Thomas Nagel in his recent book Mind and Cosmos rightly shows that scientific materialism—despite its many strengths—is powerless to explain the most fundamental fact of existence: the existence of Self. (He has recently summarized the book.) Consciousness is essential to everything that we as human beings are. When we think, feel, intuit, want, or experience, we do so through consciousness. Even the observations of science come only through human perception, and our hypotheses, insights, and interpretations are also cultivated within the conscious mind. And yet materialistic science utterly fails to account for the nature or origin of consciousness. This is a serious gap in an otherwise powerful explanatory system.
Nagel attacks the materialist view that would reduce all of existence to the physical. He points out that consciousness—our sole conduit to reality—cannot be dismissed as a coincidental “epiphenomenon”. It cannot be described in physical terms—it is not itself material. And yet it is too important and too bizarre for us to simply ignore it. If we are to have a coherent view of reality, we must explain consciousness.
At this point Nagel makes a remarkable assertion. He recognizes that the existence of God is often invoked as an explanation for the origin and nature of human consciousness. Yet he dismisses it. He does not argue against it—he makes no argument. He simply casts it off. Theology is the “dreaded” explanation, he notes. He recognizes that it is “consistent with the available scientific evidence” but answers only, “I don’t believe it.” There is no logic to this. Rather, he finds himself “drawn”—as if by instinct or some irascible force—to another option: a “naturalistic, though non-materialistic, alternative.”
So what is this compelling alternative? Nagel can’t quite say. He is enthusiastic about it but he’s not sure what it is—only that it is “naturalistic” (that is, requiring no explanation outside of nature), and yet “non-materialistic” (not explained purely in terms of physical processes).
Nagel puts himself in some danger of being accused of subscribing to an oxymoron. It’s not clear that “naturalistic” and “materialistic” aren’t, in practice, synonyms. Perhaps there is some view of nature that transcends the physical, yet avoids the supernatural. Nagel hopes so. But what a vague hope it is! Nagel waits for a solution that centuries of philosophical endeavor has never uncovered, for which there is no evidence, and that cannot clearly be expressed to begin with.
What is the attraction? What is the “draw”? Why does Nagel dismiss all other options—materialistic and theistic—when this solution is so vague? Surely this is a remarkably optimistic (one might even say “faithful”) choice for an intelligent and logical professor of philosophy and law to uphold.
It seems to me that Nagel is not so much drawn to his favored option as he is repelled by the “dreaded” theistic option. He dismisses it without explanation, filled with such dread, evidently, that he cannot bring himself to engage squarely with it. But if he would do so, he might discover why millennia of his philosophical predecessors have found it to be not only not dreadful, but logical, potent, and satisfying.
There is a teleological element to the question of consciousness that points intently to the presence of God in creation. We must ask, “Why are we conscious?” By this question I don’t simply mean, “By what natural processes did consciousness come about?” Nor do I mean, “What is the nature of consciousness and how does it relate to the physical?” These are both interesting questions, but they overlook what is perhaps a more obvious one: a question any child would ask. Why am I here at all? Why is there an I to be asking this question? Why does consciousness exist in the first place?
It’s certainly easy to imagine an alternative universe in which life never appeared. As many have noted, the most miniscule change in our universe’s properties would have made life impossible. Yet our universe, improbably, conceived life.
It’s easy to imagine a universe in which the only life that ever appeared was the simplest kind of life—proteins, protozoa, and the like. But in our universe, life climbed mount improbable and became more complex. Mechanisms aside, why should just such a universe as would facilitate this climb be the one to actually come about?
It’s easy to imagine a universe in which complex life forms appeared but were devoid of consciousness. They were simply complicated machines, chasing and scratching and procreating. But despite what materialists would have us believe, our universe went beyond this. The machines became conscious. Ghosts moved in. In defiance of all physical explanation, the universe produced creatures that were aware. Yes they chased and scratched and procreated, but they knew they were doing it, they experienced it, they felt what it was like to chase and scratch and procreate.
This awareness was no mere footnote to creation. It seems to be the one thing that gives creation meaning. The conscious creatures are far and away the most interesting ones. The mechanics of physical bodies scratching in the wilderness is intriguing, but when their scratchings become intermingled with and driven by dreams, romances, fears, ecstasies, and yearnings, you have a whole new kind of universe. In the physical universe you get star formation and antibodies and iridescent beetles—fascinating machines—but only with consciousness comes music, poetry, passion, and story.
Why did such a remarkable universe—out of all the possible universes that might have popped into existence—happen to be the one that actually appeared? Why does consciousness exist at all? 1
That is the teleological aspect to the question of the nature and origin of consciousness. Many people find that the existence of God is at least a worthwhile candidate for an answer to this question. Rather than a source of dread or a readily-dismissed afterthought, the existence of a loving and relational God would handily explain the appearance, in a cold clockwork universe, of conscious relational creatures.
In this scenario, God has fashioned the universe in such a way that it does produce conscious creatures, precisely because the existence of conscious creatures is one of God’s chief goals for making a universe at all. Conscious creatures are desirable, presumably, because without consciousness you really do have nothing but machines. Only a conscious creature has the intellectual richness, the capacity for moral choice, and the ability to love and be loved that are necessary to relationship. God wants relationship—so the explanation goes—so he made a universe producing creatures capable of relationship.
So far this is hardly a compelling argument. It is a speculation as to what may have happened. To believe that it is the correct explanation for the existence of consciousness (among other things), we would need further evidence for the existence and nature of God: observed miracles, perhaps, and/or documents that convincingly express God’s thoughts and intents for creating the universe. For my own part, I’m convinced that this evidence exists and is compelling, but that is a much larger argument. My point here is only that the existence of God would be a satisfying explanation for the origin and nature of consciousness, and that both the origin and nature of consciousness are startling enough that a potent explanation of why they exist is demanded.
A theistic explanation for consciousness, if supportable on other grounds, is intellectually satisfying because it recognizes the obvious peculiarity and importance of consciousness and offers a consistent, logical explanation for why it exists.
So why does Nagel find this explanation dreadful and dismiss it without comment?
- Subscribers to the Anthropic Principle respond by saying that many randomly-generated universes exist, most of which have no conscious beings. Therefore all the universes of which anyone is conscious are precisely those universes that happened by chance to produce consciousness. The existence of consciousness, then, is unremarkable—a product of chance rather than divine intent. By this rather brittle argument they hope to avoid God as an explanation for why consciousness exists. The argument is trivially defeated by two observations. First, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for the existence of multiple universes: it is pure speculation, a leap of faith. Second, even if the Anthropic Principle were true, it would only push the teleological problem back by one step. Rather than asking, “Why did this one remarkably consciousness-producing universe come about?” we would now ask, “Why did this remarkably consciousness-producing set of universes come about?” Consciousness is improbable in any state of affairs. Considering the myriad possible universes we can conceive of, the fact that consciousness appeared by whatever mechanism will always be remarkable such as to require an explanation. The nature and improbability of consciousness both smack of intent. ↩