny his belief that P. If you're logicians or if you've studied philosophy, you notice that I've done something here. I've made a change. That's subtle, by the way. It's just because of that subtlety that we see self deception take place. I didn't say S is motivated to deny P. He is. But the way in which he does that is he's motivated to deny his believing that P. So S believes P, but he's motivated to deny his believing it. And by misconstruing the evidence, S brings himself to believe falsely. By misconstruing the evidence, S brings himself. To believe falsely that. And I don't want to give it to you just yet because you're going to get tied up in it. Let's just see if we understand what I've said so far by misconstruing the evidence. Briefly, in this class, I've told you, and at length in the dissertation, I talk about how we exercise some control over what we pay attention to. And when we don't want to be confronted with something, we have the amazing ability. This is part of our limitation and sin. We have the ability to not pay attention to things that we should be paying attention to. We have the ability to distort and to see things incorrectly. If you have any doubt about that, just watch the O.J. simpson hearings for a while. Somebody's doing a great deal of distortion. Now. You may say, yeah, but there they're doing it self consciously and maliciously and so forth. The point is, we have that human ability. If I don't want to think about something that's unsettling to me, I tend to make sure the channel never gets close to that. And then when I look at things, I can look at it in a kind of perverted way, kind of look at it askance so that I can twist it a bit. We have the ability to misconstrue evidence. Now by misconstruing the way the evidence appears, you can bring yourself to believe something. If I worked real hard at it, this is not a good illustration because it's one of the tough ones to do. But if I work real hard, I might be able to construe myself as believing that it's raining outside. You know, I'd have to do a lot of accounting for, you know, the glare of the sun and so forth. But the point is, if you want to, you can work hard at it and misconstrue everything that's there so that you don't have to believe what most people would just automatically believe. You can bring yourself to believe things. You know, a man who has been violated by his wife, a wife who's been unfaithful and yet he still loves her, can misconstrue the evidence and say, well, in some way I need to be loyal to her. It happens. That's just part of human psychology. We can bring ourselves to believe things that other people would say. How could you possibly believe that? By misconstruing the evidence, S brings himself to believe something. Now I've already told you, not all beliefs are true, are they? Some beliefs are false. So in my analysis I'm specifying in advance that what S brings himself to believe is a false belief. This is not true, but he nevertheless brings himself to believe it. And what is it that he brings himself to believe this proposition? S does not believe that P. By misconstruing the evidence, S brings himself to believe, though it's false, that S does not believe P. Notice very importantly that up here there's three steps in this analysis. In step number one, we're talking about S believes P. Here S has a belief about what? Well, whatever the subject is, it's about P. In step three, we are not talking about S having a belief regarding P. We're talking about S having a belief about what about S. Namely that S does not believe P. And this is the distinction. This is what gives the distance between the two things that accounts for that tension and self deception. At least this is what I've been arguing, that S does have a primary belief about some subject matter. I'm going to give you a mundane illustration in a second here so you can see how it works. In our case, S does believe that God exists, but he misconstrues the evidence so that he doesn't have to have that conception of himself. He comes to believe something about himself. Namely he says I don't believe in God, so he believes in God. But he also believes about himself that he doesn't believe in God in order to preserve something about his own self conception. S engages in motivated rationalization of the evidence so that he relies in his theoretical and practical inferences on the proposition that he is not relying, he is not relying in his theoretical and practical inferences on P. He's morally culpable for this lie about himself because he engages in it intentionally. And yet he may not be aware of that intention because it's become habitual. Or being self covering has become something he no longer thinks about, like falling asleep. That is, he not only lies to himself about his belief, he lies to himself about his lying to himself. Now can there be an intention that is self covering? In the dissertation, I argue, if we think about it, we all know what it is to have an intention that's self covering. Because we all, we don't always intend. But when we do successfully intend to fall asleep. That intention becomes self covering. That as we no longer are thinking about the intentions because if we continue to think about it, we'll keep ourselves awake. Right? Maybe you all have that experience of lying in bed saying I've just got to go to sleep. I just got to go to sleep. Well, as long as you are intending that hard to go to sleep, guess what? You keep yourself awake. Is that to say that when you fall asleep it's unintentional? No, we intend to go to sleep, but that intention must become self covering. We also intend to be asleep about our intending to go to sleep. S obscures his dreaded belief that P as well as his intention to obscure it by rationalizing the evidence. His self deception involves deception of the self by the self, about the self and for the sake of the self. You may want to write that sentence down and reflect on it. Self deception involves deception of the self by the self, about the self for the sake of the self. One more time. Self deception involves deception of the self by the self. That's why it's self deception. I'm lying to myself, but it's always a deception about the self, not just about anything out there. It's about me and it's motivated for the self. I'm preserving something in my self conception. The unbeliever doesn't want to think of himself as what subject to a sovereign God. He wants to think of himself as autonomous. For the sake of that self conception, he deceives himself about himself. Let me give you an example of this from ordinary life. Let's say that the principal calls Mrs. Jones to tell her that her Johnny, her son Johnny, her pride and joy, her only child, her son Johnny, has been caught stealing money out of the desk of other students. The evidence is plain that Johnny is a thief. And this is the third time that she's received such calls from the school. Mrs. Jones has also noticed that money is missing out of her purse at home. She notices that Johnny's been coming home with expensive items from the store. Mrs. Jones therefore shows all the effective symptoms of believing the proposition that Johnny is a thief. She tries to avoid situations where she is likely to be reminded of that dishonesty. She moves to a new neighborhood, transferring Johnny into a new school and refusing to put a phone in her new home. That way the principal can't call her and remind her what's going on. She keeps an unusually attentive eye on her boy, but will not admit that she's doing it. People say, aren't you being overprotective about Johnny? I'm not paying attention to her. Yet. On the other hand, since nobody in the Jones family has ever stooped to dishonesty and Johnny has her one reason left for living in this cold and cruel world, she persuades herself that Johnny could not have done the dishonest deeds reported by the principal. And so she forgets the past evidence and now supplies more credible explanations of the present evidence. If money's missing from her purse. She's such a careless and forgetful person. She goes out of her way to express confidence in her son to others. Indeed makes a show of giving him mature responsibilities and tries to do only what one who believed in Johnny's virtue would do. She avers that she has a fine boy who's a joy to her, a regular paragon of virtue. Nevertheless, she flies off the handle at him over trifling matters in a way unlike the way she used to relate to him before the principal would call with these ugly reports. She astonishes and embarrasses others by seizing on every oblique innuendo to defend Johnny's honesty. When neighbors get curious over her missing cash and Johnny's new acquisitions, Mrs. Jones Fidgets. She blushes, she looks away. She answers in halting fashion. She changes the subject. She treats the evidence broached in an unusual and distorted way. She always got the strangest explanation for the evidence, all the while apparently satisfying herself with that her interpretations are quite plausible. Now, in that situation, I want to suggest that we find it very natural to express the view that Mrs. Jones is self deceived. The effective symptoms justify attributing to her two types of belief. One, that Johnny is a thief. Mrs. Jones believes that Johnny is a thief. Because she cannot stand that thought with its attendant psychic discomfort. She's motivated to hide this information from herself and direct her attention to the evidence in very odd ways. So she dissents from believing her son is dishonest. She claims the school officials had a vendetta against Johnny. We're framing the poor boy. She leans on implausible interpretations of facts, ignores the best and most obvious indicators. Brings herself to believe. Brings herself by such misconstrual to believe that she does not believe that Johnny is dishonest. The symptoms of this false. The symptoms of this false second order belief. A belief about her beliefs. The symptoms of this false second order belief are nearly identical. This is crucial. Are nearly identical with believing that it's not the case that Johnny is a thief. That is the outward signs that she believes Johnny is not a thief would be virtually identical with the outward signs of believing that she does not believe that Johnny is a thief. She conceives of herself as trusting this untrustworthy son, and while guarding herself against his untrustworthiness, she enthusiastically affirms her belief in him to others. She meets all the criteria of self deception. And so it turns out that we've been able to describe in a mundane case self deception without engaging in self contradiction. And I believe I won't read the rest of this, but I believe that this account not only covers the mundane cases, it will also fit in very well to the very significant religious case that's on our mind. What Paul is telling us and the Bible is telling us is that everyone believes God. Sam believes God, that God exists, knows who this God is, cannot escape it. Everyone does. Nevertheless, because of sin, everyone is motivated to deny that he believes in God. Of course, the easiest way is not just to say, I deny that I believe in God, but we just deny God. But nevertheless, the denial is about my view of myself. I am not a God believer. I misconstrue the evidence, or the unbeliever misconstrues the evidence to bring himself. You know, he has all these strange ways of looking at the world. Read the philosophers. You know, you say, how could you miss it so badly? When you get done with Plato, you say, how could you possibly think that the soul came into the body as a prison house? How could you believe that there's a realm beyond time and space of forms, and that the soul was in that realm? I mean, it's just you have to really work hard to get to these philosophical views, don't you? But it's not just the philosophers. They're sophisticated. And sadly, many people bow down and say, boy, that's really smart. They're not like the little boy who says, you know, the king doesn't have any clothes on, he's naked. That's what most people ought to say about the Schopenhauers and Wittgensteinsteins of this world. They ought to say, they're naked. But we all go, oh, wow, what a. Anyway, the philosophers have this problem, but the man in the street has this problem too. Your next door neighbor has this problem too. He misconstrues the evidence. He watches the evening TV and he sees there's war in this world. And after all, he's angry at God anyway. So he goes, no, well, there can't be a God, because look at that, there's War in this world, they misconstrue the evidence. When I was in college, I guess this still happens today. There were people who lived with each other out of wedlock. Is that still going on? And when I would witness to them, I would point out that, you know, this is one of the reasons why they need, you know, God's forgiveness because they're sinning against God. And they would come back and say, no, it's different strokes for different folks. I say, oh, and what were you all doing last Saturday when you weren't in bed together? Well, we were out there at the bank burning it down, protesting the war in Vietnam. Why were you protesting the war in Vietnam? Because it's absolutely wrong for us to be doing that sort of thing. Richard Nixon is not. Isn't it obvious to you that you're misconstruing the evidence somehow? Different strokes for different folks. But not for Richard Nixon. Not when it comes to war, only when it comes to going to bed. By misconstruing the evidence, S brings himself to believe it's false, but he brings himself to believe that he doesn't believe in God. Oh no, I'm not a Christian. Oh no, I'm not a believer in God. I'm not a religious person. And so I think we can make sense out of self deception. In fact, at the end of my dissertation, knowing that some people may want to say, this is just too difficult, too complex. Let's just chuck the whole thing. I said, maybe somebody can improve on it. I didn't mean that mine had to be the analysis. But you know, if you don't accept this analysis or something as good as this, the only option is to deceive yourself about our ability to deceive ourselves. Right? There are some people who don't want that view of human nature. I've actually had some people say, oh, oh, I don't think people do that sort of thing. Give me a break. Look around. Have you not met the Mrs. Jones of this world who protect their guilty children with the far out rationalizations and so forth? Self deception is something we're so familiar with, we should be suspicious of people who reject it. So I don't think we should fault presuppositionalism at step number one. It doesn't prove too much, provided you understand that according to the presuppositionalists, men profess not to believe in God in the Christian worldview in their heart of hearts, they nevertheless have deceived themselves. Well, they deceived themselves in that profession. But in their heart of hearts, they really do believe in God. And it's only because of that suppressed belief that they're able to make sense out of the world and get along well to any degree at all. After we take our lunch break, we'll come back and look at the second theoretical problem with presuppositionalism. And that's that it doesn't prove enough. Thanks. 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