Spiritual intelligence: Processing different information or processing information differently?

In the scientific age, theology is faced with serious epistemological and methodological questions regarding the nature and scope of its specific knowledge. A mechanistic paradigm is becoming dominant, which regards everything – from bacteria to humans to digital computers – as more or less sophisticated information processors. Humans are apparently endowed with various types of intelligence – mathematical, emotional, spiritual etc. – but all of these can in principle be described in terms of information processing. A question then arises in respect to religious knowledge and spiritual intelligence: are they dealing with a different kind of information, inaccessible to the senses and scientific theory, or are they dealing with the same kind of information, but in a different way?
This paper emphatically makes the case for the latter, and explores the theological implications of defining spiritual intelligence as a natural cognitive capacity. Being spiritually intelligent, I argue, does not entail gaining access to a separate set of information, but rather attending to the “regular” kind of information in a cognitively-discernable different manner, which involves a rebalancing between the two main modes of human cognition (Philip Barnard’s implicational vs. propositional; Iain McGilchrist’s right vs. left hemisphere; Seymour Epstein’s analytical/rational vs. intuitive/experiential). This confirms the theological intuition that we get to know God not by gaining access to occult information about a different object, but by attending differently to reality, namely in a more participatory and relational manner.