Theology and psychology: an essay review on Fraser Watts

Abstract

In his recent book Theology and Psychology, Fraser Watts explores an area of interdisciplinary dialogue that has become active on many fronts. He traces the main areas of engagement while limiting his purview mostly to psychological explorations of the formation of the human spirit and of religious experience, and theology directed to parallel concepts. Psychology is largely pursued within its subdisciplines pertaining to introspective psychologies, neuroscience, and social psychology. The theology is mostly within the Christian, and especially Anglican, tradition, yet the variety of voices here is also well known. Within these broad limits, and with impressive depth and breadth of scholarship, Watts addresses topics as diverse as evolutionary theory, the nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, the foundations of morality, the soul, immortality, divine action, the doctrine of the Fall, eschatology, and the origin of belief. Although he provides fair representations of various views, he consistently rejects 'greedy' forms of 'nothing buttery', because he believes that the human person and religious experience are so multifaceted that they cannot be grasped from any single standpoint. In addition, as he points out, various reductionistic claims are simply inaccurate. It is suggested that Watts's thinking shows many parallels with theories developing within the new sciences of complexity. Further development of his work along these lines might have significance both for his own contribution and for the growing field of complexity studies.