Introduction
Appraising the relationships between Psychology and religion is a complex task, and we need first to identify the various kinds of problems giving rise to this. Most fundamentally, the very phrase “Psychology and religion” is a misleading oversimplification, these clearly not referring to two unitary, mutually independent, camps, let alone camps of the same logical status. On the Psychology side, its sheer internal diversity in subject matters, methods, and goals renders any general statement about its relationship to religion impossible. On the religion side, not only is its internal diversity in some respects even greater than Psychology’s, but it is a logically different kind of phenomenon. While the status of Psychology is not unproblematic, at least it is unambiguously an academic discipline engaged in knowledge creation and application, and most academic experimental psychologists accept and assert that it is some kind of natural science. Religion, by contrast, is...
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Richards, G. (2012). Psychology and Religion. In: Rieber, R.W. (eds) Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0463-8_8
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