Christian Psychology
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and those meanings of the phenomenon or event being
studied (cf. Warnke, 1994). Consider prayer from
this hermeneutic perspective. Prayer is a meaningful
activity, implying there are many and varied meanings
that constitute prayer, which stem from a long and rich
tradition of prayer across many faiths and from the
current practice of prayer by many people. The many
and varied meanings that constitute prayer (e.g., prayer
as petition, prayer as praise, prayer as thanksgiving;
Foster, 1992) constitute a horizon of meaning, just as
do the many meanings that constitute naturalism (e.g.,
lawfulness, empiricism, measurement) and the many
meanings that constitute theism (e.g., God’s care and
concern for the world, God’s sustaining activity in the
world, God’s mercy).
The integration of naturalistic meanings with
meanings of prayer constitutes an interpretation of
prayer that illuminates some meanings like frequency of
prayer, changes in cognition and attitude that accom-
pany prayer, and the effects of prayer on behavior (e.g.,
Fincham, Lambert & Beach, 2010). The integration of
theistic meanings with meanings of prayer constitutes a
different interpretation that discloses such meanings as
the glorification of God, direction and guidance from
the Holy Spirit, or receiving blessings from God (e.g.,
Slife & Reber, 2012). Though quite different, both
interpretations could be valid and neither interpreta-
tion is necessarily superior to the other, even in science,
because both draw from the full range of meanings that
are appropriate to prayer, even though they do so in
their particular way. On the other hand, an interpreta-
tion that prayer has a heavy mass or tastes sour would
not be appropriate to the meanings of prayer. In this
hermeneutic sense, there are valid and invalid inter-
pretations of phenomena and events. Valid interpreta-
tions illuminate or disclose particular meanings of the
phenomenon, whereas invalid interpretations do not
(Warnke, 1994).
Given this alternative framing of worldviews, it
would be inappropriate to differentiate naturalism from
theism by claiming that naturalism is devoid of unprov-
en, taken-on-faith assumptions, values, and interpreta-
tions, or that it is free of the influence of such things.
On the contrary, naturalism, like theism, is made up
of meanings “all the way down” (Held, 2007, p. 283).
Interestingly, many philosophers of science have arrived
at a very similar conclusion through their work, the
primary focus of which is “to question assumptions that
scientists take for granted” (Okasha, 2002, p. 12). The
work of such noted philosophers of science as Thomas
Kuhn, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, Michael Polanyi,
and others does not just raise “technical uncertainties
in current philosophy of science” (p. 50) as Helminiak
(2010) describes it. Their work shows that naturalism,
Leahey’s (1991) central dogma of science, is a world-
view, which is “an entire . . . outlook” that is made up
of “a constellation of shared assumptions, beliefs, and
values that unite a . . . community” (Okasha, 2002, p.
81), many of which are implicit and have been incor-
porated into the worldview over a long period of time
(Bernstein, 1983).
Outlooks, assumptions, beliefs, and values are
meanings, and meanings, by definition, cannot be
observationally studied. The printed words in a Harry
Potter book can be observed, but the meaning of the
words—the relationship among the words—cannot be
observed. Meanings can be experienced, to be sure,
but they do not fall on one’s retinas. The worldviews of
naturalism and theism, in this sense, are not observable,
nor are the assumptions that inform each worldview.
Indeed, the scientific doctrine of observability—that
only the observable is knowable—is itself unobservable.
In this sense, any presumption (e.g., Alcock, 2009) that
the first premises that inform naturalism have somehow
passed an empirical test that the first premises of theism
have failed is, in principle, deeply problematic. Both
worldviews are in the position described by Okasha
(2002), who concludes that, “since nothing can explain
itself, it follows that at least some [fundamental] laws
and principles will themselves remain unexplained” (p.
54). At the level of their first premises, naturalists and
theists are no more or less objective. They each accept
the first premise of their respective worldviews as true
without the empirical validation that would supposedly
provide evidence of greater objectivity. One might even
say that first premises are “leaps of faith.”
If there is no evidence that the premises of natural-
ism are inherently more objective than the premises
of theism or that the subjectivity/objectivity dualism
of naturalism ought to be used, however implicitly,
to frame these worldviews in the first place, then the
claims that naturalism is more objective or neutral, or
even scientific, than theism are problematic. On the
contrary, naturalism, like theism, is a particular way
of looking at the world that is guided by systems of
assumptions, values, and meanings that say at least as
much about the adherents of the worldview as they
do the objects of the world. In this sense an assump-
tion like lawfulness, a key meaning of the naturalistic
worldview, is an interpretation that combines un-
proven, taken-on-faith assumptions of the naturalistic
worldview (e.g., uniformity of nature and inductivism,
Hume, 1739/2011) with a meaning that is appropriate
to many events and phenomena of the world—regu-
larity. The law of gravity, for example, is not directly
empirically observed. It is interpretively inferred by
adherents of the naturalistic worldview who presuppose
the uniformity of nature and a deterministic universe
and apply these non-empirically derived assumptions to
the consistency with which objects can be observed to
fall at a mathematically predictable speed.
Similarly, in psychology the connection or rela-
tionship between observable behaviors (e.g., hugs and
kisses) and the unobservable phenomenon they are
REBER AND SLIFE
