Secularism, Psychology, and Hermeneutics:

We are fortunate, indeed, to have received such thoughtful and astute commentaries on our articles. My task is to reply briefly to Dallas Willard's remarks. It is quite a privilege to have a distinguished philosopher and philosopher of religion like Prof. Willard join a few of his thoughts to this project. His reflections on "cognitive authority" and the nature of "knowing as a human achievement and practice" constitute a valuable addition in their own right to this effort. And his remarks about how a hermeneutic approach to rethinking the interplay between psychology and religion might be strengthened will surely further that aim. Professor Willard speaks for all of us in insisting that "we cannot afford to be impatient" with the kind of "philosophical" clarifications of the assumptions, including moral underpinnings, animating our lives and inquires at their core, that this special journal issue investigates. Otherwise, we simply fail to carry out our responsibilities and are doomed to repeat the errors of the past in one form or another. Willard accurately summarizes and clarifies our basic concern in these articles in a fresh way. On the one hand, we want to forcefully critique the sheer arbitrariness of a strictly secular approach to psychology, one that dogmatically excludes any consideration of the idea, in Willard's words, that "the human being is built to live in relationship to God." On the other hand, we oppose all such dogmatisms and want to affirm a kind of psychological inquiry that is "open to people in general," including nonbelievers. That, indeed, is our challenge. Willard wonders why the dominant secular methodologies in psychology have "such a grip on the field." How and on what basis do they claim "cognitive authority," the authority "to claim to know and to exercise power based upon that claim?" His answer is illuminating. Secularism and naturalism have come to dominate the intellectual professions for "largely extraneous" reasons. One such reason is to protect these professions from inappropriate interference by religious or civil authorities. Another is that many of these intellectuals simply assume that religion is unworthy of serious consideration and hostile or at least irrelevant to good social science. The second of these reasons is arbitrary and dogmatic, something that has "not been proven or even rendered plausible." The first has its merits, namely to protect freedom of inquiry. Unfortunately, however, this ideal is not defended in an entirely open and honest manner, where its true meaning and relation to other ideals and values will be clarified and deepened over time. Rather it is grounded in a "disguised ideology" usually in a version of "liberal individualism" (Richardson, 2005) asserting that all moral and spiritual values are ultimately subjective or preferential except the moral principle that everyone has the right to pursue the good life as they see fit, so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others to do the same. It has been suggested that this approach is too "thin" even to support its own best values of equal rights and human dignity and that and its contradictions actually help generate many of the debilitating tensions of modern life and (Sandel, 1996). Just this disguised ideology produces the bizarre and tortured situation in the social sciences where investigators adopt "value-freedom" or "value-neutrality" as a firm moral principle (Slife, Smith, and Burch-field, 2003), thus building a degree of inauthenticity into the groundwork of the enterprise. This situation has the deep political roots, Willard reminds us. They go back at least to Max Weber, I might point out, who in the early part of the last century laid the basis for a conception of social science as Wertfrei or value-free. As the philosopher Richard Bernstein (1976, p. 46 ff.) notes, however, Weber's struggle with this issue was more searching and complex than social scientists usually appreciate. …