Argument for the existence of God based on consciousness
The argument from consciousness is an argument for the existence of God that claims characteristics of human consciousness (such as qualia) cannot be explained by the physical mechanisms of the human body and brain, therefore asserting that there must be non-physical aspects to human consciousness. This is held as indirect evidence of God, given that notions about souls and the afterlife in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would be consistent with such a claim.
The argument may be stated in inductive or deductive form[1] An alternative, closely related, version of the argument uses Platonism as its premise in a deductive argument.[2]
Inductive form
Richard Swinburne put forward an inductive form of the argument in his book The Existence of God.[3] He uses the argument from personal identity[clarification needed] for mind-body dualism to show that we have a non-physical mental element to our minds. He suggests that the most probable way in which the non-physical and the physical are linked in causal-interaction is by design, which implies a designer. Swinburne suggests that this designer is God. He says that whilst this argument, owing to its inductive form, is inconclusive, it does provide strong evidence for a God.
Deductive form
Mental states are genuine nonphysical mental entities that exist.
Specific mental and physical event types are regularly correlated.
There is an explanation for these correlations.
Personal explanation is different from natural scientific explanation.
The explanation for these correlations is either a personal or natural scientific explanation.
The explanation is not a natural scientific one.
Therefore, the explanation is a personal one.
If the explanation is personal, then it is theistic.
Theists such as Robert Adams[5] have advanced a slightly different version of Swinburne's argument which focuses on mental/physical correlations and not merely the existence of mental states. These are similar to Swinburne's argument but take a deductive form rather than an inductive one.
If God did not exist, intentional states of consciousness would not exist.
But intentional states of consciousness do exist.
Therefore, God exists.
Peter Kreeft has put forward a deductive form of the argument from consciousness[7] based upon the intelligibility of the universe despite the limitations of our minds. He phrases it deductively as follows:
"We experience the universe as intelligible. This intelligibility means that the universe is graspable by intelligence."
"Either this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence, or both intelligibility and intelligence are the products of blind chance."
"Not blind chance."
"Therefore this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence."
The Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo formed a formulation of the argument from consciousness, sometimes termed the Argument from truth which is closely aligned to consciousness whilst using neither inductive nor deductive methodology. The argument was influenced by Platonism.
Our limited minds can discover eternal truths about being.
Truth properly resides in the mind.
But the human mind is not eternal.
Therefore, there must exist an eternal mind in which these truths reside.
The Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, whilst he feels that it could be an effective argument, feels that we have too little knowledge of the workings of consciousness for this to be truly convincing as of yet.[8]
Another Catholic philosopher, Edward Feser has promoted the Augustinian argument, including it in his book Five Proofs of the Existence of God.[9] He concludes that Augustine's argument is valid, having given many different reasons why Platonism, its primary premise, is true.
Criticism
The first premise, assertion that non-physical mental states exist, implies a dualist view of mind. Therefore, one line of attack is to argue the case for physicalism about the human mind.[10] Moreland takes the arguments for the first premise and refers to classic defenses of dualism. However, the first premise is rejected by many philosophers of mind. Frank Jackson, known for the knowledge argument in support of dualism about the mind, comments on the debate between physicalist and dualist conceptions of mind:
Much of the contemporary debate in the philosophy of mind is concerned with the clash between certain strongly held intuitions and what science tells us about the mind and its relation to the world. What science tells us about the mind points strongly towards some version or other of physicalism. The intuitions, in one way or another, suggest that there is something seriously incomplete about any purely physical story about the mind ... Most contemporary philosophers given a choice between going with science and going with intuitions, go with science. Although I once dissented from the majority, I have capitulated and now see the interesting issue as being where the arguments from the intuitions against physicalism—the arguments that seem so compelling—go wrong.[11]
If one is willing to accept the first premise that reductive forms of physicalism are false, then the argument takes off. Thus, one could think of Moreland as making an argument that tries to move a person from "rejecting physicalism" to "accepting theism." The crucial step in this move is the fifth premise, which asserts that naturalism can not account for non-physical mental states. A critique of this premise is offered by Andrew Melnyk:
Naturalism can easily explain how the universe came to contain physically irreducible conscious occurrences. It can do so by supposing that, among the fundamental laws governing the universe, there are some according to which, whenever such-and-such complex nonconscious occurrences occur, so-and-so conscious occurrences occur; perhaps such a law says that, whenever a human brain attains a certain kind and degree of complexity, a pain is experienced. Given such laws, the capacity for consciousness that some creatures enjoy, like the capacity for breathing, can be explained as having arisen through natural selection. Through mutation, some creature was born with a brain of the requisite kind and degree of complexity to generate conscious experiences; and then, because these experiences increased the creature's fitness, such creatures were selected for.[12]
However Moreland charges that such attempts to accommodate consciousness within an atheistic worldview are ad hoc and contrived and fail to take into account many features of conscious experience.[13] Moreland spends much of the book defending this premise against philosophers, such as Michael Martin, who accept pluralist naturalism. He also critiques contemporary philosophers of mind such as John Searle, Timothy O' Connor, Colin McGinn, David Skriba, Philip Clayton and Jaegwon Kim, who attempt to account for consciousness.
Finally, one can also question premise eight: why does a personal explanation have to lead to monotheistic (as opposed to deistic or polytheistic) accounts of intention?[14] However, Moreland maintains that questioning these minor premises is of little consolation to the naturalist as they essentially constitute intramural theist debates, and that for most westerners theism is the only viable candidate to accommodate personal explanations. Similarly Occam's razor can be applied so only one personal agent is required.
Notes and references
↑ Both these are following J. P Moreland "The Argument from Consciousness" in The Rationality of Theism ed Paul Copan and Paul Moser, London: Routledge (2003) ISBN0-415-26332-8 and J. P Moreland "Consciousness and The Existence of God"
The argument from morality is an argument for the existence of God. Arguments from morality tend to be based on moral normativity or moral order. Arguments from moral normativity observe some aspect of morality and argue that God is the best or only explanation for this, concluding that God must exist. Arguments from moral order are based on the asserted need for moral order to exist in the universe. They claim that, for this moral order to exist, God must exist to support it. The argument from morality is noteworthy in that one cannot evaluate the soundness of the argument without attending to almost every important philosophical issue in meta-ethics.
The teleological argument is an argument for the existence of God or, more generally, that complex functionality in the natural world which looks designed is evidence of an intelligent creator.
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.
Richard Granville Swinburne is an English philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years, Swinburne has been a proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
The existence of God is a subject of debate in theology, the philosophy of religion, and popular culture. A wide variety of arguments for and against the existence of God can be categorized as logical, empirical, metaphysical, subjective or scientific. In philosophical terms, the question of the existence of God involves the disciplines of epistemology and ontology and the theory of value.
In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
A philosophical zombie is a being in a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal person but does not have conscious experience.
The Kalam cosmological argument is a modern formulation of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. It is named after the Kalam, from which its key ideas originated. William Lane Craig was principally responsible for giving new life to the argument in the 20th century, due to his book The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979), among other writings.
This glossary of philosophy is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to philosophy and related disciplines, including logic, ethics, and theology.
Physical causal closure is a metaphysical theory about the nature of causation in the physical realm with significant ramifications in the study of metaphysics and the mind. In a strongly stated version, physical causal closure says that "all physical states have pure physical causes" — Jaegwon Kim, or that "physical effects have only physical causes" — Agustin Vincente, p. 150.
Metaphysical naturalism is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences. Methodological naturalism is a philosophical basis for science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, metaphysical naturalism rejects the supernatural concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.
The argument from desire is an argument for the existence of the immortality of the soul. The best-known defender of the argument is the Christian writer C. S. Lewis. Briefly and roughly, the argument states that humans’ natural desire for eternal happiness must be capable of satisfaction, because all natural desires are capable of satisfaction. Versions of the argument have been offered since the Middle Ages, and the argument continues to have defenders today, such as Peter Kreeft and Francis Collins.
The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit is a counter-argument to modern versions of the argument from design for the existence of God. It was introduced by Richard Dawkins in chapter 4 of his 2006 book The God Delusion, "Why there almost certainly is no God".
The argument from reason is a transcendental argument against metaphysical naturalism and for the existence of God. The best-known defender of the argument is C. S. Lewis. Lewis first defended the argument at length in his 1947 book, Miracles: A Preliminary Study. In the second edition of Miracles (1960), Lewis substantially revised and expanded the argument.
Skeptical theism is the view that people should remain skeptical of their ability to discern whether their perceptions about evil can be considered good evidence against the existence of the orthodox Christian God. The central thesis of skeptical theism is that it would not be surprising for an infinitely intelligent and knowledgeable being's reasons for permitting evils to be beyond human comprehension. That is, what may seem like pointless evils may be necessary for a greater good or to prevent equal or even greater evils. This central thesis may be argued from a theistic perspective, but is also argued to defend positions of agnosticism.
This is a glossary of terms used in New Thought.
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea that only natural laws and forces operate in the universe. In its primary sense it is also known as ontological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, pure naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism. "Ontological" refers to ontology, the philosophical study of what exists. Philosophers often treat naturalism as equivalent to materialism.
Is There a God? is a 1996 book by British philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne, claiming the existence of the Abrahamic God. The argument rests on an updated version of natural theology with biological evolution and Big Bang theory using scientific inference. In 2010, a revised version of the original book was released under the same title.
The Existence of God is a 1979 book by British philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne, claiming the existence of the Abrahamic God on rational grounds. The argument rests on an updated version of natural theology with biological evolution using scientific inference, mathematical probability theory, such as Bayes' theorem, and of inductive logic. In 2004, a second edition was released under the same title.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
