How can 4E Cognition assist Christian theologians in understanding human beings as the image of God? Though there are affinities in other religions, the claim that human beings are created in the image of God is, of course, a distinctively Judeo-Christian claim, and one of the tasks of theological anthropology is to understand what this claim means. Broadly speaking, my paper shows how recent 4E movement in cognitive science can inform an understanding of the human being as the image of the triune God. More specifically, my paper argues that the image of God is naturally realized in human beings in the enacted, dynamic coupling between self and other and is supernaturally realized in the enacted, dynamic coupling between self and God.
When speaking of human cognition in particular, one of the merits of 4E Cognition has been to foreground the intersubjective nature of human cognition, and the intersubjective nature of the human has been central for this area of theological anthropology. In this respect, both 4E cognition and theological anthropology has been generally aligned with a recent body of literature in comparative psychology, which has argued that the human species is distinct from other primate species due to a unique capacity to share intentions with conspecifics. This capacity has come to be called shared intentionality. 4E Cognition provides a rich and valuable framework in which to conceive shared intentionality, one that has generally escaped comparative psychologists. Since, according to Christian doctrine, human beings are the image of God, I argue in this paper that the unique, species-specific capacity of shared intentionality—conceived explicitly in the framework of 4E Cognition as an enacted dynamic coupling—can helpfully inform a Christian conception of humans as the image of God. My argument proceeds in three steps.
First, I summarize some recent findings of comparative and developmental psychologists, namely, Michael Tomasello, Melinda Carpenter, and others affiliated with the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and then place these findings in a 4E framework, focusing in particular on human cognition as extended and enacted. Through a variety of experiments, these researchers have shown that nonhuman primates are able to apprehend what others are intending, but are not able to share intentions with one another. In humans, on the other hand, the latter capacity begins to emerge early in life (often between 9-14 months) and develops into a more complete form as the human matures into adulthood. Such a capacity, it is argued, is a necessary condition for the emergence of human culture and for the unique forms of cooperation found among human beings. However, these researchers waver between various ways of formulating shared intentionality, sometimes conceiving it as recursive mind reading, which reduces shared intentionality to the cognitive states of individual conscious agents, and at other times merely stipulating that it is a sui generis act that cannot be reduced in such a way. In this section, I show how conceiving cognition as enacted and extended eliminates the problem, such that the human capacity for shared intentionality is enacted only when humans dynamically couple with the cognitive states of other human beings, thereby extending into and alongside the conscious states of others.
Second, because Christian doctrine holds that God is triune, I show how the relations of the trinitarian persons to one another can be analogically conceived through the phenomenon of shared intentionality, such that God’s one, intelligent, and loving operation stands as one, perfect act of shared intentionality among the trinitarian persons. With regard to cognition in the divine, certain aspects of 4E cognition would be inappropriate: namely, embodiment and embeddedness. In this Christian theology is aligned with claims from various religions that God, who is infinite, does not have a body and that God is not limited (or embedded) in any more encompassing milieu. Nevertheless, with regard to Christian theology, it seems permissible to claim that shared intentionality in trinitarian persons is enacted in the sense that the trinitarian persons are dynamically coupled with one another from eternity and that each person is constitutive of the act. It also seems permissible to claim that shared intentionality in the trinitarian persons is extended in the sense that it is in no way limited to any particular body or even to the whole of time and space.
Third, I argue that the image of God in human beings consists in the capacity to dynamically couple with, and enact in humans, shared intentionality with the divine. Although the human capacity for shared intentionality emerges at an early age and constitutes humans as intrinsically intersubjective, nevertheless the capacity, I argue, has an implicit dynamism toward dynamically coupling with the one, perfect act of shared intentionality between the trinitarian persons. In other words, although embodied and embedded in its natural development, human cognition is distinct in its capacity to extend into a milieu that exceeds the limits of space and time and in its capacity (through grace) to enact a shared intention with the divine. Indeed, the religious impulse in all human beings can be conceived as the desire to dynamically couple with everything that exceeds our natural embodiment and embeddedness, and it is this religious impulse, I argue, that designates human beings as the image of God.
My paper explains how 4E Cognition can illuminate a Christian understanding of humans as the image of God. My paper has three parts. First, I situate recent scholarship in comparative psychology, which has argued that humans are unique due to a capacity for shared intentionality, within a 4E Cognition framework. Second, I show how, for Christians, the triune God may be conceived as an eternal act of shared intentionality, which the trinitarian persons eternally enact. Finally, I argue that humans are the image of God because of their capacity to dynamically couple with, and enact in humans, the shared intentionality with the divine.