The Basic Consequence

These are deep and dark (and gloomy) theological waters; fortunately the model need not take a stand on the questions how God’s creatures could fall into sin, and whether it is intellect or will that is primary in sin. Suffice it to say that we human beings have indeed fallen from a pristine state into sin, a condition that involves both intellect and will. It is an affective malaise, a malfunction or madness of the will. But it is also a cognitive condition, and in what follows we will inquire a bit more closely into the cognitive consequences of sin.

According to the extended A/C model, the noetic effects of sin are concentrated with respect to our knowledge of other people, of ourselves, and of God; they are less relevant (or relevant in a different way: see below, p. 218.) to our knowledge of nature and the world. Sin affects my knowledge of others in many ways. Because of hatred or distaste for some group of human beings, I may think them inferior, of less worth than I myself and my more accomplished friends. Because of hostility and resentment, I may misestimate or entirely misunderstand someone else’s attitude toward me, suspecting them of trying to do me in, when in fact there is nothing to the suggestion.254

Due to that basic and aboriginal sin pride, I may unthinkingly and almost without noticing assume that I am the center of the universe (of course if you ask me, I will deny thinking any such thing),

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vastly exaggerating the importance of what happens to me as opposed to what happens to others.

254 There are also beliefs we think no person of good will could come to hold, so that holding them is prima facie evidence of

culpability; see my “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 36. According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, certain kinds of knowledge—knowledge of how to achieve salvation or happiness—require obedience: one won’t be able to acquire this sort of knowledge without obedience. (“The Call of Discipleship,” in The Cost of Discipleship [New York: Macmillan, 1963], pp. 83ff.)

I may vastly overestimate my own attainments and accomplishments,255 _{consequently discounting}

the accomplishments of others. I may also fail to perceive my own sin or see it as less distasteful than it really is; I may fail to see myself as a creature, who, if not viewed through the lens of Christ’s sacrifice, would be worthy of divine punishment. (Thus among the ravages of sin is my very failure to note those ravages.) Our grasp of ourselves as image bearers of God himself, the First Being of the universe, can also be damaged or compromised or dimmed. For example, we may think the way to understand human characteristics and ventures such as love, humor, adventure, art, music, science, religion, and morality is solely in terms of our evolutionary origin, rather than in terms of our being image bearers of God.256 _{By failing to know God, we can come to a vastly skewed view}

of what we ourselves are, what we need, what is good for us, and how to attain it.

The most serious noetic effects of sin have to do with our knowledge of God. Were it not for sin and its effects, God’s presence and glory would be as obvious and uncontroversial to us all as the presence of other minds, physical objects, and the past. Like any cognitive process, however, the sensus divinitatis can malfunction; as a result of sin, it has indeed been damaged.257 _{Our original}

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knowledge of God and his glory is muffled and impaired; it has been replaced (by virtue of sin) by stupidity, dullness, blindness, inability to perceive God or to perceive him in his handiwork. Our knowledge of his character and his love toward us can be smothered: it can even be transformed into a resentful thought that God is to be feared and mistrusted; we may see him as indifferent or even malignant.

In the traditional taxonomy of the seven deadly sins, this is sloth. Sloth is not simple laziness, like the inclination to lie down and watch television rather than go out and get the exercise you need; it is, instead, a kind of spiritual deadness, blindness, imperceptiveness, acedia, torpor, a failure to be aware of God’s presence, love, requirements.258 _{And in addition to the general injury due to}

255 “’Tis inexpressible, and almost inconceivable, how strong a self-righteous, self-exalting disposition is naturally in man;

and what he will not do and suffer to feed and gratify it: and what lengths have been gone in a seeming self-denial in other respects . . . ; and all to do sacrifice to this Moloch of spiritual pride or self-righteousness; and that they may have something wherein to exalt themselves before God, and above their fellow creatures,” Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 241.

256 Thus Herbert Simon (“A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism,” Science 250 [December 1990], pp.

1665ff.) believes that the rational way to behave is to act or try to act in such a way as to increase one’s personal fitness, that is, to act so as to increase the probability that one’s genes will be widely disseminated in the next and subsequent generations, thus doing well in the evolutionary derby; this, he thinks, is given by our evolutionary history. But then how do we account for the behavior of people like Mother Teresa, the Scottish missionary Eric Liddel, the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century, or the Methodist missionaries of the nineteenth? Why do they devote their time and energy and indeed their entire lives to the welfare of other people, apparently not giving a fig about the fate of their genes? Two mechanisms, says Simon: “docility,” whereby they are unusually likely to believe what others tell them (1666), and “limited rationality” (1667)—to speak plainly, stupidity.

257 It is no part of the model to say that damage to the sensus divinitatis on the part of a person is due to sin on the part of the

same person. Such damage is like other disease and handicaps: due ultimately to the ravages of sin, but not necessarily sin on the part of the person with the disease. In this connection, see Jesus’ remarks (John 9:1–3) about the man blind from birth.

258 It is this sloth as blindness that C. S. Peirce finds in David Hume: “Lately, when I was suffering at every mouth through

which a man can drink suffering, I tried to beguile it by reading three books that I hadn’t read for a long time, three religious books: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The last one did one most good owing to the utter blindness of the man” (quoted in Edward T. Oakes, “Discovering the American

the condition of sin itself, there is also the possibility of special damage or disease; perhaps in some people at some times, the sensus divinitatis doesn’t work at all. Furthermore, the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis, muffled as they already are, can easily be suppressed and impeded. That can happen in various ways: for example, by deliberately or semideliberately turning one’s attention away from them. Perhaps I am tormented by guilt before God, or perhaps by my desire to live a way of which, as I see it, God disapproves; then I may be inclined (with Paul Tillich) to think of God as an impersonal abstract object (“the ground of being”) rather than as a living person who judges me. Or I may come to think of him as unconcerned with the day-to-day behavior of his creatures. Or I may come to think of him, not as a holy God who hates sin, but more like an indulgent grandparent who smiles at the childish peccadilloes of her grandchildren.

That is just one way in which sin interferes with the deliverances of the sense of divinity. Another way in which the latter can be compromised is by way of testimony (which includes not only the case where someone rushes up and breathlessly tells me that my house is on fire but also the whole course of my upbringing and acculturation by parents and peers). Perhaps I am brought up to think there is no such person as God, that belief in God is a result of superstition, belonging to the infancy of the race. Perhaps I read Don Cupitt (after ingesting hallucinogens) and come to

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regard serious believers in God as objects of pity or figures of fun. Perhaps I am brought up to think of serious theistic belief as the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity and begin to look upon the rest of believing mankind with a sort of amused condescension. For these reasons or others, I ignore the promptings of the sense of divinity, a little ashamed, no doubt, to note its stirring within my heart. Ordinarily there will be a complicated interplay between guilt and damage, between what is due to my own sin (in the primary sense) and what is due to the noetic effects of sin that are beyond my control.259

An analogy: Thomas Reid and others point out that the idea of truth, as a relation between beliefs and the world, is part of our native noetic equipment. We ordinarily take it utterly for granted that there is such a thing as truth, and we ordinarily take it for granted, with respect to any given belief we hold, that it is indeed true. But the right kind of cognitive environment can squelch and smother our notion of truth, so that some people in some circumstances wind up apparently with no concept of truth at all—or, more likely, with a way of thought that displays deep and buried conflicts. One way this can happen is by way of perverse philosophizing. Following certain postmodern thinkers, I can come to see that classical foundationalism is deeply mistaken, and then (perversely) leap lightly to the conclusion that really, there is no such thing as truth. (There is only my version, your version, and so on; where these differ, there is only an issue of power, not of truth.) It can happen in other ways as well. It is said that one of the most serious results of the long

Aristotle,” First Things [December 1993], p. 27). Insofar as sloth (so thought of) is (in part) an element of original sin, it is not something for which one is wholly responsible.

259 There are also those who are “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7), despaired of by

both St. Paul and Tertullian, like the theologian in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce who finds hell more interesting than heaven on the grounds that it offers more scope for lively and controversial theological inquiry and discussion. (In heaven there is that stultifying theological uniformity. . . .)

Communist tyranny in eastern Europe was just such a suppression of the idea of truth. The truth was officially perverted so often and so cynically (for example, the official organ of the Communist party devoted to the dissemination of this propaganda was ironically named Pravda, i.e., truth) that people came to lose the very idea of truth. They were lied to at every level in utterly shameless and blatant ways; they knew they were being lied to, knew that those who lied to them knew they were lying and that those to whom they lied knew they were being lied to, and so on; the result was that the whole idea of truth tended to evaporate. One said whatever would be of advantage; the question whether it was true no longer arose. In the same sort of way, the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis can be compromised, skewed, or even suppressed altogether.

217 B. Sin and Knowledge

The most important cognitive consequence of sin, therefore, is failure to know God. And this failure can have further cognitive consequences. At present and especially in academia, there is widespread doubt and agnosticism with respect to the very existence of God. But if we don’t know that there is such a person as God, we don’t know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other, and our world. That is because (from the point of view of the model) the most important truths about us and them is that we have been created by the Lord and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence.260 _{We don’t know what our happiness consists in, and we don’t know how}

to achieve it. We don’t know that we have been created in the image of God, and we don’t grasp the significance of such characteristically human phenomena as love, humor, adventure, science, art, music, philosophy, history, and so on.

Can we take things a step further yet? According to John Calvin, “As soon as ever we depart from Christ, there is nothing, be it ever so gross or insignificant in itself, respecting which we are not necessarily deceived.”261 _{Perhaps Calvin means only what we have already noted: one who}

doesn’t know God fails to know the most important truth about anything else. He may mean to go even further, however: perhaps he means to say that those who don’t know God suffer much wider ranging cognitive deprivation and, in fact, don’t really have any knowledge at all. (This view is at any rate attributed (rightly or wrongly) to some of his followers, for example, Cornelius van Til.) That seems a shade harsh, particularly because many who don’t believe in God seem to know a great deal more about some topics than most believers do. (Could I sensibly claim, for example, that I know more logic than, say, Willard van Orman Quine, even if I can’t do any but the simplest

260 In this connection, consider the despised creationists, who believe that the world is only ten thousand years old: they are

ignorant, pitifully ignorant about when God created the world. From the point of view of the model, this ignorance pales into utter insignificance compared with that of many of their cultured detractors, who foolishly believe that there is no God and thus (naturally enough) are ignorant of the vastly more important fact that the world was, indeed, created by God.

261 Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, tr. John King (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847);

logic exercises, on the grounds that at any rate I know something about logic and he, being an unbeliever, knows nothing at all about that subject or indeed anything else?) As it stands, this

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suggestion is desperately wide of the mark; surely many nontheists do know some things, for example, their age to the nearest year or so, to whom if anyone they are married, and which university it is that employs them. (If this weren’t so, contemporary academia would display even more confusion than it does.)

1. Sin and Skepticism

A couple of less sweeping views however have a great deal to be said for them. One who is agnostic about the existence of God may also be agnostic about his origin and his place in the universe. In this section, I shall argue that one who displays a certain kind of agnosticism with respect to his origin and place in the universe, and also grasps a certain cogent argument, will not, in fact, know anything at all; nothing he believes will have warrant sufficient for knowledge. To explore this suggestion, we may begin by considering the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Thomas Reid, Hume’s great contemporary and antagonist, took Hume to be a skeptic with respect to external objects, an enduring self, other minds, causality, the past, and so on.262 _{As Reid sees him, Hume}

thinks that there is something wrong in believing the things we ordinarily do: it isn’t as if Hume simply announces that as a matter of fact we don’t really know all we think we know about external objects, causal relations, our own selves. Perhaps that would be bad enough, but there is something much deeper.

We can see what by considering the Hume of the conclusion of Book I of the Treatise.263 _Here

he isn’t coolly announcing, as a mildly interesting fact about us, that fewer of our beliefs constitute knowledge than we ordinarily think. Instead, he finds himself in a sort of existential crisis; he simply doesn’t know what to believe. When he follows out what seem to be the promptings and leading of reason, he winds up time after time in a black coal pit, not knowing which way to turn:

Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and

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begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty. (p. 269)

Of course this is Hume in his study, sometime before he emerges for that famous game of backgammon. Nature herself, fortunately, dispels these clouds of despair: she “cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends” (p. 269).

262 Although Reid’s view has been the majority opinion with respect to Humean exegesis, there has always been a minority

opinion according to which Hume really wasn’t a skeptic at all. This striking divergence is testimony to the fact that Hume is a black enigma: a certain surface clarity masks a deep underlying murkiness that makes confident interpretation impossible.

263 Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951; first published in 1739), pp. 263ff.

Still, the enlightened person, Hume thinks, holds the consolations of Nature at arm’s length. She knows she can’t help acquiescing in the common illusion, but she maintains her skepticism of “the general maxims of the world” and adopts a certain ironic distance, a wary double-mindedness: