Why Introspection is Depressing, and Not Liberating

There are a cazillion ways of describing abnormal, self-punishing, and unintentional moods, mental states, and cognitive impairments. “Depression.” “ADD.” “…mental syndrome.” “Anxiety.” “Genetic fault.” “Chemical imbalance.” “Spiritual warfare.” “Moods.” I don’t think a single human being escapes living on this earth without experiencing one of these at one time or another.
Apologetics, ministry, and evangelism must come from a passionate heart that is in love with God. That includes the whole person. We serve God with the whole person, every aspect (not just part); heart, mind, body, spirit, soul etc. And if that person is down and out, or there is an aspect that is lacking functionality and clarity, he can’t do ministry as he ought. That’s the first reason why this topic is relevant.

The second reason this is important is that introspection has been held up by conservative Christians as the very foundation for the entire Christian worldview itself. If you think I’m high on something, hold on to your pants…

Introspection: Look Deep Within Yourself…?

Eastern worldviews and the general mindset of Western self-help society are telling us that introspection is the answer to everything. If it isn’t the self-help reductionism of “biology determines your thoughts” then its the reverse conclusion of “thoughts determine biology, your life, your healthy, your everything.” Look within yourself, we’re told, and you’ll find truth, answers, peace. If you can think about your thoughts with enough patience, then you’ll see the light and your problems will dissolve in the inevitable ebb and flow of life. If you got yourself into this mess, then you can get yourself out.

Well, let me tell you something. Every time I try and  look within myself I get depressed. I find nothing satisfying, but everything gnawing away in complete absence from my core convictions, which are somehow vexed by the gears of my mind, stuck in circle-driving mode with no apparent direction and certainly no clear goal, literally, in mind. Every time I try to find answers and fix things things from the inside out, I don’t find direction, I get lost. I don’t see light, I see darkness. I don’t feel secure, I feel scared.

Of course, Jesus, Paul, and every writing in the New Testament warns us about this. “For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God.” (I Tim. 4:10)  “we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (II Col 4:18) “Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. (Php 2:4)

The point is, we should be looking outside of ourselves, towards the cross of Jesus Christ. Because the heart of man is “deceitfully wicked,” but the heart of Christ is pure and perfect. Makes a lot of sense right?

It seems incredibly strange, then, that some of the greatest Christian apologists and philosophers of the past century, indeed, of the past 1500 years of church history, have found introspection and the provisions of human consciousness to be the sufficient and necessary precondition for all knowledge, and ultimately, the entire basis of the Christian belief system. That is, non-presuppositional Christians are bound to begin within themselves since they do not begin with the Trinune God and the Lordship of Christ. This is disastrous on both an intellectual and a personal level.

Epistemology in Christian Thought

Take RC Sproul for example. Sproul is one of the greatest theologians of the century. Conservative. Reformed. Respected. And yet, when it comes to the foundations of the Christian worldview, it’s the human intellect and introspection in the spotlight:

The authors [Sproul]…affirm the primacy of the mind.[1]

Apologetics cannot begin with the inspired Bible or even with a divine Christ…[2]

If there is no primacy of the intellect there is no knowledge at all.[3]

We must begin with ourselves…autonomously.[4]

These quotes from Sproul and the Ligonier school shouldn’t be very surprising, because if the reason we believe in Christianity is because of evidence and arguments from nature and logic, and the only way those arguments can be reliable is if human reasoning and self-consciousness is affirmed to the highest degree, then of course conscious introspection is going to take place before a conscious admission to our theology. Apologetics gives room for theology, not the other way around (we’re told). So in the evidentialist, classical apologetics school, the human mind is the immediate/proximate and therefore ultimate starting point in all things human beings can assert about. It has the greatest level of validation:

The proximate is the ultimate starting point as long as we remain human creatures, which happens to be forever. (p. 317)

A philosopher from California said something remarkably similar in the book The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (2010):

e.g., I feel tired, it seems to me that there is a computer in front of me, I am thinking now. It is generally held that these sorts of beliefs have fairly strong epistemic credentials, perhaps the strongest sort human beliefs can have. Different reasons have been proposed for supposing why this is the case, most of which involve different accounts of how introspective beliefs involve particular entailments between the conditions of knowledge. One might suppose, for example, that introspective beliefs can’t be true without our believing them and we can’t believe them without their being true.

So the truth condition entails the belief condition, and conversely. One might further suppose that in this case introspective beliefs enjoy the best sort of epistemic credentials possible.

Descartes would be proud, because he essentially said the same thing in his famous line “I think therefore I am.” You can’t deny human consciousness, therefore, it’s the immediate and ultimate foundation for all knowledge, and therefore intellectual progress. Belief in God comes later. Theology is last. Sudduth goes on:

It is thus hard to see how theistic beliefs can be warranted to the same degree as beliefs about our current states of consciousness.

In other words, “it’s hard to say we have as many reasons (or as good as reason) to believe in God as we do believing in our current mental states.” The certainty of ourselves is therefore higher than the degree of certainty we have in, say, the existence of the Triune God.

The problem with Sudduth’s argument – as well as most analytic arguments for natural theology and evidentialism – is that it completely ignores the fact that there are preconditions for human consciousness. In fact, there are more preconditions for human knowledge than human consciousness (i.e. human knowledge is just as doomed if the laws of logic didn’t exist as if human consciousness didn’t exist). Why isn’t this taken into account? Well, cause the formal argument would get far too complex to even assemble, and analytic philosophy is all about the formal argument.

The argument from classical apologists is this: since I am immediately, proximately, and most consciously typing on a keyboard, I have more certainty in my belief that I’m typing on a keyboard than in the belief in a keyboard maker. Since a light is shining in my eyes from afar, I have more justification for believing there’s a light shining in my eyes than I do for believing there’s a car out there shining the light. Since I hear the news in my ears, I have more epistemological warrant for believing I have ears than I do for believing the TV is turned on downstairs.

All of this, is of course, false. You can have no more certainty in your own consciousness of certain mediate phenomena than you can of the non-immediate origin of those same phenomena.Why? Because you won’t have those immediate experiences without the prior existence of the source of those experiences. If you can be certain you’re hearing something from your senses, then you can be certain that that something exists.

The empiricist would be quick to point out “ahh, but you don’t have as much sensory justification for believing in the preconditions of the experience as the actual experience.” And of course, that’s true. I can feel, taste, touch, and smell my hands on the keyboard and the keyboard in front of me, and not the keyboard maker. But does that invalidate the degree of certainty in the Maker? Only if you have an axe to grind as an empiricist. But, do our empiricist presuppositions dominate over our biblical theology? Or do we embrace a true worldview and method that begins and not ends with self, but with consciousness of Christ and His Lordship?

Conclusion

A Real Apologetic methodology doesn’t look to the human mind to provide the necessary framework for knowledge. It looks towards the Creator of the universe.

To be sure, we begin our human experience with awareness of ourselves as temporal beings. Yet if we think self-consciously we should see that our awareness of ourselves as temporal beings presupposes God’s awareness of himself as an eternal being.[1]

“The notion of the human consciousness set forth in the works of Thomas Aquinas is worked out, to a great extend, by the form-matter scheme of Aristotle. In consequence a large measure of autonomy is assigned to the human consciousness as over against the consciousness of God. This is true in the field of knowledge, and it is not less true in the field of ethics.” Ibid., The Defense of the Faith, p. 78.

1] Ibid., Classical Apologetics, p. ix.

[2] Ibid., p. 149.

[3] Ibid., Classical Apologetics, p. 230.

[4] Ibid., Classical Apologetics, p. 231.