Christian Psychology
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axiom had it,
Intellectus in actu fit intellectum in actu:
In the moment of actual understanding, the intel-
lect becomes the understood (Thomas Aquinas, 1961
version, 1a, q. 55, a. 1, ad 2 and q. 87, a. 1, ad 3. See
also 1a, q. 14, a. 2, c and q. 85, a. 2, ad 1; Helminiak,
1996a, pp. 62-65; Lonergan, 1967). That is, humans
know by intellectual identity with the known, not by
perceptual confrontation with it. In the Aristotelian
and Thomist categories, humans know when the “form”
(essence, intelligibility) of the understood “informs” the
intellect. Then the intelligibility of the understood and
the intelligibility grasped in the intellect is one and the
same. If not, the thing has not been understood. This
identity in the known and the knower is what it means
to know something. The understanding in the subject
is none other than the understanding that pertains to
the understood. Herein is an explication of that elusive
“hermeneutic non-dualism” (Reber & Slife, this issue,
p. 11.1), and thus far, hermeneutical theory accurately
portrays the human knowing process.
However, at this point the hermeneutical analysis
stops. Yet human knowing entails another step be-
yond the intelligent generation of meaning. For valid
knowing, the reasonableness of a human judgment is
still required. It assesses the generated meaning against
the initial “intellect-priming” data: Does the proposed
interpretation do justice to the evidence? To answer this
question—namely, with a judgment, a necessarily reflec-
tive act—a distinction between the knowing subject
and the known object must now apply: “I know that is
a maple.” If, as Reber and Slife present the matter, the
“dualism of subjectivity and objectivity is not assumed
in the first place” and this “first place” is the end of the
story, then, ludicrously, I am the tree. This oversim-
plification, to ignore the role of judgment, debilitates
Reber and Slife’s rendition of knowing—consistent with
equally oversimplified hermeneutical theory, still bogged
down in the idealism inherited from Emmanuel Kant
(Cahoone, 2010; Lonergan, 1957/1992, pp. 364-366),
which cannot account for the knowledge of things in
themselves, but only for our sensate and perceptual
experience of things and the personal meaning we make
of it. Thus, Reber and Slife’s “integration” of theism and
science is a web of ungrounded speculation; it’s all ideas.
The question of correctness, validity, truth—reality
plays no part in it.
The Telltale Need for a New Term
Ongoing terminological ambiguity debilitates Reber
and Slife’s presentation. The ambiguity takes subjectiv-
ity in the two senses already differentiated: subjective as
human and subjective as skewed or erroneous. Implic-
itly acknowledging the ambiguity, blatantly disruptive
at this point in Reber and Slife’s presentation, for the
first time they introduce a new term
subjectivism
(in the
quotation still under analysis, in its prior paragraph,
and later on p. 17.1). It is needed to specify “bias” and
“prejudice” as error and, thus, to clarify the ambiguity.
Nonetheless, the ambiguity persists, as is obvious in
that quotation and its context where
subjectivism
and
subjectivity
still bleed into each other.
My point? Without an adequate cognitional
theory, the hermeneutical view only seems to solve
Reber and Slife’s problem of conflict between science
and religion because, concerned only with everyday or
“commonsense” (Lonergan, 1957/1992, pp. 196-204)
experience, not with the rigorous pursuit of correct
understanding that constitutes science, hermeneutical
theory leaves untouched the question of truth, of com-
prehensive science, of one coherent view. Hermeneuti-
cal theory deals only with the personal process by which
you, I, and the other make whatever meaning—per-
sonal importance—we can of our being in the world.
Appeal to hermeneutical theory solves the problem by
dodging it. This theory never considers the accuracy of
differing worldviews and, thus, leaves human cognition,
religion, and science in postmodern agnosticism.
Science as Ungrounded Ideas
The same conclusion follows from Reber and Slife’s
“broadened” definition of science: “the systematic
investigation of ideas” (p. 17.1). Whereas science is the
pursuit of reasonable explanation grounded in relevant
evidence, evidence does not feature in their under-
standing of science. Their broadened definition vitiates
science. They eliminate the breakthrough that produced
the scientific revolution—the need for appeal to evi-
dence. Their science is all ideas, the idealism of modern
and bankrupt postmodern philosophy (Cahoone,
2010), an untethered swirl of creative speculation for
which anything “interesting”—or “revealed”?—goes.
My sense is that this amorphous outcome is
congenial to the theistic psychologists. As long as an
imagined canopy of meaningfulness can cover multiple
worldviews and even contradictions seem not to matter
(because “objective” and “subjective,” in whatever mean-
ing, are irrelevant), they achieve the goal of making
religious claims invulnerable to any criticism whatso-
ever. Indeed, they explicitly claim such invulnerability
via an
a priori
insistence on immunity to criticism for
any revealed beliefs (Reber, 2006a; Richards & Bergin,
2005, pp. 112; Slife & Richards, 2001, p. 195). They
attempt to justify this insistence—“Certain theologi-
cal issues are closed because they are the foundation of
other beliefs” (pp. 194-195)—via a persistent misap-
plication of Gödel’s theorem to first principles, already
flagged twice (Helminiak, 2001, pp. 243-244; 2010, p.
54). But psychotics inhabit their idiosyncratic worlds
of meaning, coherent to their personal satisfaction, and
we recognize such cases as mental disorder. In a real but
less blatant case, the hermeneutic emphasis on mean-
ing does not yet, either, touch the question of truth
and reality apart from their relativist specification in
personal living in disparate cultural enclaves. We all live
