Reason, Science and God

3: Religion

The concept of religion poses several problems to this essay. Psychology inherently studies humans in a way that accounts for evolution and not creationism. In most forms of belief, the God or ruling deity has created the world how they want. This might suggest that modern psychology is indeed wrong, and therefore this essay is null. Furthermore, in most belief systems, the ruling deity instituted a divine, objective moral system for their followers to follow. This also suggests that, although morality can still be socialised, there is in fact an objective moral system to be followed.

The Two Types of 'Morality'

The latter presents less of an issue when discussing this essay. It is reasonable to believe that humans learn about this true, objective morality through socialisation, and then may choose to ignore it and develop their own system, which does not contradict this essay. However, the word 'morality' then becomes difficult to define: is it objective, or is it subjective? Are the humans who aren't following this divine system moral? As such, I propose two definitions of morality:

Personal Morality: The subjective attitude of what is right and wrong, which in itself may be correct or incorrect according to others.

Divine Morality: The objective attitude of what is right and wrong, which comes from somewhere other than oneself, particularly divine entities, which may or may not actually exist, and may be a concept/idea developed by humans in an attempt to unify behaviours, or the like.

The Issue of Creationism and Psychology

The only argument I can present for my essay still applying if the world was created by a deity is that there is research evidence to suggest that nature and nurture do help to mould the human personality. If there is evidence it would be reasonable to hypothesise that the deity instituted these systems to allow humans to be unique. For example, Albert Bandura showed that children react to behaviours in other people in his social learning theory. He showed that when a model is rewarded for a behaviour, a child is more likely to imitate it. This is an example of research support for environmental learning and socialisation. Furthermore, there is research support to show that, in twins, they are more likely to suffer from similar behaviours in the form of mental illness. Monozygotic twins are 86% likely to develop OCD if their twin has it. These examples clearly show there is some environmental and biological basis for behaviours, which suggests that these processes do work regardless of whether a deity created the world or not.