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This article argues that recent results of the cognitive sciences could make significant contributions to theological debates about free will, but they have been largely ignored by contemporary systematic and philosophical theologians. Recent work in cognitive psychology and moral psychology has to do with our intuitive and automatic patterns of reasoning in the domains of freedom and responsibility. This research will be relevant for many theological domains and has the potential to raise new issues and problems. The essay examines three such domains. First, the debate between intellectualist and voluntarist accounts of the will have been central in theology. Recent findings suggest that intellectualist accounts of the will have more intuitions on their side than has been previously assumed. Second, theologians have debated whether belief in free will is central for moral and political life. This question was pertinent during the Reformation when many of the reformers either rejected free will or presented truncated accounts of it. Recent results from moral psychology suggest that belief in free will has significant pro‐social and altruistic effects. Finally, the possible compatibility of divine determinism and free will is crucial for theological debates about sin, grace and God's providence. Recent psychological results point in the direction of affirming that while most humans have strong intuitions about the incompatibility of free will and divine determinism, these might be based on a false inference. Finally, some new counterintuitive challenges about the manipulativeness of God are raised against the divine determinist position. ; Peer reviewed

Examining the relationship between religion and science has until recently been considered a philosophical exercise and, as a consequence, theories of how natural and supernatural explanations are related tend to be highly abstract and operate at the level of ideal rationality rather than in the psychological reality of actual believers. Although cognitive developmental psychologists have studied the topic of explanation quite extensively, until recently little has been known about how people interpret, accommodate, and reconcile natural and supernatural explanations in everyday life. We review psychological data from three core biological domains and provide an analysis of how philosophical and psychological accounts are complementary. We propose that emerging psychological accounts of the coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations may be developed further by adopting the conceptual resources provided by philosophers, especially with respect to the topics of explanation and possible relationships between science and religion. Furthermore, psychological data can inform philosophical accounts by providing information concerning how people reason about topics of fundamental concern to humans.

AbstractThe ongoing conversation on AI ethics and politics is in full swing and has spread to the general public. Rather than contributing by engaging with the issues and views discussed, we want to step back and comment on the widening conversation itself. We consider evolved human cognitive tendencies and biases, and how they frame and hinder the conversation on AI ethics. Primarily, we describe our innate human capacities known as folk theories and how we apply them to phenomena of different implicit categories. Through examples and empirical findings, we show that such tendencies specifically affect the key issues discussed in AI ethics. The central claim is that much of our mostly opaque intuitive thinking has not evolved to match the nature of AI, and this causes problems in democratizing AI ethics and politics. Developing awareness of how our intuitive thinking affects our more explicit views will add to the quality of the conversation.