If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)

[bennyboy]

Organic chemistry can account for consciousness in the same way that the properties of various metals can account for the strenght of steel. We know that where there's a brain with certain functions, we have a person who seems to be conscious (and accept with a near-total confidence that the person isn't a philosophical zombie or something).

But digestion and cosciousness are different in an important way. There's nothing about digestion (so far as anyone has suggested) that cannot be studied PURELY in terms of the chemistry and mechanics of that system. Consciousness cannot be studied in this way-- you cannot observe a brain and know exactly what it is like for someone to experience their environment or ideas.

Of course studying is an activity which takes place within the domain of consciousness rather than digestion. When we think about what consciousness might be we do so within a function of consciousness itself. When we think about anything else (besides the consciousness of other beings) we are quite content with third person accounts. Empirical evidence is then the gold standard. I would suggest that the something extra you attribute to consciousness has less to do with what it is than it does with the fact that we are that.

I don't attribute anything extra to consciousness. I attribute something extra to the universe which, unless universal laws have changed over time, has always had ingrained in it the capacity for conscious experience. There's also what one might call a "metacapacity" in the Big Bang-- the capacity to create a universe with the capacity to support conscious experience.

Let's get back to the idea of God-- specifically, is there any naturalistic or non-mythological entity or principle which might sensibly be called God. I would argue that the capacity of the universe must be rooted either in itself, if the universe is eternal, and have always been there-- or it must be rooted in some creative seed which caused the universe to unfold in such a way that it had the capacity for experience. If you take the position that consciousness, or its philosophical source, either always existed, or existed at the begining of the universe, you'll find that both these ideas are expressed in various forms in the Christian and many other religions. If you take the entire Bible and other texts as a hodge-podge of allegory, mythology, and metaphor, then you could strip all that cultural excess away and stick to the philosophical point-- that there could not have been a universe that was ever separate from the capacity for experience.

Note that I'm not promoting a conversion to any religion. Instead, I think that most people, scientific or atheist or otherwise, have recognized that there's something uniquely special about a universe which allows beings to exist and experience. And trying to wave this special feature aware by waving vaguely to the physical mechanism involved in processing the environment is like waving in general to a pile of culluloid film and saying, "Casablanca is in there somewhere, you can be sure. Mystery solved!" It's a true enough statement in its own way-- but it's a philosophically unsatisfying one.