Three Questions about Minding God

Abstract. Gregory Peterson's Minding God does an excellent job of introducing the cognitive sciences to the general reader and drawing preliminary connections between these disciplines and some of the loci of theology. The book less successfully articulates how the cognitive sciences should impact the future of theology. In this article I pose three questions: (1) What semantics is presupposed in relating the languages of theology and the cognitive sciences? How do the truth conditions of these disparate disciplines relate? (2) What precisely does theology gain from what is central to cognitive science: the emphasis on information processing, inner representation, and the computer model of the mind? What exactly does cognitive science offer to theology beyond the now‐standard rejection of Cartesian dualism, the affirmation of an embodied mind, and the repudiation of reduction? (3) What can the cognitive sciences offer in tackling crucial questions in the theology‐science discussion such as divine agency and divine causation? Finally, I point to a possible begging of the question in the claim that cognitive science relates to theology because theology deals with meaning and purpose, and a particular interpretation of cognitive science grants more meaning and purpose to human beings than antecedent post‐Cartesian positions in the philosophy of mind.