Will add
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.
4e cognition offers resources supporting an anthropology and an ontology that overcome mind/body and related dualisms, dualisms which contradict the original understandings of the Western monotheisms and of some Asian religions. 4e cognition embraces a holism with respect to the human organism, enabling a rapprochement with the Hebrew biblical, New Testament, and Qur’anic view of the human being as a psycho-somatic unity. For 4e cognition, the human organism comes embedded or emplaced in an environment with affordances, as it enacts meaning in co-constituting its lifeworld. The cruciality of social relationships and nature resonate with Western scriptures and with Mahayana Buddhism, Ruism/Confucianism, and Daoism. 4e cognition extends the joint project of organism and environment to evolution, with a mutual adaptation or specification of organism and environment. The fit of organism and environment finds resonance with classical religions, insofar as they uphold the goodness of creation or of the world.
Religion can be studied within the paradigm of Scientific Worldview Studies. Worldviews address fundamental issues, enabling humans to make sense of their place in the larger scheme of things. Scientific Worldview Studies grounds this meaning-making in an evolutionary context, treating human worldviews as continuous with basic sense-making tasks all organisms engage in. Terror Management Theory (TMT) supports this meaning-making role of worldviews. While TMT treats worldviews within an evolutionary context, its explanatory framework of ‘the denial of death’ limits its scope and empirical support. Enactivism allows for a richer account of continuity between basic-level world-making and the socio-linguistic sophistication of religious worldviews. It argues that all organisms act in non-random ways to maintain functional integrity—this is autopoiesis. For social creatures, this process encompasses elements of the social environment, setting the stage for the symbolically encoded worldviews constructed by humans. This approach frames worldview construction as an extension of autopoietic processes.
The connection between body-minds and their embedding in the environment is a primary concern of 4E cognition, nature religion movements, and environmentalism. Wiccan practice presents a unique opportunity to explore the intersection of these concerns through its centering of the connection of body-mind and nature. Two cognitive strategies found in Wicca will be examined: correspondence of embodiment and environmental embedding through the conceptual blend of nature deities, and practices of enactive sense-making in natural settings. In combination, these facilitate interpretative drift toward connection and identification with nature. This subsequently leads to an increased propensity toward environmentalist activity, another central tenet of Wiccan spiritual practice. Taken together, Wiccan practice not only offers fertile ground for the exploration of embodied, embedded, and enactive cognition in religious practices, but also how these may also intersect with environmentalist concerns.
This paper expands the scope of the cognitive science of meditation by applying an enactive approach to the goals of classical and contemporary Abrahamic contemplative traditions. Drawing on recent enactive accounts of Buddhist contemplative practices and paths, it argues that influential Jewish, Christian, and Islamic accounts conceive of the contemplative path as a transformation of the "emergent self"—a self that can be deconstructed but is ultimately reconstructed in ways that simultaneously enhance attunement with divine reality in creation and ethical action. Rather than advocating for the complete dissolution of selfhood, these traditions describe ultimate contemplative transformation as the realization of a dynamically coupled (resurrected) self and world.