Christian Psychology
53
in meaningful worlds of some kind or other, but not all
meanings are correct, and not all personally constructed
meaningful worlds are realistic. The tensions in our
global society highlight this fact.
Argument by Appeal to Decontextualized Phrases
To bolster their argument, the theistic psychologists
appeal literally to Hans Georg Gadamer’s (1997/1960)
objection to “‘prejudice against prejudice’” (Reber
and Slife, this issue, p. 15.2)—a hyperbolic, rhetorical
phrase (see Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999,
pp. 228-230). I find that this merely “verbal scholar-
ship”—as also in the case of quotations from Plantinga
and from me—this “cherry picking” of seemingly useful
phrases is disingenuous. In the context of their argu-
ment, this quotation suffers from the same ambigu-
ity as does their own talk of “bias.” But Gadamer’s
position was hardly an excuse for erroneous thinking, a
dismissal of the need for accuracy, or a legitimation of
epistemological agnosticism, as Reber and Slife’s cita-
tion construes it in effect. As with Alasdair McIntyre’s
(1984), Gadamer’s understanding of truth presumes
inquiry within a tradition. Traditions generally include
mechanisms for adjustment and self-correction, and
their guiding end is to get things right, not merely to
comfortably sustain an inherited or “revealed” world-
view.
Therefore, Reber and Slife’s appeal to hermeneuti-
cal theory to overcome the supposed dualism of natural-
ism and theism founders on multiple ambiguities, and
it ultimately fails for want of an adequate “cognitional
theory” and “epistemology” (Lonergan, 1972, p. 25).
Obscured throughout by this still other ambiguity, their
new effort focuses on “meaning” as personal import, but
it completely ignores the traditional religious, philo-
sophical, and human concern about “meaning” as cog-
nitive content and, especially, as accurate explanation
and truth. Their hermeneutical solution serves merely
to cloak the inconsistency between religious claims and
scientific findings—all “meanings,” to be sure, but still
set in oppositional dualism.
Concluding Observations
I have argued that Reber and Slife’s (this issue) version
of theistic psychology is incoherent on multiple fronts.
It retains—indeed, it depends upon—the artificial
opposition of competing “worldviews,” theism and
naturalism, which it simplistically attributes to its critics
as “the conventional view.” Differing threefold ambi-
guities in each of the terms
neutrality, objectivity,
and
subjectivity
and twofold ambiguity in the term
meaning
undermine their proposed philosophical foundation for
overcoming that dualism. A theory incapable of dealing
with correct truth claims, “the hermeneutic view,” far
from overcoming the dualism by disallowing any signifi-
cance to subjectivity and objectivity, merely shields the
dualism from critical assessment. Besides, the pivotal
issue, God’s relationship to the universe, is confusedly
construed as a supernaturalism, which, one-sidedly at-
tributing all causal explanation to immediate divine “in-
volvement,”
ipso facto
precludes the critical thinking and
rational analyses of any naturalistic explanation. The
theism and science of this theory stand on contradictory
presuppositions: The uncritical blind faith of its theism
and the critical evidence-based reasoning of science can
never be reconciled.
In an absolute sense, however, theism and science
are not irreconcilable. The theism of the psychologists
from BYU appears to be burdened with particular idio-
syncrasies. Whether intended or not, whether noticed
or not, Mormon beliefs seem to determine those theo-
rists’ notions about God and creation. Most obviously,
unlike other Western religions, Mormonism is poly-
theistic—so no one point of universal coherence, one
God, is ever conceived. Mormonism holds that Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, along with many others, are all
separate gods. This consideration might explain Reber
and Slife’s (this issue) non-Western and self-serving defi-
nition of theism as “the worldview that a God (
or Gods
)
is actively and currently engaged…” (p. 6.1, emphasis
added). Except for the Holy Spirit, these gods are also
all embodied; they are not pure spirit; so these ulti-
mates, these gods, could never transcend in comprehen-
sive unity the spatiotemporal array of material reality.
Moreover, matter is eternal; it is not created in time by
God. Humans are eternal, too. “Creation,” then, means
only that “Heavenly Father” constantly and directly
manages and manipulates the already-existing material
world for the benefit of the humans who have chosen
to take on bodies and, if males, work toward becom-
ing gods themselves (God the Father, 2013; McKeever,
2013; Mormonism, 2013; Smith, 2013). This peculiar
notion of creation explains, as pondered above, what
difference-making divine involvement could possibly
mean if it is not a reference to miracles as commonly
understood. These peculiarities of Mormonism, which
completely lacks any philosophical or theological critical
tradition, arguably account for the peculiarities of the
theistic psychology from BYU and precipitate anoma-
lies and inconsistencies in the face of standard Western
monotheism. By the same token, much of this effort
of Reber, Slife, and their colleagues becomes irrelevant
to other discussion about integrating theist belief and
science because significantly different notions of “God”
are in play.
Still, other approaches have their anomalies, too.
As noted, Evangelical Christianity tends toward oc-
casionalism. It, at least, allows for expected regularities
in divine action and, thus, supports some notion of
law-like explanation. But, as I have argued elsewhere
(Helminiak, 1998, pp. 30-50), the Integration project
of biblical-literalist Christians is also unachievable. It,
too, in the end, pits unswerving blind faith against
scientific conclusions. Roman Catholicism’s acceptance
