Psychology, religion, and critical hermeneutics: comments on Reber, Slife and Whoolery, Nelson, and Richardson.

The articles in this issue have provided an important analysis of how psychology, so often stuck in Enlightenment foundationalism, needs to "catch up" with changes in the philosophy of science. These changes reveal that the older Enlightenment goal of emptying oneself of all preconceptions in order to perform "objective, neutral, and detached" investigation is no longer realistic. While some individuals in the harder sciences recognize this impossibility, it seems to be a lingering expectation in the human sciences. Positivism dies hard.

We applaud the manner in which these articles expose the hidden assumptions beneath many forms of so-called scientific psychology. Indeed, many of these psychologies move quickly from a methodological naturalism to an ontological naturalism, not realizing that they have switched hats and are now speaking about the ultimate context of our lives. Ontological naturalism lies far beyond anything which empirical science can demonstrate. It is a "faith" perspective--an assumptive world out of which some psychologists mistakenly attempt to do their more modest empirical work. While ontological materialism has every right to argue its case in the public arena, it should do so with the awareness that it is speaking philosophically rather than scientifically. Indeed, as the fine articles in this issue communicate, this is scientism, not science. Scientists often make poor philosophers, particularly when it comes to understanding the ontological substructure of their own work.

Methodological naturalism should recognize the limits of its tasks and not claim to speak for all reality. At this level, science works well and can make an important contribution to theology. Limiting one's investigatory power to the material world is one thing, but assuming that matter is "all there is" is quite another. Scientific omnipotence must be humbled by confrontations with its own finitude. Science needs to avoid what Reber (this issue) calls "a move from the non-religious to the anti-religious." And Reber is quite right about the consequences. This will leave us with a very incomplete psychology because key religious and ethical elements in life will be eliminated or translated into a naturalistically "manageable" explanation. Also, religion, when seen as a hopeless metaphysical delusion, will not be allowed to serve as an important resource for moral and spiritual transformation. Thus religion is, as Reber suggests, often subsumed or "cannibalized." In fact, ontological naturalism leaves no room for religion whatsoever, and religion should refuse to play on its epistemological turf. Science has its own fundamentalists, and if we accept their epistemological starting points without seeing the greater narrative out of which they do their work, we will fall prey to reductionism. Religion will inevitably be seen as an epiphenomenon, a mere by-product of purely natural processes. A secular metaphysic can only locate and account for secular phenomena.

Richardson (this issue) asks why ontological naturalism continues to dominate the social sciences. Why does positivism continue to draw such a crowd? Richardson recognizes, of course, that empirical science delivers, and when science can show its empirical muscle, many think it is also appropriate to explain everything. The late theologian Langdon Gilkey (1993) provides several reasons for this positivist inclination: (a) science has not seen itself as dependent on any philosophical foundation, and thus it is immune to philosophical criticism, (b) because these philosophical underpinnings are seen as irrelevant, neither the philosophy of science nor the historical traditions of epistemology and ontology are taught as requirements within most graduate programs in science, (c) philosophy itself has often rejected epistemological and ontological matters as it focuses on the more modest task of logic and language analysis, and (d) on a sociological level, physical science is established in technological culture, providing it with a kind of sovereign independence which seems to make it off limits to criticism (p. 222, n. 6).

Slife and Whoolery (this issue) point out that even if a psychological perspective may "appear" friendlier toward religion, we need to be careful about its deeper motivations. There are subtle and hidden forms of reductionism, as well as more aggressive and obvious ones. One must develop a "nose" for smelling religiously antagonistic assumptions in a secular worldview. By focusing only on what Slife and Whoolery call "surface level ideas," many assume that the underlying philosophical framework is neutral and unbiased. These philosophically naive psychologists miss Richardson's beautifully succinct comment: "Ontologies have consequences." Slife and Whoolery see this danger in the borrowing of techniques from a school of therapy while not realizing that "techniques are always under some theoretical management."

Without becoming paranoid, perhaps we do need to heed some of Slife and Whoolery's warning about psychology's hidden agenda even when it appears to be religion-friendly. For instance, it is extremely obvious what a theistic perspective is "up against" as it reads and assimilates Freud. Whatever insight one may gain--and there is a lot there--Freud puts his cards on the table as he accuses religion of promoting infantile behavior. One certainly does not have to look hard to find this. Yet in Jung, who appears much friendlier toward a Christian perspective, the problems may well be much more hidden. While some find Jung an important resource for religious and spiritual concerns, there are others who transplant the assumptions of a Christian vision into a world of Jungian archetypes in which Jesus Christ is simply another example of the hero's journey, a journey we are each called upon to take. A Jungian paradigm can use theological terms and mean something radically different from what a traditional Christian world view has meant. Jung is religion-friendly, while Freud is clearly an atheist. Yet the dangers of baptizing an entire Christian theology in a Jungian paradigm may be quite real.

We would also suggest, however, that certain techniques may be compatible with more than one worldview. For instance, many Christian therapists have focused on the benefits of Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy with their clients. Clearly, REBT is born out of an explicitly atheistic ideology which promotes the rather inconsistent position that we human beings must be rational even though there is no ultimate cosmic rationality, no Greek Logos, in which our own reason participates. Surely one can use the techniques of REBT and put them in a different (and perhaps more consistent!) "ideological surround," to use one of Watson's (1993) phrases.

As the authors all indicate, the key question should perhaps be this: Has a scientific methodology ruled out, a priori, any possibility that a meta-natural realm may be a part of reality. Physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne (1995) puts this issue beautifully.

Science, by its self-denying modesty of ambition, which is also the
enabler of its great and limited success, has foresworn the attempt to
wider questions of meaning and purpose and confines itself to prosaic
issues of process, the causal sequences by which things happen.
Scientists themselves have been less austere in practice than their
ostensible principles would require them to be. Although officially they
foreswear metaphysics, covertly they love it and lace their popular
writings with obiter dicta of that kind. Hence the claims either to
discern the mind of God or to dispose of God altogether. I am not
against such metaphysical indulgences, for it seems to me quite
impossible to live without them in one form or another. It belongs to
our humanity to wrestle with questions of significance and purpose that,
contrary to the claims of some that are meaningless issues, are in fact
so meaningful for us that they insistently clamor to be addressed. I am
simply eager that we should be clear in our minds about what is the
character of discourse in which we are engaged and what authority and
success in one kind of inquiry should not be invoked to settle
illegitimately issues in a different domain of discussion (pp. 61-62).

All the authors also emphasize the importance of one's pre-understanding in psychological investigations. None of us can completely de-saturate ourselves from our own plausibility structure (Berger, 1967). This assumptive realm, or what Gadamer (1982) frequently calls our "effective history," actually makes understanding possible. In fact, trying to understand the world without these guiding presuppositions is like trying to drive a car on an empty tank. We won't get very far.

We suggest that there are two forms of fundamentalism which should be avoided. Scientific fundamentalism collapses religion into a naturalistic psychology. A series of "nothing but" reductionisms empty religion of its intention and interpret it according to assumptions which are completely foreign to its vision. As Nelson (this issue) points out, this does not seem to have been a part of "original secularism," but the mounting positivist convictions have led to a naturalistic "take over" of religion. This is both careless science and bad philosophy. Science is pushed into a position beyond its competence, a philosophically naive position in which ontological claims are not self-consciously pondered.

The other fundamentalism to be avoided is a religious fundamentalism in which psychology is collapsed into religion. From this perspective, psychology is not allowed to do its empirical work and offer challenges to traditional theological conceptions about the human condition. All of psychology's discoveries must conform to a religious ideology already set in stone. Even limited, empirical investigations are completely controlled by a larger metaphysic which will not allow contradictory evidence into view. Thus, psychology is not allowed to have any "corrective" function in a strictly religious anthropology.

Surely the psychology and religion discussion can learn much from the broader discussion in religion and the natural sciences. On the one hand, there are ontological materialists such as Dennett (1995) and Dawkins (1986), who believe one cannot even approach natural science without a larger, radically materialist worldview. There is obviously no place for religion whatsoever, even though some evolutionists might argue that religion has had "survival" value.

On the other side of the fence are those who collapse natural science into religion and insist on a Biblically-literal reading of the universe in which scientists must "get adjusted" to the idea that the world has only been around for about 6,000 years. This sort of religious domination and control of the natural sciences will certainly not be taken seriously in the public arena, nor should it be. Science is not allowed to do its empirical work without constant accountability to its theological parent. This, too, leads to both faulty science and bad theology. While ontological materialism is not necessary to conduct good science, Biblical literalism is not necessary to do good theology. Both are forms of foundationalism, the attempt to find a completely certain, objective, and absolute starting point for human knowledge. Scientific positivism and Biblical positivism lead in the same direction-a monopoly on all conversation, a "final word" about everything. Many scientists, while criticizing religion for its smug certainties, reveal the same condescending attitude they condemn. By forcing religion to fit in its hyper-empirical, naturalistic paradigm, it reiterates Comte's conviction that humanity has passed the "stage" of human reasoning in which metaphysical and theological speculations were tolerated.

Slife and Whoolery (this issue) make the interesting point that while religion is sometimes "allowed" into the "context of discovery" phase of scientific research, it is excluded from the "context of justification" phase, which is the testing, nuts-and-bolts dimension of the scientific method. This justification phase often either excludes religion altogether or turns it into something which can be operationally defined in a completely naturalistic way. As Slife and Whoolery put it: "Researchers are allowed to have initial ideas that are inspired by God, but the method for testing these ideas are decided by an epistemology that assumes that God does not matter." The controlling assumptions of the justification phase are reductionistic. These assumptions are convinced, in advance, that the material world is the only reality. Thus, an ontology is once again smuggled into what presents itself as a mere methodology.

Religion's dialogue with psychology may be able to learn some hard-won lessons from theology's historical dialogue with culture. Theology has traditionally been divided into two poles: apologetic and kerygmatic. Apologetic theology has always attempted to communicate the heart of the Christian message in ways that can make sense to common culture. It seeks to connect religion to today's issues and show the ongoing relevance of the Gospel. Apologetic theology has often been criticized for going too far as it allows a non-Christian mindset to determine the truthfulness of the Christian perspective. Apologetic theologians have been willing to take that risk. Kerygmatic theologians, on the other hand, have pointed toward the dangers of that risk and chastised apologists for not remaining more loyal to the Biblical story. Kerygmatic theologians have often remained content simply pronouncing the message and letting the chips fall where they may. They do not take on the additional task of offering public reasons for their faith. These theologians are often criticized for being sectarian as they speak only in confessional terms. Apologetic theologians believe that this brand of theology also runs its own profound risk--the risk of irrelevance.

The tension between these two perspectives, often illustrated in 20th Century Protestant circles by Barth and Tillich, are now represented by a revisionist and post-liberal approach. Post-liberals often argue that we simply cannot correlate Christian beliefs with general claims about human experience. They often deny that there is any public theology because a variety of "publics" exist in our culture. They accuse revisionist models of wanting to move back to some universally agreed-upon epistemological standard. But in a postmodern world, they say, such a standard no longer exists. Thus, one should simply tell the Christian story and allow it to stand on its own epistemological assumptions. After all, there is no agreed-upon epistemological standard, anyway. We should never look for a means of evaluating a Christian perspective from outside of it. There is no common ground, only a clash of interpretive schemes.

While our critical hermeneutical approach clearly believes that post-liberals are right that all perspectives begin in "faith," we also believe that we have a responsibility to offer publicly accessible arguments for many of these beliefs. These arguments will hardly offer "proofs" and they will not guarantee certainty. But they can nevertheless be good arguments which show the relevance of Christian commitments for today's world. The danger of not offering such arguments moves beyond a perception of being irrelevant; instead, it communicates a radical relativism and fideism. If all perspectives endlessly argue past each other and we have no points of contact whatsoever, all public discussion is reduced to story-swapping.

But what has this to do with our discussion between religion and psychology? Simply this: a "Christian psychology" has every right to make its own claims which begin in a faith tradition. However, it should not end there. Attempts should be made to offer public reasons for the relevance of Christian convictions. A Christian thinker such as Reinhold Niebuhr did not simply announce his conviction that sin should be viewed from a radically empirical epistemology as a universal feature of human experience. Instead, he made very convincing arguments which revealed the anxiety-provoked, excessive self-regard in our lives. Similarly, Christian psychologists, no matter how confessional they claim to be, are also citizens in a public sphere. They don't simply stay in their churches; they move out into the world.

A problem frequently emerges because many assume that any discussion of "public reasons" is a return to Enlightenment foundationalism in which we empty ourselves of all assumptions and find a perfectly neutral, unbiased standard of reason. We are certainly not advocating that. In fact, we agree that such a standard does not exist. Yet draining the grandiosity from the apologetic task does not mean that the task no longer exists.

This brings us to a key point we believe is not addressed directly by our hermeneutic friends--namely, an emphasis on what Ricouer (1981) calls "distanciation." Distanciation is a process by which we distance ourselves from our assumptions and look at them carefully. Distanciation does not claim to offer complete objectivity. As the articles in this issue state very well, enlightenment objectivity as a purely presuppositionless state of mind is impossible. And distanciation does not have to mean that we alienate ourselves from our assumptions. We need to realize that while we stand in a specific tradition and do our interpretive work from a particular socio-historical matrix, we can still offer solid, public and tested reasons for the plausibility of both our religious and empirical propositions. We need to dialogue not just within our community, but with other communities as well. Put simply, we can gain some distance from our inherited meanings and faith orientations without throwing them away. This process allows for the possibility of what Slife and Whooley call "methodological and assumption ruptures" in our approach, a critical reflection in which we genuinely dialogue with the conceptual worlds of each other.

So, again, before any of us even begin to critically reflect on our lives, we have already been affected by a historically mediated image of what it means to be human. Psychology is primarily an attempt to understand images of the human which have already informed us (Browning, 1991; Browning and Cooper, 2004). Conceptually speaking, no one is "homeless." And part of this tradition-saturated pre-understanding is a religious vision. While full-blown religions contain narratives, worldviews, rituals, ethics, and a community of celebration (Browning, 1997), quasi-religions also contain a meta-narrative and world view. In other words, they offer a picture of the ultimate context of our lives. We have argued that most of the modern psychologies do indeed qualify as quasi-religions, and we have attempted to analyze them from the vantage point of five levels: the visional or metaphysical, the obligational or ethical, the tendency-need or psychological, the environmental-social or systemic and ecological, and the rule role or concrete moral level. Each of these levels is loaded with assumptions which need to be critically examined (Browning and Cooper, 2004).

Thus, while Reber, Slife and Whoolery, Richardson, and Nelson all point toward the philosophical underpinnings in the pre-theoretical world of psychologists, we would like to emphasize the significance of the religious, or at least quasi-religious, dimensions of this pre-understanding. Whether the influence is positive or negative, no one can grow up in Western culture without being affected by these religious narratives. While these insightful authors have highlighted the metaphysical backgrounds of psychological thinking, we believe that they have not been explicit enough about the religious heritage that plays in the background of our assumptive worlds. Metaphysical principles can often elicit attitudes of trust, hope, and faith (Browning, 1997), and in so far as they do this, we believe they have become quasi-religious. Most of the modern psychologies, in particular, involve this quasi-religious dimension. Thus, our central conviction can be stated as follows: Contemporary psychology needs to conduct its research and practice in a regular dialogue with a broader philosophical anthropology informed by the deep metaphors and narratives of the Western religious traditions. Religious traditions often provide the classic images of the human condition which continue to inform our pre-theoretical worlds. Even if they may appear lost to conscious memory, we believe they live on. These images are more than objects to be explained by the psychology of religion. Instead, they shape the philosophical anthropologies working behind the stage of our "official" theorizing. We are steeped in them long before we begin to talk about them or reject them. Both religious and secular people are in the "deep metaphor" business. The question is whether or not they'll admit this and talk about it.

We also share some of Richardson's (this issue) nervousness about the "integration" of psychology and theology. As Richardson points out, the question quickly becomes, "Who decides the rules for verification and confirmation?" We certainly agree that psychological methods of inquiry, however valuable they may be, must not be allowed to be the final arbiter of all truth. They are an important voice in the conversation, but they should not be allowed to trump all other voices. There are aspects of reality beyond its investigatory scope. Perhaps this is why Richardson says: "What seems called for, I suggest, is not so much integration as full-blooded argument and dialogue between, on the one hand, the whole package of modern liberal individualist beliefs and institutions, and, on the other hand, religious faith and practice."

If, however, we employ Nelson's (this issue) understanding of integration, we have no problem with an integrationist approach. Nelson uses Gorsuch's (2002) definition of integration, which occurs when "two or more disciplines are brought to bear on the same issue so that decisions about that issue reflect the contributions of both disciplines"(p. 6). This type of conversation, as Nelson suggests, is based on a mutual attitude of respect and the identification of a common item for discussion. There is no attempt to collapse religion into psychology or psychology into religion. In actual practice, however, these conversations seem rather infrequent.

Perhaps a very helpful resource in this type of conversation is a re-examination of the mid-twentieth century dialogues between Tillich and psychology (Cooper, 2006). While religious conservatives have understandably been concerned about Tillich's rather impersonal image of God as the "Ground of Being," there are few theologians who have pushed secular psychologists harder to recognize their own ontological assumptions. While listening to, and taking in, much of depth psychology, Tillich remained steadfast that psychology simply cannot heal the human dilemma of estrangement and sin. Few have been as adept as Tillich in calling out the implicit ontology of a self-congratulatory naturalism.

If we truly want to move beyond a dialogue impasse between secular psychology and Christian convictions, we must move away from all forms of foundationalism. While we religiously-oriented psychologists point out the fallacy of foundationalism in a positivist ontology, perhaps we should also admit that a positivist reading of Scripture has also stopped dialogue from the other end. Conversations that simply end with, "I'm scriptural and you're not," are also not very effective, particularly when we grant the hermeneutical point that there are no "innocent" readings of anything, including the Bible. Whether it is a radical reductionism that measures all truth according to objectivity, measurability, and observation or a dogmatic biblical inerrancy which shouts down scientific data because it is not scriptural--the result is the same. Claiming that we can completely empty ourselves prior to our scientific investigations or scriptural readings reveals a similar attempt to deny our human finitude in a search for a foundationalist certainty. Thus, we are in complete agreement with the conclusion of Richardson's (this issue) article:

I suppose some religious people might feel that a hermeneutic ontology's
stress on human limitations and uncertainty undermines religious faith
or confidence. But I would suggest that these are simply the marks of an
appropriate creaturely status, that a fuller appreciation of them, in
our time, especially, can encourage us to rely on Divine mercy more than
our own artifacts, and that all a reasonable confidence in outcomes of
inquiry and dialogue requires is the conviction that God is a God of
truth.

Indeed. There are cognitive ramifications to our finitude. Nobody begins the theorizing business from scratch. We bring our assumptive worlds with us as we enter any conversation. Can we strip ourselves of those worlds and embody the Enlightenment vision of "innocent" investigators? No. Can we recognize much of our assumptive world, bring it into focus, and critically reflect on it as we dialogue with others? Yes, we think so. The fact that we each have a thinking "context" does not mean that all thought is completely relative. Just because certainty cannot be grasped, we need not give up our search for good answers. After all, some answers are indeed better than others.

REFERENCES

Berger, P. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion. New York: Doubleday.

Browning, D. (1997). Can psychology escape religion? Should it? International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 7(1), 1-20.

Browning, D. (1991). A fundamental practical theology: Descriptive and strategic proposals. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.

Browning, D. & Cooper, T. (2004). Religious thought and the modern psychologies (2nd ed). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.

Cooper, T. (2006). Paul Tillich and psychology: Historic and contemporary explorations in theology, psychotherapy, and ethics. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

Dawkins, R. (1986). The blind watchmaker. New York: Norton.

Dennet, D. (1995). Darwin's dangerous idea. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Gilkey, L. (1993). Nature, reality, and the sacred: The nexus of science and religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Gorsuch, R. (2002). Integrating psychology and spirituality? Westport, CT: Praeger.

Polkinghorne, J. (1995). Serious talk: Science and religion in dialogue. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International.

Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences: Essays on language, action, and interpretation (J. Thompson Ed. & Tr.). Paris: Cambridge University Press.

Watson, P. (1993). Apologetics and ethnocentrism: Psychology and religion within an ideological surround. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 3(1), 1-20.

AUTHORS

COOPER, TERRY D.: Address: St. Louis Community College, 300 South Broadway, St. Louis, MO 63102-2800. Title: Professor of Psychology. Degree: Ph.D.

BROWNING, DON S.: Address: University of Chicago, Swift Hall 401, 1025 E. 58th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Title: Alexander Campbell Professor Emeritus of Ethics and the Social Sciences. Degree: Ph.D.

TERRY D. COOPER

St. Louis Community College

DON S. BROWNING

University of Chicago

Correspondence concerning this article may be sent to Terry D. Cooper, PhD, St. Louis Community College, 300 South Broadway, St. Louis, MO 63102-2800. Email: [e-mail].