David G. Myers PhD - Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith

I am free, I am bound to nobodys word, except to those inspired by God; if I oppose these in the least degree, I beseech God to forgive me my audacity of judgment, as I have been moved not so much by longing for some opinion of my own as by love for the freedom of science.

NATHANIEL CARPENTER, PHILOSOPHIA LIBERA, 1622

Reality is a nuisance to those who want to make it up as they go along.

AUSTIN FARRER, SAVING BELIEF, 1964

O ver the last centurypsychologys first full centurydefinitions of the field have varied. For its first forty years psychology was, as William James declared in his pioneering 1890 text, The Principles of Psychology, the science of mental life. During the next forty years, from the 1920s into the 1960s, it was the science of behavior. Todays textbooks commonly synthesize this history by defining psychology as the science of behavior and mental processes. Note what all these definitions have in common: that psychology aspires to being a science.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner cautioned that psychology has not added up to an integrated science, and is unlikely ever to achieve that status. Yet he noted that it was important to recognize insights achieved by psychologists; to identify the contribution which contemporary psychology can make to disciplines which may some day achieve a firmer scientific status; and finally to determine whether at least parts of psychology might survive as participants in a conversation which obtains across major disciplines.

Psychologys claims to be a science are justified today by its solid achievements in both pure and applied research. Claiming the status of a science implies also acknowledging the limits of science. These limits are not imposed by Christian belief but are shared by humanists and scientists alike. There has, however, been a trend in recent years for somenotably, postmoderniststo argue that scientific knowledge is subjective. Some Christians, mistakenly believing that by weakening the objectivity of scientific knowledge they might strengthen the claims of religious knowledge, have at times succumbed to the temptation to endorse such views. Max Perutz, a Nobel laureate in molecular biology and himself a Christian concerned about the postmodern challenge to the future of science, notes: This is a caricature of modern sciencethe bulk of scientific knowledge is final. If it were not, jet planes could not fly, computers would not work and atomic bombs would fail to explode.

As part of that conversation, this book asks, What is the relationship between Christian faith and psychology? To answer that we must take a brief look at the history of relations between faith and science.