Customer Reviews

Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

David Myers is well known for publishing some of the best college manuals for general psychology, that are used in a majority of colleges and universities. He is also a devoted Christian. Consequently, his recent book on Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith marks a testimony to his dual commitment to both scientific psychology and the orthodox Christian faith. Highly recommended.

My first copy of this, I bought as a textbook for my Psychology of REligion course At Wayland Baptist University. This is a good book for a unbiased view of Psychology from a religious or faith perspective. Be careful to buy one that has all the pages my original goes 1-130, inserts a previous section of 51-82, and finishes from 160 to the end of the book. Overall, it is a responsible text.

While waiting for the book to arrive, I decided to visit the David's web site, [...]. It was while browsing his web site that I noticed David's advocacy for same sex marriage. The basis of his argument is natural and biblical. People are naturally predisposed to their sexual orientation, this cannot be changed, and only 7 of 31,103 Bible verses mention homosexual behavior, therefore the Bible has nothing to say about enduring sexual orientation.

Many people would find this a bit disturbing. Others, maybe those a bit more enlightened or of a more recent generation, would find this rather refreshing. Perhaps a parent sending a child to college for a liberal education might fit into the first camp, while more enlightened professors and their younger students might fit into the second. I'm speculating here, of course.

Using David's reasoning then, my enduring urge to covet my neighbor's wife, and to have her husband murdered should be excused (or even encouraged) because it cannot be scientifically proven than any amount of therapy can change my own predispositions and less than 0.02% of Bible verses mention these topics.

Really, what did I miss? Is there another normative test to know if something is acceptable or not? Is it not a sin if no human is injured in the affair? Is sin defined as a transgression against man or a transgression against God?

Chapter 20
Well, I finally got the book and using the index, flipped right to pages 129-131 where I learned that accepting the limits on my "capacity to change can be liberating", and that "to make peace with myself is to be able to say that grace extends to me, just as I am ... whether I am predisposed to be slim or chubby ... whether my longings are for those of the same or other sex."

This appears to be at odds of what a Christian child knows. After Adam's failure, people (including their predisposition) are no longer normal, but sinful. If we were normal, we would not be banished from the garden, there would be no death, and there would be no need for grace. As it is, we are sinful, but in faith we confess our sins, and God forgives us freely through Christ's sacrifice.

I confess my sins of coveting my neighbor's wife, and of murdering her husband. Just as I am the Lord forgives me. The man who longs for same sex relationships is required to do the same for his sin of homosexuality. Then both of us are called to go and leave our life of sin. Yet we will struggle, even as the son of Jesse struggled, until the Lord transforms us.

Looking for a fresh start, I turned to the beginning of the book. Maybe I can find some good intellectual meat here (and throw out the bones like any good fish dinner). After all, I've only read three pages of the book, and somewhat out of context at that. Besides, the topic was one that is in this current day very explosive.

This book "identifies major insights regarding human nature ... and ponders how the resulting human image connects with Christian belief." Maybe David's editor made a mistake and what David meant to communicate is that this book identifies major insights regarding man from Scripture and ponders how that image connects with what we observe or better yet, helps us understand what we observe.

Chapter 1
David agrees with and quotes Max Perutz who noted that "the bulk of scientific knowledge is final. If it were not, Jet planes could not fly..." David believes Francis Bacon to be humble when Bacon claims "we must submit all ideas to nature's test." David concludes the matter that "we must be willing submit ... to the test of divine revelation, including the reality of the universe around us."

Some of this reminds me of what I read in Gordon H. Clark's The Christian View of Men and Things:

William Gilbert, the father of electrical engineering, who wrote that true science, arrives at conclusions "not with mere probability, but with certainty." Yet we all know that historically, the scientific method has a long history of accepting what is later thought to be false. Gilbert claimed the Earth's magnetism holds it in its rotational course. Robert Wood, the first to take infrared pictures, claimed (in vivid defiance of Newton's earlier experiments) "that the prism actually manufactures the colored light."

I suppose modern scientists may counter that the scientific methodology had not been adequately developed in Gilbert's day. But Wood's claim was made not that long ago. How do we know (or more appropriately by what science are we certain) that the methodology of today's science is now adequately developed?

Rescuing scientific conclusions by pointing to verified predictions is irrational. It is a logical fallacy called asserting the consequent. For example, if the periodic table is true, this undiscovered element must exist - the element does exist so the periodic table is true. And, if I eat roast turkey and plum pudding I lose my appetite - I lost my appetite therefore I ate turkey and plum pudding.

Chapter 3
On a positive note, David provides a basic discussion of worldviews. Yet when I read the text carefully, it seems as if there were two authors writing this section, a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde. Consider, "psychology is morally and ethically neutral." Vs. "Students of ... psychology ought never forget that science involves more than impersonal, objective, pure facts." And "there is not a Christian psychology any more than there is a Christian physics" Vs. "this subjective element of scientific exploration is even larger in ... psychology than in ... physics" Finally "worldviews further influence our conceptions of mental and sexual health" Vs. "a Christian psychology is one that is faithful to reality." At least Dr. Jekyll recognized the problem and concluded the matter neatly with a note.

David slips in a vice versa that does not seem to belong. The text I am referring to reads: "Thus if Christian psychologists are to be fully serious both as scholars and as Christians, they must not wall off their scientific and religious levels of understanding from each other. Instead, they should allow the content of their faith to inform their psychology (and vice versa), much as they also allow their faith to inform their social awareness, politics and personal relationships." David concludes this paragraph in a way that focuses only on faith driving psychology. So where is the justification and argument for the "vice versa"? It appears to have just materialized for a brief moment and then vanished. Kind of like Elvis sightings in Kalamazoo. If the "vice versa" really does exist, then the C.S. Lewis quote "When [Scripture] tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery" should be "vice versa'd" to say that lessons in cookery will alter our understanding of whether or not it is right to feed the hungry. I know this is absurd, but what else can the vice versa mean?

On the very next page David writes that "the results of psychological research prompt us to reexamine some widely held beliefs, the nature of the soul being one such example." I guess David really meant vice versa after all.

Chapter 4
"In humans, detectable brain activity is now known to coincide with and even preceded by a fraction of a second the instant at which a person consciously decided to perform an action such as lifting a finger."

I think that in a book on psychology, the term "consciously" would have been defined prior to using it in such a startling sentence. I checked the table of contents and index, and while "homosexuality" is listed, the term "conscious" is not. I guess it is a matter of priorities. In any case, according to Encarta, the psychological definition of the adjective "conscious" is "relating to or concerned with a part of the mind that is capable of thinking, choosing, or perceiving." So is David talking about a person who thought and decided to lift a finger, or a person who chose to decide to lift a finger, or a person perceived that they decided to lift a finger?

Leaving that unanswered, I think we can still salvage enough out of the quote to know that brain activity precedes our thoughts, choosing, and/or decisions. So, if I decide to lift a finger, the thought is preceded by brain activity. Wouldn't any young child presented with this fact then cautiously ask: What then triggers my brain activity? David's best answer is that "it is also very important to remember that it is people who speak, think, and feel - not brains." Shouldn't David define how a person thinking is different from a brain thinking?

Irreducible Intrinsic Interdependence
The crowing point of David's philosophy comes on the very next page, where David claims that there is "an interdependence of what we think, remember, and see, and how we feel and express our feelings, with what is happening in our brains." You see, what David is talking about here is a version of monism - that there is no soul separate from the body but both are unified. This "'intrinsic' interdependence" ties the soul and brain together so tightly that one cannot stand without the other. This reminds me of something else I once read. It goes like this: "It is clear therefore that, in the supremely wise arrangement of God, sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the others." There, as here, the soul cannot survive without the physical Man. David cannot help himself to carry this into the final triumph of Man, when he comes to the climactic-, beautifully heretical-, issued by supreme fiat-, final verdict-, encyclical-on-the-matter: "It is this irreducible aspect of mental life that makes it sensible to further qualify `intrinsic interdependence' and describe it as an `irreducible intrinsic interdependence'."

Malcolm Jeeves:
Malcolm is the second author of "Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith", and it would be unfair of me not to mention him. For now, I'll just focus on the most recent published speech of his I could find on the internet. To get a tone for the speech I though I would share the words that Michael Byrne used to introduce Malcolm. "These Boyle Lectures in some ways represent an updated version of the 'natural theology' which was so important in Boyle's day as an exercise in Christian apologetics. But natural theology - or even a less ambitious 'theology of nature' - is in fact roundly rejected by certain sections of Christian opinion. Following Karl Barth, many conservative and evangelical Christians do not accept that theology has much if anything to learn from the natural or human sciences. For them God's revelation is complete in the Incarnation and in Scripture: all else is a distraction, or perhaps worse. The Catholic tradition has never had such a negative attitude to the possibility of learning from the sciences."

In his speech, Malcolm tells us that there is indeed an "irreducible intrinsic interdependence." This is incompatible, according to Malcolm, with the views of John Calvin. "The notion that humans possess a soul was typical of the thinking of major figures from the past such as Plato, Aristotle, Origen, Demetrius, Augustine (who held a modified Platonic view), and Descartes. Until relatively recently in the Western world the dominant cultural influences have been the religious ones. As Stevenson notes "Under Aristotle's influence Aquinas thus retained an element of Platonism, arguing that the soul has a separate existence until the resurrection, and that this helps to solve the problem of maintaining personal identity but at the cost of incurring all the problems associated with dualism". Similar strongly dualistic views are present in the writings of some of the Protestant reformers such as John Calvin who wrote, "It would be foolish to seek a definition of 'soul' from the philosophers. Of them hardly one, except Plato, has rightly affirmed its immortal substance... Indeed from Scripture we have already taught that the soul is an incorporeal substance."

Done:
I'm sure anyone with an opinion of this book might have had quite enough. And so have I. Whether you are crying with laughter at my scientific naivety, or crying about the heresy that David and Malcolm are promoting, or bored beyond tears, I may never know. Then again, maybe it does not matter since we might all be irreducibly intrinsically interdependent.

I did not like chapter one, thought it was a bunch of circular talk but, it got better. I used it for school and I actually took some good information away from it.

I originally bought this as a textbook for my Psychology of Religion class at Wayland Baptist University. I recommended as a fair view of Psychology for a religious or faith perspective. BE careful that you copy as all pages. 131-159 was missing out of mine 51-80 replaced it.

This book sets out to present psychology through the eyes of faith. However, I found the book dissappointing. In fact, it quite uncritically accepts a rather steep picture of human nature from social and cognitive psychology and then goes on to pepper them up with a few bible quotes. Even free will is challenged. Now, that would be legitimate, but interestingly enough, even in mainstream psychology many of the findings Myers offers as the last truth are challenged (e.g. compare David Funder's research and Myer's stand on the bias-and-heuristics-programme). All in all, I wouldn't recommend this book. It is short, uninteresting and its title offers more than the book offers.