Secular Psychology Defrauded the World

It warped our view of human nature, says a psychologist.
But we’re better now. We just want you to be happy.

 

 

Would you continue doing business with a company that ripped you off in an enormous fraud operation that ruined the lives of millions of people? What if they admitted they were wrong? If they came at you smiling and feeling sorry about what happened, would you have anything to do with them again?

This is the spirit of a revealing article by a secular psychologist about “classic psychology”—the kind from Freud to modern times that ruled the alleged “science” of mind. His admission of how bad it was should jolt people like a shock treatment. But now psychologists want your trust again.

How classic psychology warped our view of human nature as cruel and selfish – but new research is more hopeful  (The Conversation, 19 July 2023). Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Becket University. After recounting some famous historical experiments by secular psychologists, and the conclusions that psychologists drew from them, he has a confession to make about his field.

Such theories and studies from the 1960s and 1970s implied that the “evil” sides of our character lie just below our civilised surface, while the moral and altruistic side is a thin veneer. They encouraged a view that human beings are essentially callous and selfish. The problem is that the findings of these experiments have now been contested and even discredited by other researchers.

The classic experiments were staples in psychology textbooks, told and retold by psychology professors. One alleged to show that people role-playing as prison guards enjoyed torturing their “prisoners.” Another showed that bystanders didn’t want to get involved when a crime was being committed. The more bystanders, the story went, the fewer would come to help. This was called the “bystander effect.”

These and other experiments were judged to portray human nature as selfish and callous. Taylor describes how flawed the studies were.

Psychology Has Learned Its Lesson

Things are better now, says Taylor. We don’t believe those old studies that “warped our view of human nature as cruel and selfish.” We now realize that people are the opposite: heroic and altruistic! The field of psychology is now 180 degrees different.

The burgeoning field of “heroism studies” also questions the bystander effect. In a recent article for The Conversation, I described how acts of heroic altruism are common during terrorist attacks, when people often risk their own lives to help others.

Isn’t Taylor nice? He wants you to believe you are a good person, and so is everyone else. Sorry for the misconception. Psychology is better now.

In my view, early psychologists may have been unconsciously tailoring their experiments to confirm a view of human nature as innately cruel. These studies were carried out less than 20 years after the second world war and the Holocaust, when the horrors of WWII were still fresh in people’s minds.

Around the same time, genetic theories were published that suggested that human beings are biological engines, caring for nothing but replication and survival.

That sounds like Darwinism. In fact, Taylor next aims his criticism at outspoken atheist and Darwinism champion Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene. That book, Taylor says, “portrayed human beings as ‘survival machines’ who treat other survival machines as “something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited”, he says. But wasn’t that view straight out of Darwin’s survival of the fittest?

Smile: Now We Offer the New Happy Psychology

Since the early 2000s, Taylor says, psychology has come to terms with its brutal past. It regrets the warped view of human nature preached by its forbears. Now, there is “positive psychology” that appreciates virtue, and honors the old-fashioned character traits of “wisdom, courage, gratitude and resilience.” How those qualities emerged by natural selection, he does not say.

Positive psychologists like Martin Seligman argue conventional psychology had for too long been essentially “the study of unhappiness” and that a new field was needed to study what “is good or virtuous in human nature”.

The consensus from anthropologists is that, for the vast majority of the time that we’ve inhabited this planet, human societies have been egalitarian and peaceful. This challenges the neo-Darwinist idea that human life has always been a competitive struggle for survival, conditioning us to be selfish and individualistic.

A look at the news shows that “human beings can be brutal and selfish,” Taylor admits. “But we can be heroically kindhearted too.”

So keep buying at our store, Taylor seems to be saying. We psychologists just want you to be happy. But is this an honest repentance and change of heart, or is he putting on a Greek happy mask? See our previous articles about secular psychology’s many failings going way back. Taylor’s remorse doesn’t go far enough. All the Darwin-based, materialist social sciences are pseudosciences, as admitted by social scientists and psychologists themselves. For example:

• Social Scientists Ashamed but Still Ask for Trust (11 April 2023)
• Social Sciences Flunk Science Test (13 April 2022)
• Psychologists Are Schizophrenic about Mental Illness (14 April 2022)
• Psychotherapy Is Useless (3 Aug 2021)
• Evolutionary Anthropologists Fail Big Time (22 July 2020)
• Don’t Trust a Secular Shrink (30 May 2020)
• Brain Science Needs a Rethink (18 May 2020)
• Freud: Celebrity Fraud (22 March 2020)
• Psychology’s Fake Superiority Over Religion (16 Feb 2020)
• Psychologist, Fix Your Own Problems (6 Oct 2019)
• More Criticisms Raised Against Psycho-Science (6 Aug 2019)
• Anthropologists and Psychologists Under Fire for Flawed Methods (19 Nov 2018)
• Evolutionary Psychologists Deny Their Own Minds (24 Nov 2017)

Use the search bar for more articles going back two decades about the failures of psychology and other social sciences.

Notice the reference to “the consensus from anthropologists” in Taylor’s quote above. He does not say, “The whole lot of them were wrong. They were wrong about neo-Darwinism. They warped the secular view of human nature, therefore I have repented. I have quit the field of secular psychology, turned to the Creator who made our minds and souls, and have become a Biblical counselor at a God-honoring church.” If he had said that, it’s almost certain that The Conversation (better, The Indoctrination) would never have published it. No; Taylor is still one of them. He still wants to be part of The Consensus: the new Groupthink party of secular anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists in academia.

But guess what. The whole lot of them are still Darwinians!

While Steve Taylor, author of Spiritual Science, is a “panspiritualist” who takes issue with Darwinian reductionism, he still believes that altruism evolved and became an “innate” or “intuitive” part of human nature. He refers to a 2010 paper by Denis Noble, an evolutionist who has problems with Dawkins-style Darwinism but still believes in human evolution. Taylor thinks the “spiritual” part of human nature is expressed in near-death experiences. But if human nature is “natural” or naturalistic—if spirituality is some quality within the universe and not external to it (i.e., if the spirit of man was not breathed into man by a transcendent Creator)—then it is just as naturalistic as the old Darwinism, but even more dangerous because of its deceptive mask (see 9 June 2019: “Spiritual Science: Anything but God” and 28 Feb 2016, “If Materialism Is Bad, This Could Be Far Worse”). Taylor just adds a pinch of mystic spirituality to get the origin and evolution of life going (see review of his book at Amazon).

Taylor’s brand may look like a nicer form of neo-Darwinism, but “positive psychology” is mere lipstick on a Darwin pig that teaches the secular, atheist, millions-of-years view that “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Some of today’s pigs in academia are sorry that the earlier pigs made the horse work itself to death, but now they have learned their lesson. They want to honor the heroism of the horse with a plaque at the slaughterhouse. “He was such a good horse,” they say with hands over their hearts. Just keep us in power, trust the experts in academia, and we will never do that again.

Jesus said an evil tree produces evil fruit. If the tree that denies our Creator was evil when it preached racism, eugenics, survival of the fittest, selfish genes and unhappiness, it is still evil now. Don’t believe the commercial showing off a new look for the secular tree. That nice-looking fruit on the branches is mere plastic fruit they tied on for the cameraman. Real fruit is only produced by God through the human soul that abides in him (John 15:1-17).