Christian Psychology
66
Nelson, 2009), acknowledges the “destruction of
positivism” (Nelson, 2009, p. 63) in the philosophy of
science literature in the mid to late 20th century, citing
works by Popper and Kuhn as examples in his com-
ment. The problem is, as he has deftly pointed out in
his psychology of religion text, psychologists underesti-
mate “positivism’s persistence in psychology and its ef-
fects” (p. 65). Examples of its persistent effects include:
“1) unreflective adoption of philosophical positions, 2)
physics envy and the limitation of method, 3) narrow-
ing of topics, 4) narrowing of theoretical approaches, 5)
distorted perspective on current and new theories, and
6) a negative attitude toward religion” (p. 66).
Interestingly, in Nelson’s reply to our article he
quotes Helminiak advocating a “’positivist viewpoint’
of science” (p. 36) in his writing. Nelson also notes
that “positivism would fit well with what [Helminiak]
articulates as a goal for his proposed science of spiritual-
ity” (ibid). This would suggest that the persistence of
positivism in psychology may be sufficiently subtle that
even psychologists who acknowledge that it has been
discredited in the philosophy of science may still be
susceptible to its influence within their own discipline.
Nelson’s arguments suggest that both Collicutt and
Helminiak may underestimate the strong, enduring grip
this once-dominant philosophy still holds on the minds
of many American psychologists, including, perhaps, at
least one of the primary critics of a theistic approach to
psychology.
Several other commentators support Nelson’s
argument that positivism persists in psychology. For
example, Freeman states that, academic psychology con-
siders “naturalism a better, more objective perspective
than theism (and any other non-naturalistic “ism” that
might be brought to bear on the psychological world)“
(p. 23). He suggests that this is so because “naturalism
has become naturalized, its ostensibly objective status
being largely a function of its epistemic “obviousness” –
to those for whom it is obvious” (ibid). Johnson states
that “modernism’s minimalist metaphysics” is “allied. .
. with naturalism and neo-positivism” (p. 32) and adds
that “hard subject-object dualism. . . has so compro-
mised modern thought, including modern psychology”
(p. 34). Hathaway makes the same basic point, assert-
ing that “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 that psychology is a science,
it is as well” (p. 28).
Hathaway’s comment on positivism is particu-
larly interesting, because later on in his paper he uses
the popular logical positivist distinction between the
context of discovery and the context of justification in
his discussion of the place of theism in psychology. In
that section, Hathaway allows for theism, and any other
worldview, to inform psychology, but he then compart-
mentalizes its influence by adding that “any idea source
should be valid in what Reichenbach (1938) has called
the context of discovery” (p. 27). The context of justifi-
cation, on the other hand, “is more demanding than the
context of discovery in the sciences” (p. 28) for Hatha-
way and can therefore employ demarcation principles
and retain only those “disciplinary elements that survive
the discipline’s justificatory processes” (ibid). Though
Reichenbach (1938) did not view objectivity and sub-
jectivity as opposites, he does seek to “distinguish the
subjective and the objective part of science” (The three
tasks of epistemology, para. 17) and to “suppress the
traces of subjective motivations from which [scientific
expositions] started” (para. 8) in the justificatory stage.
He accomplishes this by separating the more subjective
context of discovery from the more objective context of
justification.
Whether Hathaway intends to do the same thing
or not, his use of these two contexts, his references to
Reichenbach’s (1938) writings on the subject, and his
assertion that theism is an appropriate idea source for
the context of discovery with no mention of its appro-
priateness to the context of justification, make it appear
as if the subjectivity/objectivity dualism we discuss in
our article is at play in Hathaway’s comment. It seems
that for him the worldview of naturalism has a place in
the justification phase of science, but theism might be
outside the “delimited range” (p. 28) of disciplinary ele-
ments in the justification arena. This suggests not only
a separation of the worldviews of naturalism and theism
but also their hierarchical organization according to the
positivist subjectivity/objectivity dualism we describe in
our article and that Reichenbach clearly manifests in the
text Hathaway cited.
Meaning
Another manifestation of worldview superiority that we
addressed in our article is the conventional tendency to
view approaches to psychology that emphasize mean-
ing (e.g., theistic approaches) as being more subjective
than approaches that emphasize objects (e.g., natural-
istic approaches). We countered this tendency with an
alternative framing of worldviews that is not based on
the subjectivity/objectivity dualism that supports the
positivism, which as we have just described, persists
in psychology. The alternative we discuss takes the
position that worldviews are constellations of meanings
that are “integral parts of meaningful wholes” (p. 11)
that are strongly related to each other and are “neither
mostly subjective nor mostly objective” (ibid). We also
explained that a hermeneutic framing of worldviews is
not the same as a pure subjectivism, where meanings are
seemingly conjured out of thin air. Instead, meanings
are grounded and “mutually constituted by the inter-
preter, interpretive context, and the thing interpreted”
(p. 15). Because they are grounded in this hermeneutic
realism (Slife & Christensen, 2013) interpretations of
phenomena and events can be adjudicated as to their
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