Christian Psychology
14
supposed to demonstrate (e.g., love) does not fall on
the retina of the psychologist conducting the research
any more than love itself does. Consequently, both the
unobservable emotion and its unobservable connection
to the observable behaviors has to be inferred (Slife,
Reber, and Lefevor, 2012), which again, logical though
the connection may seem to be, opens the door to the
subjectivity and bias that concerns adherents of the
conventional frame . None of this means that concepts
like love and gravity cannot be useful or productive
interpretations in a number of important ways. On the
contrary, gravity and other inferred natural laws (i.e.,
meanings) have played a significant role in the develop-
ment of new technologies and tools, but these products
say nothing of the objective reality of the laws them-
selves. Moreover, concepts like “useful” and “produc-
tive” are also meanings, understood in terms derived
from the same naturalistic worldview and are capable
of the same biases as the laws themselves. Ultimately,
evidence that a worldview has many adherents, has
withstood criticism for a long period of time, or has
produced impressive benefits to human beings, as in
the case of technology, is not the same thing as evi-
dence that the worldview is objective or that it is more
objective than other worldviews. Yet, these are often
the evidences offered when criticisms of the naturalistic
worldview’s claims to objectivity are made (e.g., Forrest,
2000; Schafersman, 1997).
If naturalism, like theism, is a worldview grounded
in a number of untested assumptions, human values,
and shared meanings, then what should we make of its
unilateral influence on theism? If it is not more objec-
tive or less subjective than theism, should its scientific
findings pass easily into the theistic realm without issue?
Must theists acknowledge these so-called findings and
accommodate them? The problem with the superiority
feature of the conventional view is not that natural-
ism has an influence on theism or even that it has a
greater influence on theism at any given time. From a
hermeneutic perspective, influence is inevitable among
worldviews. The problem is the unidirectionality of
the influence and the pretense of objectivity (superior-
ity) that supports it. This pretense implies that the
influence does not stem from a belief system, but rather
from some unbiased description of the world that the-
ists are compelled to acknowledge. The consequence of
this pretense is that the untested assumptions and values
of both worldviews are not being taken into account in
understanding the influence of one worldview on the
other.
If the untested assumptions of a worldview are not
taken into account, that worldview could actually be
more
prone to dogmatism than worldviews like theism
whose untested assumptions are acknowledged and well
known. One of the properties of naturalism, as we have
shown, is that it obscures its own untested presup-
positions (Alcock, 2009; Rea, 2007). Its values and
assumptions are “the way of science” or axiomatic. Rec-
ognizing this property, the well-known philosopher of
science, Sir Karl Popper (2002) anticipated naturalism’s
propensity toward dogmatism in
The Logic of Scientific
Discovery
, when he wrote:
I reject the naturalistic view: It is uncritical. Its
upholders fail to notice that whenever they believe
to have discovered a fact, they have only proposed
a convention. Hence the convention is liable to
turn into a dogma. This criticism of the naturalistic
view applies not only to its criterion of meaning,
but also to its idea of science, and consequently to
its idea of empirical method (p. 52-53).
Thus, it is the pretense of factuality or truth at the
level of research findings, method, and theory—the
naturalist’s unawareness of their a priori assumptions—
that puts the naturalistic view at risk of dogmatism.
Such a pretense does not occur in the alterna-
tive relation of worldviews we have described, because
the objectivity/subjectivity dualism that gives rise to
concepts like objective facts and neutral truths is not
assumed. There is no pretense of a superior, self-
contained worldview that informs all others. Instead,
all worldviews are interdependent, varied frameworks
of meaning that participate in different interpretations
(i.e., integration of meanings) of the phenomena stud-
ied while also mutually constituting each other.
This interdependence of meanings also implies the
interdependence of methodological and metaphysical
naturalism. Recall (above) that some scholars sharply
distinguish the two as if the methodological concep-
tion is not a conception at all. It is, by their rendering,
merely the “uncovering” of “physical facts and regulari-
ties” (Bishop, 2009, p. 108), more an objective activity
than a subjective meaning. To be fair, this distinction
is also borne of the philosophical convention that
separates epistemology and method from ontology and
metaphysic. A hermeneutic understanding, however,
does not sharply distinguish these meanings, and yes,
casts even methodological activities as meanings that are
themselves undergirded with assumptions, values, and
biases (Gadamer, 1997).
What this implies is that even method activities are
themselves borne of metaphysical assumptions. These
activities may not be the metaphysic, and thus are
somewhat distinguishable from it, but this distinction
in no way prevents the person engaging in the activities
from making important and even strong assumptions
about the world in which the method is presumed to
be successful (Slife, Reber, & Lefevor, 2012). Why else
would methodological naturalists restrict themselves
to natural events? This restriction is not arrived at
randomly or revealed to us through “common sense”
(Bishop, 2009, p. 109) because even common sense is
contextual and cultural (Slife, Starks, & Primosch, in
press). It is, instead, borne of a view of the world in
which supernatural events, and perhaps the religious
THEISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELATION OF WORLDVIEWS
