Imagine building a cathedral with just a hammer and nails. How might theologians today continue to build the grand cathedral where human knowledge meets divine revelation by implementing the tools of psychological science? Experimental psychologist Justin Barrett joins theologian Miroslav Volf for a conversation on how psychology can contribute to theology. This episode is made possible by Blueprint1543.
Imagine building a cathedral with just a hammer and nails. How might theologians today continue to build the grand cathedral where human knowledge meets divine revelation by implementing the tools of psychological science? Experimental psychologist Justin Barrett joins theologian Miroslav Volf for a conversation on how psychology can contribute to theology. This episode is made possible by Blueprint1543.
Introduction
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yep, we’ve heard that before. But imagine trying to make that work. Imagine, for instance, the visionary builder of a medieval cathedral… building it only with a hammer and nails.
And you know there’s an analogy coming here. Suppose the cathedral you’re trying to build is nothing less than the human inquiry into the nature of the cosmos and the nature of the God who created them—from the dark matter at the edges of the expanding universe, to the recycled space dust that’s found its way into the pristine fingernails of a newborn baby.
Artfully articulating the nature of reality with nuance and care—saying something true and meaningful about God, people, and thriving in the world we share—the task of theology could be just like that extravagant building project.
But imagine if the theologian only had one tool.
Experimental psychologist Justin Barrett tells a story like this to make a suggestion to theologians to consider how they might incorporate the tools of science—and psychological science in particular—into the building of their theological cathedral.
Justin is long-time researcher in cognitive science of religion. He’s author of a number of books, including Why Would Anyone Believe in God? and Born Believers: The Science of Childhood Religion. He just edited the Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Religion.
And in 2019 he co-founded Blueprint1543, an organization that’s bringing theologians and scientists together to accelerate better contributions to life’s biggest questions.
And today we’re launching a series of episodes on For the Life of the World that will explore the tools of psychological sciences that might contribute to a deeper and greater theological understanding of the world. By bringing a science-engaged theology to bear on the most pressing matters for how to live lives worthy of our humanity.
Throughout the series, we’re featuring conversations with psychologists who can offer insightful tools for crafting the cathedral where human knowledge meets divine revelation.
About Justin Barrett
Justin L. Barrett is an honorary Professor of Theology and the Sciences at St Andrews University School of Divinity. An experimental psychologist by training, he is concerned with the scientific study of religion and its philosophical as well as theological implications. He is the author of a number of books including Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, Born Believers: The Science of Childhood Religion, and Religious Cognition in China: Homo Religiosus and the Dragon.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Acknowledgements
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.
This transcript was generated automatically, and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit blueprint1543.org
Justin Barrett: Are there moments in which normative discussions of what is a good life that theologians and philosophers engage in, when is it that they could be helpfully informed by psychological science in theology and philosophy? Often the argument floor or the justification of particular visions of a flourishing life often make use of psychological claims fairly uncritically.
So what do I mean by psychological claims there? I mean claims about how human minds work, how emotions work, how our social relationships work. We then the theologians, how do we know that they work this way? Well, because some very clever person writing a couple thousand years ago said so, and it fits with our intuitions as well. That's a good starting point.
But in psych science, we call those hypotheses. We don't call those conclusions.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We've all heard that one before, but imagine trying to make that work. Imagine, for instance, the visionary builder of a medieval cathedral building it only with hammer and nails. And you know there's an analogy coming here. Suppose the cathedral that you're trying to build is nothing less than the human inquiry into the nature of the cosmos and the nature of the God who created them, from the dark matter at the edges of the expanding universe to the recycled space dust that's found its way into the pristine fingernails of a newborn baby. Artfully articulating the nature of reality with nuance, care, saying something true and meaningful about God, people thriving in the world that we all share. This task of theology could be just like that extravagant building project, but imagine if the theologian only had one tool.
Experimental psychologist, Justin Barrett, tells a story like this to make a suggestion to theologians to consider how they might incorporate the tools of science and psychological science in particular into the building of their theological cathedral. Justin is a longtime researcher in cognitive science of religion. He's author of a number of books, including Why Would Anyone Believe In God and Born Believers: the Science of Childhood Religion, and he just edited The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Religion. And in 2019, he co-founded Blueprint 1543, an organization that's bringing theologians and scientists together to accelerate better contributions to life's biggest questions.
And today we're launching a series of episodes on For the Life of the World that will explore the tools of psychological sciences that might contribute to a deeper and greater theological understanding of the world by bringing a science-engaged theology to bear on the most pressing matters for how to live lives worthy of our humanity. Throughout the series, we'll be featuring conversations with psychologists who can offer insightful tools for crafting the cathedral where human knowledge meets divine revelation. And we're starting off with this conversation between Justin Barrett and Miroslav Volf.
Thanks for listening today, friends.
Miroslav Volf: Justin, fantastic that you can be on our show here.
Justin Barrett: I'm really happy to be here,
Miroslav Volf: How do you think that say purposes of human life, the normative question, the normative vision of human life—how do you think it bears, upon applied psychology in clinical kinds of settings from psychology as a science?
Justin Barrett: Yes, let's talk about psychological science as primarily a descriptive and explanatory enterprise. Explanatory though, in a particular sort of narrowed scope, right? There's certain types of causal explanations that, you know, there are only certain ones that are kinda part of what we're doing as psychological science. And then just like applying those insights, those descriptive and causal insights to any kind of technology, they can be applied to these human technologies potentially, including clinical practice, but also in education, in industrial and organizational environments, and lots of different ways, right?
Psychological science, which while certainly going to be carrying certain kinds of values and normative perspectives, is sort of more deliberately focused on, well, how do humans just work? How do we think, what are our feelings like? Can we get a handle on that scientifically? And then let that inform either instrumental or normative types of concerns about the good life.
And at least from my perspective, at that point, then it becomes a really good resource for theologians to help shape that discussion of what's a flourishing life, what's the life we're called to do. And psychology is weaker for not being explicit about those types of considerations.
The danger I see, and the reason why I think people, especially from particular faith traditions have felt uncomfortable around psychology and see it as a competing worldview, is that when it comes to a lot of these applications, I think many of those working in psychology have assumed the normative dimension without articulating it clearly and defending it.
So there is a presumption about what counts as a good life. And often psychologists don't specify what that means. And if they do, they don't necessarily defend it in a robust sort of way. They just assume it. And psychology as an academic discipline, if we are to trust the sociologists of this sort of thing, is among the most secular of academic disciplines. Depending on who measures it, sometimes the most.
Partly it's its history. It was popularized by characters like Sigmund Freud, right? Who was not just not religious. He was anti-religious in many respects, right? And B.F. Skinner, similar. So these characters who popularized and captured the public imagination about what psychology could be really were in some ways trying to offer an alternative to theological visions of human life and that's part of psychology's heritage. There is a tendency among psychologists to, even who think that they're just doing the science side of things, to try to keep ghosts outta the machine. So any of the sort of religious talk about our spirits, our souls, even our volition sometimes, is considered out of bounds.
Now that's a sociological kind of observation. It need not be that way. There are plenty of Christians who are very good psychological scientists and are much more deliberate in thinking about how their Christian faith informs doing psychological science. And we've sometimes seen this, especially in recent decades, lead to the development of areas of psychology like positive psychology, where it's hard not to notice once you start getting to know who are the main players in this, that Christians are kinda overrepresented in these domains compared to others. And it's easy to see why, because they're drawing from their own faith traditions around topics like gratitude, forgiveness, hope, that these are really important parts of what it means to be human, and they deserve, sort of, reason to treatment by the scientific methods as well.
Oh, I certainly think they do. You know, just in terms of living the life of a psychologist, even if my focus is on psychological science, not on, necessarily the applied side, I'm going find myself drawn to particular types of questions and problems because they seem important to me. Well, why do they seem important to me?
Well, they're somehow consistent with what I regard as either my personal purpose or the purpose of humans, right? There's a lot of focus on pathology, psychopathology, for instance, as a field, because there's a sense that whether it's tacit or well articulated, that, well, when things are going wrong emotionally, when we're not well regulated, when we're not responding to our environment well, we're somehow not living into our purpose as well as we ought to be.
So there's definitely teleology baked in and I guess my encouragement for my colleagues in the psychological sciences is just to be clearer about that and where that teleological vision is coming from, because often that's just not clear. What's it coming from? A consensus, you know, that some association of psychological science, or psychiatric science for that matter, have determined quite literally on the basis of some kind of convention where we vote and decide "ok, this is what it means to live a good life because we voted and therefore we've arrived at a conclusion." There's something not terribly satisfying about that, it seems to me.
Miroslav Volf: going to think well about the purposes of our lives.
Justin Barrett: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And so the critique of especially applied psychologists who are sort of smuggling in or maybe slithering in, I'm not sure which verbiage is right here, but some kinda of view of what the good life is, without carefully scrutinizing that, is a fair critique of psychology.
There is, of course, the other side of this and that is, well, are there moments in which normative discussions of what is a good life that theologians and philosophers engage in? When is it that they could be helpfully informed by psychological science? And I think there are those moments, too. Where often, at least I read in theology and philosophy, often the the argument for, or the justification of, particular visions of a flourishing life often make use of psychological claims fairly uncritically.
So what do I mean by psychological claims, there? I mean claims about how human minds work, how emotions work, how our social relationships work, and how do we know? We then the theologians, how do we know that they work this way? Well, because some very clever person writing a couple thousand years said so, and it kind of fits with our intuitions as well. Well That's a good starting point.
But in psych science, we call those hypotheses. We don't call those conclusions. I guess my question back is when are those moments in theological inquiry on the normative project where the psych science can actually be used?
Yeah. Yeah, I've, for several years, been involved with a project where we're trying to, we call it the TheoPysch project, a project where we've been trying to introduce psychological science to theologians and vice versa. Not so that they will become psychologists but so that they've got another tool in their belt in doing theology. Theologians have lots of disciplinary tools at their disposal. They're kind of the ultimate interdisciplinarians. At least they could be, right? Because they know a little bit about philosophy and textual studies and history and linguistics and sometimes anthropology and archeology and all kinds of things.
I thought, well, psychology is another good tool for the belt. So the first one is, is the theologian making, what you might call, just descriptive claims about how human minds work. And you might think that doesn't... well, that's not what theologians do. Except that it turns out they do it quite a bit.
There is that descriptive face of theology that has to make certain claims about the lived world out there that people are in, especially in areas like pastoral and other areas of practical theology, and theological anthropology as well. There are lots of claims about, well, what's the nature of a human? What are its features? What does rationality look like? What's the role of language in human thought? I mean there are al psychological and many theologians doing that have drawn upon the psychology of the times to do that, even fairly explicitly. But we don't see that, I don't think as much in contemporary theology drawn on contemporary psychological science, as much as maybe the ancients did where the division amongst the disciplines was much more collapsed, right? Where they were all some types of each other.
So that's that descriptive. The second question was, are you making a normative claim? Are you making a claim about how things ought to be, which ought to be doing? What is the good life? And using descriptive claims as evidence or support for that argument.
So then the third question I see in theological texts often claims about, for instance, what the sacraments do to people, to individuals and the community, or what prayer does, or what worship does. And that's often the language; as if there's this thing worship, and then it has these consequences. It does these things. It's almost agentified—it's personified in some ways. It need not be. Sometimes it's again offered as a description of a causal sort of relationship between certain kinds of actions or a text and what it does.
And then finally, the fourth question was, in constructing a theological argument, are you relying on intuitions that, and there's a subpoint in here, that you take to be representative of general people's intuitions.
And here, I'm leaning into the insights that for, you know, that has controversially sweat some areas of philosophy, especially through what's known as experimental philosophy. Experimental philosophers have started reexamining the intuitions of philosophers to see, well, are they as universal as the philosophers lead on, lead us to believe? Because they often take, well it seems that as very strong premises that play important roles in their argument structures. And what if it doesn't seem that? You know, X or P. What if that doesn't seem to be the case? Or if that seeming more interestingly is importantly conditioned by things that really shouldn't matter to the argument? So it's not just philosophers. Not very careful thinkers, not very educated people can have wrong seemings. Their intuitions might not be properly tuned.
Okay, but what if it's not education, or intellect, that's at play, but it's your cultural condition that's at play. And suddenly your seemings are very different, just because you're from a different cultural environment, not a different intellectual sort of strength. That might make us reexamine those intuitions that we're using as premises.
And so far as that applies to philosophical kinds of arguments, it seems to me that it could apply to theological ones as well. So, we might think there is an analog to experimental philosophy that you might call experimental theology that could be developed that actually looks at theologians intuitions and see, are those intuitions, are they of the right sort that we should put so much confidence in them?
So those are the four questions: description, normative claims that are supported by description, effects, and then arguing from intuitions. But maybe there are more. Maybe I've missed some of them.
Justin Barrett: that's right. that's right.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think that's right. And I don't disagree with anything that you've said there. Psychology needs to do its own inspecting. And I think that's where we started. Psychology often, again especially, well, all of it—the sort of psychological science as well as the practical side as bringing in certain kinds of normative commitments—is often less examined than it ought to be.
So definitely that's true. And the point about it being culturally conditioned, absolutely true. I think where there's a little bit of a difference here is that, at least as I see it and certainly how I've been taught psychological science, is the science of psychology has a great self-awareness of how we can't trust ourselves. The entire method is built around, to put in theological terms, a great conviction about total depravity, in that we can't trust any individual psychologist to actually get the story right, which is why we don't, even though in the beginning of psychology we relied a lot on introspection.
And it was much more an extension of philosophy of the time, but we've moved away from those methods because we've learned they don't work very well. They're not very reliable. And we've created a, what you might think of as a distributed epistemology, right? That's based on the idea of you can't trust me as a psychological scientist, and you shouldn't trust me. You must force me, first of all, to gather data which means I'm going to be bringing in input from other people necessarily. And how I gather the data, I need to be able to articulate to you, at least I should, with enough clarity, that then you can go and check my work behind me to make sure you get the same results I do.
I take it that kind of methodological, we think of it as rigor, but sort of exercise, is something that's different about the sciences compared to most of the humanities disciplines where there isn't that same type of expectation. And so in some ways it does protect us from some, even if not all, of the accusation of, "yeah but you're culturally situated." Yeah, and I know that. And that's why you don't trust me. You trust sort of the collective, first of all. And second, "yeah, and that's why I gather data." So if my impression is, "well, people think the following way," that's not good enough. Now I go out and I check it with lots of people thinking that way. And ideally, I do it across cultures, I do it developmentally, I do it under different conditions, and then I draw a conclusion about what people's intuitions are or how they think, or how their memory systems work. So I don't rely as heavily on either my experiences or authority sources. So that's one of the differences, is difference in emphasis. It's not a difference in kind, I think. We often pretend it's a difference in kind, but I think it's more a difference in emphasis.
That's Yeah. That's right.
right. That's right.
Yeah. In fact, I saw support for this view in your book, For the Life of the World. And I think you're reflecting on some of Paul's writings with regard to just how badly we know ourselves; how even our own internal lives are not accessible to ourselves, and I went, "oh, wow. Absolutely, that's a psychologically astute observation. We don't ourselves well." So we need these other methods out there to even get at ourselves.
Well, I think I've got good news for you. And that is, at least, it sounds plausible, psychologically And, and psychology has resources from a couple of different angles on this. One is the perception field where there is a fair consensus at this point that we know that what we perceive in the world around us really is shaped by our expectations.
We sometimes talk about top-down influences, or sometimes they use the language of "priors" and other kinds of expectations, really do shape what we perceive. And so it's entirely plausible that by coming in with a different conceptual frame, you experience even things like odors in a different way. And there are plenty of demonstrations that this is the case, right?
Food experts and wine tasters, because they've built up certain kinds of expectations and expertise, they actually experience these things differently. There are sort of trivial examples of this too, or sound like trivial. For me, they're important, like, my wife is allergic to hazelnuts, and so the smell of hazelnuts is not a pleasant aroma to me because I know it's poison to my wife.
I've had to learn that, right? And so, no, it's a negative thing even though for a lot of people it's a positive thing and for me it used to be a positive thing, but now it's negative cause it carries very different meanings. So I think you're on safe ground. Perception science will get us there. And also, state dependent memories will get us there. So a lot of our memories and all other information processing is emotionally latent and we're more likely to attend to features of information that's mood congruent, we will say. So the depressed person pays more attention to reasons to be depressed.
So I think you're on safe ground there. Now I want to see somebody go out and run the experiment because that would be really cool.
Yeah, no, that sounds really great. And look, I think this is a good example: the point I tried to make with the four questions and with this encouragement of theologians is not to try to get theologians to become psychologists.
I think that's an unfair expectation. Y'all have a big enough job. I've tried to encourage theologians more to do what theologians do really well, and that is, I sometimes have used the metaphor of being like the master builder at a building site, of building a cathedral or something like that, and you have all of these specialists who you bring in at the right time to do the right job.
You don't have to be an expert masonry worker or a finished carpenter or whatever fine skilled craftsmen. What you need is a big vision and an understanding of what these different craftsmen do, what they do well, and what their limitations are. And then you can bring them onto your building site So I think there's an asymmetry here. Because we're very collegial type people in the environment we work in. Well, there's the psychology side and the theology side. "no, no, no, no. Theology gets all the sides. And psychology has a space within that." It's a reductive discipline necessarily. That's its strength. And I don't think that psychologists need to be ashamed of that. It's necessarily reductive, and that's ok. Theology is not reductive. It's expansive. It can put all of the pieces together, and we need people who do that job well. And part of my encouragement for theologians is, part of doing that job well, is to know what craftsmen are available to you that you can bring in to do these specialty jobs maybe better than you can do because they sure can't do the big jobs you're doing and that frees you up to do that broader, normative, descriptive and instrumental job, hitting all of those things all at the same. So I hope that takes the pressure off of the theologian from feeling like they need to know all of these areas. Now they just need to know about these areas and the tools that are available to them to be able to synthesize them.
But I think you're probably right when you are leaning towards, this is gonna take collaboration and it's going to require more scientists of various sorts, especially psychological scientists in this context, to step up to at least become more theologically conversant so that they can engage with theologians and they can understand what is the grand project and then what's my place in it?
right? that's right? So what I'm hearing is you're saying I can be a theologian too, huh?
I are. Oh, that's great. That's great. Well then, I look forward to that honorary degree from a Yale Divinity School. No, I'm with you.
Miroslav Volf: I think that's right. And I guess that's part of my encouragment for other human scientists. It's to go ahead and, with appropriate humility, step into those roles.
Oh, I was just gonna say that I think we just started and I think it's very important for the sake of the wellbeing and flourishing of our world to have these kinds of conversations. And I would say selfishly from the perspective of our own discipline that it needs to be enriched by the deep wisdom that can be had from folks like you, Justin. Thank you.
Justin Barrett: Oh, it's great to be here and thanks for having me. I hope that this is the first of many such conversations.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured experimental psychologist, Justin Barrett, and theologian, Miroslav Volf. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. Special thanks to our friends at Blueprint 1543. Visit Blueprint 1543.org for more information on how theology might engage the sciences.
And for more information on the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, visit us online at faith.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. So thank you for listening today, and we'll be back with more soon.