ABSTRACT
Cognitive science gives us some valuable insights on the nature of naming in human and other biological worlds. Instead of confining these insights to previous cognitive approaches to religion, Cognitive scientists of religion have a scientific agenda in their attempts to explain religion, though they often misrepresent just how much we know about the human mind/brain and the uncertainty at the heart of modern scientific projects. Humanist scholars in Jewish studies and biblical studies, on the other hand, heavily conditioned by postmodern fears of science, desperate to guard their own particular slice of territory, and suspicious of biological approaches to culture, are often reticent to accept anything derived from cognitive science. For biblical minds, the relation between the written token of God's name and God is analogical and not digital; the relationship is token token, not token type. Or rather, what makes the text sacred is that they contain Gods name.
