Final answer:
The Parallel Model emphasizes a pre-established harmony between mind and body, crediting a deity for this coordination, and avoiding causal explanations for their correlation. Its strengths include the preservation of dualism and alignment with certain theological views, while its limitations involve a lack of mechanistic explanation and challenges for empirical testing.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Parallel Model, in the context of integrating psychology and theology, is prominently recognized for its postulation that mind and body exist in separate dimensions, with their coordination established at the universe's inception. Its key characteristics include the existence of minds and bodies in separate realms, and the presence of a pre-established harmony, often attributed to a deity, which ensures that mental and physical events occur in correlation with one another without direct causation. The strengths of this approach lie in its elegant sidestepping of the problematic mind-body interaction, maintaining dualistic integrity without requiring causal explanations for the mind-body correspondence.
The strengths of the Psychophysical Parallelism include the avoidance of metaphysical complications that arise from causal interactions between mind and body, thereby preserving both the physical deterministic framework and the autonomy of mental operations. Furthermore, it aligns well with theological perspectives that attribute the harmony between mind and body to divine foresight. However, this approach also has limits, such as the lack of a mechanistic explanation for the correlation between mental and physical events, which can be seen as philosophically unsatisfying to some. Additionally, it does not offer a clear avenue for empirical investigation, as the parallels are posited as a given rather than an observable phenomenon.
The concept is often traced to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who argued for a harmonious correlation akin to two perfectly synchronized clocks, eliminating the need for direct interaction or intervention. Leibniz's metaphor reinforces the natural agreement between soul and body as inherent and self-sufficient, without external moderation.