Has Psychology Banished the Ghost from the Machine?

The advance of science has challenged some of humanity’s most cherished beliefs. Sigmund Freud noted three such scientific disturbances, describing them as “severe wounds” (schwere Kränkungen). The first was the cosmological wound inflicted by Copernicus. Then there was the biological injury caused by Darwinism. The third wound was the psychological one which Freud modestly attributed to his own theory of psychoanalysis (Freud 1917). For Freud, the victim of these three assaults was “the universal narcissism of men,” but it would be more historically accurate to identify the Christian faith as the real victim of these particular scientific revolutions. It would also be more accurate to credit psychology in general, rather than psychoanalytic theory, with inflicting the third wound, but Freud was right in thinking that this was the deepest cut. Despite what churchmen thought in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, no deep theological question hinges on whether the sun orbits the earth or vice versa. Nor is there any fundamental incompatibility between belief in a Christian God and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. As I will argue in this chapter, however, the various developments in scientific psychology over the past century are far more corrosive of Christian faith than the earlier revolutions in astronomy and biology. I will focus on three strands of psychological research in particular: the study of human error, research into the placebo effect, and the demonstration that psychological properties can be exhibited by purely physical systems.