Christian Psychology
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least about the kind of questions psychology was asking,
because they allowed our beliefs to be more “deter-
mined by the data” than did pre-scientific and religious
methodologies.
Such a view of psychological science admits that
confirmation bias and other truth distorting factors are
always present in human belief formation. Still because
theory survival and robustness was dependent upon
a research programs producing productive outcomes
in response to the intersubjectively observable world,
Campbell argued in Popperian fashion that science
“selects” for better pictures of the world as it progresses.
Such progress does not occur, on this view, as a straight
upward line. Evolution after all has its dead ends,
spandrels and vestigial consequences and so it is with
evolutionary epistemology.
The professor argued that religious anthropologies
had very little progress because they trafficked in ideas
and approaches that were too “underdetermined by the
data” to be sensitive to selective evolutionary pressure.
This account, while a bit more subtle than the conven-
tional view outlined by the Slife and Reber (this issue),
shares many of its features. It clearly viewed contempo-
rary psychological science as a superior way to come to
truth about what the field identifies as the psychological
than religion.
The last thing I expected as a Christian taking a
methodology seminar was such a direct engagement in
worldview apologetics. While there is much in evolu-
tionary psychology that I like, such as its deemphasis
on apriori methods as a royal demarcation principle for
science, I challenged the professors’ account along three
lines. I suggested that there was actually much more
consensus about at least some basic aspects of human
functioning in theism than His account suggested.
Yes, there were different schools but so are there in
contemporary psychology. Next I questioned whether
the famous divides in religion might be more due to
biases obscuring the abductive force of the data than
due to religious beliefs being more
underdetermined
by the data
than those in modern psychology. People
typically invest a great deal of ultimacy in their religious
convictions and would this not make it hard for them
to simply go where discrepant data takes them? Here I
was thinking about the picture in Romans 1 of some
being blinded to reality because of their spiritual cir-
cumstance.
Since what may be known about God is plain to
them, because God has made it plain to them. For
since the creation of the world God’s invisible qual-
ities—his eternal power and divine nature—have
been clearly seen, being understood from what has
been made, so that people are without excuse. For
although they knew God, they neither glorified
him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their
thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were
darkened. (Romans 1:19-21 NIV)
I also attempted to point out the problem of truth
in evolutionary epistemology along the line of thinking
now formally advanced by Plantinga in his
evolutionary
argument against naturalism
(1993, 2000; Plantinga &
Tooley, 2008). If there are selective evolutionary pres-
sures on our beliefs systems, I saw no reason for them to
be disposed towards verisimilitude because there is little
reason to suppose that veracity of beliefs and functional
advantage are linked. A naturalistic evolutionary epis-
temology could give us some confidence that we might
have increasing pragmatic advantage for our beliefs, but
I could not see how they would give us any assurance of
progressively more truthful beliefs.
I give this rather long personal digression to
indicate why I am disposed to look favorably at the any
claim that a theistic psychology should have a seat at
the table in psychology and against any claim that it is
disqualified on a priori grounds. If the Reber and Slife
thesis were merely claiming that theism can inform
psychology to the same extent that any other worldview
might be able to do so, I would have no quibble. After
all, any idea source should be valid in what Reichen-
bach (1938) has called the
context of discovery.
But that
does not seem to be all the Reber and Slife are claim-
ing. The specific case they have made rests heavily on
certain lines of late 20th century hermeneutic thought
that brings its own set of challenges for a theistic vision
of psychology as well as for influencing the existing
discipline to recognize its value.
The Reber & Slife argument
As I understand it, the argument presented in Reber
and Slife (this issue) is as follows:
1. Modern psychology privileges theoretical
perspectives and methods that are naturalistic.
2. Modern psychology argues that naturalistic
approaches and perspectives are superior and
logically distinct from perspectives such as
those found in theism in part because the
naturalistic approaches allow for bias free “ob-
jective knowledge” whereas theism does not.
3. #2 turns out to be false because
a. Naturalistic psychology does not in fact
provide superior, objective knowledge
about the world.
b. Some strands of the hermeneutic tradi-
tion have shown that the modernist
distinction between the objective and the
subjective is a false dichotomy.
c. Methodological Naturalism is either
unnecessary or is merely naturalism
simpliciter and therefore suffers the same
problems as metaphysical naturalism.
4. Allowing admission of psychologies shaped
by non-naturalistic worldviews such as theism
to the contemporary disciplinary discourse in
psychology on these grounds does not degen-
