The Argument From Consciousness

[FallentoReason]

Specifically speaking, Chad Wooters. He requested me to write this up.

Indeed, I asked you to start this thread so I’m sorry about coming late to the party. Your argument has makes me think about consciousness and God in ways I had not previously considered. The terms ‘God’ and ‘consciousness’ are ambiguous at best, and that is why I think it makes for such and interesting problem.

Agreed. When I first thought of this, I sort of took a lot for granted as "common knowledge", but some people (including yourself obviously) have rightly pointed out that perhaps there's some work I ought to do there to establish a more concrete meaning of those words.

Of course my first question is about consciousness. When we say that God is a conscious being of what is He conscious? Do the contents of His consciousness change like ours? Does God have an unconscious part of His intellect?

I'm somewhat inclined to believe that the theist will be closer to knowing how to answer these questions than myself. Surely the Bible hints at possible answers.

The second thing I ponder is if time is the only field of action for consciousness, time being only one metric of extension. A graph with an x-axis of God's anger and a y-axis of Man's disobedience would show a change relationship without any reference to time. But intuitively I agree time and consciousness seem go hand-in-hand.

That's an interesting thought. I don't know if this is entirely accurate, but wouldn't such a "mechanical" relationship almost partly rob God of his free will? My initial thought would be that the x axis (the independent variable) would actually be man's disobedience, because we have been granted free will i.e. our actions are independent of anything (as opposed to, say, determinism which would mean our actions are in one way or another dependent on something else). Therefore, God's anger would be the dependent variable which would fluctuate according to what we do. So in a way, he knew that his emotions would be out of his control as soon as humanity was created. Or it's as if he never was actually conscious but is simply a "materialistic" construct that reacts to certain things e.g. our behaviour, much like chemicals. Or maybe... my deep involvement with graphs and science (academically speaking) don't allow me to divorce the notion of a graph and the context it is usually in!