Truth
A Christian in Psychology
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 05 November 2006
The War Between Christianity and Psychology
Malcolm Jeeves, a famous British psychologist, and a Christian, in a series of lectures (CiS-St Edmunds Lecture series—Pyschology & Christianity) proudly displayed online, simply gives the usual Christian apologetic, albeit sprinkled with the knowledgeable anecdotes that a long established professor should have. He ought to be a scientist—honest and factual—but his presentation is Christian—dishonest and tendentious. What is it about Christianity that does this to people?
He mentions the “warfare” metaphor “used in the past to describe the interactions between science and religion”, adding that though “largely discredited by historians of science”, “it surfaces again from time to time”. Plainly we are meant to see that there is no warfare between science and religion, then he proceeds to add his own musket volleys in it. Are these people really top scientists, or have they gotten into their positions by use of the Christian freemasonry? The historians who have discredited the warfare metaphor must be Christian historians, because the war goes on, and the Christians mainly lead it. The reason is that the war has been won by science, but Christians refuse to lay down their arms.
Jeeves is an obvious example. He gives instances of the war in psychology between science and religion throughout the twentieth century, from Freud, through Skinner to Crick, so how can he maintain the idiocy that there is no war? No one can, on any basis of science or logic, but Christians, even when they are supposedly scientists like Jeeves, just say whatever suits their religious case, whether it is true or not. Science and religion were at war because they are incompatible, and petty apologies like Jeeves’s prove it. He abandons evidence for parable.
What does he say? Well, at the beginning of the twentieth century the famous works of psychology show no evidence of a war. Is this man naïve or plainly dishonest. The people he cites were all religious and did not want to highlight the fact that religion was explained, not “explained away”, the pejorative expression used by apologists like Jeeves, by psychology.
An examination of the book by R H Thouless, also a Christian, shows that he simply could not make a case for there being anything behind religion that is not explained by psychology perfectly adequately. What then was Thouless to do. He simply said repeatedly that despite the adequate explanations of psychology, the supernatural sources of religion were not disproved. In other words, although psychology had a full explanation of the observations, God could still be operating in the background. It might seem convincing to simple mid-west cowboys, but it ought not to suffice for a Cambridge professor, or even a professor lecturing at Cambridge.
A Continuing Tradition
What does Jeeves think of Thouless?
His approach was highly constructive and a complete contrast with the warfare metaphor. He represents a tradition, which has continued since the second world war, with several noteworthy attempts to offer new insights into religion through the eyes of psychology.
This is a carefully crafted sentence with little in it that can be gainsaid. His approach was psychologically constructive, but it showed religion as fully explained by psychology. The tradition he means must be that the science could be ignored by Christians who could and should continue to believe despite the scientific findings. Psychology certainly offers insights into religion. They are on such a scale that they render the supernatural redundant. That is what Christians like Jeeves will not accept. Jeeves calls this tradition, non-confrontational. Fine. No confrontation is necessary, now, but anyone who will not recognize that there is no need for the supernatural, and that supposed supernatural or mystical experiences are natural, if unusual and even pathological, has their head in a bucket, and they are the ones who perpetuate the confrontation.
Jeeves is fond of saying that such and such a critic or criticism of Christianity has been disproved by some professional or other, but this is the Christian talking not the scientist. No single study, however scientific, instantly undermines a well held hypothesis, especially in fields where there are many factors. Evidence must always be repeated by other unprejudiced scientists. A weight of evidence has to be widely accepted as being a refutation of any hypothesis for which the evidence was previously favourable, and a better alternative hypothesis has to be on offer. All the more so when the arguments are by Christians who abandon their scholarship when it comes to belief. So, for Jeeves, Freud has been spectacularly refuted, but Jung is cited favourably. Curious that he was an eminent psychologist who liked religion.
Behaviourism
B F Skinner could not simply be ignored, so Jeeves just slags him off! Skinner studied “behaviourism”, a way in which behaviour could be conditioned by rewards and punishments:
He believed that… the effects of rewards and punishments, could explain how religious practice functions psychologically.M Jeeves
A form of behaviour is reinforced by a reward. Belief in God promises several good things like personal immortality, prayers being answered, and a general feeling of well being called the Holy Spirit. To get these, the Christian has to do certain things among which are to attend Church and put money into the platter. On the other hand, priests and ministers—themselves accomplished behaviourists—know that the threat of hell fire is a serious mental punishment for disbelief that is a serious obstacle to apostasy.
It is all quite valid behaviourism in practice, but Jeeves the apologist produces his typically apologetic tactics for his audience of sheep. First is to call Skinner “reductionist”, an insult used against anyone Christians do not like, and especially scientists. Science works by analysis, which is reducing whatever is being studied to its components. That is why tricksters and liars can get away with the insult, but scientists also then use what they have learnt to build, to synthesize. So, they are not reductionists.
The sign of being a reductionist, it seems, is using any expression like “is no more than” or “is nothing but”. So Jeeves dismisses Freud as a reductionist because he wrote:
Psychoanalysis… has taught us that the personal God is psychologically nothing other than a magnified father.
And that religion is…
…nothing other than psychological processes projected into the outer world.
Whether Freud meant that there really was nothing other than a substitute father in God or whether he would have conceded that there might have been other less important elements does not matter to Jeeves. He has decided that any use of such a phrase denotes reductionism, and that ends the argument. The reason is that Christians always want to end the argument. They know they cannot win it, and, by trying, always simply expose their own dishonesty. Jeeves has not offered any reason yet why Freud is wrong in thinking that God is merely a figmentary father, or religion a set of psychological responses. Like all apologists, he is interested in winning debating points not in seriously considering arguments. Despite all his scientific awards and honours, when it comes to Christianity, he is a trickster.
What is remarkable is that people like Jeeves suddenly stop being scientists when they put on their Christian hat. Jeeves is just as much a reductionist in practising his scientific skills, such as they may be, as Skinner or any other scientist. It simply proves his dishonesty. Indeed, the true reductionists are Christians, who reduce everything to an act of God, or one of His lackeys on His behalf. Jeeves recommends his readers to ask:
What are the nature of the explanations which people are purporting to give, and what are the pre-suppositions that they bring to their work?
And what you find, he says, not surprisingly, is:
You can be sure that people reach the conclusions that their pre-suppositions required. If they began as reductionists, they finished as reductionists.
It sounds impressive, but anyone critical, following Hegel, flips the coin over—if you begin with Christian suppositions then you end up confirming Christianity! That, though, must be all right because the Christian suppositions are God’s. Christians cannot get away from special pleading, even clever ones. The suppositions of science, being well founded and endlessly tested are true, and they work, but the suppositions of Christianity are superstition and fancy, albeit applied with a cruel disregard for the damage the psychological methods of Christian indoctrination do to the individual psyche.
Jeeves calls Roger Sperry, the discoverer of the split brain, as a witness against behaviourism:
He criticised the bankruptcy of some forms of behaviourism.M Jeeves
Crude apologetics again. Everyone criticised some forms of behaviourism, probably including Skinner himself. Jeeves aims to discredit all of behaviourism by this ploy, and thus save Christianity from Skinner’s attacks. Behaviourism cannot be undermined so easily. It has been proven empirically over and over again. Much of behaviour is explained by rewards and punishments, whether natural or consciously applied. The legitimate criticism is of those who thought behaviourism was enough to explain all behaviour now. It is not, but that does not mean it never was, and still is in large measure, and it is sheer dishonesty to argue in this distorted apologetic way. The psychological reward and punishment system of religion is a central factor in bringing people into it, and in holding them there. Only liars can deny it, and anyone who does has to be looked at very carefully.
Multiple Personality Disorder?
Even more crudely, Jeeves likens the descriptions by psychologists of human religious characteristics to a computer engineer’s explanation of how the computer works by movement of electrons—quite so, but ignoring that the electrons are constrained by a program devised to do some task. The analogy is presumably that Nature, and as part of it, the human brain, works but some intelligent being—a designer—makes it work as it does. This is so thoroughly crude and unscientific, it is remarkable that this man is employed in a scientific field. Perhaps, it is his age.
No scientist, let alone one involved in human biology of any kind, can ignore evolution, yet this childish analogy does just that, and at the same time forces the audience to accept that the human brain has a programmer, namely God. Elsewhere Jeeves does not ignore evolution, but for the sake of his Christian apologetics, he does. It is that magic property of Christianity again, that turns honest people into liars for God. The behaviour of animals is conditioned by evolution. It is evolution that makes them what they are, including their brains, and, if there really is a God, he evidently set evolution going, thus hiding all traces of Himself, and it is certain that He Himself could not have sprung vast but perfectly formed from nothing. If there is a God, He too must have evolved.
Jeeves is principled enough to deny the existence of the soul. He says the ideas we have about our nature affect how we treat one another. It impacts on our ethics. And it is undeniable except by Christians, that, for hundreds of years, they burnt people alive while they were tied to a post and could not escape the flames. These good Christians stood by eating lunch and laughing! They were able to do it because they claimed they were saving the burning person’s soul. Anyone able to read this, stop their stomachs from heaving and remain a Christian should think seriously about which god they are worshipping. Jeeves denies the notion that religion can speak about a non-material soul while science and common experience sees only the physical being. So, he considers the biblical use of the word soul to mean the whole person—body, mind and spirit. Jeeves puts it as:
We are souls, we don’t have souls.
What he means by soul, he explains is the capacity to have relationships, with other humans, with the whole of creation and with God. Remember this is a top scientist speaking. Relationships with other people and the whole of Nature are plain, in a broad meaning of “relationship”. But what of a relationship with something imaginary? That sounds distinctly lunatic, especially for a scientist. Moreover, he really seems to think people do have a formal relationship with this figment, and they are expressed as covenants!
It is this capacity to enter into a covenant relationship with God which is one of the important themes through scripture and therefore I think of soulishness in these terms.Malcolm Jeeves
Does he really believe that God made contractual arrangements with human beings—a top scientist? It is quite sad, isn’t it? He has dispensed with the supernatural soul, so why can he not dispense with the supernatural soul of souls, God? Maybe he is getting there for he also gets rid of the whole purpose of the supernatural soul, which is to allow people to wake up again alive when their body has died. Jeeves prefers to return to the ancient Persian and then Jewish idea that the body is resurrected. After death, the soul is not freewheeling in delight liberated from its prison of a body, the conscious person is in a supernatural sleep until God resurrects them into an incorruptible body. His best evidence for this is again the scriptures which often use the euphemism of sleep for death. People still do today, but they mean death all right. They have, for example, had to put the old dog to sleep. But because it is in God’s word, Jeeves must take it to be God’s word, and so death is sleep!
Jeeves proves in this lecture that no Christian can be a proper scientist. Christians like Jeeves must suffer from multiple personality disorder. They wear either their Christian personality or their scientific one, and each does not know what the other thinks. Isn’t any scientist who speaks repeatedly of “our sovereign God” a nutter? What experiments has Jeeves to establish this sovereign God? To speak like this, he is wearing his Christian personality, and to win his scientific distinctions he has to have on his scientific one, for any such talk ought to disqualify him from anything scientific.
Fredric L Rice of The Skeptic Tank asks whether there are any highly intelligent Christians, and decides there obviously are, but they cannot apply their intelligence to their beliefs. Jeeves must be one of these, and Rice agrees that one reason is a “compartmented” personality. But why do they not realize it? Is it childhood indoctrination? Even intelligent people need to have a basis for their thought, and if they are taught myth, then they simply cannot escape the web of fantasy they have been forced to build. It needs investigation, and the intelligent believers, if sincere, ought to step forward to explain their reasons scientifically. After all, there are not that many of them! If it is not this, then you have to imagine that their belief is not sincere. They are opportunistic “believers”—extreme extrinsics. They are getting something out of it, perhaps the kudos and the admiration of the simpletons. They get out of it what the priests and pastors get, some sort of power and the adulation that accompanies it. Either way, it is puzzling and even disturbing that intelligent people remain apparently devoted to lies and fantasy.
