Secular Science Cannot Explain How Consciousness Came From Non-Consciousness

05 Jun Secular Science Cannot Explain How Consciousness Came From Non-Consciousness

Blog Series

Moving from Checkers to Chess

Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective

This week we’re continuing our series: “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective.” Unless we have an eternal perspective, viewing life as God does, we are playing checkers in life while God is playing chess. And, if that’s the case, two things are certain: (1) we will consistently make the wrong moves, and (2) we lose in the end. I’d like to help avoid that.

Secular scientists and an “anti-supernatural presupposition”

With an anti-supernatural presupposition, secular scientists cannot explain five important things concerning existence without the need for five free miracles. We’ve looked previously in this series at the first three:

1. Secular scientists cannot explain how something came from nothing. 
2. Secular scientists cannot explain how order came from chaos.
3. Secular scientists cannot explain how life came from non–life.

Today, we look at their next problem in trying to explain reality without God:

Secular scientists cannot explain how consciousness came from non-consciousness.

The existence of moss and lichen is hard enough to explain, but a thinking brain that is conscious of itself and its surroundings is impossible to explain without God.

The theory of evolution and natural selection takes all reality back to the Big Bang, and leaves us with no God, nothing spiritual or non-material, nothing but a physical world. But consciousness is not physical. Therefore, many scientists and educators conclude that consciousness is not real. It is an illusion. We have evolved in such a way as to appear to be conscious, but without understanding how, we are not conscious.

As physicist John Hagelin said, “there is a deep philosophical problem surrounding how you get consciousness from a hunk of meat.”

On the other side of the ledger, it is extremely difficult to explain how a non-conscious brain can have the conscious thought that consciousness is impossible!

In a New York Times review of the book, The Mysterious Flame (Conscious Minds in a Material World), the subheading is: “A philosopher examines human consciousness and argues that the mind is too ill equipped to understand it.” ¹

Philosopher Evan Fales goes further and calls it a mystery: “Darwinian evolution implies that humans emerged through the blind operation of natural forces. It is mysterious how such forces could generate something nonphysical.” ²

Philosopher Colin McGinn takes the next step and treats consciousness as akin to a miracle. “We do not know how consciousness might have arisen by natural processes from [previously] existing material things,” he writes. “One is tempted, however reluctantly, to turn to divine assistance: … It would take a supernatural magician to bring consciousness from matter.” ³

Yet none of them concludes that “divine assistance” is actually an option… just that one would be tempted to conclude that, if one did not begin with an anti-supernatural presupposition.

Yet everyone, on a practical level, operates as though consciousness is real. It is impossible not to. Philosopher Galen Strawson brings us down to solid ground when he writes that the denial of consciousness “is surely the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought.” It shows “that the power of human credulity is unlimited, that the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith, is truly unbounded.” It reveals “the deepest irrationality of the human mind.” ⁴

So now, we turn our attention to evidence in support of consciousness as a mark of the image of God in humans.

Medical science suggests that consciousness exists apart from the brain.

Wilder Penfield, the father of modern neurosurgery, stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients to cause one hand to move, and challenged them to keep it from moving. The patients used their other hand to keep the hand from moving. One hand was under the control of the electrical current and the other hand under the control of the patient’s mind, and those two actions fought against each other.

Penfield concluded that the patient not only had a physical brain that was electrically stimulated to move one hand, but also a nonphysical “reality” that caused the other hand to move. Electrical stimulation may cause a hand to move, but does not cause a patient to “decide” to control that hand with their other hand. That’s because “deciding” originates in the conscious self, not the brain.⁵

 Near-death experiences (NDE) suggest that consciousness exists apart from the brain

A near-death experience is an occurrence in which a person dies or appears to die and has memories of experiences during the time when they were dead or appeared to be dead.

These experiences were universally dismissed by naturalists for years, asserting that while they appeared to be dead, there was actually brain activity going on.

This perspective has fallen on hard times lately. Stories now abound of people who have had memories of events they experience while flatlined, meaning the brain is not functioning, but they are having experiences that they recall when revived.

In Proof of Heaven, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander tells of his experience in which a serious brain infection attacked the part of his brain that controls thought and emotion. In a coma for seven days, Alexander had extensive experiences that he recalled after he recovered from his coma, leading him to conclude that consciousness is apart from the brain because his brain was non-functioning during that time.

Another significant obstacle to the naturalistic explanation of NDEs is “veridical” experiences (verifiable).  One woman died and in her NDE, she saw a tennis shoe that was on the roof of the hospital, which was later verified.

Something cannot come from nothing.

Philosopher Geoffrey Medell said, “The emergence of consciousness… is a mystery, and one to which materialism fails to provide an answer.”

Atheist Colin McGinn agrees, asking “how can mere matter originate consciousness? How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness? Consciousness seems like a radical novelty in the universe, not prefigured by the aftereffects of the Big Bang. So how did it contrive to spring into being from what preceded?”

In an interview with Lee Strobel, in his book The Case for a Creator, J.P. Moreland said, “here’s the point: you can’t get something from nothing. If there were no God, there would be no thoughts, beliefs, feelings, sensations, free actions, choices, or purposes. There would be simply one physical event after another physical event, behaving according to the laws of physics and chemistry. 

“How then, do you get something totally different – conscious, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures – from materials that don’t have that? That’s getting something from nothing! And that’s the main problem.”

 Conclusion

Additional insight is summarized from Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for the Creator. Anthropologist Marilyn Schlitz wrote, “I am driven by data not theory. And the data… refutes the physicalist position that the mind is the brain and nothing more. There are solid concrete data that suggest that our consciousness, our mind, may surpass the boundaries of the brain.”

Oxford University Prof. of physiology Sir Charles Sharrington, a Nobel Prize winner described as “a genius who laid the foundation of our knowledge of the functioning of the brain and spinal cord,” declared five days before his death: “for me now, the only reality is the human soul.”

Neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate John C Eccles has come to the same conclusion. “I am constrained to believe that there is what we might call a supernatural origin of my unique self-conscious mind or my unique selfhood or soul.”

The more medical and scientific knowledge we gain, the more it verifies the biblical teaching that we are created in the image of God, that we are a spirit, but we have a body, and that consciousness comes from our creator. Therefore, we cannot give modern science their fourth free miracle.

Next week we’ll look at the final free miracle secular scientists want from us, our fifth reason for being confident in the existence of God: without God, secular scientists cannot explain how transcendence came from consciousness. I hope to see you then.

¹ New York Times Book Review (https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/11/reviews/990711.11strawst.html)

² Evan Fales, “Naturalism and Physicalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 120. (As quoted in Finding Truth, by Nancy Pearcey, page 109)

³ Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 45; and The Mysterious Flame (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 13– 14. (As quoted in Finding Truth, by Nancy Pearcey, page 109)

⁴ Galen Strawson, Real Materialism and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), (italics added). (As quoted in Finding Truth, by Nancy Pearcey, page 110)

⁵ Finding Truth, by Nancy Pearcey, page 110

Helpful books on near death experiences:

Imagine Heaven, John Burke

To Heaven and Back, Mary C. Neal, MD

7 Lessons from Heaven, Mary C. Neal, MD

In case you’re new here, below are two resources I’ve created for additional help in your Christian discipleship journey:

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