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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Consciousness

Form

As stated by Richard Swinburne (The Existence of God, 2004, ch. 9) and J. P. Moreland (Consciousness and the Existence of God, 2008):

  1. Conscious experience exists: there is something it is like to see red or feel pain, and this subjective character is not captured by any physical description.
  2. Physical facts do not entail phenomenal facts. One could know everything about the brain and not know what red looks like (Mary's room); a physical duplicate without experience is conceivable (the zombie). So the correlation between brain states and experiences is not explained by physics; it is an additional set of brute facts.
  3. Naturalism therefore has no explanation of consciousness. Theism has: a personal God, himself a mind, created minds and set the laws that link them to brains.
  4. Therefore consciousness is evidence for God.

My Positions

  1. This is the Appeal to Ignorance in its purest form. "We do not understand consciousness, therefore God" is the structure of every gap argument, and consciousness is the last large gap. It is being filled: the neural correlates of experience, the effects of anaesthesia, the lawful alteration of experience by damage, drugs, development, and sleep, and the theories (global workspace, predictive processing, integrated information) that organise them. I do not claim the problem is solved. I claim that "unsolved" is not evidence of anything but our position in history.
  2. My own position is set out under Consciousness and Substrate Independence. Consciousness is what certain physical systems do; it is a matter of the work done, not the material doing it; and the "hard problem" is a difficulty about explanation, not evidence for a second kind of stuff (Mind-body dualism). The argument requires dualism to be true first, and then asks how the two halves are joined. If there are not two halves, the question dissolves.
  3. Explaining mind by positing a mind is the one explanation that cannot help. The thing to be explained is how consciousness arises. "An unembodied, uncaused, infinite consciousness made it" uses the explanandum as the explanans. On the argument's own standard, a mind that exists with no brain, no evolution, and no history is more in need of explanation than the ones we have, not less; Moreland's reply that God is a necessary being is Special Pleading.
  4. "Personal explanation" is not an explanation. It names an agent and an intention and gives no mechanism, no prediction, and no constraint. It fits every possible fact about consciousness equally well: if experience correlated with the liver, God would have willed that. A hypothesis that forbids nothing explains nothing (Popper's Razor).
  5. The correlation is total, and it is the wrong shape for the theory. Every known consciousness is built, slowly, by a developing brain, and is taken apart, piece by piece, by dementia. If God installs consciousness, he installs it on a schedule set by neurodevelopment and removes it on a schedule set by plaques. The simpler account is that the brain is doing it.
  6. If it worked, it would prove too many gods. Every conscious animal would be a standing miracle, and panpsychism or idealism would be as good a terminus as theism. Thomas Nagel, who rejects reductive naturalism about mind, also rejects theism, which shows that premise 3's dilemma is false.

Sources

  • Swinburne, R., The Existence of God (2nd ed., 2004), ch. 9; The Evolution of the Soul (rev. ed., 1997)
  • Moreland, J. P., Consciousness and the Existence of God (2008)
  • Adams, R. M., "Flavors, Colors, and God", in The Virtue of Faith (1987)
  • Chalmers, D., The Conscious Mind (1996), for the hard problem
  • Dennett, D., Consciousness Explained (1991)
  • Nagel, T., Mind and Cosmos (2012)
  • Oppy, G., Arguing About Gods (2006)

Also see