Psychology Ignores Science

APA ‘ignoring the science’ on homosexual reparative therapy [Excerpts]

A Christian attorney says the American Psychological Association’s rejection of therapy designed to help homosexuals leave their lifestyle is “devoid of science, reality and the common practices of a counselor.”

On Wednesday, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a strong condemnation of reparative therapy, declaring that mental health professionals should not tell homosexual clients they can change their sexual behavior through therapy or other treatments.

Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, says the APA is a political organization that has chosen to leave science behind.

“When it declassified homosexuality in the 1970s, it did it against the background of a lot of science that continued to classify it as a mental disorder. It also ignored over 120 Matt Staveryears of research, which by the way has recently been published showing that individuals who are same-sex attracted can change,” he notes.

“Consequently, the APA’s position that you’re born with it and that it would be detrimental to counsel someone to change or leave behind their same-sex attractions is simply ignoring the science.”

Staver says the APA typically recommends client-directed counseling — a counselor being sensitive to the request of a client — except when a client does not want to act on their same-sex attractions.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=634346

[TBC: The premise is that the field of psychology has been left to the world. But, one cannot be reminded too often that psychology is the world. Too many have approached the question of psychology from the assumption that it is a science (i.e., something God built into His creation) that only lacks qualified Christian personnel in order to make it work. Despite being more than 30 years old, it is again worth considering Dr. Sigmund Koch's comments concerning his own field of endeavor: "The hope of psychological science became indistinguishable from the fact of psychological science. The entire subsequent history of psychology can be seen as a ritualistic endeavor to emulate the forms of science in order to sustain the delusion that it already is a science" (The American Scholar, Autumn 1973, p. 66). Consequently, even secular psychologists recognize that psychology began as a theory, has never advanced beyond a theory, and will remain a theory. That exposure continues today.]

 

Tomado de www.thebereancall.org

“OUR BRAINS ARE NOT US”

“OUR BRAINS ARE NOT US” [Excerpts]

“The mind is what the brain does,” according to Steven Pinker, Harvard’s celebrity neuropsychologist. We “are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” according to the co-discoverer and Nobel laureate Francis Crick. “You are your synapses,” according to neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux.

Neuro-reductionism, the theory that we essentially are our brains, is the flavour of the week in popular science. Which makes it all the more surprising that the hottest article in the latest issue of the journal Bioethics runs under the headline “Our Brains Are Not Us”. Normally in the vanguard of attacks on the reduction of personality to a computer-like neural network are non-materialist philosophers. But this study, by Walter Glannon, of the University of Calgary, takes a different tack, something he calls “the distributed model of the mind”. “I challenge and reject neuro-reductionism by arguing that the mind emerges from and is shaped by interaction among the brain, body, and environment. The mind is not located in the brain but is distributed among these three entities as the organism engages with and constructs meaning from its surroundings.”

Glannon points out that although cognitive neuroscientists reject a dualist model of a non-material mind and a material body, they fall into an equally contentious theory — brain-body dualism. This fails to appreciate the effect of the body on the brain.

The mind is not a disembodied brain in a vat of chemicals, as in some B-grade horror films, he says. Transplanting a brain into a different body would not preserve the identity of the person. In the words of German neuro-philosopher Thomas Fuchs, “The brain is only an organ, and it is not the brain, but the organism or the living person that has conscious access to the world.”

http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8643/

[TBC: As Dave has commented, "[The articles] Sir John Eccles has written are very fascinating….he received his Nobel Prize for research on the brain.  He describes the brain as: ‘A machine that a ghost can operate.’ Your brain doesn’t think; if it did we would be prisoners of our brain. Our brain is like a computer that we use. There’s a ghost in the machine, as they say and the brain is like a computer that we use to interface with this space-time-matter continuum in which our bodies function.”]

 

Tomado de www.thebereancall.org