Minds, Brains, Souls and Gods

A Conversation on Faith, Psychology and Neuroscience

Malcolm Jeeves

• Editore: IVP Academic
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830895625
• Argomento: Théologie et religion
• Categoria: Religion et sciences

The field of psychology, and especially neuropsychology, can be daunting for Christian students trying to find their way. In the face of surprising new research and radical new theories, it is tempting to limit the integration of Christianity and psychology to relatively "safe" topics that one can easily differentiate from matters of faith. In Minds, Brains, Souls and Gods, the highly esteemed professor of psychology, Malcolm Jeeves, insists on addressing the difficult questions head-on.- Do I have a soul?- How free am I?- What makes me uniquely human?- Does my brain have a "God spot"?In this hypothetical correspondence with a student, Jeeves argues that we must avoid false choices in the relation between Scripture and science. Christians need not choose between a "God of the gaps" that competes with science, a "neurotheology" that bases our understanding of God on the latest scientific theory, or a scientific reductionism that claims to have explained God away as a mere function of the brain. Students encountering the brave new world of neuroscience need not view such research as a threat to the faith. With the wisdom of a seasoned scholar, Jeeves guides us down the road less-traveled—the way of integration.

1

What Is Psychology, and How Should We Approach It?

Ben,

Your father keeps me up to date with how you and your brothers are getting on in school. He tells me you have been accepted to the university of your choice. Congratulations. Your grades must have been good to succeed in such a competitive market. The psychology department has a high reputation. Each university psychology course has its own distinctive strengths, depending on the research interests of the staff. Yours is well-known for its scientific rigor and for majoring in areas of psychology that overlap with neuroscience and evolutionary biology. If the department has a short course on the history of psychology, I’d advise you to take it. It is so important to know how psychology arrived where it is today. It helps put current trends in perspective.

Malcolm,

Thanks! I’m excited to be here and wondering what I’m going to encounter in my psychology courses. To be honest, my parents aren’t enthusiastic about my studying psychology. They think it could undermine my Christian faith. What reactions do you get from people, especially other Christians, to your being a psychology professor?

Ben,

The answer is, mixed reactions. Sadly, some Christians see psychology as an archenemy of the faith, a view perhaps reinforced by surveys of U.S. academics that show psychology faculty members to be the least religious group. Given the media treatment of some advances in psychology, I can understand your parents’ concerns.

Ask ten friends what they think psychology is about, and you will probably get as many different answers. However, you may detect three major themes: first, that psychological knowledge is primarily to help people cope with mental and emotional problems; second, if they are avid magazine readers and TV watchers, that it is about the links between what is happening in our minds and brains; and third, with celebration of Darwin, that it is about how human psychological characteristics evolved from rudimentary forms elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

The first view is widely held in Christian circles. Half a century ago in North America, the Christian Association for Psychological Studies was established to provide a forum for discussions about psychology, counseling and Christian faith. Since then the majority of their activities and publications have focused on counseling and clinical psychology. The overwhelming majority of their members are affiliated with these specializations, which are evident in the Association’s journal. All for good reasons. Their primary concern is to help others, fulfilled in the day-to-day, practical concerns of counselors, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists.

This helping theme continues a nineteenth-century approach in which almost all major Christian groups assumed a seamless relationship between “psychological care” and “soul care.” In due course the meaning of “psychology” began to change, and its earlier limited scope became almost unrecognizable to a typical twenty-first-century psychology major.

Sadly, as psychology developed, its previous amicable relationship with religion began to change. First came the early-twentieth-century development of Freud’s psychoanalysis. Then came the mid-century emergence—and, for a while, dominance—of behaviorism. Coincidentally, both of these specializations enjoyed high profiles in the nonscientific popular media. For example, psychoanalytic concepts and terms such as Oedipus complex, repression and guilt complex cropped up in literature, drama and everyday speech. Behaviorist terms also became widespread: people were conditioned to do this or inhibited from doing that.

The second and third themes, linking mind with brain and tracing out the evolutionary emergence of mind, find strong support if you look at a typical twenty-first-century college or university psychology textbook. There you find many references to the biological bases of cognition and behavior. For example, consider the ninth edition of David Myers’s Psychology, the most widely used North American textbook of psychology. Of the sixteen chapters, three deal with personality, psychotherapy and social psychology; one addresses methodology; and the remaining twelve, making up 70 percent of the text, deal with psychological topics for which awareness of their neural and evolutionary roots is important. The balance is made up of other heavily biological topics such as emotion and stress.[1] So, while psychology is a professional practice in the clinics, in the universities it is a science.

Malcolm,

Thanks for the background information on the perception of psychology. I have only attended a couple of lectures so far, but I don’t get the sense that people here embrace either Freud or Skinner. They seem to lean more toward the second and third themes you mentioned, linking mind with brain and tracing the evolution of human psychology.

Ben,

I’m not surprised. I think you will find that today most of your lecturers will be grateful inheritors of what has become known as the “cognitive revolution,” which occurred as a reaction to the dominant behaviorist outlook in psychology at the middle of the last century. Howard Gardner, a psychology professor at Harvard, wrote a fascinating book on this so-called cognitive revolution. He recorded some of the recollections of Professor George Miller, a psychologist at MIT around the same time that the leading behaviorist, Professor Skinner, was at Harvard. Gardner recalls how George Miller went to a small international conference in Cambridge in the UK in 1956. Miller wrote, “I went away from the symposium with the strong conviction, more intuitive than rational, that human experimental psychology, theoretical linguistics and computer simulation of cognitive processes are all pieces of a larger whole, and that the future would see progressive elaboration and coordination of their shared concerns.”[2]

An editorial in the journal Science in 1997, reflecting on fifty years of psychology, read, “The promise that Miller envisioned in those early days has come to pass.” It went on, “The remarkable progress that has been made in recent years is beginning to generate excitement outside of the scientific community because of its relevance to our daily lives in shedding light on normal cognitive functions (such as language, memory, and planning) and on brain-related diseases (such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease).”[3] I was at that Cambridge meeting in 1956 acting as its secretary. My role was to help my research supervisor, Sir Frederic Bartlett, organize the meeting. I fully agree with George Miller’s account of what happened at that time. Many see that conference in Cambridge as the start of the cognitive revolution.

As I write this, I see that George Miller has just died at the age of ninety-two. On August 2, 2012, the New York Times noted that in 1955, psychological research was in a rut when a paper by George Miller “set off an explosion of new thinking about thinking and opened a new field of research known as cognitive psychology.”[4]

Malcolm,

With all due respect, 1956 and 1997 seem like a long time ago to me. Where is the action today?

Ben,

The cognitive revolution continues and now has, in part, merged with developments in neuroscience. For example, just today I read a report underlining how an understanding of brain processes, combined with developments in cognitive psychology, is continuing to revolutionize our understanding of mental illnesses. This report comes from a laboratory in Cambridge and is titled “New Blood-Test to Aid in Schizophrenia Diagnosis.” It quotes the lead researcher, Professor Sabine Bahn: “Schizophrenia is a complicated and challenging disease, yet current diagnostic approaches continue to be based on patient interviews and a subjective assessment of clinical symptoms. We expect [our new technique] to be used as an aid to this current process, and we hope it will provide the psychiatrist with additional confidence in their evaluation, as well as speed up the process.”[5]

I have received another report from the Academy of Medical Sciences in Britain that draws attention to the rapid advance in research of dementia. It points out that by 2040 about 80 million people will be living with dementia—a very worrying statistic and a good reason why so much effort today is being put into studying this illness, trying to understand what is happening in the brain when it occurs.[6]

Another recent report explodes a myth that has been widely held until now. People once believed that the prevalence of dementia in developing countries was low. But now an international collaboration at the Institute of Psychiatry in London has shown that past estimates have substantially ­underestimated its prevalence in low- and middle-income countries, and it is almost as common as in developed countries. My point in sharing these examples is simple: what is widely accepted at one time can quickly be overturned by the emergence of new evidence.

Malcolm,

It sounds like you’re pretty confident in the scientific approach to psychology. I’m still not quite sure. Even before I started school, I read enough to know that the views of Sigmund Freud, so dominant in the early twentieth century, are not taken very seriously by today’s psychologists. Our textbook reflects that—Freud’s views are only a handful of pages out of more than seven hundred. So while I agree that science has taught us a lot, I worry that we may put it on too high a pedestal. Even so, I am taking neuro­science as well as psychology because from my general reading I have seen how research in neuroscience is directly relevant to applications of psychology like clinical psychology, and that I am very interested in.

Ben,

I see your point. Regarding balance, I think that science, including the scientific approach to psychology, does have much to offer today’s world. However, with great success in scientific work comes the temptation to develop a misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise. As the example of changing views about dementia shows, at times we have to realize that the assertions that come from science are tentative. This point was made very recently by the President of the Royal Society of London, Lord Martin Rees, in an article titled “Keeping It Real.” Rees says, “Science isn’t dogma: its assertions are sometimes tentative, sometimes compelling. The hardest situation to portray is where there is a strong consensus but some dissent. Controversy, confrontations and skepticism about Orthodoxy have such public appeal.”[7] Current debates about the evidence for climate change are a good example of this.

Science is not something that stands alone from the rest of the world. As Martin Rees also says, “The applications and priorities of science should not be decided by scientists alone. There are political, economic and ethical dimensions.” He argues that science matters to everyone: “You can appreciate the essence of science without being a scientist, in the same way you can appreciate music without being able to read a score or play an instrument.”

I suspect that with so much media attention on developments in psychology, you in your generation will have an important part to play in doing your best to give a balanced, realistic, evidence-based account of what psychological research really is and is not producing.

Lord Rees’s theme was also taken up by one of his recent predecessors as president of the Royal Society, Sir Michael Atiyah, one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians. He commented, “There is a lot of public interest in science, and a real understanding of its benefits, but there is also a fear. This growing reaction against science—particularly its impact on the environment—has come about as the applications of science have had a greater impact on our lives. If you did all your science in the laboratory, then only a small number would care but, because we don’t, more people are questioning its impact.”[8]

When it comes to questions about how “scientific” psychology is or should aim to be, you will find a spectrum of views among Christians who have a shared faith perspective. You’re not the only one who fears that the so-called scientific approach to psychology may, at times, lead to a failure to recognize the potential contribution that psychologists can make in fields that would not claim to be scientific. Psychotherapists have to deal with immediate pressing problems and so, understandably, protest that they do not have the luxury of waiting until the latest properly designed empirical investigation into a particular kind of therapy has been completed and published.

Psychologists are not the only ones who understand human nature. Shakespeare’s plays are full of deep psychological insights into human nature. Sally Shuttleworth of Oxford University has reminded us that developmental psychology did not start with Jean Piaget but in literature. She cites how books by Dickens and the Brontes represented the child’s mind from the inside and had a huge influence on child psychology and psychiatry. Shuttleworth believes that the actual start of child psychology can be traced to Charles Darwin’s 1877 book A Biographical Sketch of an Infant.[9] Even some of the books of the Bible, such as Proverbs and Psalms, are full of profound insights into human nature.

I just received a book that describes five different approaches that Christians have taken to relating what is happening in psychology with what Christians have traditionally believed.[10] Some of the contributors support your concerns that an overly scientific approach misses important things that psychology can teach us. Other contributors feel strongly that psychology, and particularly modern psychology, has been in error by not making greater references to religion. The whole area of what is called “transformational psychology,” for example, would see the scientific approach as too limited, a view shared by some of those psychologists who are engaged primarily in clinical psychology and counseling.

 

2

What Is the Relationship Between the Mind and the Brain?

Malcolm,

I’ll admit that I do feel at least some fear when reading about studies that seem to reduce the mind, or some mental experiences, to the activity of a brain circuit.

Ben,

I understand your concerns. Nowhere is the questioning of science more necessary than when you read the dramatic reports of research on brain and mind. In December 2011, Professor John Stein, a leading Oxford ­neuroscientist, wrote, “Claims are being made about brain research that just aren’t true, and they are being accepted uncritically by the press, the public, policy makers and even the courts.”[1] He warned about the increasing dominance of reductionism. He noted that “scientists [are] picking off the relatively easy tasks of working out how little bi...