Monday, January 27, 2014

The New Psychology



The “New” Psychology

If you went to college, you probably took an introductory Psychology class – Psych 101. If your children go to college, they will probably take one too. But for students today, Psychology class will be very different than it was for their parents – way back when. Today, students taking Psychology do so at a time predicted by Charles Darwin in the final chapter of The Origin of Species. Darwin described a new paradigm for understanding human psychology, an evolutionary paradigm that 150 years later dominates modern psychology.

Darwin predicted:

“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important research. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”

That is bold. That is the state of modern psychology today.  Darwin’s theory quickly transformed many sciences, but it was slow to penetrate psychology – its implications were too shocking. Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is called “new” because only recently has it become the dominant naturalistic paradigm for describing Mankind’s Mind. Until recently, Behaviorism, Freudian psycho-dynamic psychology, and humanism were the dominant theories.

But Darwin left nothing to doubt – “each mental power and capacity” means every topic in every Psychology textbook. According to Darwin, we acquired all our mental powers and capacities (even those we think of as uniquely human, special, and God-like) bit by bit, over a very long time, through variation and natural selection. Evolutionary Psychology explains the Mind -- consciousness, morality, our capacity to make decisions and plans, religion, love, altruism, hate, dreams, and everything else that makes us human -- in terms of mental modules that evolved to solve problems of living faced by our Pleistocene Epoch ancestors.

The challenge for Christian students taking psychology today may be to not laugh out loud in class at the evolutionary explanations of the Mind. The opportunity is for students to understand and effectively communicate that the Christian worldview is a more logical, internally consistent, and meaningful paradigm for understanding the big questions about the Mind. After all, it is God’s grandest creation.

There is an opportunity because many who believe in Evolution may not have really thought it through, stopping short of believing that it applies to them.  But Darwin was clear. The whole Theory of Evolution, not just evolutionary psychology, hinges ultimately, not on fossils and geology or even sub cellular irreducible complexity, but on the wonders of the human mind. It requires that every human psychological characteristic, all humanity throughout human history, be explainable by variation, survival and reproductive advantages in an unbroken line backwards through to the Pleistocene and beyond.

The evidence is weak for a faith so strong.

©2013 Tim Rice
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Tim Rice, D. Min., LPC teaches Psychology from a Christian Perspective to High School students. He is the author of Psychology: A Christian Perspective, High School Edition and Homeschool Psych: Preparing Christian Homeschool Students of Psych 101. Dr. Tim and his wife Tina are 20 year homeschool veterans. Contact  Dr. Tim at tim@homeschoolpsych.com or www.homeschoolpsych.com.

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