ThinkBlog

In the introductory paragraphs of the seventh chapter of Friedman & Schustack’s Personality (2003), the authors make another reference to evolution as the end-all, be-all of psychology:

Although philosophers have long been concerned with the nature of the human mind, it was not until Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution liberated thinking about human nature that cognitive psychology could begin in earnest. That is, only after the human mind came to be seen as a biological organism rather than a fixed creation from the divine being could scientists begin to explore how thinking changed as a child developed […].

Now, there’s nothing wrong with hypothesizing certain things about what the theory of evolution did and did not allow scientists to conceptualize, but some of the assumptions here are as preposterous as the ones I’ve already addressed.

There seems to be this conception throughout this book–which might as well have been written by popular culture for all its spiritual depth and philosophical rigor–that Christianity and indeed all so-called “Western” religion is static and all its adherents are thus as well.

It isn’t that the concept of “fixed creation” doesn’t do justice to the concept of creation, it’s that it has nothing whatsoever to do with it! There is no sense in which the Judeo-Christian notion of the individual is unstudyable, unanalyzable, impenetrable. This is patently untrue.

This is something that I come across time and again: Christians don’t believe that they can benefit from psychology (and other related fields) because the majority of its professors espouse materialistic atheism; and likewise, thinkers in many scientific fields believe they cannot find faith because they would have to sacrifice their reason and intellect.

We may know that there are limits on what we can see into ourselves (i.e., metacognitive limits) and others (i.e., extrapolation of motivation, &c. from others’ actions), but one of the great joys of being a Christian psychologist or a Christian philosopher is not having all the right answers, but starting with better questions. Don’t let pop psychology, narcissistically obsessed with its own latest and greatest findings and hypotheses, distract you from the great questions that knowledge of God opens up for you.

In the introductory paragraphs of the seventh chapter of Friedman & Schustack’s Personality (2003), the authors make another reference to evolution as the end-all, be-all of psychology:

Although philosophers have long been concerned with the nature of the human mind, it was not until Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution liberated thinking about human nature that cognitive psychology could begin in earnest. That is, only after the human mind came to be seen as a biological organism rather than a fixed creation from the divine being could scientists begin to explore how thinking changed as a child developed […].

Now, there’s nothing wrong with hypothesizing certain things about what the theory of evolution did and did not allow scientists to conceptualize, but some of the assumptions here are as preposterous as the ones I’ve already addressed.

There seems to be this conception throughout this book–which might as well have been written by popular culture for all its spiritual depth and philosophical rigor–that Christianity and indeed all so-called “Western” religion is static and all its adherents are thus as well.

It isn’t that the concept of “fixed creation” doesn’t do justice to the concept of creation, it’s that it has nothing whatsoever to do with it! There is no sense in which the Judeo-Christian notion of the individual is unstudyable, unanalyzable, impenetrable. This is patently untrue.

This is something that I come across time and again: Christians don’t believe that they can benefit from psychology (and other related fields) because the majority of its professors espouse materialistic atheism; and likewise, thinkers in many scientific fields believe they cannot find faith because they would have to sacrifice their reason and intellect.

We may know that there are limits on what we can see into ourselves (i.e., metacognitive limits) and others (i.e., extrapolation of motivation, &c. from others’ actions), but one of the great joys of being a Christian psychologist or a Christian philosopher is not having all the right answers, but starting with better questions. Don’t let pop psychology, narcissistically obsessed with its own latest and greatest findings and hypotheses, distract you from the great questions that knowledge of God opens up for you.