Many scholars view the worldview of naturalism as not only important to traditional science but also neutral to theism. This neutrality has long provided the justification for psychological science to inform and even correct theistic understandings. Still, this view of neutrality, as the authors show, stems from the presumption that these two worldviews are philosophically compatible. The authors' review of the traditional candidates for compatibility suggests not only that these candidates fail to reconcile naturalism and theism but also that these worldviews are fundamentally incompatible. Therefore, attempts to use the insights gleaned from a naturalistic worldview to inform or correct the understandings of a theistic worldview could constitute a significant prejudice against theism and theists. The authors then provide practical examples of this prejudice in the following:(1) mainstream psychology and its history, (2) research design and explanation in the psychology of religion, and (3) interpretations of important philosophers and scholars relevant to psychology.

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Much theorizing about altruism has been undertaken within a naturalistic and deterministic sociobiological framework that has sought to explain altruistic action in terms of underlying genetic selfishness. Recently, however, social constructionist thinkers have developed an alternative to such theorizing which suggests that human action arises out of fundamentally open-ended and malleable social relationships. This paper intends to show, however, that a reductive egoism is nonetheless still at work in such accounts, typically taking the form of an underlying concern for matters of personal status and social recognition. As a response, this paper will briefly outline the work of the French phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas as an example of non-reductive and fundamentally Other-oriented alternatives to both sociobiological and social constructionist accounts of altruistic action.

our study of the philosophy of social science has led us to realize that many psychologists, including ourselves, have participated in a kind of popular myth, sometimes known as the myth of neutrality. The primary feature of this myth is the supposition that the research findings and conceptual practices of secular psychology are essentially neutral to or compatible with various worldviews, including theism. We first attempt to dispel this myth. instead of being bias-free or bias-minimized, the research and practice of psychologists presupposes certain assumptions or biases about the world. We explicate some of the more important assumptions of conventional methodology and practice and compare these assumptions to the theistic assumption of a currently and practically relevant God. We find that theistic conceptualizations are considerably different from secular conceptualizations, not only in their hypotheses about psychological events but also in their practical applications to psychological problems. These differences, we believe, suggest the need for a theistic approach to psychology as a complement to our currently secular approach to psychology. We describe how this is possible by pointing to several applied branches of this theistic approach, including other articles of this special Journal issue, which relate to programs of research and approaches to practice.