Minding God

Does it make sense to speak of the "mind of God"? Are humans unique? Do we have souls? Our growing explorations of the cognitive sciences pose significant challenges to and opportunities for theological reflection. Gregory Peterson introduces these sciences: neuroscience, artificial intelligence, animal cognition, linguistics, and psychologythat specifically contribute to the new picture and their philosophical underpinnings. He shows its implications for rethinking longstanding Western assumptions about the unity of the self, the nature of consciousness, free will, inherited sin, and religious experience. Such findings also illumine our understanding of God's own mind, the God-world relationship, new notions of divine design, and the implications of a universe of evolving minds. Peterson is gifted at explaining scientific concepts and drawing their implications for religious belief and theology. His work demonstrates how new work in cognitive sciences upends and reconfigures many popular assumptions about human uniqueness, mind-body relationship, and how we speak of divine and human intelligence.

Gregory R. Peterson is Associate Professor of Religion at Thiel College, Greenville, Pennsylvania.