BIBLICAL STUDIES AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES

Recent decades have seen a growing interest in various quarters in questions concerning the human mind. Today we can identify an array of disciplines which, due to their focus on cognition, can be subsumed under the heading “cognitive science(s).” These include, among others, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, social and developmental psychology, as well as linguistics and some sociological approaches. The questions concern issues such as the phylogeny and ontogeny of an inner world and a theory of mind. They also deal with the complicated interplay between biology and culture, as well as the role of language and emotions in a functioning rationality and the development of a moral capacity.

Within the larger context of the dialogue between science and religion, the cognitive sciences can have a particular potential to bear cross-disciplinary fruit in the garden of theology. As pointed out by Gregory Peterson, cognitive science “affects both metaphysical and soteriological accounts of human nature” and thus has an influence on all types of theological activity, in as far as theology deals with questions of meaning and purpose within the context of a contemporary worldview (Peterson 2003: 10, 3–22). Theology's interest in the cognitive sciences is of a fairly recent date, however, going back no more than a decade or two, but the field is growing.

Today a number of biblical scholars have begun to be engaged.