Failures of both Behaviorism and Darwinism

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There are many schools of psychology, some of which borrow concepts from each other. They are all wrong because they are not only atheistic but also have Darwinian foundations. Although secular psychologists deny the existence of the soul (mind, consciousness), they still try to understand it.

In behaviorism, humans are essentially meat machines. They respond to stimuli — behaviors come from conditioning. This includes reward and punishment. Conditioning is gradual, a piece here and there over time. Interestingly, some aspects of behaviorism can be accurate.

Brain and network, Pixabay / Gerd Altmann (Geralt)

Psychologists lost their affection for behaviorism because they liked cognitive approaches and because it failed to explain language. The extreme specified complexity of language speaks (heh!) of the Creator, which flies in the faces of Darwinism and behaviorism. The Intelligent Design article linked below ends with a bit of a cop-out: "The science is clear. Mind, not matter, is the source of life and the human mind, and the signature of Mind lives in us and in all living things." Cowboy up and admit that life comes from the mind of the Creator; there's no need to imply a vague cosmic force. Still, the article has some merit.

Behaviorism, as a scientific explanation for the mind, attempts to explain human behavior as caused by innumerable iterations of simple physical events. B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), a key behaviorist thinker, put it like this:

The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior — verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.

Behaviorism has a lot in common with Darwinism, the belief that we are all the outcomes of unguided, purposeless evolution. Both ideologies attempt to explain remarkable aspects of living things — i.e., the human mind or the astonishingly complex and specified biology of all living things — as caused by innumerable iterations of simple physical events.

The rest of the article is located at "Behaviorism Failed Much as Darwinism Has Done."