I am in danger of going on an extended rant here, so let me try to keep this post within some boundaries. This is not something I have just discovered, nor is it something I do not have many thoughts about. But, in this particular case, it hit home. So let me deal with the particular case.
I was researching for a paper on the subject of the initial intensity of punishment, specifically as it results to behavior change, for a psychology class. The research all points to the idea that the initial punishment must be strong if change is to effectively occur. If a judge, teacher, parent, or even a psychologist experimenting on a rat, uses mild punishment initially, it will only result in the need for the continuing escalation of punishment, as the ‘punishee’ will effectively develop a tolerance for punishment. The primary author I was dealing with noted that this causes problems because it is, to paraphrase him, essentially impossible to know what strength the initial punishment should be. In other words, we know that we need to make a strong statement with the initial punishment, but we have no way of knowing how strong it should be. We’re pretty much in a conundrum that can’t be solved.
We were asked, for the paper, to discuss this along with its implications for the parental punishment of children. The problem here is that children are not rats or criminals (at least not usually) and parents are not psychologists wearing white smocks or judges wearing black robes. Punishment (so-called) of children takes place in a context, and that context is not the laboratory or a courtroom. From a Christian perspective, the context in which the discipline (not punishment) of children takes place is a loving relationship (and a gracious one at that) based on the love of God, in Christ, for us.
The issue then, as far as the paper is concerned, became the fact that the natural science approach to psychology (which the main text under discussion advocates) does not really allow for love. Love is not something that can be studied by science. Perhaps we can study the firing of neurons in the brain, perhaps we can study the accumulation of hormones in certain parts of the brain – but we cannot really study emotions. They’re intangible. Of course, this also means that we cannot study the soul. In fact, there’s not really any such thing as the soul, or even the mind for that matter. That’s philosophy, not psychology. We can only study behavior and the past behaviors that drive those behaviors.
So now, psychology, which originally meant the ‘study of the soul’ or the ‘study of the mind’ cannot study those very things. Hence the maxim, ‘every institution tends to produce its opposite.’ Psychology has become ‘Natural Scientific Psychology,’ which has become no psychology at all. And we are left with Darwinistic Behaviorism (that’s my own term, but I’m sure it’s been used by someone else before).
How can you shepherd a child’s heart when you cannot allow that a child has a heart to shepherd? C.S. Lewis was right. How can we help but produce ‘men without chests?’ We will demand love and obedience from them while effectively cutting off the ‘organ’ of true love and obedience because it cannot be scientifically explained.
