Questions Does God exist?Where does consciousness come from? From the physical you only get the physical

Does God exist?TheismConsciousness

Where does consciousness come from? From the physical you only get the physical

The argument from consciousness

J. P. Moreland born 1948Consciousness is poorly explained by matter alone: it is evidence for God.

What it claims

The explanation of consciousness is God: the existence of conscious beings is evidence for God, and against the idea that matter is all there is.

Why

A scientific explanation leads only from the physical to the physical, and consciousness is not physical.

The same idea through history

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz1714The mill of the Monadology: walking through a thinking machine enlarged to the size of a mill, we find only parts pushing one another, never a perception. Leibniz concludes that perception does not come from the machine; he does not yet draw an argument for God from it.

Richard Swinburne1979In The Existence of God (chapter 9, kept in the 2004 second edition), he argues that the regular links between brain and consciousness escape any scientific explanation, but are explained if a God willed them. He makes it a probabilistic argument: consciousness makes God more probable.

Robert Merrihew Adams1987In "Flavors, Colors, and God", Robert Adams starts from a simple question: why does a given brain state yield this colour or this taste, and not another? Moreland cites Adams and Swinburne as his two sources.

J. P. Moreland1998He gives the argument a nine-step form and sets it against John Searle's "biological naturalism", for which consciousness simply emerges from the brain.

J. P. Moreland2008In the book Consciousness and the Existence of God, he develops the argument and compares it one by one with the naturalist answers (emergence, panpsychism).

In short

"Where does consciousness come from? From the physical you only get the physical" is an argument by J. P. Moreland ("Searle's Biological Naturalism and the Argument from Consciousness", 1998; Consciousness and the Existence of God, 2008, 1998) on the question "Does God exist?" (answer: theism). Its claim: The explanation of consciousness is God: the existence of conscious beings is evidence for God, and against the idea that matter is all there is. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 5 objections, 5 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

"Searle's Biological Naturalism and the Argument from Consciousness", 1998; Consciousness and the Existence of God, 2008

Valid with an implicit premise

You are in pain, you see red, you think of someone. These lived experiences are what we call consciousness. Yet the universe described by physics is made only of particles, forces and fields, which feel nothing. How, from these ingredients, can a being that feels appear? For the American philosopher J. P. Moreland, following Richard Swinburne and Robert Adams, this is evidence for God. Out of the physical, physical processes only make more of the physical. If consciousness is not physical, it needs another explanation: that of a person who willed it. And if a conscious God lies at the bottom of reality, the appearance of conscious beings is no longer strange. The argument does not claim to prove God for certain: it says that consciousness is better explained with God than without. It extends Leibniz's old mill, which found in a machine only parts, never a perception.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where consciousness is real and non-physical, where its links with the brain have an explanation, but where that explanation is scientific: for instance a law of nature that makes consciousness arise in a complex enough brain. Then no person is needed, and God is not proven.

Valid with P4. Moreland does not put it in his list of premises, but he writes it elsewhere in the article: what comes from the physical through physical processes is physical. Without it, nothing prevents science from explaining a non-physical consciousness. Moreland admits that everything turns on two points: P3 (does consciousness have an explanation?) and the claim that no scientific explanation suffices, hence P4. Physicalists instead attack P1: for them, consciousness is physical.

Analogy. With Lego bricks you can build a house, a castle, a rocket: always arrangements of bricks. If one day you found the smell of warm bread in the box, you would not say "the bricks fitted together well": you would look for who put it there. For Moreland, consciousness is like that smell: not one more arrangement, but something else.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Patricia Churchland 1994 · attacks premise 1

The capacities of the mind are capacities of the brain: no need for separate "spooky stuff". We do not yet understand how the brain produces consciousness, but we do not understand much better how it makes us walk, run or climb trees. Consciousness is not intrinsically more mysterious than motor control. Neuroscience is advancing, and the question will move from mystery to tough problem we are beginning to crack.

Moreland replies

J. P. Moreland 1998

The problem does not come from what we still do not know about the brain, but from what we already know about matter and mind: they are so different that no necessary link between them can be seen. More detailed links between brain and consciousness will change nothing: we will have a fuller dictionary, not an explanation. The problem is about what exists (it is ontological), not about what we know (it is not epistemological). And if many naturalists reduce consciousness to the physical, it is so as not to give up naturalism.

Daniel Dennett 2001

Without answering Moreland directly, Dennett defends the opposite position: the "hard problem" of consciousness (why there is something it is like to be conscious) is a theorist's illusion, calling for therapy rather than a new science. Our body is made of trillions of cells that know nothing; we must explain how we get from these cells to a subject who knows, and that transition must be made without any magic ingredient.

The debate goes on (our summary) The disagreement is mostly about P1. In the 1998 article, Moreland assumes P1 more than he defends it: he targets Searle, who himself grants that consciousness does not reduce to the physical. Against Churchland or Dennett, for whom consciousness is the brain at work, the argument must first show that consciousness is not physical, which Moreland attempts in his 2008 book. Physicalists answer that a gap between our ideas of "matter" and "experience" does not prove a gap in reality.

Daniel Dennett 1991 · attacks premise 5

Saying that consciousness is not physical, then explaining it by a soul or by God, is giving up on explaining. A mechanism we could study is replaced by a mystery we can never study. Dennett does not claim to prove that dualism is false, but he makes it his rule to avoid it at all costs: accepting dualism is giving up.

Moreland replies

J. P. Moreland 1998

This criticism assumes that an explanation must always show a mechanism. But a personal explanation works differently: we explain that someone's finger moves by citing the person, their intention and their power to act, not a mechanism. In the same way, consciousness can be explained by citing God, his intention to create persons whose mental states are linked to their world, and his power to do so.

The debate goes on (our summary) Critics answer that a personal explanation sheds light only if we already know what the person wants: invoking an all-powerful will could explain any world, and so teaches nothing. Defenders, like Swinburne, answer that a good God has reasons to create conscious beings able to choose and to love, which makes consciousness more expected with God than without.

John Searle (after Diderot) 1992 · attacks premise 4

Consciousness emerges from organised matter, like other properties: no water molecule is liquid, but water is. Likewise, no neuron is conscious, but the brain is. Consciousness is an ordinary biological property of the brain, caused by it. Diderot already said so with the egg that becomes a chick (see his argument "The egg: matter can think"). If we find this mysterious, it is only because we cannot picture consciousness.

Moreland replies

J. P. Moreland 1998

The difficulty is not that we cannot picture consciousness. It is that from the physical, through physical processes, we only get the physical; things do not arise from nothing. Even the materialist D. M. Armstrong granted this: that a complex nervous system should have new properties, fine; that it should create, out of no materials, something of a quite different nature, no. And liquidity is not a good example: it is only the group behaviour of particles, which physics explains without trouble.

The debate goes on (our summary) Supporters of emergence answer that Moreland demands to see how consciousness follows from the brain, which amounts to assuming it cannot follow from it. Moreland himself admits that his answer requires sorting "good" from "bad" cases of emergence, and that this sorting is debatable. He adds that naturalists have not spent fifty years trying to eliminate solidity or digestion, as they have with consciousness.

J. L. Mackie 1982 · attacks premise 4

Some believers, like Locke, granted that God could give thought to suitably arranged matter. But then, if some material structures can be conscious, how can we know in advance that matter cannot produce consciousness of itself? The naturalist can take this appearance of consciousness as a fact of nature, without God.

Moreland replies

J. P. Moreland 1998

That God could add thought to matter does not show that matter can do it alone; Locke himself thought the opposite. Above all, the naturalist cannot both give matter the power to produce consciousness and keep the matter described by physics: matter that carries within it what it takes to make mind is no longer the naturalists' matter.

The debate goes on (our summary) Naturalists reply that no one knows in advance everything matter is capable of: physics has already changed our idea of matter a great deal, and it could do so again. This is exactly the path Thomas Nagel takes (next objection).

Thomas Nagel 2012 · attacks premise 5

Nagel, who is not a believer, grants Moreland the main point: consciousness is the biggest obstacle to a naturalism based on physics alone, and materialism is very probably false. But he refuses to conclude to God. There is a third way: widen our idea of nature, so that mind is a basic aspect of it, present in some way from the start (panpsychism), with a universe tending toward the appearance of life and mind. Nagel admits that his rejection of God rests partly on an assumption he does not justify.

Moreland replies

Alvin Plantinga 2012

In his review of the book, Plantinga applauds Nagel's attack on materialism, but doubts his solution. Saying that particles have a bit of mind does not explain how little minds combine to form a mind like ours. Theism, by contrast, has no trouble with consciousness: the basic reality is God, who is conscious. And Nagel's refusal seems more emotional than philosophical: if he followed his own arguments, he would end up a theist.

Thomas Nagel 2013

In a summary of his book written after the criticisms, Nagel holds his position. Theism, in some versions, fits the scientific facts, but he does not believe it. Mind, he thinks, is neither an inexplicable accident nor a divine gift: it is a basic aspect of nature, which we will only understand by going beyond the limits of current science. He adds that believers could accept this, by saying that God is the author of this widened natural order.

The debate goes on (our summary) The debate remains open, and it has changed shape: many now grant that consciousness poses a real problem for materialism, but ask what explains it best, God or a nature richer than that of physics (panpsychism now has defenders, such as Galen Strawson or Philip Goff). Moreland already noted in 1998 that, if one accepts the rest of the argument, only a debate between theists and panpsychists remains. Panpsychism must explain how small minds form a single mind; theism must explain why a creating mind would exist.

What today's voices say

Defend it

Trent HornHe asks whether consciousness can persuasively point to God as its source, without a god-of-the-gaps move. He does not claim it is a proof.

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