Faith, Psychology, and Human Nature

Periodically, undergraduate psychology students enrolled in a course dealing with the relation of the Christian faith to their science interview me. As a Christian naturalist, I am, it seems, an exotic specimen. Here’s a compilation of some of the sessions:

Question 1: How can a belief in human personhood (a human being as a rational, conscious agent capable of making choices, having limited but real freedom, being morally accountable, reflective, creative, of a unified identity across situations and across situations) be reconciled with the conception of man as the product of causal laws (whether they be physiological, genetic, cultural, historical etc.)? If these views cannot be reconciled, why not?

Our conceptions of freedom and responsibility are complex and not necessarily coherent. They are not theoretical concepts, devised with a view to consistency; they arise out of ordinary human experience, where they serve different purposes in different contexts.

I think the “compatibilist” account of freedom is generally adequate: a free choice is one that has the “right sort” of causes: With respect to freedom, what more could I ask for than that my choices be caused by my deliberative process, involving my very own, reflectively considered, beliefs and desires?

However, the idea of responsibility is more problematic: Part of our idea of responsibility appears to be that our choices be caused by our desires and beliefs, i.e. that they be free as compatibilism understands freedom. And part of our idea of responsibility coheres with this, viz.,. that a person is responsible for what she does just if her behavior is “sensitive to reasons;” i.e. she would have chosen differently if she had relevantly different desires and beliefs. But another part of our idea of responsibility seems to require that human beings be “agent causes,” i.e. that there are no antecedent events that cause our choices. But no material thing, and thus no human being, can be an agent cause.

My view moves along the lines of saying that while we are not—and, as material beings, could not possibly be—agent causes, over time we can become increasingly good material “simulations” of them, to the extent that much of what matters about us is explainable as due to our free choices.

Question 2: Regardless of whether one has a deterministic or a humanistic (or theological) view of a human being, it is safe to say that people are being held responsible for their actions in all societies. Yet if one’s behavior is completely determined, as some scientists claim, how can we be held responsible for it?

I don’t believe determinism is true, but I don’t think it makes any difference in this context. We are completely enmeshed in the cause and effect structures of nature, so our choices are no less caused than other macroscopic events in the world.

So, how can we be held responsible for our choices if they are caused? I think we need to distinguish ordinary, human responsibility—a responsibility appropriate for creatures—from an absolute responsibility appropriate only for an agent cause, i.e., for God. Any attribution of responsibility to a human being needs to take account of the fact that we do not ultimately create ourselves; our rational choices are caused by our beliefs and desires, some of which are prior to any choices we make. We cannot be completely responsible for what we are; and what we do depends in part on what we are, so we have only a relative kind of responsibility. (This places constraints on what it would be right to do to a person by way of punishment: If no ‘ultimate’ responsibility, then no ‘ultimate’ punishment)

Question 3: We can say that determinism hasn’t thoroughly permeated the society, and that people in general do recognize that human beings make choices freely, and are therefore responsible for making the wrong ones (think of breaking laws and suffering legal consequences). However, if a deterministic view of the person prevails in the end, do you think this will bring an end to holding people responsible for their actions? Can any society truly exist if everyone is left alone to do whatever one is “determined” to do?

Among the causes of a person’s choices and behavior are his beliefs and desires, and what he believes and desires at any point is in part an effect of what other people have said and done. The fact that a person’s behavior is caused does not imply that it cannot be affected by social constraints. (The fact that someone is caused—or even causally determined—to do something doesn’t mean he was fated to do it, that he would have done it no matter what anyone else said or did, that he would have done it even if he had no reason to do it, or strong reasons to not do it.)

From my point of view, the worry is that the incompatibilist view will persuade people they are less responsible that they actually are, or that they will not consider it worthwhile to make the effort to become more free, more morally responsible.

If we have scientific findings that say our choices are caused, and a philosophical theory that says caused choices cannot be free, why would anyone reject the science and hold to the philosophical theory? Why would anyone have more confidence in a philosophical theory than in scientific findings?

Question 4: What is the evolutionary perspective on this issue?

Evolutionary theory stresses the fact that humans are to a high degree adapted for social life. We are “hard wired” to care a great deal about what others think, say, and do; to want to cooperate with others; to be somewhat altruistic; and to have intense, action-motivating emotions connected to perceptions of human suffering, and to unfairness, inequity, injustice, etc.

Question 5: Some Christians claim that scientific determinism is compatible with the Christian doctrine of predestination. God has predetermined every detail in His divine plan. The causal laws are simply the means by which God works out His plan. Human freedom is an illusion.

That’s an extreme version of predestination, isn’t it? One might say instead that predestination is a matter of God acting efficaciously to bring human beings to saving faith in Christ, i.e., that God’s choices about whom to do this for are necessary and sufficient for the person to have that faith. One need not move from “God decides who to save” to “All events are intended by God.” In general, I don’t think there’s a tight connection between the general (philosophical) issue of freedom and responsibility, and the (theological) issue of God’s role in salvation. We could be completely free, but still lack the ability to do what is required for salvation.

I believe that God’s acting upon a person is necessary to bring her to faith in Christ, but we should assume the way this usually occurs is by persons of faith—the body of Christ—bringing the gospel to her. God principally works in this world not “magically” but through us.

Question 6: The question is: if we can’t help but do what we do, does this not imply not that we need to be helped rather than punished for our behavior (as some humanists claim), but that no help would help, since our actions had already been predetermined? In this case, how can God hold us responsible for our sins? Is there an alternative way of looking at this? Please elaborate.

I think that most people who have this view about salvation are also compatibilists; i.e., they believe that a choice can be both free and caused. At least I was when I believed it.

Note, though, that a compatibilist cannot accept these questions at face value; they tend to have incompatibilism built in as an implicit assumption. The compatibilist will resist your move from “I was caused to do x” to “I can’t help doing x;” he’ll say you were caused to do x, but if things had been different, e.g., if you had better information, or had deliberated further, or had different desires, etc. then you would not have done it. (versus: you would have done it no matter what: you were fated to do it.) The compatibilist will also reject the implicit idea that causes always compel. Your beliefs and desires cause your choices; they don’t force you to do things. Various things cause you to believe what you believe and to want what you want; but it is odd to describe these causes as forcing you to believe and desire as you do. If you choose to buy pizza because you want to get something to eat, and you believe that the best way to satisfy this desire is by buying pizza, then, at face value, you were not forced to buy pizza, irrespective of whether your reasons (beliefs and desires) cause your choices. We might ascertain that you have a pizza-eating compulsion; this discovery would lead us to reverse the judgment and conclude that your choice was not free: you would have chosen to buy pizza even if you had very good reasons not to. A compulsive desire is a cause of the wrong sort, so far as freedom is concerned. It’s there being a cause of the wrong sort, one that renders you insensitive to reasons, not there being a cause per se, that robs you of freedom.

But, having said all this on behalf of “compatibilist Calvinism,” I don’t think it works. If an event happens because it’s what God intends to happen, then God, and no one else, is responsible for it. If determinism were true, then all responsibility would be God’s and effectively none of it would be ours. If you do something because your beliefs and desires cause you to do it, but you have these beliefs and desires because someone else caused you to have them, with the intention of your doing it, where her intention guarantees you will do it, then it is more her action than yours. Were that person God, none of the responsibility would be yours. But determinism is not true; not everything that happens is intended by God (or even foreknown). There is a kind of responsibility appropriate to rational creatures. Still, God created the world with its initial conditions and causal laws, and thus is responsible for what happens, though to a lesser degree than if determinism were true. It seems to me that God has so devised the world that God and creatures share responsibility for what creatures do.

However, the bottom line is that God does not hold us responsible for our sins: if he did we’d be sunk. But Christ died for the sins of the world. There can’t be blame or punishment left over. I don’t think there’s a way out of these dilemmas that does not accept that. One aspect of what the crucified God means is that God assumes responsibility for his creatures’ wrongdoing.

Question 7: Other Christians claim that we are truly free only if and when we act out of our God-given identity, our character. We are not free when we succumb to external pressures. In my mind, the question remains: if our character and our identity had already been predetermined, and we are only free when we act out of that identity, isn’t freedom in the ordinary sense (having genuine alternatives to chose from) lost? When we sin, acting out of our God-given identity, does this not make God the author of sin? Again, how can He then hold us responsible? Is better then not to be free (not act out of our identity), and simply follow God’s laws (external pressure)? What is your opinion on these two positions and how would you tackle the questions raised? Is there another way to look at this dilemma? Can we be free and not free at the same time? If so, how? How do you reconcile, if at all, causal laws by which our body operates with the notion of real freedom? How does the evolutionary perspective on persons fit into theological notions of free will?

First, why believe that there is such a thing as a God-given identity? It seems to me that there are some pretty general things that God wants for human beings: he wants us to trust him, to love one another as we love ourselves, to have meaningful, interesting lives, to be happy, to be responsible persons, and so on. But I assume that God wants us to decide for ourselves what to become and responsibly to pursue the ends we’ve chosen. The alternative seems to be that God has some sort of semi-secret, detailed blueprint that we are supposed to figure out.

On my view, we can be free only if our choices are caused by our own, reflectively considered beliefs and desires, i.e., we’re free to the extent that we are rational agents. If that is our generic identity as persons, then it’s true that we are free only insofar as we act in accord with our identity. But that amounts to the uninteresting fact that to be free you have to be free.

By the way, though, I find it strange that anyone would think we are not free when we “succumb to external pressures.” Suppose Prof. W. is broke, and you offer him $100 for an A in the course. He knows he should not accept the bribe, but he succumbs to temptation. Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing we think he should be blamed for? And if we think he is to blame, don’t we think he is morally responsible for doing it, and that it was a free choice on his part? (On the other hand if to “succumb to external pressures” is simply to be caused to do something in a way that renders your beliefs and desires irrelevant, then what you do is not free, and perhaps not an action at all. But what the compatibilist won’t buy is characterizing your own reasoned desires and beliefs as “external pressures.”)

Question 8: Where does, in your opinion, human responsibility originate? Can you reconcile, and in what ways, theological views and the views of evolutionary psychology with regards to human responsibility?

We are responsible because we act for reasons (beliefs and desires) and our choices can be influenced by rational deliberation. A responsible person is someone you can reason with; she’s responsive to reasons. Dogs, cats, and small children are not responsible because giving them good reasons to do something does not suffice to get them to do it. They have to be dealt with by other means, involving non-rational constraints, training, physical force, and so forth.

But, as I say above, we are not ultimately responsible because we never escape a causal history that traces back to desires and beliefs that are simply “given,” not the products of rationally chosen processes of inquiry and reflection. (Perhaps here the distinction to make is between being responsible—which we are—and having unlimited culpability—which we don’t have.) We never directly choose what to desire or what to believe; we choose what to do in light of those reasons; and we choose, or ought to choose, to put ourselves in the position of acquiring only true beliefs and good desires. So we are partially, not totally, responsible for the reasons for which we act. Only God can be responsible in this ultimate sense: everything about God is what God freely chooses to be, except of course when he makes himself vulnerable to us, as the Christian faith claims he does.

Question 9: From an evolutionary perspective, how would you describe the origins of morality? How is this view, if at all, compatible with the Christian view that morality originates with God and is innate in human beings who are created in the image of God? Basically, if values are derived from this world, how can any society (or any man) hold the others accountable for their actions? Who is to say that certain values are better than others if there is no ultimate authority, if there are no ultimate, transcendental values, against which to judge human behavior? If we reject the God-established normative standards of behavior, and insist that it is through the evolution of culture that we inherited our values, are we not left with cultural relativism? And isn’t it obvious that some cultural practices are superior?

Contrast three issues:

(1) What is the truth about morality? E.g., is it right to smother my roommate to make her snoring stop?

(2) What makes the truth about morality what it is; e.g. why is it morally wrong to smother your roommate to make her stop snoring?

(3) Why do human beings have the capacity to know the truth about morality, and why are we motivated to act on it; e.g. why do we find the idea of your suffocating your roommate so horrible?

Evolutionary theory has nothing to say directly relevant to the first question or the second. It addresses the third question only. (Analogy: “What’s the mathematical truth, e.g., what’s the solution to the equation 1 + 1 = ?” vs. “Why is the mathematical truth what it is, e.g., why is it true that 1+1=2?” vs. “Why can human beings know that 1+1=2?”)

The typical evolutionary view is that human beings have the capacity to acquire moral concepts, make moral judgments, engage in moral reasoning, and (especially) to have and act on moral emotions, because natural selection favors creatures that have these capacities; they are important adaptations for social life. (Note that for evolutionary psychology, the crucial changes our pre-human ancestors underwent after they departed the main chimpanzee line five or six million years ago were adaptations to the social, not the natural, environment.)

However, an evolutionary answer to question (3) might have indirect relevance for question (2): Certain kinds of explanations might have implications about the nature of moral knowledge and its object, e.g., that, given its nature and origins, it is not a grasp of some sort of transcendent reality.

Does morality originate in God? Some Christians think moral principles are like commands God gives, and thus that morality originates in God in a direct way; but this is not the main line of Christian thought about the nature of morality. Most Christians who have thought much about it say morality depends on human nature, and thus originates with God, the creator of humanity, but only indirectly. This traditional view says that if we find out what human nature is, we can draw conclusions about what we ought to do.

Evolutionary psychology is in some respects on board with this: the human moral capacity is a feature of a universal human nature. This contrasts with views that describe morality as being culturally relative. But evolutionary theory does not suppose that we can infer what we ought to do from a description of human nature. (No more than an evolutionary or psychological explanation of how we can do math can tell us what’s true in math.)

I see morality as originating with human beings; it’s a result of how we evolved, not something handed down from God. I think of God as being interested in morality only because God cares about persons, and morality involves constraints on how we treat persons. God cares about morality not for its own sake but only insofar as it coincides with what’s good for the human beings he loves, and serves his purpose of having a personal relationship with us. (Sin should not be understood as infraction of a moral law, but as failure to trust God.) And I think our innate morality can and should be criticized and modified from the perspective of the Christian gospel. I imagine Jesus was doing something like this when he asked, “Who is my neighbor?” (It should also be criticized and modified from a general perspective of rationality.)

Question 10: What do you think of survival (that is, reproductive success that leads to survival of the species) as the ultimate value? Do you see any problems with Skinner, or evolutionary psychology, claiming that reproductive success is the ultimate value by which all other values should be judged? Does the end, in this sense, justify the means (think Hitler and the preservation of Aryan culture)?

I don’t see either of these research programs—Skinner’s zany personal pontifications aside—as having implications about what is valuable. At most they might tell us why we value what we do. (As a theory of the mind, behaviorism is defunct, anyway.)

Evolutionary theory says that many (but surely not all) human characteristics can be understood as adaptations, and that the primary explanation of how we acquired these adaptations involves natural selection. Human beings have a characteristic because, in the past, creatures who had it were more likely to reproduce than creatures lacking it, and it was a heritable characteristic. At most this predicts that, under certain circumstances, a human being is likely to value such and such. It tells us nothing about what we ought to value, i.e., about what we have good reasons to value. Some of the characteristics we have (e.g., wanting to care for infants, dislike for cheaters) are ones we judge as morally good, and worth encouraging; others (e.g., dislike of strangers, hatred of homosexuals) we judge morally bad, and as worthy of being suppressed, or at least denied the categorical force we reserve for moral matters. The fact that some feature of human beings is the product of natural selection tells us nothing about whether we ought to approve of it. Nor does it tell us whether we can do something to mitigate it.

It is important to distinguish a causal explanation of why people have the motivations they have from claims about what motivates them to act. E.g., why do oranges taste good to most human beings? Maybe, a liking for the taste of things rich in vitamin C was selected for in an ancestral environment in which such sources were rare but getting enough of it was a factor in health, and thus reproductive fitness. But that does not mean that people who want to eat oranges have getting vitamin C as a goal; lots of people want to eat oranges even though they’ve never heard of vitamin C; they eat them because they like the taste.

The same goes for the motivation to have sex: people have sexual desire because in the past there was natural selection for it—we can be quite confident that all our ancestors had sex, and that we are descended from no one who consistently avoided it! And there was natural selection for sexual desire because those who had it tended to have more sex, and more descendents. But this does not mean that people are, or ever have been, motivated to have sex because they have the goal of maximizing reproductive fitness. People would want to have sex even if (somehow) they did not notice its connection to reproduction. Of course, people who do have the goal of making a baby will want to have sex for that reason (just as someone who wants to get more vitamin C might want to eat more oranges.) But plenty of people want to have sex even when they do not want to produce offspring. And even people who have sex as a way to get a baby are not trying to maximize reproductive fitness: suppose someone has the choice of having one baby and keeping it, or having ten, all of whom would be given away immediately to a reliable adoption agency; she’d choose the former, even though it’s the latter that would maximize fitness.

Question 11: What experiences have influenced your view of the relationship between religion and psychology, or the separation of the two? What are some illustrations of how you experience this relationship in your work?

I was raised in a community of quite conservative Christians, many of whom were also natural scientists who saw no conflict between faith and science. E.g., I learned the theory of evolution in Sunday school, from a distinguished biochemist whose approach was “Isn’t it wonderful how God made us?” So the anti-scientific mentality that pervades evangelical Christianity is barely comprehensible to me.

My interest in psychology is roundabout, by way of my philosophical interest in the nature of the human mind, and my view that philosophical inquiry should be constrained by science. Psychology became interesting to me only after it became clear that evolutionary explanation can be applied to the workings of the mind, that there is a good deal of quite intricate, modularized innate causal structure in the mind, and that it is not a “blank slate.” When I went to college in the 1970’s, much of psychology, particularly where it aspired to rigor, focused on learning theory, which was very boring. Without some such grounding in the underlying causal mechanisms, much psychology seems to me to be, if not sheer speculation, at least not sustaining the claim upon rational belief that science enjoys.

Question 12: How have ideas or issues from psychology influenced the way in which you interpret religious faith (e.g., your interpretation of Scripture, or God, or morality)? Are there any other issues for which you presently believe that you must take into account of psychology in understanding a specific issue of the faith?

I think there are at bottom two main ways human beings have tried to understand themselves: one has its origins in ancient Greek philosophy, one in modern science. For historical reasons, mainly having to do with the fact that when Christian theology was first articulated, Greek philosophy provided a set of default suppositions about the world, the Christian faith absorbed various assumptions that are neither true nor ultimately consistent with Christianity. Modern science, which has its origins not in pagan Greece but in late medieval Christianity, offers an alternative account of human nature, one that is both true and more consistent with Christianity. Unfortunately, today many of the ideas that come from the Greeks are still assumed to fit with Christianity, and ideas from science are regarded as opposed to it.

Question 13: Have issues of religious faith influenced the way in which you interpret psychology?

I believe it is important that we not ignore the fact that we are creatures: We need to avoid the temptation to inflate our status, so as to see ourselves as more god-like than we are. From a biblical perspective, it seems that human pride, the desire “to be as gods,” is a much more significant concern than any tendency to see human beings as less special than they really are. I regard the fact that we are physical beings as of central importance in seeing us for what we are. There is a long philosophical tradition that describes human beings as having value or importance because they are not being part of the material world; its roots are fundamentally opposed to the Christian view, which is that the material world is good and in fact that God becomes incarnate as part of it. (In fact I believe that God created the world for the purpose of becoming incarnate in it.) I regard the idea that we have souls that exist after the body dies as especially at odds with the Christian faith. We are material beings whose only hope of life beyond death is the resurrection we see prefigured and promised in Jesus’ resurrection. Also, conceptions of responsibility that require that we be agent causes seem to me to portray us as only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from God, i.e., they make a human being a “prime mover.” In general, the fact that a scientific theory tends to debunk inflated notions of human beings as transcendent should count in its favor for Christians, not against it.

The imago Dei is best understood not in terms of some sort of resemblance of human beings to God, but in terms of God’s election of human beings for fellowship with himself, to be invited to share in the personal life of the Holy Trinity, and to be God’s representatives, and share his work, in the creation. Still, we do resemble God in various ways: like God, we are persons; we have rationality, consciousness, freedom, creativity, meaningful thoughts, etc. but not necessarily in the same way. We have these characteristics, but in the way a material thing can have them, which might be quite different than the way in which God has them. (What I said about the nature of human, as opposed to divine, responsibility is an example.)

Question 14: In what respect do you think psychology (science) and religion should be separate? In what respect do you think they should influence one another?

Christians should always weigh the evidence for a scientific hypothesis in light of Christian faith. If you believe that something is true, and that it might affect the plausibility of a hypothesis, it is rationally obligatory to pay attention to it. We should reject the idea of a scientist leaving her faith at the door of the lab for the sake of “objectivity.” (In discussions of these matters objectivity often seems to get confused with neutrality.) For one thing, why should she accept the notion that her theological beliefs are less objective—rather than simply harder to justify—than her scientific beliefs? If her religious beliefs cannot be justified on an objective basis, then why should she have them at all? If they can be, why should she pretend she does not have them? If a hypothesis conflicts with her Christian faith (or with anything else she is sure is true), that is a good reason to be skeptical of that hypothesis. She should accept it, and conclude that her theology needs to be revised, only if the evidence for it is extremely good. But the evidence might be good enough, and if it is she should modify her theological beliefs accordingly.

The interpretation of Scripture is a reliable, but not infallible, method of getting truth. This is true even if we assume that the Bible is God’s word; it is infallible, but we are not infallible as its interpreters. Science is also a reliable, but not infallible, method for getting truth. If there is a conflict between what science thinks the creation ‘says,’ and what the interpreter thinks the Creator says in the Bible, where are we most likely to have gone wrong? Science is the more reliable method, so we should suspect that, in the event of conflict, it is more likely our interpretation of Scripture, not our science, has gone wrong.

However, it seems to me that most of the alleged conflicts between Christianity and scientific hypotheses are not really between the scientific hypothesis and Christianity, but between a hypothesis and some philosophical theory that is associated with Christian faith; e.g., incompatibilist ideas of freedom, dualist ideas of the human mind, ideas about transcendent moral values.

Question 15: On what foundation should psychological theory or methods be based? Should religious, theological concepts of “personhood” play any role in influencing these methods or theories? Please explain.

If we regard science as being principally in the business of explanation (as opposed to other ways of trying to describe, understand, and otherwise make sense of things) then the paradigm is natural science: finding the relevant causal laws and locating things in the world’s causal mechanisms. To explain something is to show either that the laws in the circumstances necessitated its happening, or to show how they fixed the probabilities of its happening. I think psychology ought to be “naturalized,” i.e., integrated with the natural sciences. From this perspective, the major challenge is to figure out the nature of the freedom, moral responsibility, rationality, consciousness, personhood, and so on that human beings, conceived as part of the causal order of nature, possess. In all likelihood, scientific inquiry will lead to some, though perhaps not always radical, revision of our concepts of these characteristics. We should keep in mind that what undermines the traditional human self-image does not necessarily undermine an authentic Christian view of the human condition; at the end of the day it might strengthen the Christian view. Christian faith need not be held hostage to pre-scientific ideas about human nature.

If we have beliefs about human beings, then no matter what their source, it makes sense to ask what empirical implications they have and to see if they can be tested scientifically. A belief might not have any testable scientific implications; that is no reason to abandon it. We don’t need scientific evidence for all our beliefs. But if a belief can be tested scientifically, and it is disconfirmed, then we should stop believing it.

Science is our best way of knowing, in the sense that the strongest degree of justification we could have for a belief about the world or ourselves is that it is a well-confirmed scientific theory. (We should not assume that there is a correlation between the importance of a belief and how well it can be justified. In particular, we should not pretend that our religious beliefs have as secure a basis in the evidence as scientific beliefs. Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon us to possess good enough evidence for them.) None of this means that science is our only way of knowing (“scientism”), or that scientific methods are best in every context. There is much of importance to know about human beings that cannot be acquired by scientific methods. Perhaps there is a basis here for a non-scientific, “humanistic,” psychology. We should not decide a priori what the structure of knowledge can be; we should let the world reveal itself to us.