Christian Psychology
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replies to our article: 1) the myth of neutrality, 2) the
denial of the dialectic, and 3) the invisibility of accom-
modation.
The myth of neutrality.
We have addressed the
potential blindness to violations of the separability as-
sumption in previous publications under the heading of
“the myth of neutrality” (e.g., Reber, Slife, & Saunders,
2011; Slife, Reber, & Lefevor, 2012). The myth, in this
case, is manifested by psychologists believing that they
honor the demarcation between psychology and faith
because they only present the objective evidence gained
from their scientific psychological research; evidence
that is supposedly neutral with regard to theism or any
other worldview. In our article in this issue, and in
other publications, we have cited numerous examples of
unsupported assertions about faith traditions and their
beliefs, including off-hand references to God as “an
imaginary figure” (Cassibba, Granqvist, Costantini, &
Gatto, 2008, p. 1760) and an “individual construction”
(Granqvist, Ivarsson, Broberg, & Hagekull, 2007, p.
598). Given the seeming invasiveness of these assertions
into the very core of theistic belief, we were surprised
to find virtually no response to this major point of our
paper in the comments. At the very least, we expected
those advocating a weak relationality with its attendant
fears of contamination and prejudice to find these in-
vasive, unidirectional practices unacceptable. Yet, as we
will see, Helminiak and Johnson expressed no concerns
about these practices.
In Helminiak’s case, this lack of concern is not
surprising given his conceptualization of science as
“reasoned and evidence-based” (p. 47) and theism (as he
interprets our definition of it) as being based on “bald
and blind assertions of faith” (ibid). He has already
concluded that a theistic approach to psychology “as
an intellectual enterprise. . . is a bust” (p. ibid), so
what concern could there possibly be with the asser-
tions of scientific psychologists about it? Johnson does
express concerns with the “totalizing tendency” (p. 32)
of late modernism, just as he acknowledges totalizing
tendencies in Christianity, but he does not express
any concerns about threats of worldview contamina-
tion as long as the worldviews are understood to have
no reliance upon each other. Thus, while there may
be a “hegemony of modern psychology” (ibid) in the
academic marketplace of ideas, this hegemony does not
affect the worldview of Christianity itself. Christianity
may be relegated to a minority status in the marketplace
of ideas, but for Johnson, its core beliefs and assump-
tions are not affected by the dominance of modernism.
In this sense, either Christianity is protected from the
unsupported assertions of psychological science that
appear to threaten its core beliefs because it is self-con-
tained and not interdependent with naturalism or other
worldviews in any way, or these assertions can have no
deleterious effect on the theistic worldview because they
are neutral with regard to faith.
Our own research challenges both of these assump-
tions. We have found that active Christian students
and psychologists with more training and education
in psychology express significantly greater negative
implicit attitudes toward faith than students with little
or no training and education in the discipline (Reber,
Slife, & Downs, 2012). This research suggests that
the unsupported assertions of psychologists regarding
faith traditions and their beliefs are not neutral and the
worldview of the theist is not uninfluenced. Rather,
these assertions can influence the implicit attitudes of
students and psychologists of faith and may even impact
their core beliefs.
Thus, as we have argued, worldview separability
and neutrality cannot be achieved because the world-
views of naturalism and theism are strongly related,
and, as we will show in the next section, do rely on each
other to some extent for their very identities. Conse-
quently, it is not the “violations” of separability that
concern us. We fully expect mutual influence given
the interdependence of the worldviews involved. Our
concerns are the pretense of separability and the myth
of neutrality expressed by psychologists and some of our
commentators, which together can lead to a hierarchical
framing of worldviews, prejudice against theism, and a
naturalistic dogmatism that is unacknowledged.
Denying the dialectic.
The weakly relational
assumption of separability that supports the conven-
tional worldview can also blind adherents of that view
to the ways in which differences and even incompat-
ibilities dialectically constitute a relationship between
worldviews. As advocates of this dialectic relationality,
we do not and did not (in our original article) take
issue with Johnson’s assertion that theism and natural-
ism are incompatible, incommensurable, and at times
even antagonistic. We also agree with Helminiak that
these two worldviews conceptualize reality very differ-
ently and we recognize that a number of naturalistic
and Christian scholars share Johnson and Helminiak’s
concern with any claims of interdependence or reliance
between the worldviews. However, we do take issue
with the assumption that incompatibility, incom-
mensurability, antagonism, and difference signify the
absence of relationship between worldviews. Bernstein
(1983), in studying the work of Kuhn, has carefully
addressed this weak relational assumption. He argues
that incompatibility and incommensurability do not
connote separation, but imply fundamental relatedness.
Incompatibility and incommensurability are only pos-
sible
in comparison
. From Bernstein’s perspective, only
“incomparability” denotes atomistic separability and
theism and naturalism are not incomparable.
One example of their comparability is manifested
by the definition of naturalism, which explicitly “denies
that an object or event has supernatural significance”
(Merriam-Webster, 2014). In this sense, naturalism
is defined
in terms of
theism. How could it be more
REBER AND SLIFE
