Evidence for Theism
14
The Argument from Consciousness
That we have a mental life of thoughts and perceptions is the most fundamental fact of human experience and the starting point for every other kind of inquiry. Colours and objects in our field of vision; intentions and beliefs; pains, memories, thoughts—the most radical forms of philosophical skepticism must take all these as properly basic even when denying everything else. [1] At the start of the previous chapter I mentioned Locke’s puzzlement that, “ever incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being.” It should be noted that our discussion of the very considerable difficulties attending the origin of life only approached but did not reach Locke’s principal concern. Life, after all, no more explains the emergence of consciousness than fine tuning explains the emergence of life. And indeed, many philosophers of mind consider the origin of consciousness more mysterious and problematic than the origin of life itself. [2]
In what follows I will be discussing five properties of consciousness that are permanently unsusceptible of psychophysical reduction and unproblematically compatible with theism—a circumstance which, I shall argue, is precisely what we would expect if physicalism is false and theism is true. It will therefore be my concern to show that, together with the arguments already given, consciousness contributes forceful posterior evidence for the existence of God.
1. Mental Properties
1.1 Qualia
The hiss of car tyres on a wet road; the smell of jasmine or the taste of avocado; a flash of sunlight on a stormy lake. All these things have a raw qualitative “feel” that is as immediate and undeniable as it is indescribable. Philosophers call these subjective tinctures of sense perception qualia; and in his influential paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? the eminent philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel argues that they present an insurmountable conceptual challenge to physicalism.
Nagel begins by noting that if an organism is conscious at all then, “there is something it is like to be that organism.” To complete a physicalistic account of mind, this subjective savour of selfhood must be reducible to an objective brain state. The problem is that the reductive step by which a physical theory is arrived at translates what is private and subjective into what is public and objective—a point to which we shall return. Qualia, meanwhile, just are the private and subjective experiences of sense perception. And since quaila are also facts about the world it follows that there are facts about the world that physicalism cannot possibly explain.
To help us understand this point and its implications Nagel invites us to consider what it is like to be a bat. Sonar, though a form of perception, is wholly unlike any sense that we possess and there is no reason to suppose that the subjective experience of a bat is like anything we can experience. Imagining that you have webbed arms that enable you to fly around at dusk catching insects in your mouth; or that you perceive the world by means of high frequency sound signals; or that you spend the day hanging upside down by your feet in an attic—all this only tells you what it would be like for you to behave as a bat behaves and that is not the question. “I want to know,” Nagel writes, “what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”
How, then, can this be known? The answer is that it cannot because the task is impossible by tautology: Bat qualia can no more be instantiated in nonbat consciousness than triangularity can be instantiated in a circle. Limited to the resources of the human mind, the extrapolation to bat experience is incompleteable. And critically, the problem is not confined to such exotic cases. In contemplating bats, says Nagel, we are in the same position of an intelligent bat contemplating us. The structure of their minds make it impossible for them to succeed; and nor could they plausibly deny that there are qualia of human experience. We know what it is like to be us; know, that is, the ineffable but highly specific subjective savour of personhood from moment to moment. Nagel concludes that qualia are trapped within a particular point of view and can never survive transference to a physical theory open to multiple points of view.
1.2 Intentionality
A second property of mental states that defies physicalistic explanation is what philosophers call the "intentionality" or "aboutness" of thought. [3] By this they simply mean that all thoughts have the property of being about or of something external to themselves. When you think about shoes and ships and sealing-wax, for example, your thoughts are in those moments of or about shoes and ships and sealing-wax—a property, moreover, that is inescapable since even the thought, "Thoughts do not have intentionality," if it is to be meaningful, must itself be about intentionality and therefore have intentionality. The denial of intentionality would therefore suffer from what Plantinga calls, "self-referential inconsistency," and cannot be rationally affirmed.
The intractable problem intentionality raises for physicalism can be drawn out in the following way. Consider the word moon penciled on a piece of paper. In the absence of a literate observer to read the word and associate it with the moon, can the carbon particles of pencil lead and the wood pulp that composes the sheet of paper be said to be "about" the moon? Clearly not. And what can be said of a penciled word on the page can be said equally of physical brain states. A pattern of firing neurones representing someone's thought about the moon cannot, in the absence of a conscious observer to experience that brain event as a thought about the moon, be said to be "neurones about the moon" in any meaningful and objective sense. Physical things (whether they be neurones or particles of pencil lead or teapots or rocks) are not "about" other physical things in the way that mental states are. And so an exhaustive physicalistic description of mental states would leave something essential to them out of account.
1.3 Free Will
Friends and foes of the intuitive and commonsense view that humans have libertarian freedom of the will all agree that it is, on the face of it, incompatible with physicalism. If the mind just is the brain and the brain just is a physical object subject to the laws of physics, our thoughts and intentions would seem to be the result of causal forces which predate us and over which we have no control. Free will, on this view, is an illusion.
There are three points to note.
The first: John Searle has written that the experience of free will is so compelling that people cannot act as though it is an illusion even if it is one. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz, in another connection, have said something of significance to the dispute. They take the view that if something belongs to a universal and commonsense ontology, “then there is a prima facie presumption in favour of its reality. Those who deny its existence assume the burden of proof.” Swinburne has formalised these ideas into a basic principle of epistemology which he calls The Principle of Credulity: We should, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, believe that things are the way they seem to be.
The second: There is, on present evidence, no good reason to think that humans do not have libertarian freedom of the will. The laws of Quantum Theory, notes Swinburne, are probabilistic. And while, in general, indeterministic behaviour on the small scale averages out to produce deterministic behaviour on the large scale, “it is possible to have devices that multiply small-scale indeterminacies so that a small variation in the behaviour of one atom can have a large scale effect." Consider, for instance, an atomic bomb designed to detonate if and only if a certain carbon 14 atom decays within an hour. This would qualify as a "multiplying system," since it relays indeterminacy on the small scale into the large scale, while a block of radioactive carbon would be an "averaging system," since it averages out indeterminacy on the small scale to produce determinacy on the large scale. The brain, notably, is the most complex physical system known to science. And because it, "causes conscious events and its states are caused by conscious events," so, clearly, "laws of a very different kind govern the brain from those that govern all other physical states.” It is possible that the brain is a multiplying system rather than an averaging system. And for this reason, "it is widely believed that Quantum Theory rules out physical determinism."
The third and final point is of great relevance to the first. There is in principle no possible evidence that could produce a justified belief in determinism because free will is a prerequisite to the formation of justified belief of every kind—including justified belief in determinism itself. To understand this last point consider the plight of a neuroscientist who seeks to establish that determinism is true. To complete his task he must make observations, discern a pattern, formulate a generalisation and infer a theory. All this relies on rational adjudication, memory and intention. But if determinism is true, these mental operations and their results have no rational content. His belief in determinism is, ex hypothesi, not caused by the apprehension of reasons but produced by a brain state that is itself determined by extramental forces. Justified belief in determinism therefore requires that determinism is false and so suffers from self-referential incoherence.
It follows from the combination of all these points (the compelling experience of free will, the Principle of Credulity, the lack of evidence and the a priori impossibility of justified belief in determinism) that we are rationally obligated to affirm free will.
1.4 Nonphysicality
Another crucial problem for physicalism is that mental states are in every important respect nonphysical. A desire for roast beef has no length; nostalgia lacks spatial extension; the mental picture of a tiger is without weight. Beliefs, moreover, are true or false and right or wrong—properties that have no meaningful application to physical objects. The flux of brain signals associated with the impulse to commit murder is not immoral; the axons and dendrites associated with the false belief that Shelley wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are not themselves "false." Nor can the physical structure of the brain (its electrochemical impulses, say, or its neurones) be lucid or confused or naive or cynical in the way that thoughts and beliefs undeniably can be.
1.5 Privileged Access
The fifth and final property of mental states is the most essential and also the most problematic: their personal immediacy to the subject who experiences them. “A mental property,” as Swinburne puts it, “is one to whose instantiation the substance in which it is instantiated necessarily has privileged access.” “Others," he clarifies, "can learn about my pains and thoughts by studying my behaviour and perhaps also by studying my brain. Yet I, too, could study my behaviour (I could watch a film of myself; I could study my brain via a system of mirrors and microscopes) just as well as anyone else could. But I have a way of knowing about pains and thoughts other than those available to the best student of my behaviour or brain: I experience them." And the problem this raises for physicalism is that what makes a mental event a mental event is not the public knowledge captured by physicalism but just this private knowledge that physicalism cannot possibly capture.
In this connection Swinburne’s offers several thought experiments. I previously considered one; [4] let us now consider another. Suppose, firstly, that Swinburne dies and his family pay for his body to be cryogenically frozen; suppose, secondly, that shortly afterwards there is an earthquake and Swinburne’s brain is broken into many parts—a few of which are lost; suppose, finally, that fifty years later medical technology has advanced to the point where his descendants are able to have him revived using replacement parts from another brain: His body and most of his original brain become a living person who behaves somewhat like Swinburne and seems to remember much of his past experiences.
Reflection on this thought experiment shows that, however much we know about what has happened to his brain (“and we may know,” Swinburne emphasises, “exactly what has happened to every atom in it”) we do not know what has happened to him. And this is important because whether Swinburne has survived the ordeal or not is an objective truth about the world that cannot possibly be captured by physicalism. “And note,” adds Swinburne, “that the extra truth is not about what thoughts and feelings and purposes the revived person has. Rather, the extra truth, the truth about whether I have survived, is a truth about who that is--which substance those properties are instantiated in.”
2. Worldview Compatibility
Physicalism entails that mindless particles organised in various ways by mindless forces is all that exists. Theism, per contra, entails that, "Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth of the evolution of life, has always existed as the matrix and substrate of physical reality." I will now be arguing that since the five properties of consciousness just discussed are recalcitrant on a physicalistic worldview but entirely to be expected on a theistic one, consciousness provides forceful posterior evidence for the existence of God.
2.1 Physicalism
“How,” asks John Searle, “can we square the self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?” The answer, Moreland replies, is, “Not very well.” In the following paragraphs, I will summarise three reasons for thinking that our conscious life, in view of the five properties under discussion, is impervious to physicalistic explanation.
2.1.1 Irreducibility
Reduction in the physical sciences is achieved by distinguishing mental phenomena from more fundamental physical phenomena and giving primacy to the latter. Warmth, for instance, is reduced to molecular energy in thermodynamics. Thereafter, molecular energy is understood to be what warmth, “really is.” Because sensory perception is subjective and can show variation between individuals and species we therefore move toward a more objective knowledge of the world when we understand it in this way; when we understand warmth as the way in which molecular energy is perceived in consciousness; or understand colour as the way in which electromagnetic wavelengths are perceived in consciousness—and so on. “What the evidence of the history of science shows,” notes Swinburne, “is that the way to achieve integration of sciences is to ignore the mental.” But an intractable problem arises when we come to the mental itself: We do not move towards a more objective understanding of consciousness along analogous lines when we attempt to understand consciousness as the way in which brain activity is perceived in consciousness: It is simply incoherent to reduce consciousness to some more fundamental physical phenomenon and ignore the former because the former, consciousness, is the very thing we are attempting to explain. Here, again, an exhaustive physicalistic description of the universe is incompletable.
2.1.2 The Impossibility of a Physical Law
Physical objects differ from each other in measurable ways. As a result, we can have general laws that relate quantities in all bodies by a mathematical formula. Rather than an exhaustive index of laws (an object of mass n and velocity p colliding with one of mass q and velocity r results in t—and so on for innumerable different cases) it is possible to formulate a single law that, “for every pair of objects in collision the mass of the first multiplied by its velocity plus the mass of the second multiplied by its velocity is always conserved.” The problem for any psychophysical theory of mind is that thoughts do not differ from each other in measurable ways. One thought does not have exactly twice as much meaning as another one; nor could one put a figure on the strength of a remembered odour or weigh the poignancy of a memory. An infinitely long list of psychophysical laws matching every possible brain state to a mental state is impossible in practice and useless in theory. An elegant and simple general law describing the correlation of brain states and mental states, on the other hand, is unachievable in principle. “Above all,” adds Swinburne, “there could not be a formula that had the consequence that this brain would give rise to my mind and that one to yours rather than vice versa. We could discover at most that there were these connections, not why there were these connections.”
2.1.3 Limits of Evolution
Natural selection is a theory of elimination. It explains why variants thrown up by evolution are eliminated. But it does not explain why they were thrown up in the first place. In the case of physical variants (the countershading of a moth, say) there can be an adequate explanation in terms of a mutation that causes the variant to appear in accordance with the basic laws of chemistry. But our problem is to explain why some physical state produces a conscious mind with properties so recalcitrant to physicalistic explanation in the way we have discussed. Natural selection can perhaps explain how, having appeared in evolutionary history, conscious animals survived; and it may explain how they developed a preponderance of true beliefs. But it cannot explain the origination of the most novel feature of human beings: Their conscious life. Moreover, so long as an organism generates the correct behavioural outputs in response to stimuli, it will survive: Functions that organisms can and do execute unconsciously. For this reason conscious states are, strictly speaking, superfluous to evolution and so lie beyond its explanatory limits.
It is important to recognise that all five properties under discussion are intractable on physicalism and must be taken as brute facts. It is in the very nature of qualia to be unsusceptible of objective analysis and we can no more expect physical evidence to explain the intentionality of thought than we can expect an exhaustive chemical analysis of the carbon particles of pencil lead to eventually yield the meaning of the word moon which to a literate English observer they compose. The denial of libertarian causation and nonphysical entities is, meanwhile, presupposed by physicalism and physical evidence is by definition public and so can never collapse into or capture the privileged access of the subject to his own mental life which is, moreover, its essential feature.
2.2 Theism
All five properties of consciousness we have discussed are unproblematically compatible with theism. Rather than mindless particles compelled by equally mindless forces, mind is basic to the theistic ontology. God, the Basic Being, is a nonphysical conscious self with irreducible teleology, rationality and free will. Moreover, since the Bible teaches that God created man in his image, Abrahamic theists have a priori grounds to expect these properties to be instantiated if God exists. It is no surprise on theism that our most novel and essential feature, our mental life, should be recalcitrantly nonphysical. And this is because it is imparted to us by our nonphysical creator. Free will, too, is provocatively suggestive of the imago dei since if man exercises libertarian causation he instantiates in miniature the principle of uncaused causation imputed to God in classical theism. The foregoing can be compendiated into the following syllogism,
P1 If theism is true, human beings should have properties that resist physicalistic explanation
P2 Human beings do, in fact, have such properties C Therefore, these properties provide posterior evidence for theism |
Conclusion
We have seen that the most essential feature of human experience, our conscious life, is inexplicable on a physicalistic ontology while for the theist all such difficulties fall away. The theist can, moreover, provide a priori reasons for the instantiation of consciousness in the doctrine of the imago dei. In Is There a God? Swinburne suggests yet another such reason: If God is unlimited in power and intelligence, it is certain that he could create a universe that contained intelligent beings; and if He is perfectly good, it is reasonably probable that He would. Writes Swinburne,
We have seen that the most essential feature of human experience, our conscious life, is inexplicable on a physicalistic ontology while for the theist all such difficulties fall away. The theist can, moreover, provide a priori reasons for the instantiation of consciousness in the doctrine of the imago dei. In Is There a God? Swinburne suggests yet another such reason: If God is unlimited in power and intelligence, it is certain that he could create a universe that contained intelligent beings; and if He is perfectly good, it is reasonably probable that He would. Writes Swinburne,
We have some understanding of what a good person will do. Good people will try to make other people happy, happy in doing and enjoying worthwhile things (but not happy in causing pain to others). Good people try to help other people for whom they are responsible (for example, their own children) to be good people themselves. Good people seek to share what they have with others and to cooperate with others in all these activities.
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God, in other words, might reasonably be expected to create a universe in order to share with us the good things He has—such as a mental life, knowledge, freedom and love. All of these things require consciousness. And if all humans are to have access to the greatest good of all, knowledge of God himself, they will need to be able to develop sophisticated metaphysics which will require rational intuition. It is therefore credibly probable that agents with these abilities will exist if there is a God but incredibly improbable that they would exist if there is not. The existence of conscious agents therefore provides evidence that there is a God who created them.
Footnotes
[1] Philosophical idealism takes a skeptical view of the external world and holds that reality is fundamentally mental; solipsism holds that only one’s own mind can really be said to exist. Descartes famously held that we can coherently doubt everything except the fact that we doubt: Cogito ergo sum.
[2] Some quotes. See Moreland intro.
[3] Intentionality, privileged access and irreducibility were all introduced in Chapter 2. However, since the concepts are both critical and difficult, I think they can be revisited with profit.
[4] See the "split brain" thought experiment in Chapter 2.
[1] Philosophical idealism takes a skeptical view of the external world and holds that reality is fundamentally mental; solipsism holds that only one’s own mind can really be said to exist. Descartes famously held that we can coherently doubt everything except the fact that we doubt: Cogito ergo sum.
[2] Some quotes. See Moreland intro.
[3] Intentionality, privileged access and irreducibility were all introduced in Chapter 2. However, since the concepts are both critical and difficult, I think they can be revisited with profit.
[4] See the "split brain" thought experiment in Chapter 2.