The Appeal to Survey Results

One effort at specification depends on survey research—an understandable enough empirical attempt to go to the people and see what “religion” and “spirituality” mean to them. The results have been stunningly incoherent, however (Piedmont , 265). Shafranske and Sperry () summarized the reports of major studies in this way: “No single category accounted for the majority of the definitions”; “a sizable amount of variability exists in the ways in which people use these terms and, perhaps, also in the ways in which they experience religion and spirituality” (14; see also especially Harris )—and no wonder. This method is what Barnet Feingold called the “shopping‐cart model” of research (Feingold and Helminiak ). Just as a science of nutrition could not emerge on the basis of tallies of people's supermarket purchases, a science of religion and spirituality cannot depend on surveys of people's personal religious beliefs. At best, such effort represents the descriptive data‐collection stage of a budding science, the documentation of numerous instances or cases—as with early biological naturalists before Charles Darwin's explanatory theory of evolution or, in a more advanced case, as with Johannes Kepler's mathematical descriptions of the elliptical planetary orbits before Isaac Newton's explanatory theory. Thus, even Piedmont's () call for refined research techniques cannot succeed because illuminative research depends on prior coherent theory, and none is commonly acknowledged in the field.

Appeal to God and Other‐Worldly Forces

Attempting to get to the heart of the matter and accepting a longstanding popular presupposition, another effort to define religion and spirituality appeals to “an experiential singularity,” some “uniqueness,” “a thing unto itself that constitutes the core of ‘genuine religion’” (Paloutzian and Park , 9). The most obvious such core in Euro‐American culture—but, most tellingly, not in non‐theist Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, or Taoism (Muesse )—is God, the object of worship and a prime connotation of the “spiritual.” Thus, some theorists assert outright that among their “basic theoretical assumptions” for the psychology of spirituality must be “that God exists” (Sperry , 311; also Bergin , 99; Richards and Bergin , 112; Slife and Melling , 282). Supposedly, “God is central to any understanding of spirituality” (Pargament and Mahoney , 649; and emphatically Slife and Richards ). Likewise (depending on what the divine means; see “Fifth” below), “when religion is defined so broadly as to exclude the necessity for a sense of the divine, the term loses its analytic power” (Hood , 349; Hood and Chen , 423).

Recognizing that direct invocation of God is hardly a scientific maneuver, a majority of psychologists of religion obscure the matter and appeal to what I call “God‐substitutes.” In general, the field has not absorbed the distinction between the spiritual and the divine (see Helminiak , , , ), so appeal to God provides the best known, and often the only known, means of referencing the spiritual. Then generic terms are suggested, and, as best as I can determine (see also Wulff ), the Western understanding of God is always the prime analogue: boundlessness, divine, divine‐like, higher power, holy, immanence, mystery, numinous, supernatural, transcendence, ultimacy (e.g., Hood and Chen ; Pargament et al. ; Park ; Piedmont and Wilkins ; Richards and Bergin ) or “whatever one wishes to call that which lies beyond” (Elkins , 31), “that something beyond us” (Schneider , xv), or, with a debt to Upanishadic thought, “man's ‘innermost’ consciousness…identical to…Brahman, Tao, Dharmakaya, Allah, the Godhead” (Wilber , 75–76) or “(choose whatever term one prefers) God” (Wilber , 93). Above all and early on, the “sacred” (whether with an upper‐ or lower‐case “s”; Pargament ) featured in “A Consensus Report” (Larson, Swyers, and McCullough , front cover) and has become the most widely used construct.

A number of interrelated methodological problems encumber the appeal to God or God‐substitutes.

• First, they are amorphous. To be sure, my theoretical criticisms notwithstanding, I find in the suggestive allusions of almost all theorists some valid sense of the spiritual. Nonetheless, “there is no agreement on what the essential ingredients of the sacred are” (Paloutzian and Park , 9). The theological consensus is that God is ultimately mystery in any case (e.g., Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 12, henceforth, S.T.; Armstrong ; Carmody and Carmody ), so appeal to those unspecified constructs, which all seem to point back to God, cannot provide firm content for a scientific account.

• Second, those constructs are external to humanity. They characterize human spiritual experience by reference to an amorphous something‐else that attracts or impinges on humanity. These constructs “define the singularity itself as outside the realm of psychological [i.e., human‐science] study and preclude explanations in terms of [inherently human] psychological processes” (Paloutzian and Park , 9). Allowing that there does indeed exist some nonhuman spiritual entity, the revealing psychological question would be this: What in the human allows relationship with this entity? My answer has long been human consciousness, or spirit, sufficient in itself to explain human “spiritual experiences” and also open to theological elaboration regarding human relationship with God (Helminiak , ch. 6).

• Third, given that ethics tends too easily to be grounded in religion (e.g., Richards and Bergin ) but the meaning of “God” can vary so widely—hence, the quotation marks around this term—the problem of ethical relativism attends any appeal to the divine. When an ISIS and a Mother Teresa can both claim to do their work “in the name of God,” human “science” exemplifies its inadequacy by claiming value‐neutrality.

• Fourth, most psychological discussion of spirituality deals with psychotherapeutic practice, not theoretical explication. In this context—psychotherapy is more art than science—allusive language is adequate because in every case clients carry their personal understandings anyway, which must be the focus of therapeutic attention. The difference between successful practice and explanatory science, however, easily gets blurred. Indeed, the identity of all psychology remains ambiguous, two‐pronged: a practice and a wannabe science. Significantly, discussion often bleeds from the practice into the science, from personal experience into ontological claims—as, likewise, in religion. From its earliest beginnings, religion involved belief in divine or other‐worldly intervention. Even today there reigns a pervasive belief in “the power of God to work in human lives” (Keller , 31). So out of religious practice, the scientific or explanatory question of causality arises (Muesse ). The challenge is to explain that divine work in human lives and—there's the rub—in a world of highly developed naturalistic explanation. Science obviously discredits many longstanding religious assumptions, but in popular piety they continue to hang on. Thus, bolstered by the confusion of psychotherapy and psychology, a conflict between religion and science persists. Ever and again, common sense and theory are confounded.

• Fifth, however, it is difficult to know whether appeal to God‐substitutes and even to God outright is to be taken literally or only metaphorically. The ambiguity is obvious in the unfortunate term for psychedelics, entheogens: sources of the divine within (Forte ; Richards , , ; see Helminiak , 101–05). Relating to a drug‐induced experience, the theos in entheogens could not intend the Creator‐God of Western religion at the beck and call of an ingested chemical but, rather, continues the classical Greek usage—or in another way, the Hindu usage—wherein divine or godly indicates something eternal, transcendent, or unchanging, such as Plato's perfect triangle (Muesse ). Aristotle, however, recognized that triangle to be a universal concept in the human mind—ah, another indication of an inherently human spiritual capacity! Is the sacred, then—or God, divine, ultimate, and the like—to be taken as something extrahuman that impinges on human life, or is the sacred merely a generic term applicable to people's varied, internally generated notions of what they consider ultimately determinative and worthy of particular reverence? Psychological usage would like to restrict those terms to these varied personal creations and, thus, point to a genuine psychological phenomenon. If such is the case, however, psychology has no reality on which to ground the personal applications of those terms. What are they expressions of? What is the source that requires these extraordinary descriptors? The ontological, the truly scientific, question cries out for an answer. Readily in the West, the supposed ontological reality, God, provides the grounding. In the East, Atman is identified with Brahman and provides another, if incoherent, answer (see Helminiak , 14–17, 126; , 97–99, 349–52, 361). But no inherently human candidate—the human spirit or Buddha Nature, for example—is widely acknowledged to specify the spiritual and to ground God‐substitutes in psychology.

Appeal to Belief Systems

Yet another approach to the psychology of religion and spirituality outright rejects appeal to any “singularity” or “uniqueness” “that constitutes the core of ‘genuine religion’” (Paloutzian and Park , 9) and, instead, explains religion as an instance of human meaning‐making, “a conscious or unconscious need to make sense of one's experience and to feel that one's life has significance and purpose” (11). Specifying the human need for meaning as the “need for a functional meaning system,” Park (, 372; see also Park ; Park and Slattery ) developed this understanding: Religion is a meaning system, one product of an inherently human capacity. Others have proposed this same or a similar understanding. Speaking to social workers, Edward Canda () defined spirituality as “the basic human drive for meaning, purpose, and moral relatedness among people, with the universe, and with the ground of our being” (573). Robert Emmons () wrote of “a religious belief system and a religious worldview” (7), noting explicitly that “in form, there is nothing inherently different about religious and spiritual goals in comparison to any other type of goal” (91). Daniel Helminiak () researched supposed midlife crisis as a spiritual matter of finding meaning and purpose in life, noted the role of “systems of meaning and value” in human living as a key aspect of religion (Helminiak , 35–36), and projected a spiritual vision for a pluralistic global society on the basis of shared beliefs and ethics (Helminiak ).

This focus on a common human urgency is most welcome because it grounds religion—or, at least, one aspect of religion—squarely in the human make‐up. Then, “meaning making and assessments, not religion and spirituality, are the core psychological processes” (Paloutzian and Park , 10). That is, religion emerges from the human “mind and heart,” bottom‐up, as it were, not from some exterior spiritual force, top‐down. This promising emphasis, however, also has its complications.

• All human meaning systems are, indeed, of the same making, so religious meaning enjoys no special validity or importance, as Paloutzian and Park () rightly conclude. A product of human consciousness, or human spirit, meaning is, perforce, a spiritual reality, and all meaning systems are spiritual in nature. They comprise beliefs and ethics, or ideas and ideals, or knowledge and love, respectively the productions of what classical and medieval philosophy called the uniquely human intellect and will. They involve humans in a realm of reality that goes beyond the here and now. Again the universal ideas that so awed Plato provide an easy example. And a new understanding—nay, a retrieved ancient understanding (Adler )—of the spiritual is on the scene, and God has not yet made an entrance. This realization prompts the need to distinguish the spiritual nature of all meaning systems from a person's lived spirituality. Every human lives by some set of meanings and values, but not all deliberately attend to the enhancement of this spiritual or transcendent dimension of their lives. Only the latter qualifies as spirituality. Simply said, if all humans are spiritual by nature, not all have a spirituality; and traditional terminological usage must give way to contemporary specification (Helminiak , 34–36). In the parallel case of bodybuilders, we have no problem making that specification.

• What, then, once again, of epistemological and ethical relativism? People presuppose, and psychologists of religion argue to the effect, that religion is generally a good thing, a positive force in human life; yet all also allow in passing that religion does sometimes get things wrong and becomes destructive (e.g., Miller and Thoresen , 11; Richards and Bergin , 14–15; Park , 362–63; see especially Aten and Leach , 10–15 for a useful overview). Evil is frequently done in the name of God, and no one really knows the mind of God in any case. So, in line with longstanding philosophical analyses, I propose that some other factor beyond an appeal to God must be determining what is true and good. What we determine as best we are able, the meaning systems most likely positive for our changing situations, these we attribute to God: Surely, what is best is what God wants. Tellingly, however, we ourselves make the determinations, and we make them by means of our intentional conscious capacity.

  Analysis of human consciousness (e.g., Lonergan [1957], , [1980]) shows that it is geared to embrace the universe; it is capax infiniti, open to everything, as the medievals phrased the matter. The human mind moves toward Plato's one, true, good, and beautiful. Such movement could hardly be haphazard. The positive unfolding of human consciousness—and of humanity and our world, with it—follows inherent requisites, Lonergan's () transcendental precepts, introduced above. Human intentional consciousness itself entails criteria for determination of the true and the false, and the good and the evil. Therefore, although all meaning systems are spiritual in nature, at their best religion and spirituality lay claim only to the positive systems—because they lead to human fulfillment and, in the Western ideal case, to God. In contrast, citing Lee Kirkpatrick (), Paloutzian and Park () deny psychology the right to make truth and value judgments: “We make no claims regarding ‘the true meaning.’ The science of psychology is neutral with respect to religious or other truth claims” (11; also Paloutzian and Park , 560; the explicit policy of the Journal of American Academy of Religion, Cynthia Eller, ed., personal communication, August 12, 2016). Within so sweeping a statement, it would be useful to distinguish religion's other‐worldly claims: the “indeterminables” of doctrine, from its this‐worldly claims: the “inconsequentials” of custom and, most important, the “indispensables” of ethics and consensual opinion, which are, indeed, subject to empirical investigation (Helminiak [2007], 318–24; , 49–50). In fact, every mature science, when it has determined the probable explanation of some matter, claims its understanding as trustworthy and acts in accordance with it. Medical doctors do not hesitate to prescribe medications, diets, and lifestyles; rocket engineers compute pathways to Pluto, trustingly applying the calculations of Einsteinian relativity; and, truth be told, in clinical practice psychologists themselves follow psychological findings and adhere to codes of ethics, implicit affirmations that life is simply not neutral in its unfolding. If psychology ever achieves the status of a true science, that is, if it discerns the essential structures, mechanisms, and processes that explain the functioning of the human being in all its varied expressions, like other sciences psychology will be in a position to state what it is to be a genuine, an “authentic,” human being (Lonergan ; see Helminiak and Feingold ), to prescribe ways of living, and to authoritatively discredit dysfunctional meaning systems, including the religious. A major shortcoming in understanding religion as simply a particular kind of meaning system is to ignore the quintessentially human issues of truth and goodness. More hopefully, the appeal to meaning systems implicitly points to a deeper reality, human consciousness, and, as Lonergan has elaborated, beyond generic meaning‐making it has normative implications, the transcendental precepts.

• Appeal to meaning‐making deliberately also ignores that singular and unique dimension of religion that comes to the fore when spirituality becomes the focus. True, “Ultimate goals [of religious meaning systems] can include…achieving enlightenment…or experiencing transcendence” (Park , 363); but this admission does not yet account for the enlightenment or transcendence itself, for the religious, numinous, or mystical experience that religion might include or to which it might lead. Such experience transcends meanings and values; as in meditative practices, its moment of fulfillment moves in a realm beyond all thought, feeling, question, and seeking, in the nonobjectified, nondual self‐presence of consciousness as conscious (Helminiak ). More incisively than an appeal to meaning systems, therefore, an appeal to the deeper reality that generates meaning is needed, namely, human consciousness or spirit. It can ground meaning systems and also explain both Eastern enlightenment and Western mysticism (see Helminiak , , ).

• A last consideration sheds light on a pervasive confusion. The very meaning of is ambiguous. The term can apply existentially or commonsensically to personal or communal import—what things “mean,” that is, what they matter to us, facts that are self‐validating and cannot be disputed. In this case, as a single notion, “meaning” encompasses knowing and evaluating, thinking and feeling, hoping and dreaming, the whole complex of human response (clearly exemplified also in Shafranske and Sperry , 12–13, 18). The fact that Park and Jeanne Slattery () categorize as “the emotional or feeling aspect” of meaning (125), not the cognitive, further highlights the ambiguity in this case. For the term can also apply theoretically and differentially to only cognitive content—what is affirmed in propositions, assertions that are, indeed, subject to adjudication as correct or mistaken. Only attention to the differential meaning allows for assessment and judgment, and these are the makings of the tested explanation that constitutes science. Taking in the commonsensical sense (what something matters to me) ignores the self‐transcendence that judgments of true or false entail, allows the relativism that merely personally (or religiously) asserted beliefs can hold, overlooks the consciousness itself that generates the meanings and values in whatever sense, and obscures the uniqueness of consciousness that restricts meaning to the human case (Helminiak , 244–49; compare Paloutzian and Park , 8, 10, 357 re non‐human animals). The difference between commonsensical and theoretical meaning is critical to any field that would aspire to the status of genuine science.

The Issue at Nicaea

In 325 C.E., the Council of Nicaea solemnly defined the divinity of Jesus Christ in opposition to the Alexandrian priest Arius. He accepted all the biblical teaching about Jesus and, with all Christians, worshiped Jesus as God. But Arius claimed Christ was, not in himself the ultimate God, but the first and highest creation of God, the saving agent of God, and for this reason Christians reverenced Christ as God. Arius's pointed question was whether Christ was a creature or not. Phrased in terms of created‐versus‐uncreated, the question could not be avoided, and its abstract formulation is foreign to the New Testament. As scripture scholars name it, a “functional mentality” governs the Scriptures, namely, faith: a concern for what personal stance we should take, a concern for how things matter to us. But Arius's question entered into “ontological mentality,” a concern to understand things in themselves, regardless of our personal feelings and commitments (see Helminiak , 87–90; Brown, Fitzmyer, and Murphy , 81:24, 82:29). Undoubtedly, the early Christians reverenced Jesus as God. He was God for them, and they related to him as to God. But with the notion of creation, Arius had pushed the question: Is Jesus really God in himself?

This question moved the consideration from a quoad nos to a quoad se perspective. Not how we relate to Christ, but what Christ is in himself became the issue to be addressed. The Council Fathers knew well that any citation from the Bible would not answer Arius. So after affirming in images the belief of all Christians in “one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, only‐begotten, light from light, very God of very God,” they added “begotten, not created, consubstantial to [or ‘one in being with’ or ‘of the same substance as’] the Father.”

The Council Fathers were forced to follow Arius in his quoad se mode of thinking. They clarified the status of Christ by relating him to the Father, not to personal faith. Far from ever stating what God is and regardless of one's accepting or rejecting the teaching, the Council taught that whatever the Father is as God, that, too, the Son is: They are consubstantial. And appropriating Arius's own term, the Council taught that, although the Son is born of the Father, the Son is not created. The teaching rested on a technical distinction specified by the contrast between two mutually exclusive conditions: created and uncreated. Thus conceived, the teaching could almost be expressed in an equation: Christ = Father (as God) ≠ creatures.

The Methodological Implications: Scientific Thinking

The Nicene Council introduced a new way of thinking into standard religious teaching: ontological mentality and theoretical, or systematic, formulation. Via a differentiation of consciousness, the development of a specialized way of using the mind (Lonergan ), the Council moved from a commonsensical or quoad nos meaning of meaning (what something matters to us) to the theoretical or quoad se meaning of meaning (what things are in themselves). In so doing, the Fathers saw no conflict between personal faith and, now, theoretically formulated dogma (Helminiak , 104–08). They saw no change in what Christians, certainly in practice, had always held. They saw, rather, an advance both in doctrinal clarity and in conceptualization (Helminiak , 109–13).

When questions about important matters arise, the human mind pushes for clarification and precision: “the systematic exigence” (Lonergan , 81–83). There eventually results a “differentiation of consciousness” (257–60, 302–05), a specialized way of using the mind, as exemplified in advanced formal education, especially in math and science. Namely, in the arena of everyday living, consciousness operates undifferentiatedly. All as facets of one whole: curiosity, attentiveness, ideas, facts, decisions, commitments, emotions, imagery, memories, hopes and dreams, all the makings of rhetoric and persuasive and moving discourse, focused on the here and now and geared toward action, the practical need to get on with living—these facets of human mentality function intertwined. Such undifferentiated consciousness is also the coinage of cultures and of popular religion—and the engine of the psychology of religion as currently conceived. Undifferentiated consciousness appeals to the whole person, beliefs and obligations, stories and lessons, emotions and commitments, all in one package: the ambient culture.

In contrast, questions that arise push for cognitive clarity, and this push prescinds from those other aspects of the mind and advances the ability to question with focus, to understand and propose explanations, and to assess and confirm or reject these explanations. That is, “the pure desire to know” emerges (Lonergan [1957], 372), the “detached, disinterested, and unrestricted desire to know” (696), relatively unencumbered, and even supported, by those other aspects of the mind. This desire results in the intellectual specialization aimed solely at understanding and explaining. These are the makings of science—systematic explanation reasonably grounded in relevant evidence. And it can include refined theology!

With surrender to the pure desire to know, theory develops—but here the term theory has a particular sense. It does not mean abstract speculation of whatever kind; it means a particular kind of articulation of achieved explanation—actually, in its full‐blown form, David Hilbert's ([1902]) “implicit definition” (Lonergan [1957], 37). A mathematical example would be the algebraic equation for a Euclidean right triangle, a ² + b ² = c ². It specifies the unchanging relationships and ipso facto specifies the terms being related, intellectually capturing the essence of right‐triangle‐ness—pure intelligibility—without specifying any concrete triangle in particular. Such theory, as in all mature science, understands things on the basis of how things relate to one another, quoad se. In the equation for this plane figure, a, b, and c relate to one another in such a way that they could only constitute a right triangle and nothing else—challenging, by the way, the postmodern agnostic conceit that nothing can be formulated precisely. Theory expresses understanding by relating things to one another—for example, the created and the uncreated as intellectually distinct but factually inseparable aspects of the universe.

On these bases, I can state what, with Lonergan ([1957], 297–303), I mean by “science,” because the term is problematic (Goldman ). Coming from the Latin scientia, it simply translates “knowledge,” but etymology hardly helps. Parenthetically above, I defined science as “systematic explanation reasonably grounded in relevant evidence.” In Lonergan's usage, science is proposed explanation; it is not knowledge. Knowledge is factual and certain and results from a judgment at the third level of consciousness—for example, “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” or “This dial reads 4.78, not 4.75.” Indeed, despite loose popular talk, the natural sciences no longer claim to prove anything conclusively (Lonergan , 94); rather, they accumulate evidence to make a hypothesis ever more confirmed and credible, or disconfirmed. Science is reasonable in that judgments of fact reliably credit the evidence as relevant, and they ensure the confirming or disconfirming outcomes (e.g., of experiments) that impinge on the hypothesis. Thus, acts of knowing on the third level of consciousness serve the specialized second‐level concern to understand. So rather than factual knowledge, science is likely explanation, a matter of the second level of consciousness, attempted generalized understanding that pertains to an array of individual cases—for example, the Pythagorean theorem (inaccurate beyond Euclidean space). In mature form, after a breakthrough that discerned the necessary and sufficient factors involved, the explanation gets formulated via implicit definition (37), so it is systematic (304–10), or theoretical (81–83) in the strict sense of the prior paragraph—for example, a ² + b ² = c ². This formulation occurs, and can be understood only, within an array of interrelated terms, a system—for example, point, line, straight, plane, square. Finally, the explanation does not float in mid‐air or rest on clever speculation, strong intuition, gut feeling, stunning experience, or divine revelation, but relies on appeal to relevant data, grounding evidence. Then, as with the German term Wissenschaft, translated as “science,” this understanding of science can apply to a range of rigorously pursued disciplines. It fits physics, which tends to set the paradigm; but it can also apply to other cases in which this particular kind of intellectual pursuit occurs: the periodic table of elements, the species of evolutionary biology, the bimodal and four‐level structure of human intentional consciousness (120–21), or the Nicene teaching: Christ = Father (as God) ≠ creatures. On this understanding, in contrast to most prevalent usage, be it noted, it is not the materiality of its object or the history of successful naturalistic explanation that determines a science, but the mode of thinking that the enterprise employs. “Science” as an enterprise is implementation of this particular kind of intellectual pursuit; this particular kind is “science” as a method; and “science” as content is the resultant explanation.

Accordingly, the Nicene definition of the divinity of Christ evinces an inchoate scientific thinking, and with Method in Theology Lonergan () proposes to extend the scientific mindset into cultural and religious studies. Of course, “science” in the usage of others cited in this article reflects the unsettled status quo and, thus, easily ends up pitting naturalism against theism, science against religion.

In Lonergan's account, the contrast to theory, or systematic thinking, is in common sense ([1957], 196–269; , 153–54). As used here, then, common sense does not imply being smart rather than foolish: “Have some common sense! Don't be so dumb!” Rather, the term denotes the shared understandings of how life is to be lived in different times and places: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Different cultures have different common senses, that is, different consensual understandings about things and different ways of doing things. Essential to the notion is this: Common sense understands by seeing things in terms of ourselves, our needs, our practical purposes. Thus, for example, in the popular religious understanding, Jesus is Master for Christians, followed as Lord and reverenced with the ultimacy of God; whereas in theoretical explanation, Jesus is the Eternally Begotten of the Father become human, uncreated God even as the Father is God. One and the same belief gets expressed in two different ways; one refers to practical import, and the other, to precise explanation. Similarly, to preach well is not to present a theological lecture; to inspire is not to explain; to believe deeply is not what it means to have the truth.

Driven by the human need to understand, in religion the move from popular piety into theory is a rarified instantiation of Anselm's definition of theology as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. At stake is the difference between religion and theology as instances of common sense and theory—although, unlike as in contemporary physical science, little theology (or human “science” in general) ever achieves the status of theory as understood here. Most “theology” is merely sophisticated preaching or intricate speculation (cf. Williams ). So, by theology I mean neither the beliefs of this or that religion nor religious thought about whatever topic; rather, like Aquinas (S.T., I, q. 1, a, 7; see Helminiak , 115–20), I mean refined and interrelated analytic conceptualization about God and God's relationship to the created universe. At Nicaea religious thinking achieved such theoretical conceptualization and formulation without in any way betraying popular religion. No opposition between “science” and religion pertained.

Another Religious Example

There is the term supernatural. It has a popular usage, absolutely legitimate in its own right, and Reber and Slife (, 64.2–65.1) invoke it to characterize “‘weak’” theism in contrast to their own “‘strong’ or ‘thoroughgoing’ theism” (Slife and Melling , 282; Slife et al. , 220). A weak theism does not allow that “divine activity truly makes a difference in the world” and “limits God's involvement to a corner of the universe (e.g., the supernatural realm…)” (Reber and Slife , 6.1). In this case supernatural is used pictorially to indicate spatial distance from us; its usage is quoad nos. I would express that popular meaning as other‐worldly because, like metaphysical, the term supernatural also has a technical meaning.

The technical meaning arose from the medieval attempt to understand how divine grace relates to human nature—another example of divine involvement with the natural universe. “About the year 1230 Philip the Chancellor completed a discovery…a distinction between two entitatively disproportionate orders: grace was above nature, faith was above reason; charity was above human good will; merit before God was above the good opinion of one's neighbors” (Lonergan , 310). The lower order is the natural, and the higher, the supernatural. Today the terms proportionate and disproportionate more accurately convey the meaning of the distinction. Certain aspects of human experience are proportionate to humanity. They are what would be expected of a human being endowed with intentional consciousness or an immortal soul—the capacity to question, understand, know, and love, and even to recognize and reverence God. But, according to Christian belief—and I am not advocating it, but only using it to exemplify a mode of thinking—other aspects of current human experience also apply but only because of the redeeming work of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit. These offer humanity the possibility of a created participation in the very life of God, deification, or theosis as the Greek Fathers named it (cf. Helminiak , 123–43), specifying the intent of Jesus’ prayer to his heavenly Father “that they may all be one as we are one” (John 17:22 NRSV). Regarding such fulfillment, no human being has a right or natural possibility. Yet through divine graciousness, the effects of deifying (sanctifying) grace are now part and parcel of the human situation redeemed in Christ (cf. Helminiak , 135–40, on “Different Opinions about the Universality of Grace”; Lonergan ). Two different dimensions constitute the one de facto human state, one dimension proportionate to humanity and the other, fully gift, disproportionate. Specified by opposition to each other, these two are not separate realms or separable components. Rather, they are two conceptually distinguishable facets of one and the same human reality, and distinguishing them allows for focused and interrelated explanation of the two: theory.

The achievement of that medieval distinction is methodologically instructive. It exemplifies again a theoretical means of conceiving even a religious issue. The distinction introduced a new level of precision in the understanding of the common Christian beliefs about grace and nature. At the same time, the achievement of this distinction also entailed the development of a new way of thinking about those beliefs: It related distinguishable matters to each other; it moved from a quoad nos into a quoad se way of thinking. This latter advance is the point: Theoretical or systematic—science‐like—thinking spontaneously surfaced again in religion. Whereas popularly (what it matters to us) grace is the wondrous, unmerited experience of inner healing, freedom, and transcendence, in its theoretical explanation (what it is in itself) grace is a disproportionate, deifying aspect of redeemed humanity; and both understandings validly apply to the same religious reality.

Again I emphasize that my point is not to advocate Christian doctrine, but to demonstrate theory, a way of thinking about doctrine (Lonergan , 81–85). That way emerged inchoately at Nicaea as a spontaneous development of reflective religion. The firmer reemergence of this mode of thinking in the High Middle Ages partially laid the foundation for the emergence of empirical science in the Renaissance and Early Enlightenment (Goldman ). Initially developed by Aristotle, then lost and recovered, lost again and recovered, implicitly defined theory, evinced by the ubiquitous use of equations, has finally become a secure intellectual achievement in modern science (Lonergan ; [1980], 6–13). Such thinking is hardly a naturalistic aberration. It is not inimical to religion. In no way does it conflict with theist beliefs. Quoad se theorizing is simply a different way of thinking about theist beliefs.

A Secular Example

Another example, more obviously “scientific” because of its subject matter but only for this reason, regards the rising and setting of the sun (Lonergan [1957], 319–20). In commonsensical experience and thinking, the sun does rise and set. Such movement is precisely how the sun relates to us, how we experience the sun, when examined from our personal standpoint. Explained theoretically, however, explained in terms of how the sun and the Earth relate to each other, the sun is relatively motionless and the Earth is rotating. These two understandings, common sense and theory, pertain to the same phenomenon, and it does not change when understood in these different ways—one way, completely sufficient to simply get on with the practicalities of living and the other, to explain, as needed, the exact functioning of matters behind the living. They pertain to “separate but complementary domains” of knowledge (319).

There is no disjunction, opposition, or multiplicity of realities in this state of affairs. Indeed, given the further precision of the theoretical account, granted the explanation of things related among themselves, the theory can even explain why common sense would naturally—and, from its own standpoint, absolutely correctly!—think of the sun as rising and setting. Even as I am doing here, theory can explain common sense (Lonergan [1957], 419, 538, 562). Theory can consider common sense as a particular instance of how things relate to one another, namely, how things relate to flesh‐and‐blood people, why people experience things as they do, and what they make of the things they encounter. But this explanatory ability does not move in the opposite direction: Common sense cannot generate theoretical explanation. Common sense “is concerned with the concrete and particular” (251). Its limitation to personal experience and daily‐life practicality does not include the theoretical commitment to a pure and unrestricted desire to know (316–24; Lonergan , 82). By the same token, reported personal religious experience cannot specify the relationship of God to the universe. Nonetheless, different understandings, popular and scientific, or commonsensical and theoretical, or descriptive and explanatory, or quoad nos and quoad se, can cohere and interrelate in one differentiated consciousness, so no perspective is lost. The differentiated mind is able to shift from this to that way of thinking easily, comfortably, and interrelatedly, as is appropriate to every situation (Lonergan , 84). Only a pedant at a cocktail party would fault a comment about the beauty of the setting sun or rebuke a person who thanked God for having arrived safely despite a near accident.

The Problematic Option for Religion over Theology, Common Sense over Theory

With the technical notions of common sense and theory, or religion and theology, in place, I return to the matter of miracles as an example of divine involvement, and I explicate the methodological implications of Reber and Slife's (; 64–65) recent forthright definition. Their account of miracle as a wondrous happening presents an exquisite, a quintessential, example of commonsensical thinking or biblical functional mentality—and on this score, with the rest of the psychology of religion, they move in the arena of mere popular opinion. Likewise, the flaw in their hermeneutical attempt to put religion and science on a level playing field is to appeal to “meaning,” but only as commonsensical, as personal import, and to overlook the meaning that is pure cognitive content, theory (Helminiak , 42.2). The problem of God in science results from overlooking that difference.

Reber and Slife's (; ) presentation appears to be “theoretical”—but it qualifies as such only in the sense of elaborate speculation. For example, they formulate their position with the abstract term worldview—a rather common usage in the field (e.g., Pargament , 6–9; Emmons , 7; Shafranske and Sperry , 17; Richards and Bergin , 74, , 15; Park and Slattery , 121). The exchange in Peter Hampson (), however, never resulted in a firm or useful understanding of this fuzzy notion. On my Lonerganian analysis, worldview actually refers to the different versions of common sense of varied people and societies, not to theoretically elaborated positions with differing ontological implications. It bespeaks cultural and personal perspectives, not theoretical stances. Physicists around the world, for example, comfortably live within the worldviews of their different cultures, but on physics they share one understanding, which applies in every culture. Appeal to worldviews fails to distinguish common sense and theory.

Again regarding what might appear as clean theory but is merely elaborate speculation, Reber and Slife () specify worldviews in terms of differences in basic beliefs—as if, for example, they believe in God, and scientists do not; as if science has to be defined as a “naturalistic‐atheistic worldview” (Richards and Bergin , 19; but, at long last, see Slife et al. , 220); or as if every culture that believes in God or gods shares the “theist worldview”—ancient Greece, Hindu India, and Southern Baptist U.S.A., for example. Obviously, given that “God” means different things to different people, not theoretical positions, but, again, only varied personal beliefs are in question, and some one preferred common sense is being gratuitously taken as normative.

Said otherwise, the conflicting, differing beliefs by which the theistic psychologists specify competing worldviews are theism (personal belief in God) and science (reasonable belief in evidence‐based explanation). But these two are incommensurate. “Theism,” belief in God, is an a priori, particular content of personal faith, an already formulated answer, whereas science is an enterprise with a method for generating answers and assessing their cognitive content. This confusion is clear in Reber's () claim that theist religion—not theology—enjoys its own “method, or means by which to understand” (202; similarly Gorsuch ). Besides, as I have been arguing, the method of quoad se explanation can apply to the question of God or any other; genuinely “scientific” theism, or “high‐end” theology, is possible (compare Richards and Bergin , 97–102). But confounding beliefs with different modes of conceiving beliefs, the theistic psychologists take the different conceptualizations to actually be different beliefs: theism versus naturalism, revelation versus science, that old dichotomy of faith versus reason, which ignores the mediation of Anselm's theology, “faith seeking understanding.” Their proposed resolution of the conflict relies on a somehow‐coexisting pluralism of opinions (but conflicting, if compared), all “meaningful”; but their controlling choice is for theism, not science, for faith, not reason. Yet one cannot have it both ways—impugn a hegemony of science, champion the inviolability of religion, and then attempt to reconcile science and religion. In this case, religion trumps every other claim; and religious belief becomes the criterion of reality, the proposed measure of ontology. Such, indeed, has been the traditional stance of religion for millennia, so conflict with science arises—but only because evidence‐based reasoning has inevitably asked whether the religious opinions are actually correct, and naïve religion does not entertain this question whereas science is built on it. Only in this muddled scenario does conflict arise.

In sum, Reber and Slife () advocate a purely commonsensical, and therefore particularistic, understanding of theism and its claimed miracles. They advocate the right of individual believers to be taken, not just seriously, but literally at their word (cf. White , 139). Then, supposedly, scientific breakthroughs are extraordinary divine interventions “given as insights to scientists through divine inspiration” (Richards and Bergin , 101). Then, supposedly, in response to a prayer, God did intervene in an extraordinary way to give Jeremy Bartz () the insight he needed to help his client. These claims would appear to be dealing in theory because they are engaging psychology and the natural sciences and asserting opinions about God's causal role beyond natural occurrences. But the “theism” in question is not so. The theism is a statement of personal faith—as is also the theism of all survey studies of theist believers. And the “miracle” in question—at least as most recently explicated—is simply a naturally occurring but awe‐inspiring event. In faith, believers see the working of God in everyday events—in some mysterious way, to be sure, often heartbreaking, but actual and real, nonetheless—and they praise God for it. As a believer myself, agreeing, but from a nuanced theoretical perspective, I would hold that the believers’ faith is valid. I am not out to disparage popular religion wholesale, but popular religion and a scientific account of it are very different enterprises, and I urge that the difference be respected.

Working fully with a commonsensical understanding, working within the undifferentiated consciousness of popular religion and culture, the theistic psychologists and psychology of religion have unwittingly been pitting common sense against theory, popular personal devotion against evidence‐based reasonable explanation, as if these two modes of conception constituted competing theoretical stances and competing beliefs. In contrast, hard‐won differentiated consciousness can specify these two modes of thinking and even explain a congenial relationship between them. Common sense and theory are merely different ways of dealing with one and the same reality—for example, the rising or setting of the sun and the rotation of the Earth, or the reverence for Christ as God and the profession that Christ is God. An experience can be wondrous and, in this sense, miraculous, an “act of God,” and not entail actual suspension of the laws of nature. God can be involved in the processes of nature—positing (creation), sustaining (conservation), and facilitating (concurrence) them—without needing to make some “difference in the world,” “a meaningful [?] difference in the order of nature” (Reber and Slife , 5.2), in order to certify divine involvement. Popular religion and scientific explanation, including theology, are not in opposition.

A Historical Perspective on the Problem

The distinction between common sense and theory mollifies the problem of God in the psychology of religion. The possibility of acknowledging these two modes of thinking, however, has forcefully arisen only with the emergence of modern science—and a whole new era in history has opened, masterfully recounted by Lawrence Principe (). Credible scholarship must understand and accept this historical development. The alternative is to reject the validity of modern science and to choose personal opinion and cultural preference over evidence‐based explanation. Epitomizing a trend in psychology of religion and in culture at large (Otto ; Denialism ), theistic psychology has opted for this alternative; but, befogged in postmodern agnosticism, it cannot explicate its choice as such and unwittingly mixes apples and oranges, common sense and theory.

This realization can be stated otherwise: “Outdated simplistic religion is struggling to survive in a highly sophisticated culture,” but “this sorting out of the issues requires the very strategies of contemporary thinking and science that the religionists are, in principle, often unwilling to embrace” (Helminiak , 54.1). Echoing a famous medieval debate, Lonergan () made the same point: “Those with no taste for systematic meaning will keep repeating that it is better to feel compunction than to define it” (329). At stake is what I called “leveling the field…by obfuscation” (Helminiak , 47.2), namely, the refusal or inability to address theism in a theoretical mode; the insistence that commonsensical religion—personal piety and faith—be immune to criticism or questioning (Helminiak , 243–44; , 66); and the assumption that the achievement of accurate knowledge and its precise expression is a human impossibility in any case (Helminiak , 49, 53, 59; see , 133). Making the same point in yet another way, Lonergan () insists on the critical difference “between the religious apprehension of a doctrine and the theological apprehension of the same doctrine” (333). Current psychology of religion seems to rest its whole case on personal religious apprehension, almost innocent of theological apprehension.

Further considerations support this suggestion and illuminate the tensions between religion and science at this point in history. For example, the theistic psychology in question here emanates from Brigham Young University. Although its Mormonism serves its faithful followers strikingly well, the religion has no tradition of theological analysis: “Since scriptures and specific revelations supply Latter‐Day Saints with authoritative answers to many of the traditional concerns of faith, members of the Church tend to devote little energy to theoretical, speculative, or systematic theology” (Midgley ). Similarly, affirming “The Great Apostasy,” Mormonism is highly critical of the religious development between the apostolic era and the time of Joseph Smith, rejecting, for example—and tellingly in the present context—“the pagan philosophical systems of the day (Trinitarianism, resulting in the Nicene Creed…)” (Talmage [1909], reported in Compton ) and “[denial of] the existence of miracles” (Compton ; see Helminiak , 68–69; , 53). Something similar can be said about Protestantism and, more so, fundamentalist‐leaning Evangelicalism, which color much of American psychology of religion (Hill and Hood , 3; Wulff , 20–21, 26–28). Their founding emphasis on faith alone, scripture alone, and God alone—transcended in professional theological circles (Reumann ; Rusch ; Mattes ) but living on in the popular religious ethos—presents problems, in principle, for any interdisciplinary religious studies, which must grant validity to human (“sinful,” “fallen”) science (see citations under “Appeal to God and Other‐worldly Forces” above and Helminiak , 30–50, on the Evangelical project of “integration” of psychology and religion). Roman Catholicism, too, continues to require miracles as evidence of sainthood (McBrien , beatification, canonization, q.v.); proposes that the individual human soul is an immediate (unmediated) creation of God (John Paul II , §5); ignoring contemporary sexology, holds procreation to be an inviolable aspect of every human sex act (Congregation for Catholic Education ; Congregation for the Clergy ); and, with most Western religion but without the input of current neuroscience, has consistently understood mysticism to be a matter of the direct experience of God (Tanquerey ; Carmody and Carmody ). Thus it is that, for varied historical and highly personal reasons, religious believers across the board often struggle to reconcile their religion and the sciences.

The Reconciliation of Theism and Science

As long as the psychology of religion looks to personal belief as its primary subject matter, it cannot propose more than sophisticated descriptions of varied belief systems, never a genuinely scientific explanation of beliefs, their sources, their practical functions, and their validity in the face of living on planet Earth. If, however, theoretical theology is compared with theoretical science, conflict easily dissolves and scientific explanation of religion becomes possible. In the face of postmodern agnosticism, the question is whether we are willing to allow the possibility of a genuine, explanatory, scientific psychology of religion and also acknowledge an explanatory theology. “If the competence of theology is specified as a specialized cognitive contribution to comprehensive understanding, theology fits hand in glove with the other sciences” (Helminiak , 50.1, emphasis added; see also , ch. 6)—as follows.

Summarizing the consensus of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim medieval thought, Aquinas (S.T., I, q. 3, a. 4; q. 8, a. 1) specified the essence of the Creator‐God as existence itself, ipse esse. God is the answer when existence becomes a question.

• Scientifically speaking, then, “the God hypothesis” (Helminiak , 361–64) accounts for the very existence of things. Existence is the one datum that the sciences, natural and social, must presuppose.

• Theologically speaking, the sciences explain existing realities such as God chose to create them and have them function. Science unfolds the wonders of God's handiwork.

Thus, the God hypothesis offers a reasonable answer to a reasonable question: Why is there something rather than nothing? How is it that anything at all exists when all existents we know are inherently contingent? To explain the given evidence—namely, the datum of contingent being—the hypothesis of God arises: necessary, self‐explanatory, eternal, nonmaterial Being. Understood in this way, the God hypothesis is as cogent in its right as is the affirmation of imperceptible fields, quarks, leptons, and dark matter in contemporary physics. All are the unavoidable conclusions of careful, evidence‐based understanding; all are intelligibles—realities constituted in part by meaning (Lonergan , 121)—that must be affirmed as actual if explanation of the data is to be coherent and effective. Then, theology and science cohere as instances of compatibly formulated human understanding. In every case, sophisticated human self‐conscious intelligence is making sense of the given.

In such a comprehensive scientific endeavor, on a level playing field, theory engaging theory, God explains the existence of things and science explains the nature of the created existents. On this basis, God can be reasonably and safely extracted from all this‐worldly scientific explanation. Affirming God or denying God changes nothing of the existing realities that science studies. God has no place as an explanatory factor in the natural and social sciences. In Questiones Naturales Adelard of Bath enunciated this consensual principle of science 900 years ago. God's only place in science is to address the further question, which many might legitimately raise, about the very existence of those natural and social realities.

Then, what of miracles? The miracle, strictly taken, is the only case that falls outside of such an approach to comprehensive explanation because a miracle entails some suspension or alteration of the laws of the created natural order. Unique by definition, however, miracles cannot pertain to the generalized explanation that is science. There can be no science of unique events. Alternatively, God could providentially use secondary causes to effect results that, respecting the natural order, are possible but improbable or even likely. As instances of genuine divine intervention, these would be miracles; but fully explicable naturalistically, they would neither afford determination of, nor need additional appeal to, divine intervention. If it remains that the defense of miracles, strictly taken, does, indeed, govern the concern of religious psychologists, if literal divine interventions are what believers mean by God's being active in their lives, let us all freely and respectfully admit that such miracles might well occur, but let us sanely also realize that they do not pertain to science and are not opposed to it.

Let the religionists pursue their concern about miracles in religious circles, where such concerns belong, not psychological or natural‐scientific circles. In the last analysis, however, I would wager that the only coherent theism the varied religionists might achieve by consensus—if such a goal still merits consideration amidst postmodern agnosticism!—is the longstanding, Western consensus that I have summarized. I, at least, see no other coherent option (on Eastern philosophy and Western process theology, see Helminiak , 182–85, 213–92; , 205, 307, 321–24, 330, 351). Besides, any achieved consensus would need to rely on some meta‐agency that could address all the religions fairly. Exemplifying again the emergence of critical thinking and theoretical formulation as history unfolds, that agency could only be critical reason, the same agency that guides the sciences. That agency could hardly be a particular claimed revelation: The “revelations” tend to differ. Thus, in a pluralistic and truly global twenty‐first century, as they say, “It's a new ballgame.” The ultimate foundation of religious claims has become human consciousness itself, “interiority”—as is the grounding thesis of Lonergan's (, 257–66) Method in Theology. Happily, this approach both leaves room for the, perhaps, occasional genuine miracle and also allows the sciences to explain the otherwise lawful functioning of the universe without need to invoke God but also allows believers to correctly see God's creative power working in some way (namely, through the natural order, via secondary causes) in life's every occurrence.

The Contemporary Challenge of This Resolution of the Problem

The supposition of the psychology of religion as specified by the theistic psychologists—naturalism versus theism, or psychology versus religion—and the resultant need to append God to otherwise sufficient explanation are ill‐conceived. They stand as an example of what Lonergan () called “troubled consciousness” (84), the crisis of epistemology that emerges when highly sophisticated theory, as in the current sciences, is “sufficiently advanced for the sharp opposition between the two realms of meaning [common sense and theory] to be adequately grasped” as “when an Eddington contrasts his two tables: the bulky, solid, colored desk at which he worked, and the manifold of colorless ‘wavicles’ so minute that the desk was mostly empty space” (84). The exit from this problematic does not come through uncritical and unconditional respect for religious beliefs, that is, not through regression to, and insistence on, undifferentiated religious consciousness, which would credit—and has long credited—naïve beliefs as valid ontological statements. Rather, the exit comes by pushing through in advance to fully differentiated consciousness, which can sort out the intricacies (85, 256–60). Then “the subject relates his [or her] different procedures [relation of things to oneself or relation of things to one another] to several realms [common sense and theory], relates the several realms to one another, and consciously shifts from one realm to another by consciously changing his [or her] procedures” (84).

In commonsensical terms, in popular lingo, I spoke of such differentiation of consciousness as my wearing many hats and easily interchanging them as the situation required (Helminiak , 43.1). Producing the present article, again exchanging many hats, I am struck by my need to draw on my early theological training and writings, matters that slipped into the background once I joined a department of psychology in a state university. This realization confirms my earlier assessment: Often, this discussion about psychology and religion “is not really about the relationship of psychology and theism” at all but “about different sets of religious beliefs, different claims to infallible revelation, and different theologies [in the loose sense of different creeds or religious speculation]” (50.1). Indeed, there is available an elaborated and pedigreed technical theology that entails no conflict of naturalism‐versus‐theism whatsoever.