One of evolution’s (many!) problems is the impossibility of consciousness arising from matter alone. The situation is so bad that some atheists even claim consciousness is merely an illusion! The fact is, the very existence of rational, wilful, emotional creatures (e.g. humans!) defies naturalistic explanation, and is powerful evidence for the existence of God.

Why God is the Best Explanation for Rationality

Is there evidence that people have souls? Oh yes, we have this awareness of our surroundings and of ourselves. If we’re merely byproducts of non rational forces, why would those non rational forces give rise to thinking beings? Is it plausible that our consciousness could emerge over time? And become more complex.

No matter how complex you make a brain, that’s not going to turn it into a conscious thinking. Being to get consciousness from matter alone is like getting something from nothing.

CS Lewis once called the human ability to think in reason. The cardinal difficulty for naturalism. Why can our human minds comprehend, and why is that a problem for atheists? Keaton, you have a master’s degree in Christian apologetics, and you enjoy talking about philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

So tell us, what was C. S. Lewis getting at, and what is the problem that some have called God? the argument from reason. Sure. Well, I do love to talk about these subjects and the argument from reason as it’s been called is a very powerful argument for God’s existence. And it’s also a problem for naturalists, as you mentioned, naturalism being The view that nature is all there is, and so there’s nothing supernatural beyond nature.

But this argument shows that God is real if it’s successful. And, uh, of course, Lewis did write a lot about this in many of his writings, um, and most principally his book Miracles has a lengthy treatment. But there were people who wrote about this prior to Lewis and afterwards, it’s been significantly developed.

In fact, it’s become really a whole family of different arguments because there are many features of human beings that need to be true for us to be the kind of creatures that can think rationally and a variety of those things naturalists cannot account for. And so it’s been treated by philosophers today like Victor Ruppert, Alvin Plantinga.

J. P. Moreland, um, Angus Minouge, and, and many others. And so the basic idea is, uh, at least one way to formulate it would be to start from the idea that humans have this capacity to think and reason. Uh, we can make a rational logical inferences, right? Follow an argument from premises to conclusion. We can think abstractly in ways that animals cannot and our reasoning powers go way beyond even the smartest creatures like dolphins, apes, and birds and things.

And so, uh, working from that starting point, Pretty much everybody would agree that humans can think rationally. And if someone disagrees, just ask them what their reasons are. And the minute they give you one, they’ve come over to my side. But, um, it would start from that premise and then say, what is the worldview that best accounts for this capability that all humans have.

And if we compare, say, Christianity with atheism, according to atheism, how did human beings appear? Uh, we came about through a blind, purposeless process of evolution. And would we expect that to give? us rational minds or to create any type of creature that can think rationally. And by contrast, if we, um, take the Christian worldview that says we’re created in God’s image in particular, uh, then I would argue that does make better sense of this capability that we have.

Kate, now we’d love for you to elaborate a little bit on why evolution couldn’t give rise to the ability to think rationally. Yeah. Sure. Well, um, when Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, he explicitly created it as an alternative to the design inference, this idea that, um, the complex sophisticated features in living things show evidence of design.

And this points to a designer. Darwin argued that we can get. This appearance of design without a real designer. It’s just natural selection that pushes creatures in this direction that makes them seem adapted to their environments and so forth. Um, but certainly the way atheists view evolution, since they don’t believe in God.

They are committed to this idea that it’s a purely blind process, that it doesn’t have any intention or direction. It doesn’t have any goals. So it’s not trying to create human beings that are intelligent and rational. And so it’s sort of an, An unexpected thing if we’re if we’re merely byproducts of non rational forces.

Why would those non rational forces give rise to thinking beings like ourselves? And sort of an analogy that we could give, you know, C. S. Lewis himself gave a number of analogies. One is, imagine somebody walks by a table and knocks a milk carton off the table onto the floor. The big splash that it makes, Lewis says, Would you expect that splash to somehow contain information and give an account of who knocked the carton over and how it tumbled down?

No, not at all. And in the same way, why would you expect evolution, these blind forces, to lead to some kind of logical, rational, thinking creature? So what do evolutionists have to say about that? Um, how do they say our minds, uh, could have evolved? Yeah, so they would say, well, of course evolution, though it is blind, it’s not entirely random in the sense that Natural selection is a part of that process, and natural selection can kind of push, um, these natural processes in a certain direction to favor certain outcomes.

So they might compare it to, say, like, rolling a die. You know, like a pair of dice, but one single die. Um, a normal die would be, um, six sided, and any one of the faces. So, say, the, getting a three. face up would be a one in six chance, right? Because there’s six sides, one in six chance. But a weighted die, um, say it was weighted in such a manner that it wasn’t guaranteeing the outcome, but it preferred the number three, right?

And say 50 percent of the time it was a three, and all the other numbers, Well, that would be a weighted outcome, and that’s the kind of way that evolutionists envision natural selection, that it, that it can favor certain creatures. And so when it comes to our rational thinking, they might say, you know, our human ancestors in this evolutionary story say there was a group of them, but just by chance, some of the creatures in the population thought less rationally, and their minds didn’t work very well, and others were quite intelligent, and they thought properly.

What is natural selection going to favor? The creatures that don’t think well, they’re less likely to survive. They’re less likely to find a mate to reproduce and pass on their DNA. And so you can sort of see how it would naturally work out that the creatures who are smarter Pass on their DNA and over time, you know, natural selection can keep working on this until creatures become smarter and smarter.

Does that scenario make sense? Um, I think there’s a sort of like logical rationality to it, but I do think there are problems there. So the major problem is that Again, without having a goal in mind, natural selection isn’t trying to achieve right thinking creatures. All it can do is favor those creatures whose bodies behave in the right ways to allow them to survive and to pass on their DNA.

But the key problem, then, is that you don’t need to think rationally for your body to behave naturally. in the right way. Natural selection isn’t aimed at right thinking, it’s only aimed at survival. And so there’s an important differentiation there that even many evolutionists would acknowledge. But wouldn’t organisms be more likely to die if they don’t think clearly?

Yeah, that’s sort of the logic of the evolutionary point of view here, but not necessarily. Because I can give you a couple of scenarios where they wouldn’t. Um, the first one would be Say there are some creatures, like I mentioned, a population where some think less clearly than others, if those creatures have completely wrong thinking, but nevertheless their bodies allow them to survive, then they can survive just as well as the creatures who don’t think rationally.

So think of, say, like a mouse who’s trying to avoid being eaten by a snake. But say he thinks that snakes are no danger to him. He thinks that they’re friends, right? And, and yet he thinks the best way to become friends with a snake is to run away from it. Now, he’s got wrong beliefs, um, and yet those wrong beliefs lead him, lead his body to you.

Flee from the snake to survive just as likely to pass on his DNA as a mouse that understands the threat that a snake is and so forth. And so you can come up with these scenarios if it’s just random processes that give rise to these beliefs and thinking, the working of the mind in the first place.

There’s no reason natural selection is going to favor right thinking creatures, but the problem is even worse than that because There are plenty of organisms that don’t have rational thinking at all and they are also able to proliferate in the world I’m thinking here of plants. They don’t have minds at all.

They just react to stimuli and that They survive and, and propagate just fine, or bacteria as well, and many other organisms that you could point to. So, evolution could favor certain creatures, get them to pass on their DNA, get them to behave in the right ways without rational thinking. And so the problem for this evolutionary account is, you know, sure, once we have a lot of rational thinking already in place, like once human beings exist, can natural selection maybe help to favor, uh, better thinking among human beings?

In theory, yes. But what about much earlier? In the evolutionary story, before there were any rational thinking creatures to begin with, would they ever be produced by evolution? And that’s what we have no reason to believe is true. All right. You’ve outlined some key points to the evolutionary perspective, but what about the biblical perspective?

How would our ability to think and reason, um, make more sense if we were created and not evolved? Right. Yeah. Yeah, so this isn’t just a critique of an atheistic account of human minds, but the biblical perspective does give us more reason to trust our own minds and it’s a better explanation for why we can think rationally.

Because I mentioned earlier, the Bible says that in Genesis, God made human beings in his image, meaning that he wanted us to be like him. And God, of course, is a rational mind. He is all knowing. That’s Orthodox Christianity. And he’s existed from all eternity. And so from a Christian perspective, minds aren’t built by a bottom up process, non rational processes giving rise to rational ones.

But rationality has existed from eternity, and God simply created us because he wanted creatures to be able to have dominion over the world, as Genesis also teaches us, that he wanted us to, um, subdue the earth, um, just like when he made Adam and Eve, he put them in a garden, and so he showed Adam that you, you can cultivate this world, there’s no disease or death or flaws in the world, there’s But Adam can still, um, make use of the natural resources and eventually produce things like smartphones and these things that we have today.

Are there any other problems for the evolutionary account for reason? Yes, I would say. Uh, another difficulty for those who don’t believe in God, who think that our minds just evolved is our composition, that the sort of creatures that they think we are, we’re merely made of matter. Just atoms and molecules doing what they do according to the laws of physics.

But for reasoning to take place, it would seem that we need to be more than creatures made of matter alone. Brains, it turns out, are actually not capable of doing thinking all by themselves. Uh, whereas Christianity teaches that we are body and soul. Jesus talked about how we shouldn’t fear those who can kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.

And so, uh, the soul survives the death of the body according to the Bible. And one day those who know Christ will get resurrected bodies. So, uh, we’re not meant to be souls disembodied, but, uh, we’ll one day be reunited and have. bodies and souls for eternity. So that’s, um, inherently what a human being is, a body and a soul.

And it would seem that there is clearly just, you know, not just arguing from scripture, but outside the Bible, we can see lots of evidence that we are more than mere, matter. Um, take the fact that we are conscious, for instance. Um, we have this awareness of our surroundings and of ourselves, but it turns out that’s very difficult to explain from an atheistic perspective.

Atheists are absolutely puzzled about how do you get consciousness to arise from matter alone in the evolutionary process? Would, you know, just the increasing sophistication complexity of the matter in our brains. Make consciousness emerge that doesn’t seem to be the case and it’s led people like Daniel Dennett.

Who’s an atheist philosopher? He’s he says that the human mind is like a bag of tricks that’s been cobbled together over eons By the foresightless process of evolution, but he also says that consciousness is an illusion He has such a hard time explaining how matter could give rise to consciousness that he doesn’t believe it exists But when you think about what an illusion is You An illusion is when our consciousness is mistaken, when our consciousness is appeared to falsely or something along those lines.

And so, how can consciousness itself be an illusion if to have an illusion you need to be conscious, right? And so other philosophers have criticized Dennett for these very things, but it seems that his atheistic outlook leads him to this absurd conclusion to deny that we are conscious creatures. I want to go back just a minute to the idea of consciousness.

Can you actually define it? Sure. Um, some philosophers have defined it as what we are aware of when we introspect and that might be a mouthful, but we can think about it in practical terms. It’s, it’s our awareness of our surroundings and it would include for us self awareness, our awareness of ourselves.

So if you imagine a person who, say, has been in a coma, and then they begin to wake up in the hospital room. Imagine that they, all of a sudden, um, have thoughts occurring in their minds. They realize, oh, I think I might be waking up. I’ve been asleep. And they can smell the flowers that are nearby. They hear voices talking in the distance.

They feel a throbbing, maybe, in their head from a headache and so on. They are regaining consciousness. Now, to some extent, it could be true that even while we’re asleep and dreaming, we have consciousness in a limited way, um, but, but to be conscious is to be, um, to, to have this awareness of not just sensations like, um, our physical senses, touch and smell and taste and so on, but also it would include Uh, the seat of our thoughts, our beliefs, our desires, our hopes, and our fears.

And so it seems, again, that consciousness is the sort of thing that atheists can’t account for because all those features of our minds, of our consciousness, are not reducible to physical states of affairs. You can compare things that are true of our conscious states. and realize that physical states never have those particular qualities.

Can you give us a few examples? Sure. One thing would be our conscious states. occur to us privately. Uh, we say that they, that we have privileged access to these things. So when you have a pain, the feeling of a pain, the, the physical event would be maybe you’re stuck by a pin, right? And that can be observed by an outside observer.

But the pain that you feel is internal to you. Only you alone feel your pain. And no matter how much a scientist probes your brain, your brain is a physical object. It can be understood by a third party observer, maybe better than you understand what’s going on in your brain. But your brain states are not the same as these conscious states.

The conscious state of feeling that pain, or having the thought, or seeing the color green, or hearing a sound, and so forth. Uh, philosophers call that qualia. Uh? And so one problem is that it’s, it’s private, it’s personal to you, that doesn’t seem to be true of physical things. Another thing is that there’s actually a felt sense of it.

There’s a, a quality that philosophers call a what it is like feel. And there’s a famous essay by an atheist philosopher. Who titled the essay, what it is like to be a bat, meaning the mammal, the creature with wings that lives in caves, right? What it’s like to be a bat. And he argued that all this work we’ve done in trying to explain how consciousness might emerge, it’s really made no progress in that area.

And he says, even if evolution could explain our physical bodies and physical brains, it does not understand. It just, it does not explain. What it is like to be me, how consciousness could arise, and we can’t really know what it’s like to be a bat without actually becoming the bat. No, no matter how much a scientist learns about that bat, he’s still gonna lack that knowledge, that firsthand personal experiential knowledge of what it’s like.

You just mentioned bats are only humans. conscious or do other creatures have consciousness? Yeah. I think from our observations, there are certainly many animals that do seem to have this awareness. Um, unlike plants, they, they have minds and so forth. And, uh, they may not be, you know, as rational and as logical.

They don’t have all of the capabilities that human beings have, but yes, I would, I would say that some creatures are conscious. Uh, and the Bible would also say that animals have souls. In fact, the term soul is applied to not just humans, but animals in the Bible, as well as the term spirit in a few instances.

And so there again, I’m I’m not suggesting that animals have the same kind of souls that human beings have, you know, suggesting that they, um, people often assume that would mean that they could go to heaven someday or something like that. And that’s not clear just from the terminology that animals have a soul.

But I think when the Bible is using that term, it’s, it’s saying that they’re the type of conscious creature. that requires something more than mere physical brains for them to operate as they do. They’re nephesh creatures according to scripture, which means that they’re soulish creatures very much like humans, but plants are never given that description in the Bible.

All right. So you’ve used a couple of terms like soul and, and, and mind, um, Are you using the mind as something distinct or is it really synonymous with our soul? And, and is that consciousness the same as our soul? Yeah, there are a variety of terms here that might be used sometimes interchangeably. And, um, yeah, we could differentiate between them perhaps.

And it’s not always entirely. clear to me how that should be done. For our purposes here, I’m just trying to make a case that we are more than matter alone. And so there is some immaterial aspect of ourselves that I tend to call the soul. Scripture uses terms like soul and spirit, and these may not be exactly interchangeable, but this is sort of an in house debate among Christians about whether they are Like distinct separate ontological parts of our immaterial self or whether they’re just different aspects of our immaterial self.

But, um, at least for our purposes, I’m sort of using mind and soul interchangeably, and I would say a consciousness is, um, a capacity of our souls. So from an evolutionary perspective. Is it plausible that our consciousness could emerge over time and become more complex? Yeah. Well, you know, the funny thing is that, um, atheists often assume this is the case without giving arguments to help demonstrate that.

And the more that philosophers look at this, the more they just, um, are flummoxed by it. And it’s been called the hard problem of consciousness because it’s really hard for atheists to explain it. It’s not so hard for those who believe that God created us with a soul. Uh, but an example is that same philosopher I mentioned earlier who wrote the essay, What It’s Like to Be a Bat.

He later wrote a book called Mind and Cosmos, where he tried to analyze how can these different abilities of our minds have arisen if an atheistic evolutionary account of the world is true. And he ultimately said evolution doesn’t explain this at all. He is still an atheist, but he’s casting about for some way to have minds be something that’s more fundamental in nature, so that you don’t, you know, need to build them from non rational processes from the bottom up.

And so he’s, he’s sort of proposing radical new views within an atheistic perspective because he just doesn’t want to believe in God. And yet he has no explanation ultimately for how consciousness could arise. And I think the difficulty there is that consciousness, as I’ve mentioned, it just seems to be fundamentally non physical in nature.

It’s a completely different category. From rearranging molecules, no matter how complex you make a brain, that’s not going to turn it into a conscious thinking being. And same thing with computers. We have these science fiction movies like iRobot or the Terminator films, which the whole premise is one day, once computers are complex enough, they’ll eventually become aware and have consciousness, right?

And then go and try to eliminate humanity. But I see no reason to fear. Uh, that idea, because to get consciousness from matter alone is like getting something from nothing. Those who try to argue for this idea, they’ll often talk about consciousness being an emergent property, and they compare it to, say, the, the fluidness of liquids, like water.

And they say, From just looking at hydrogen and oxygen and H2O molecules, you wouldn’t necessarily realize that water would feel wet, but actually, in principle, that isn’t so hard to understand. You can sort of tell that the way molecules slip past one another, that’s what makes water feel wet. And so it does arise from a certain arrangement of the molecules.

But consciousness, has so many features that just defy any type of material explanation. And so, no, I don’t think that it could arise from increasingly complex arrangements of matter alone. You were talking about how consciousness is more than just being physical. Is there evidence that people have souls?

Oh, yes. Well, I would say, uh, It’s not only our thinking that’s not physical, but our conscious experience also has to be grounded in what philosophers call an immaterial substance, and by that they mean a soul. And there are further arguments that would support the existence of the soul. Again, if you’re a Bible believing Christian, then Jesus is the authority, the Bible is the authority, and they tell us that humans have souls.

People actually from cultures Around the world throughout history that’s been the the default view that people have tended to believe that we are bodies and souls it’s only in recent years where Naturalistic worldview has become more dominant in the Western world that people are now skeptical of this idea But the reason people have believed that is because it’s kind of a natural conclusion from our awareness that We are not reducible to our, our bodies.

You know, we have a will, for example, and we can differentiate between things that we, we will to do, like say raise my arm intentionally, versus if there were a scientist with maybe an electrical probe who stimulates my arm and forces it to rise, I recognize that that wasn’t me. That was the scientist who did that.

But why should we differentiate between those two things if all we are is our physical bodies? According to a naturalistic outlook, even when I will to raise my arm, that’s really just the right position. atoms happening in my brain that causes nerve impulses and muscles contracting and so forth, it’s really not fundamentally different from other forces acting from outside to force my arm to move.

But we know that our reflexes and things like eyes blinking, we can do it intentionally, or it can just be a reflex. And, um, it’s us causing those intentional movements. One other argument would be the very fact that I remain myself over time as parts of my body get replaced. Uh, I understand scientists tell us something like every seven years all the atoms in our bodies, um, get replaced by new ones.

So as physical objects change over time, especially if they’re replaced entirely, they would technically not be the same object that they were before. So how do I still remain me? over the years. And think about when I was five years old, my body looks radically different than it does now, right? Why am I still me today?

The best explanation seems to be that I’m not merely my physical body, but there’s an immaterial part of me that grounds my identity over time. So why did God create us as rational creatures? That’s a great question and, um, maybe a harder one to answer because the Bible doesn’t directly answer that.

Although I, I think the scripture does give us, um, some ways to think about it. So, first I would say, Genesis tells us that God made human beings in his image. And so that means that we’re like God. In certain respects, including I believe it refers to our rational capacities that God has those. And that’s part of what it means to be made in his image.

Uh, but it also seems that this image bearing quality that we have is meant for us to be God’s representatives in the world. And so to carry out this function of pointing other people to God and suggesting that they ought to get to know him, we need to be rational creatures for that as well. You have the dominion mandate that God gave Adam and Eve.

He told them to subdue the earth and to fill it up. And so in order to take care of the world and to understand the world and to cultivate it and to create technology and things out of its raw materials, we need to be rational creatures as well. And then, I guess, finally, The most important reason I would say that God made us as rational thinking beings is to know God himself.

Philosophers talk about God as the greatest conceivable being, and so when we think about spending eternity with God, which he made possible, even though we’re sinners, if we put our trust in Christ who died for our sins and rose from the dead, then we can continue to have fellowship with God in eternity.

And I think some people are tempted to believe that Heaven, eternity will be boring. Whereas I see it as the best gift that God could give us is Himself. And because He’s infinite, He’s inexhaustible, the more that we get to know Him, there will always be more to know. And so I don’t expect eternity to be boring at all.

I think we’ll just have new, increasing glories. For all eternity and I’m very much looking forward to that If you found this time with ketan as thought provoking as I have then you’re in good company Let me share some feedback that we’ve received what a fantastic video This has my brain reconfiguring the way it considers reality and another person shares This has just restored my lost christian faith in god and the resurrection brilliant If you want to be a part of supporting change like this, simply donate in the description below.

Thanks so much, Keaton, for your time today. It was my pleasure.