Do you think the study of psychology is tantamount to declaring the Bible inadequate? Do you believe that God created psychology when He created Mankind in His own image? Have you ever given it much thought?
Some Christians think that psychology is an important discipline, that it is consistent with a Christian worldview, and that it is an acceptable field of study and career choice. Other Christians see psychology as an idolatrous and ungodly rival religion. Some describe it as psychobabble, psycho-heresy, and the most deadly form of modernism to ever confront the Church.
Whatever you think about psychology, the time to deal with it is now. Many Christian students go to college to become psychologists, counselors, or social workers. Most colleges (even Christian colleges) require students to take an introductory psychology class (at least). Although there are many Christian professors, psychology departments are home to some of the more anti-Christian intellectuals on college campuses. Psychology professors have high levels of agnosticism and atheism and may attack the Christian worldview as unscientific, irrational, prudish, exploitive, controlling, inhibitive, oppressive, and naïve. Many psychology professors believe that Christianity is incompatible with sound mental health, that it contributes to human suffering, and that the intelligent believer will eventually abandon their faith.
The material taught in introductory psychology courses will challenge their beliefs. Christian students are not usually well-prepared to recognize and refute modern psychology’s core philosophical assumptions; naturalism, humanism, evolutionism, empiricism, relativism, and reductionism. Those core assumptions are embedded, sometimes subtly, in modern psychology’s theories and schools-of-thought and presented under the banner of “science.” Assumptions that are wholly inconsistent with a Christian worldview are thoroughly embedded in most psychology courses, even at some Christian colleges. Students need to recognize and be able to refute the anti-Christian and anti-scientific philosophies embedded in modern psychology. Failure to recognize those assumptions may lead Christian students to inadvertently compromise their Christian worldview.
Failure to recognize those assumptions my lead some Christian students to walk away from their faith. If it is true that 70-75% of Christian students walk away from their faith after the first year of college, and if that has anything to do with the teaching in college, it is because of the subtle worldview challenges embedded in psychological theories. By simply forewarning and preparing students in advance, they are better able to resist believing false assumptions.
The time to deal with psychology is now because Darwinian evolution is the “new” psychology. Freudian psychology, behaviorists, humanists, and cognitive psychology are yesterday’s news. Today, neurobiology and evolution are psychology’s main theories. Darwin anticipated evolution’s impact on psychology in 1859 when he wrote:
"In the distant future I see an open field for more important research. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation."
Darwinian evolution, when applied to human psychology, reduces our consciousness, our morality, our capacity to make decisions and judgments, religious experience, love, empathy, altruism, hate, greed, dreams, and everything else that makes us human to nothing more a pack of neurons firing. All mental activity, even what we think of as our God-likeness, is nothing more than brain activities that humans acquired, bit by bit, through variation and natural selection.
Psychology is where evolution has the most difficulty and it is the author’s opinion that evolution’s death knell will not come from cellular biology, it will come from psychology. The fight against evolution, in my opinion, will not be won with arguments of sub-cellular irreducible complexity. It will be won in the arena of the incomprehensible complexity of the human mind.
It is important to deal with psychology because people are hurting. Christians have long been at the forefront of meeting the world’s physical needs with food, blankets, and shelter. But are we at the forefront of meeting the world’s psychological needs? Too often secular community mental health centers serve more hurting people than they can handle while Christians debate whether Nouthetic or Christian counseling or “just praying harder” is the answer. That is not right. Correcting the problem begins by re-claiming psychology for Christ.
The goal for our study of psychology, just like the study of biology, theology, history, and every other discipline, is to understand God’s creation and, in the words of Johannes Kepler, to “think God’s thoughts after him.” Instead of surrendering psychology and falling away in the face of the world’s beliefs teaching, we have a duty to put forth reasoned explanations for our worldview in every discipline, including psychology.
That is why I wrote High School Psychology: A Christian Perspective. There are many excellent works that explain a Christian worldview, and there are dozens of excellent introductory psychology texts. But there are very few introductory psychology texts that present psychology’s content from a Christian perspective and none, to the author’s knowledge, intended for Christian high school students. That is part of the problem.
High School Psychology: A Christian Perspective equips you to deal with psychology by presenting psychology’s subject matter from a Christian perspective and in a manner suitable for high school students.
The author believes that the study of the soul, the mind, and behavior are right and proper for Christians and that Christian students should join the contemporary psychological conversation and become part of the future intellectual leadership in psychology.
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