Minding God: Theology and the Cognitive Sciences

Christian Century, Dec 13, 2003 by John A. Teske

By Gregory R. Peterson. Fortress, 252 pp., $19.00

ANY HEALTHY SYSTEM of belief needs challenges to stay alive and vibrant. Theologies that continue to engage the world have regularly, creatively and valuably responded to the challenges provided by the sciences. But research in the cognitive sciences, which gives us insights into the hearts and minds of human beings, where faith lives, has not been systematically addressed. Until now.

Perhaps it took a relative newcomer to the scene to do so. Gregory R. Peterson, who completed his doctorate in 1996 and teaches in the department of philosophy and religion at South Dakota State University, has written a broad overview of developments in the cognitive sciences, specifically outlining topics that involve traditional theological understandings. Though his book does not go far enough in laying out these issues and the two millennia of theological resources for meeting them, it accomplishes an impressive amount.

Cognitive science challenges a lot of rarely questioned theological presuppositions about the human person. Peterson argues that we cannot address either metaphysical questions (about the meaning of soul or spirit, about freedom, about our images of God) or soteriological ones (about the framework of human purpose and happiness, about sin, transformation and sanctification without considering findings from the cognitive sciences about the relationship between minds and brains, the unity or freedom of persons, or our relationships with each other and nature as a whole.

Peterson wants both to remain committed to theology's autonomy and to take seriously the claims about the world made by scientific theology. He may be playing a dangerous game. In a pluralistic religious world, exclusionary claims about the literal truth of one set of beliefs over the mythical truth of another are increasingly untenable. Moreover, questioning the existence of separate theological sources of knowledge does not seem inconsistent with either the limits of human knowledge or the ultimate mysteries of the sacred or the divine. Nevertheless, Peterson raises some serious points.

The first point is the need to rethink the soul of spirit. Many of the problems of consciousness for which supernatural accounts were once given can be explained by studies of the organization and function of the brain. The current wisdom is that the mind itself may be emergent--not reducible to its components, but a novel property of their organization; that is, while the mind may not be reducible to lower-level components and patterns, it cannot exist without them, it cannot leave and go elsewhere. Our thoughts, our feelings, our identity, even our very personhood can be altered if, and only if, there are changes in the brain. We don't need exotic forms of brain damage to see this, merely the devastation of Alzheimer's or of a loved one's poststroke mind. These render traditional notions of disembodied substances implausible, though not impossible.

But there are also theological positions which treat "soul" as a term for a whole unified person. One can go even further than Peterson does to ask whether individual preservation of memory and consciousness is theologically necessary. Might they be surrendered, poured into a larger vessel and sacrificed to something greater? Might I identify and experience the eternity of this as I still live, though no longer as an individual, sapient center of self-awareness, when, say, my brain has been run over by a street grader?

Peterson's remaining challenges are equally provocative. Do the dissociations common in our brains suggest that unified personhood is not a given but an achievement? To what extent does our embodiment make possible our freedoms, despite the escapist trajectory of some traditional Christian views? Does the finding of a correlation between the brain and a variety of religious experiences tell us any more about their possible referents? What is the status of human uniqueness, our creation in imago dei, if our differences from the animal kingdom are differences in quantity rather than quality? What does the evolution of social intelligence, of cheater detection, of deception and self-deception say about our capacities for sin, as well as novel forms of nonzero-sum cooperation for grace and redemption? How might we need to rethink our ideas about the mind of personhood of God and therefore about the relationship of God to the world? Peterson provides the raw materials that could help revitalize some of the anachronisms of theology.

Reviewed by John A. Teske, professor of psychology at Elizabethtown Pennsylvanis College.