Christian Apologetics

Consider the first full paragraph on page 5 of Dixon. I think almost every sentence there irks me.

1: While anti-religious and merely non-religious psychologists were not the only ones to use the word `emotions', they did so sooner and integrated the category into their psychologies more readily than did their Christian contemporaries. Geeze, where to begin? Psychologists, perhaps? A bit of an ahistorical word to be applying to the period 1800-1850. Who are these people? How do I tell a psychologist from a moral philosopher, for example? Was Hegel a psychologist? Emerson? Thoreau? The Duke of Wellington? And apparently this undefined group comes in three flavors: Christian, non-religious, and anti-religious. What is Christian at this time period? Were the Mormons Christian? (They don't use the word `emotion' in their Scripture; see here ). Was Emerson a Christion? Harold Bloom suggests that this period was the foundation of the American Religion , a religion distinct from Christianity. And this brings up a bugaboo from the history of science: are the non-religious, at this time, Christian? Christian history of science writers want to claim all scientists who ever expressed any vaguely Christian sentiments as Christians; I wonder how Dixon will differentiate between the properly Christian and the non-religious who live in a Christian society.

2: Influential figures in secular science and psychology in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, were among these early `emotions' theorists (see chapter 5). Well, I checked Darwin's material at Project Gutenberg ; he never uses the words `emotion', `passion', or `affection' in the 1859 Origin of Species ; The Voyage of the Beagle , published between 1838 and 1843, uses `passion' a lot, but never `emotion'; the 1872 Expression of Emotion in Man and Animal uses all three words quite a bit. It's hard for me to accept, based on this, that Darwin was an early adaptor of the word `emotion', and that he influenced others to use it.

3: Christian writers, especially in the more conservative environments such as Oxford and Cambridge (and some American colleges) continued to use the terms `will', `passions', `affections', and `sentiments' much more than the term `emotion' (see chapter 6). Well, duh. Oxford and Cambridge were notoriously stuffy and traditionalist during the Victorian years (and I was going to say second rate, which is probably false; on the other hand, 1800-1850 was not the grandest fifty years in the history of either of these institutions). Of the three mentioned above, Darwin and Spencer were private scholars and Bain was at Aberdeen. When I think of 19th century British physicists, I think of Faraday (private scholar), Kelvin (University of Glasglow), and Maxwell (who was at Cambridge, starting in 1871). Much of what was new and innovative in Victorian England wasn't being done at Oxford or Cambridge. I see no need to pull in religion to explain that strongly traditional faculty in a strongly traditional milieu used strongly traditional language.

4: There was, then, a correlation betweem the adoption of the new `emotions' discourse on the one hand, and a lack of traditional Christian belief on the other. Well, let's drag out the old chestnut: correlation doesn't imply causation, and, in fact, doesn't even mean the two events are in any way related. Also, this isn't a correlation. Two events are completely correlated if they always happen together. Key words there: `always' and 'together'. Two unique events that happen at the same time ARE NOT CORRELATED! The flu epidemic and the throwing of the World Series both happened in 1919; does that make them correlated? Dixon is high-jacking a well-defined term from statistics and using it in his own special way (he does this again, later in the introduction, with the terms `emotion', `psychology', and `science'). And, finally, `traditional Christian belief' is not well-defined; later (page 10) he says traditional Christian belief involves grace, the fall, sin, Christology, and Trinatarianism. So Jefferson, in particular, is not working in traditional Christian belief, I guess.

5: There was also a correlation, later in the century, when the transition to `emotion' talk had become a fait accompli, between Christian faith and the adoption of cognitive and anti-reductionist theories of emotions. Spare me the gratuitous French. Again, Christian faith is broad and ill-defined; if he tries to speak of a correlation here, he must show that most of the people who are Christians (with whatever definition he has) use `cognitive and anti-reductionist theories of emotions'. I really don't know much about religion in the late nineteenth century, though. I'd suspet that American religion, as practiced by travelling preachers, was probably not particularly theologically or psychologically coherent.