On arguments from psychology

Something to have in mind before I begin : How to Have Spiritual Understanding | Fr Matthew the Poor (Matta El-Meskeen)

There is a sense all men have that life is teaching them something. Is this a true story? It may seem to some especially perceptive skeptics that, when Christians refer to being transformed or taught by God, they refer only to what their experience has been like living with new ideas. This skeptic I’ve invented might say, “You may want to believe that you are a Christian but this claim says nothing more than that you adhere to a particular network of mere ideas.”

But my contention is that God is more than a mere idea and there is more than a merely psychological explanation for Christian belief.

Let’s imagine for the sake of argument that we put together a completely exhaustive psychological analysis and profile for me. I’m an enneagram type 5, Myers-Briggs ENTP, and so on. We could just as easily use that data to explain why I believe that I love my wife. I might not even be able to give more satisfactory reasons for that belief on my own than this psychological profile gives me.

Does that mean that I don’t have good reasons to believe that I love my wife?

Of course not. Skepticism explains too much.

Holes in the stories of our lives are ugly and they draw our attention to corruption. So, we can choose to pick at them, fixate on them—or we can do something different altogether and search for a greater pattern in which even corruptions reveal something about God. Failing this, we live in ignorance of what makes life good, and as such, ours isn’t an invincible ignorance but a self-imposed moral blindness.

One of my struggles in belief has always been an uncommon one that I’ve been calling “the problem of idiocy”. The general idea is this, that the Bible has a category for the good and the bad—but not the stupid, who only do wrong because they’re, well, morons. Is it always more biblically (read: truthfully) accurate to say that a cruel man intentionally inflicts suffering “because he’s a sinner”? Or might we instead say that “he hurts people because he’s an idiot”?

Then what about the intellectually handicapped? Can they ever even convert to Christianity if they don’t have “beliefs” to begin with?

Yes. Belief is the fruit of salvation, not its cause. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-23 KJV). Therefore the intellectually disabled are saved the same way as everyone else though we may not see that fruit flourish in this life. We can however see that, if they’re conscious at all, they’re capable of knowledge (the way we know our parents even in the womb), assent, and trust, if even in the slightest ways.

Moreover, John Kleinig (https://youtu.be/KSOgVcfNfng) argues against an overemphasis on the intellectual side of humanity by noting that God made humanity in the image of God—without a word about Reason as what separates us from the animals. Now that I know this about what it means to be in God’s image, I’m better understanding something disastrous about much of missions work. We are tempted to assume that we are on God’s mission to restore benighted and pre-Enlightenment peoples to our image rather than ministering the word to them, the fruit of which is always surprising and mysterious when we encounter it.

I’d also argue that psychological reductionism of the sort I’m addressing here typically reduces intelligence and its opposite to amoral capacities. The commonly held belief in our secular Western thoroughly-psychologized self-understanding is that stupidity, for an example about which I’ve given a lot of thought, is the opposite of intelligence; but I believe that stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence. Instead, we should consider stupidity a consequence of immoral choices for false ideas (this is something like Bonhoeffer’s idea of stupidity). Sometimes these ideas form a network with other ideas born of selective listening or confirmation biases (i.e., choices to believe things that benefit oneself). There is no exception made for the provenance of idiocy; it must necessarily derive from the fall like every other ailment. So, no matter whether we’re referring to a smattering of people or an entire people-group, they’re all in Adam like us though they suffer different consequences.

One manifestation of stupidity is in a failure to believe the truth. In moments of temptation, it can seem that one’s mind is actually more occupied with, and he is more deeply exercised by, a fear of the temptation itself and of what it means, than he is consumed with whatever gluttonous or idolatrous desire. This is a failure to believe in God. If he believed in God, he would be wise to replace the fear of what his sinfulness means with a reverent fear of God—as experience in Christ would tell him that faith in Christ’s forgiveness erases or dispels from the Christian’s mind any other fears besides filial fear of the Savior God. So, is this technique anything more than a mental trick? Is it just an escape from rumination? Is there, in other words, a merely psychological explanation?

Another manifestation of stupidity is in having unwarranted reasons for true belief. A lot of people simply aren’t interested in the idea of God. Even if they’re religious, they seek utility elsewhere in religions. One way to get across what I mean by this is to note that, in my experience, I’ve never been able to convince someone to see God in precisely the same way as I see Him unless they have the right personality type to care about the idea of God the way a theologian might. They could be Christians—perhaps they’re church leaders—but when I ask them why they believe as they do, once we go off-script, I come to find that their reasons have nothing extraordinary about them unique to religious beliefs; they’re the same ordinary reasons that lead them to do every other ordinary thing they do in life. Some of them, for example, only go to church because they’re driven by social engagement. They mouth the words and say that they believe, but they’re not referring to belief as a deep trust in the same notions or mysteries as someone like me might go for. They don’t really mean anything. In short, ideas in themselves just don’t carry a lot of weight for such people.

Stupidity is not just blindness but active skepticism. There is a moral component, and this is not something reducible to psychology. Numbness to a rich emotional life will produce skepticism about sentimentality in toto. The emotionally-numb might skeptical that a film critic is indeed saying the same thing twice when she says that a film is both deeply meaningful and deeply moving. This is a redundancy because to be meaningful is to be moving, and vice versa. The mature can detect the difference between genuine sweetness and the saccharine; the former is evoked in fiction as well as in non-fiction, so this isn’t a matter of real or fake interactions (where only real world occasions would stir up real world emotions). The mature can manage such distinctions because emotional sensitivity is learned as part of a spiritual and moral education; the critic in our example has matured in such a way that her heart wasn’t hardened. In our emotional lives, as we discern the shallow from the deep in meaning, we are thereby able to make out a direction into which we might grow into our full maturity.

Real Christian spiritual maturity connects us to the history of a church full of other people who also grew to maturity. We are not just interpellated into ideological sets. We are born into a history freighted with endlessly meaningful lives. If we do not connect with them then we do not see God, we only see meaninglessness, and we die. Death has no dominion with those in Christ. The whole Christian religion is to be in Christ. His righteousness is ours. Sin is not an infinite fault; sin is a finite condition with an infinitely good resolution already delivered. To dwell on our sin by hyperfocusing on the holes in the plot is to give the enemy the final word on who we really are. Our shame was carried away, as well as our sin.

There is still an inescapable, gnawing thought which many people have which is that they’ve in fact never experienced God at all. This is often a suspicion that’s universalized to assert that really, if we’re honest, nobody has ever experienced God; to claim that the first Christians did so in the apostolic age is just fallacious special pleading. To that I’d say that such a view betrays an ignorance about the Christian experience of knowing God. Knowing God is a way of living in the world. It isn’t like knowing anyone else. It isn’t like an imaginary friend. This is yet one more way in which psychological reductionism fails: it fails to account for the way in which we know God. I used to think that if any theologian were honest and bold enough to tell the absolute truth about his or her belief, he or she would admit that nobody knows any better than anybody else whether God even exists. But now I disagree with that, although this kind of knowing is hard to describe. I can begin to describe this knowledge of my Christian identity by saying that I experience a deep peace and resolve when I see how choices for the good continue to shape my character into something better than what it was before.