Consciousness

[Ahriman]

Cute strawman from a nut who believes that goddunnit.

Theists believe that God created us, but the reality is that our parents did.  Our parents are both necessary and sufficient causes of our existence.  

If you follow that reasoning back through biological and stellar evolution, then God's assumed attributes slowly disappear the further back you go.  In the end, there is nothing left that resembles the theistic God, at least according to modern cosmology.  Instead you have some variety of quantum weirdness at the beginning.  How the universe actually works has proven to be complex and counter-intuitive.

I think a lot of the confusion about consciousness comes from the assumption that consciousness is our self rather than a brain function which is just a part of our self.  That self is a working body with a brain and a nervous system, and it is the product of millions of years of evolution.  The human brain is likely the most complex object in the natural world, and scientists are still figuring out how it works.  That it can do some amazing tricks therefore shouldn't be surprising.

They already know how it works. Turns out, it's not really that complex.