Reshaping Natural Theology is a sustained philosophical argument, a call to reject Cartesian categories and accept the commonsense view that nature is expressive of mind. This book is not a book of Christian apologetics or a rehashing of the cosmological argument for God.

The general point here is this. If I can know, just by looking at another human being, that her behavior is the result of intention, despite the fact that a complete, non-intentional, natural scientific explanation of that behavior exists, then why could it not also be possible for me to know, just by looking at the design of natural organisms, that they are the result of intention, despite the existence of perfectly good non-intentional natural scientific explanations of their various properties? (3)

Wahlberg lays out his argument in four steps:

1. “Mental states with representational content are constitutively dependent on the subject’s relations to the extra-mental environment” (17).
2. “Mental activity is not the manipulation of ‘representations’ in an ‘organ of thought’. Rather, the mind is a system of essentially world-involving capacities” (17).
3. “One such capacity is the ability to ‘take in’ the world through experience. Perceptual experiences are, when all goes well, cases of having facts . . . Directly manifested to one” (17).
4. “Perceptual experiences have conceptually structured contents” (18).

To make his case, Whalberg dialogues with various philosophers, including especially John McDowell. For those (like myself) who are not fluent in all the source material, the book is challenging to follow. But this is not a critique of the book; simply a statement of what’s required to benefit from it.

Wahlberg, Mats. Reshaping Natural Theology: Seeing Nature as Creation. Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.