Consciousness

Can It Be Explained Without a God?

ImprintAcademic, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.

Thomas Nagel asked, "What is it like to be a bat?” A typical bat has one trillion synapses in its brain, whereas the average human has 1,000 trillion. Yet, with 1,000 times the brain capacity, we lack many structures needed to “see” the world as a bat does through echolocation. Our most powerful massively multiplexed supercomputers cannot let us experience what it’s like to be a bat. But you don’t need to be a sci-fi genius to imagine a story where a future computer powers a chamber that allows us to experience life from the viewpoint of hundreds of different animals. There is no reason to think that only God could let us muse on what doing something is like.

Philosopher David Chalmers coined “the hard problem of consciousness” in a 1994 lecture at The Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, AZ. In doing so, he may have set neuroscience back by several decades.

Chalmers’ hard problem appeal to qualia also gave theists cover to assert without justification that consciousness cannot arise from any mixture of non-living matter; it requires a God for grounding. If a theist uses that…