Psychology, Cosmology and the Christian Concept of God: Reconciling Theology and Science

Abstract

I draw from traditional theology and modern science to develop an account of the Christian concept of God. God is, above all, the creator of the world and I first reconcile God as Creator with modern cosmology. However Christians also anthropomorphize God: as the persons of the Trinity, for example. Several traditional Christian theologians, such as Augustine and Aquinas, claim that the human mind is structured according to a Trinitarian image of God; I point out that this traditional psychology is remarkably similar to a model of the mind used by modern evolutionary cognitive psychology. I reconcile the traditional theological account with the modern scientific account and propose that defining anthropomorphic characteristics of the Christian God concept are due to the Trinitarian God-image of the human mind. I then use the notion of projection to show how the Trinitarian structure of the mind is conflated with perceptions of objects in the world and that this conflation gives rise to conceptions of anthropomorphic characteristics of God, such as that He comprises three persons.