Hard Facts vs. Fuzzy Logic

In last week’s blog on my identity as a religious psychologist, the following comments were posted by readers:

First, from Ian: It appears I may have rushed to label Josh "highly educated"; he has a "PhD" from a dubious "spiritually-oriented" institution that has very little recognition in the academic community, and lost its accreditation. His PhD is laughable.

Then, from Chris: Ian: First, your ad hominem attacks on Josh aren't helpful. Secondly, from my limited understanding, most psychologists opt for the less academically rigorous "PsyD" professional degree-- so ones with a full PhD are likely to be, on average, more academically/scientifically oriented.

Thank you Ian for giving me my topic for this week.  Thank you Chris for defending me and getting me to finally look up what “ad hominem” means (for the rest of you, who like me didn’t know:  it means to attack the person rather than their argument).

So, first as to the school:  I attended the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco for both my master’s and doctoral degrees.  I moved my family 9,000 miles from overseas to be able to do so.  As I posted recently, it was very clear to me that unless my studies included a spiritual component I wouldn’t be able to do a doctorate.  Not many schools offered this back in the ‘80s; I chose the one that seemed to have feet in each world (spiritual and scientific) and I felt I got a good education there.  Even a Ph.D. is only a beginning:  I’ve had to continually study all manner of things ever since, like most people graduating from most places.  The accreditation they lost in 2011 is from the American Psychological Association, which is a kind of blue chip stamp of approval, though they remain fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.  Also as explained in a previous post, a Psy.D. is a degree for those pursuing a clinical track (seeing people for therapy primarily) and a Ph.D. is for those pursuing a research track.  At the time I started the Psy.D. didn’t exist or that’s what I would have because my professional focus is clinical.

But the real reason I wanted to follow up to Ian’s comments is because it gives me an opportunity to look at what lies behind the attitude that is so often prevalent between what makes knowledge reliable and credible and what makes knowledge suspect. We talk about “hard science” or “hard data” vs. “soft” or “fuzzy”.  One is clearly good; one is usually looked at with some kind of scorn. There is an implicit misogyny in this – the male is hard and reliable, the female soft and unreliable.  I think the same prejudice gets applied to religious thinking:  it can’t be proven so it can’t be reliable.  Only that which can be tested according to strict scientific standards has validity.  All of these other people talking about God just don’t know how to think clearly. 

And even further:  let’s say the worst of Ian’s suspicions are true and my school focuses only on how to help people develop their spirituality and not on the “science” of psychology:  do we know for certain that would be a bad thing?  Who would you want to confide your worst fears to?  Someone who can read statistical analyses or someone who can read the human heart?

I don’t want to set up a false dichotomy here because I don’t think you should have to choose:  I think we should be able to think clearly with our heads and feel fully with our hearts, have a developed analytical mind and a developed trust in our intuition.  The lopsided push for facts and figures, I think, stems from a mistaken belief that the world around us can be reduced to such things, that it is possible to know things with certainty and make decisions with security.

I don’t believe such an ultimately objective reality exists, and I consider it my job to help people get more comfortable with that truth.  Even in the “hard sciences” things are not as they appear on the surface.  Pick up any book on quantum mechanics and you will read that the universe is not as solid or predictable as our daily sensibilities would lead us to believe. Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist who writes books trying to explain the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory to the general public. The following quote comes from The Fabric of The Cosmos:

Whereas human intuition, and its embodiment in classical physics, envision a reality in which things are always definitely one way or another, quantum mechanics describes a reality in which things sometimes hover in a haze of being partly one way and partly another.  Things become definite only when a suitable observation forces them to relinquish quantum possibilities and settle on a specific outcome….But the oddity of quantum mechanics does not stop here….Quantum mechanics – if taken at face value – implies that something you do over here can be instantaneously linked to something happening over there, regardless of distance…revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space.

What does all of this mean?  Well, at the simplest level he is saying that what we do in the privacy of our living room may be linked instantaneously and inexplicably to something that is occurring in Mongolia or on a distant star.  To the pedestrian scientific mind, this is untenable.  Prove it to me!  According to Greene’s books, there are experiments which do just that.  I don’t pretend to understand them but I don’t have much trouble accepting them because they are completely consonant with a religious worldview:  we are all interconnected, there is much more to the world than meets the naked eye, and the best we can do is to understand as much as we possibly can and have faith that there is a larger web we are a part of.

Ian’s comments and their tenor are not unique to the secular world view. Many religious writers are equally threatened by the unknown and therefore cling steadfastly to a set of rules which are like hand holds in the darkness.  I have nothing against hand holds:  I use them too.  But I find that whenever my tone gets shrill, it’s because I’m holding on too tightly.  It’s time to let go and reach for something deeper, stronger…and more fuzzy.

Do you have a question about your marriage or relationship? Is there a particular topic on relationships or individual psychological issues you would like addressed in this blog? Ask Josh in the comments below or email him at josh@joshgressel.com.

Josh Gressel, Ph.D., is a couples and individual therapist based in Pleasant Hill, CA. Visit his website at joshgressel.com.  He is currently accepting referrals.