Anthropogenic Cognition in Religion and Nature

This talk uses cognitive linguistics which affirms the embodied mind approach gaining ground in cognitive science to consider natural kinds. The claim is that humans use a basic mental tool set grounded in our sensorimotor capacities to reason about entities we interact with in our environment. The specific nature of the human body is key to understanding how humans cognize. I will examine several of these tools and show how they are used to construe natural kinds as well as God.

Which way to the future?

Here is a fun example of how different languages can think about the same topic differently. Think for a moment about how English speakers understand the future in relation to our bodies. A parent may say to a child that “You have your entire future in front of you” and a commencement speaker tells the […]

Metaphors and God

The Bible contains over fifty different metaphors for understanding who God is and our relationship to God. Some of these are: husband, woman, shepherd, potter, bear, eagle, and rock. The metaphors structure how humans construe the types of relations and expected behaviors we have with God. For instance, thinking of God as a father involves […]

Truth has many meanings

English has a number of ways to understand truth. We speak of “discovering,” “distorting,” or “twisting” the truth. This uses the truth is an object metaphor in which truth is a physical object that we can “grasp” and do things with. We also think of truth as a journey so that we pursue truth and […]