BY: Dr. Cliff Guthrie | October 6, 2025
Back when my day job was teaching practical theology for a small, progressive theological seminary in Maine, I often taught a course I called “God and Gray Matter.” The early 2000s were perhaps the high-water mark of what was then known as the “dialogue” between science and religion. Has it ever truly been a dialogue? I don’t know, but it was hard not to notice at related conferences and events that theologians and religionists were doing almost all the talking while the scientists seemed to have stayed in their labs, working. We still hear complaints decades later that more theologians are wanting to engage in science than the other way around.
But there was Templeton money to be had! And so, biblically speaking, it came to pass that a very small part of that vast storehouse of Templeton mammon funded the development of my “God and Gray Matter” course. And with that, like Dorothy’s Scarecrow, I was finally able to obtain a brain. I got my particular brain not from a wizard but via an ordinary medical supply company catalogue where it was listed under the unpromising name of “The Budget Brain.” It was small and crude compared to the more expensive models (even Templeton funds only go so far). But it was a brain that basically served my purposes: I could separate the hemispheres, show the major lobe divisions, and admire the sloppy paint marks that designated a few key blood vessels, the corpus collosum, and the limbic area. To get a better look at the brainstem I could also separate the hard green orb of the cerebellum, which in my Maine and lobster-obsessed context I liked to call the “tomalley” (you may need to look it up to get the joke).
Compared with many others, my brain was simple, but I was still inordinately proud of it, thinking that I might be one of the very few theologians in the world to own a budget brain. The point of this story is simply to say that I liked to start that course each semester by holding my budget brain up before the class and saying, “This is the most complicated thing we know to exist in the universe.” Twenty years later I worry whether that can still be said to be true, but ChatGPT assures me that it is…for now.
I don’t know if my students cared to hear this fact, but for me it was—and still is—important to keep this complexity in mind. The human brain is the most complicated thing we know to exist, a thing we barely understand. And yet it’s the same tool that we use to try to understand everything. At the same time, it’s also true to say that every human experience is a brain-based experience, since otherwise it couldn’t be our experience at all. In short, no matter what our disciplines, all our attempts to understand anything, academically or with folk tales, are the brain’s best efforts to understand itself, however imperfectly.
I stopped identifying as a theologian some years ago and become a professor of ethics. But academics, like humans in general, are tribal creatures, and moving from one field to another is not unlike getting a divorce: in many cases in leaving your spouse you lose your friends as well. My budget brain and I have since made a few new friends among the moralists. It turns out that moralists are not that different from theologians in some respects. For one, they also have grand dreams about how to make the world a better place and virtually no plans or means to do so. They likewise have pet theories that divide them into various camps and often enjoy arguing with other camps even more than they enjoy pursuing dreams about how to make the world a better place. Finally, some moralists, like some theologians, have realized that if they want to make claims about human nature the responsible thing to do is to read and understand psychology.
This wonderful program about psychology engaged theology has represented a strange kind of homecoming for me, a chance to talk the language of theology again, at least for a while, and to make a kind of a reckoning with the arc of my academic life. Having been a resident in the worlds of theology and of philosophy, it occurs to me that although the move from one world to the other, from one tribe to another, seemed momentous at the time, it now seems less so given how similar the fields can be.
However, there are some critical differences between theology and philosophy that make it possible for me to identify with the second but no longer the first. One of these differences Luc Ferry describes well in the first chapter of his book, A Brief History of Thought. Both theology and philosophy offer compelling responses to the brutal fact of our mortality, he argues. Theology’s religious response to death ultimately involves faith or trust in something unseen, some reality that is simply a given and a basis for hope. For example, the subject of my own ancient theological dissertation, Episcopal theologian Urban T. Holmes, included a diagram from one of his books detailing the relationships between the church, society, and individual and, in a nod to his religious faith had an arrow shooting off to the right that pointed simply to “Mystery.”
I’m quite happy knowing that my budget brain cannot comprehend itself, let alone everything else there is or may be out there, but that arrow pointing to a vague deific “Mystery” never sat well with me. It seemed like a weak excuse to stop asking important questions like, for example, What purpose does such an arrow even serve in our attempts to understand ourselves? But this arrow, this nod to a cloudy mystery of unknowing, is normal in theology. At some point every theologian I’ve met or read will stop a line of questioning when it becomes too uncomfortable and say something like “It’s a mystery,” or “It’s a matter of faith.” Maybe they are right to do so. However, philosophy won’t accept this as a disposition. As Ferry put it, “Ultimately, to philosophise, rather than take on trust, is to prefer lucidity to comfort, freedom rather than faith.” My budget brain and I would rather sit with the discomfort of knowing I don’t know than to suggest that something is intrinsically real but not knowable at all. Both fields acknowledge there are, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once artfully put it, “unknown unknowns,” but they do so with a different attitude.
In my experience living in both the theological and the philosophical worlds with a budget brain, this difference matters in the ways the two fields relate to psychology. In moral psychology, philosophers mostly take it for granted that psychologists are much better than they are at describing the inherited and acquired processes that create our moral perceptions, judgments, and biases. There is a debate (going back at least to the British empiricist David Hume) about whether “descriptive ethics” should lead to normative ethical judgments or whether it simply outlines the typical limits of the human moral world. What we don’t dispute is that contemporary psychology has developed better tools for describing aggregate moral experience than traditional armchair philosophies. (For individual moral experience nothing tops the humanities, though.)
What I observe in theology (to distinguish it from religious studies) is that between theologians and psychologists there is still often a contest about descriptive claims (about the nature of sin, souls, sources of religious experiences, and so on). That arrow pointing off and up to “mystery” as a real causal factor in the world matters to theologians and, generally speaking, justifies their work. For this reason, it seems to me that theology “engaged” with psychology is an accurate way to put it: theology will forever be engaged, but never married, to the naturalistic methods and assumptions by which psychology does its work (yes, even for pantheist and metaphorical theologians). Philosophy, while always critical, seems pretty okay with a more straightforward term, “moral psychology,” much like scholars of religion (as opposed to religious scholars) are pretty okay with the phrase “psychology of religion.”
My budget brain grants that not everyone may agree with this distinction, so I’ll stop there and suggest that maybe better brains with more brightly painted lines, or perhaps brains that are genuinely connected to a mysterious other via an outward traveling arrow, may well understand this in a more profound way than I do. Being an American pragmatist, the distinction works for me. And that’s pretty okay.
Note: All the photos were generated by ChatGPT-4o.
