Levi Ritchie's Archive

Humanism is often today associated with atheism, perhaps in part because it rejects practices typical of many religions and part because many non-religious individuals adhere to its principles. Humanistic psychology is even at odds with other branches of psychology, claiming a special spot for mankind as purpose-driven creatures that are (usually) distinct from animals. I associate Carl Rogers, and most humanistic psychology, with restoration because of the optimistic views of humankind he held as self-actualizing beings.

The concept of the restoration in Christianity branches into a few different beliefs. Some believe it will be done almost entirely by God, and that we will be snatched away by a Rapture when the time comes. Other believe that it will be done primarily by humans on God’s behalf, with varying degrees of help. Humanistic psychology would tend, of course, to get along more with the later view. However, while Rogers might see an individual quest for each person, the Christian metanarrative sees a more broad, communal effort toward a final goal. Heaven, or a restored Earth, is something that we will reap together, rather than each entering a personal heaven.

Humanistic psychologists were also often existentialists, and therefore put a lot of emphasis on confronting death. Many of them would say that the Christian promise of eternal life is nothing more than denial and refusal to accept death as an inevitable consequence. For some individuals, this may be true. Some very difficult questions like the purpose of suffering are disregarded by some, who say things like “Well, I’ll just have to ask God when I get to heaven!” Even Jesus had to confront his own death, however. An atheist friend of mine once brought up a point that stuck with me for years. “What kind of sacrifice,” he asked, “is it to give your live when you know you’re going to come back from the dead 2 days later?” And he’s not wrong. Most people disregard Jesus’ intense prayer and fear at Gethsemane as his anticipation of the pain, not death. Perhaps, however, somewhere in the head of Jesus, who was both 100% man and 100% God, he only mostly, or only intellectually knew that he was going to die.

After all, for the claim that Jesus was entirely human to be true, he had to have experienced the fear of a permanent death. If this is true, than the existentialist claim that we must all confront death does not threaten our Christian faith, but rather gives us a new way to think about our fragile humanity. Fear need not be entirely rational. Sometimes it simply “is.”

Skinner is typically seen as an enemy of religion, and it’s true that he is not a particularly religious individual. Most of the reasoning for this comes from his views on free will and superstition. Skinner is not specifically an opponent of free will, like many past thinkers. He’s an opponent of will. Skinner believes, regardless of one’s belief in spirituality, God, or a soul, that any attempt to describe man as autonomous, aside from basic instincts, is incorrect at best and delusional at worst. As branches of Christianity are often reliant on free will to explain suffering, this causes problems among many believers.

Furthermore, behaviorism can explain prayer as superstition. Prayer, to Skinner, is always on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule; we see things happen that we prayed for, which makes us feel as if the prayer works. From a theological standpoint, there are all kinds of ways to nitpick this idea: First, we consider prayer to be asking God for help, not the direct source of help. Second, prayer is (for most people) two-way communication with God, not just a chance to ask for things. Third, most of us can tolerate an answer of “no” to our prayers without losing our faith.

But Skinner wasn’t looking to argue the merits of Christian theology. He’s just looking to explain behavior, as someone who is not a member of the Christian faith. Let’s suppose Skinner is correct, and that prayer, like all behavior, is the product of reinforcement or punishment. Obviously, few people are punished for praying, so we’ll leave that idea aside. Suppose, for a moment, that prayer is not supposed to be a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, but a fixed interval one. Consider how Jesus taught his disciples to pray in one is almost universally known as The Lord’s Prayer. Do you recall the one physical thing Jesus asks for?

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Yet Jesus also spoke of how he knew God would care for him, as he even cared for birds: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Matthew 6:26, NIV)

Why would Jesus pray for something he knew he would receive? I would suggest that we aren’t only supposed pray for miracles, but for the things we know God already gives us. In this way, our prayers, in some way, are always answered. Our requests cease to be endless begging to God for things we may or may not need, and instead become a new means of appreciating what God gives us. All good things come from God.

I associate Skinner with redemption, not because of his anti-religious beliefs (obviously) but because of proven effectiveness of behavioral treatments and the way behaviorism forces Christians to consider the origins of their behavior and think critically about their beliefs.

I hate being unoriginal, and Freud is about the most uncreative and overdone topic in the history of psychology writing assignments. Nevertheless, I can’t resist the urge this evening to defend Freud from a bit of the undue hate he gets.

I would suggest that Freud can be associated not with creation or fall, as his theories on the nature of man were mostly unsubstantiated, but with redemption. Psychoanalytic therapy laid the foundations for a healing process in which people could sew up old wounds. Though it has been suggested by critics that past traumas were often fabricated during the therapy, the psychological issues with which these experiences became associated were far from imaginary. The fact that this could even work says a lot about therapy in general: We go there not to cut the tree from which a problem hangs, but rather to find a boat (any boat) onto which it can sail away. This same idea is seen in virtually every modern therapy. Problems are addressed in the present, not through the past.

Though Freud would say psychoanalytic therapy worked because it dealt with problems in the past, its immediate effect was one of redemptive value in the present. It created a pathway through which neuroses and “hysteria” could escape and let a person feel free. It’s easy to claim that, because therapy doesn’t always “stick,” that the method is useless, but, if you’re a Christian, I would urge you to consider this: Is it so much difference from the “redemptive” experiences seen at a Church camp or other emotionally charged religious event? Both (usually) involve initial feelings of regret over some kind of “brokenness” followed by an epiphany (described by many religious devotees as the experienced love of God) and then feelings of restoration and freedom from psychosis (sin). The psychological events taking place in both scenarios are unproven and not falsifiable.

It’s because of this kind of comparison that I wonder if Freud would have many more surviving followers if he had, like many thinkers before him, spent time kissing the collective butt of mainstream Christianity and adapted his theory to support, rather than attack, religion. He didn’t do this, fortunately, so the only dogma standing in the way of his critics was that of his own followers. Even if you reject everything else Freud did and said, you have to give him brownie points for not selling out. He wasn’t a con-artist; he genuinely believed in his work. And I believe that the patients of psychoanalytic therapy do see genuine healing, even though it may be scientific hogwash.

The hostile reaction to Charles Darwin’s theory spurred arguments that it opposed the truth of scripture and denied that God created the world. Even though there are areas of scripture most people believe weren’t literal events (prophetic books come to mind), the creation story is one with which a large part of Christianity is unwilling to compromise. The sheer force of the hostility can’t be explained by biblical literalism alone, even though that’s where most of the arguments happen.

It also can’t be explained away by how it swept an argument out from under the Christian apologetics. Prior to this time, if someone challenged the existence of an omnipotent God, someone need only point to their own existence as proof. Still, proof of a uniquely Christian God didn’t exist, and your average person didn’t spend all day arguing with nonbelievers about their faith, anyway. This wasn’t the full cause of the reaction.

The truth is, people didn’t get mad at Darwin because he challenged individual verses of scripture. People were angry because evolution challenges the structure of the Christian Narrative as it has existed for thousands of years. If humans did evolve from more feral, undeveloped species of primate, then there was never a time during  which we were perfect sons and daughters of God. If there was never a time man was perfect, there was no fall. If there is no fall, there is no “redemption.” If there is no redemption, we are no longer pitiful, hopeless worms lost in the world without the light of Jesus. What did Jesus even die for, in that case?

Most people respond by adapting the narrative to fit evolution. A few others are prepared to abandon the traditional narrative altogether in favor of one in which Adam is the pre-human and Jesus is the post-human, rather than one where both Jesus and Adam are perfect sons of God. If Adam and Eve, one could argue, were already capable of sin before eating the forbidden fruit, they were not, by definition, perfect. On the other hand, if what they did was not evil because they did not yet know evil, then their act was innocent and did not contaminate us with original sin. This idea feels weird if we believe God created everything in 7 days. If we believe God created us over a longer period of time through evolution, however, this interpretation fits perfectly. Pre-human hominids were social, but largely driven by instinct and without a good understanding of what God did, then we learned good from evil and became responsible for our actions.

Darwin gets my vote as a representative of creation. However, he deserves some credit for challenging the fabric of the grand narrative itself. Darwin didn’t renounce his faith, but instead, like Descartes, revived the power of doubt instead of blind adherence to tradition as a tool for understanding God.

Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that man was naturally good, but ruined by society. On the surface, this would appear to mostly relate to the Christian concept of the fall: People were good, but then turned bad. On closer inspection, however, his views conflict with the most widely-held Christian narrative, because Rousseau believed that people were not BORN into evil and that the problems society created could be overcome. This is more in line with the concept of an ongoing creation, or one that states that man didn’t actually fall, but rather that the fall is a concept invented to explain the broken state of man. In actuality, someone who held this view (not necessarily Rousseau) would say, the act of disobedience committed by Adam and Eve in the garden was not the original sin, because they were incapable of comprehending good and evil before partaking of huge forbidden fruit. It was their first, intended step toward further human development, and “creation” was still an act in-progress.

Rousseau said man was born free, but still put in chains, perhaps implying that our good nature by creation is still intact and is not destroyed at some fundamental level but by specific worldly obstacles. The imago dei (image of God) is not shattered, but more like a sculpture still being chiseled. Jesus, then, was an example for the future of humankind, rather than a flashback to the “perfection” of Adam. To put it more briefly, Rosseau’s views could be seen as relating to creation if you held that the entire Grand Narrative was “Creation, and then more creation.”

Giovanni Pico, whose books for burned for being heretical, believed that the ideas of man should be respected in the name of understanding. The idea that a Christian point of view didn’t need to be at odds with the point of view of everyone else didn’t sit well with many in the church, but it fits one of the central ideas of restoration: Peace. Pico also thought that humans had the ability to choose to make good decisions or bad, and that ultimately rationality and intelligence would lead to good decision-making.

He further argued that different philosophical viewpoints, which seemed contradictory, would be part of one whole if they were properly understood. Giovanni Pico saw the need for peacemakers in a world made hostile for intellectuals. He fits an interpretation of the end times that doesn’t involve a bloody war and a rapture to save those few truly faithful, but rather the reconciliation of all mankind underneath the grace of God. Unlike many thinkers of his time, he doesn’t have a pessimistic view of the secular world. It’s possible that, were he alive today, he would fit in among universalist Christian scholars (those who believe that God will save or has saved everyone, including non-Christians).

In true fashion of a peacemaker himself, he analyzed opposing viewpoints in order to find common ground. Had he lived in a world needing diplomacy, he would have made a great diplomat, prepared to give ground and compromise not just in property, but in intellect. Pico displayed the kind of humility the world needs to come to peace after thousands of years of war. It’s a shame he died young instead of being confronted by the Church. Like with Christ, there are few people who could hate someone unwilling to hate them back.

The creation story is a topic of great importance to the Christian narrative and, in the outside world, controversy. Young Earth Creationists are often offended by those, Christian or not, who believe humans came to be as a result of evolution, not solely creation by God in 7 days. Much of what we believe it means to be human comes from our understanding of what it means to be made by God and in God’s image. When the need to reconcile these two points of view arises, teachers, youth ministers, and pastors often try to bring these groups together by pulling discussion away from origins and toward function: What is it we do as human creatures and what purpose do the things that make up our bodies serve? This is exactly how Aristotle believed the world should be known.

The function of an object, especially one in nature, can be broken down into sub-functions that are easier to understand. We know that myelin allows nervous signals to travel faster and make us more agile and adaptable to situations. We know that blood carries resources from place to place to ensure each other part of the body can function optimally. From a purely functional point of view, the argument of our origins becomes irrelevant because we can be impressed with what God accomplished either way.

However, Aristotle’s thinking might make man appear to be like animals, because we function in many of the same ways. There is a point at which the traditional Christian narrative cannot rely solely on empirical observation of the world. Humans are certainly different from animals in many observable ways, but there is no way to prove that we have an “official” connection to the divine. Aristotle, were he alive and in the business of commenting on religion, might say we can learn about God by observing humans, citing us being made in God’s image as an example. In my opinion, it’s a stretch to assume that being in God’s image means our physique should be the same, but the point stands. Aristotle’s way of looking at the world, as well as the impact he had on future sciences, probably impacts the way people look at the origins of man more than it does any other part of our Grand Narrative.