Christian Psychology
28
erate to relativism because the hermeneutic
tradition has in some way dispensed with the
problem of relativism.
5. Conclusion: Since naturalism is not supe-
rior or more objective, an explicitly theistic
approach to psychology is as warranted as a
naturalistic approach.
I will be reacting to this understanding of the
argument advanced by Reber and Slife (this issue).
Of course, if this is not a fair assessment of their basic
argument at any germane point, I trust that they will
point that out in due course. Let me start by stating that
I largely agree with premise 1. While there have been
famous exceptions to psychology’s default commit-
ment to naturalism, I do believe it has been the primary
worldview currency of the discipline.
The claim that naturalism should not be privileged
in psychology
I find premise number two to be largely correct. Most
psychologists probably believe, along with the self-
described brights of the new atheists, that science is
an inherently superior knowing approach to religion
and, to the extent it is a science, psychology is as well.
Yet it does not follow from this bias that psychological
science presupposes
bias free
or even neutral objective
knowledge while characterizing religion as a domain of
mere
subjective belief
. This appears to be to claiming too
much despite the supportive examples in Helminiak’s
work cited by the authors.
The unavoidability of bias in psychological research
has been a clear emphasis in psychology’s own self-
understanding, particularly in its research methodology
literature, for decades. From Hawthorne, Pygmalion,
and Halo effects to standard history and systems texts
that bemoan the male Euro-centrism of much of con-
temporary psychology’s first century when
Even the Rats
Were White,
psychologists have admitted the prevailing
influence of biases and perspectives from many sources
(Gillepsie, 1991; Guthrie, 2003; Rosenthal & Jacobson,
1968). This was in large measure why my methodology
professor in my doctoral program was drawn to evolu-
tionary epistemology. It presented a picture of science
that was fully cognizant of bias and many other non-
rational factors that impact the beliefs and scientific
activities of psychologists but that he thought still left
room for truth and progress.
Despite admitting the role played by these non-
cognitive factors in scientific belief formation, it does
not follow that objectivity as a regulative ideal, even if
an unattainable one, should be abandoned or that just
any approach to human belief has an equally appropri-
ate claim on a scientific discipline. Reber and Slife’s
case may be stronger here if they did not characterize
psychology as having a self-understanding reflecting
almost exclusively the naïve objectivism of scientism.
Scientific disciplines can have plausible rationales for
employing demarcation principles even while admitting
the unavoidability of bias. The
context of justification
is
more demanding than the context of discovery in the
sciences, retaining as proper elements for discipline a
more delimited range than those considered during
discovery: namely, those that survive the discipline’s
justification processes (Reichenbach, 1938).
Reber and Slife (this issue) appear to share an
understanding of objectivity, subjectivity and relativism
with Richard Bernstein’s (1983) hermeneutic tradition.
Bernstein’s influential text, combining aspects of Anglo-
American analytic, neo-pragmatism, and Continental
philosophy, argued that the hermeneutic tradition
allows us to transcend the false subject-object dichoto-
mies of Cartesian modernism. Bernstein exhibits the
common post-modern motif of characterizing Descartes
as a font of all sorts of modernist philosophical sins. He
offers us a Heidegger/Gadamer/Rorty inspired alterna-
tive to Cartesian foibles: meanings are inescapable and
all attempts to understand the world are inherently
interpretative. Subject/object dichotomies are illusory
by products of an objectifying view of being that is false.
Since there is no valid way to separate the realm of the
subjective from the objective, with all
facticity
arising
because of our historical situatedness within pre-existing
horizons, then any claim to arbitrate between differ-
ent interpretations of the world based on an appeal to
facts
becomes a kind of imperialistic imposition of one
horizon upon another. Given such a frame to human
understanding, naturalistic science has no legitimate
basis to claim a hegemony in knowledge and therefore
other interpretative paradigms cannot be excluded from
dialogue by any knowing community carte blanche.
One might naturally be concerned that such a dis-
missal of objective knowledge as the regulative ideal for
human understanding would leave us with nothing but
competing narrations about the world, adrift in a post-
modern relativistic sea. However, Bernstein’s (1983)
thesis was that objectivity, subjectivism, and relativism
are all artefacts of the Cartesian dichotomization of the
objective and the subjective and once this dichotomy
is transcended these distinctions become irrelevant. We
are to stop worrying about relativism not such much
because the hermeneutic tradition has proven it false,
but because we have gone through a kind of philosophi-
cal therapy that helps us no longer be concerned about
it. We need not worry about the objective truth of our
claims about the world, psychological or otherwise,
because we such truth is fictional by-product of a passé
view. Instead, we are to pursue expanded horizons that
create new interpretative possibilities that have practical
values or our being in the world.
Reber and Slife devote considerable time to ap-
plying this Bernstein motif to the objectivist claim that
naturalism is the appropriate worldview for psychology
and that theism is improper because of its subjectiv-
ity. As the author’s claim, “A hermeneutic non-dualism
