Revisiting the Philosophical Principles of Intelligence, Consciousness, and Morality

The nature of the God of Christianity

"Where does Jesus get His Authority? Where do His Followers get Theirs?" was the title of my four-part blog project responding to a philosophy textbook that critiqued the idea that we should look to God for morality.

One objection was it is morally undesirable to do good things to earn rewards. I have a story to go with that. I once liked a girl who had younger siblings. I started to be conscience of being nice to them to look attractive. I ended up feeling bad, because when I would try to help them I would have her in mind. So, I reasoned with myself (oh thank God for the power of reason). I had been just as nice to them before. My feelings had overridden my mind. 

(Not only is the power of a crush -- infatuation -- unbelievably swaying for a teenager,  my feelings and mind often didn't, and still don't, match up with each other anyway. I think it had something to do with starting to learn about all this as a teenager, being thrown into a huge world where your foundational beliefs hang in the balance, instead of having a brain with the type of mind already educated, which would comfortably adapt into puberty.) 

Anyway, I have mentioned rewards on this blog, one example being the post on the Coronavirus. I am conscience of them. But I stopped and asked myself, would I do good things even if I didn't get rewards? The answer was an easy yes. When I have mentioned heaven in this blog as something appealing to believe in Jesus, it is described as a perfect place of relationships that never ends. And that's what everyone gets if they just believe in Jesus. 

I don't even know much about rewards at all! I listened to a sermon from Turning Point given by Dr. David Jeremiah, where he explained the concept of rewards are constant throughout the New Testament. That means they are not something which have to be dismissed entirely in a Christian's mind (although he didn't disagree that we should be willing to do things that are good just because they are). One reward people get are a crown (or crowns, I'm not sure), and they end up casting them at the feet of Jesus. I'm not looking forward to rewards nearly as much as a reason to live for Jesus, because I hardly know anything about them! 

(Also, Christians, if they are mature, choose to do good deeds because they love the God who saved them and want to bless Him.  Jesus said in John 14:14, "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." This love spills over into valuing others for themselves.)

I also argued God's true correlation to the world's morality is ultimately beyond human understanding. A self-sustained Being is going to appeal circular to us by definition. He exists, because He is there to hold Himself in existence. We have to stick to this as a belief and will be unable to really get more detailed. (At least I think that's true: I know from reading that Christian apologists and philosophers can learn things that I never would have imagined. I know enough to see it is obvious that God ultimately is beyond human comprehension, though.) But we don't get to God by circular reasoning. 

Moreover, a Spirit cannot be scientifically expressed, like ethical principles. God, being immaterial, is everywhere, and nowhere. He doesn't take up space, He can't be mapped. Morality is not like a rock on top of a Planet. It isn't even directly shown to exist. This is unlike truth, which reasonably is grounded in God's eternal mind and parallel with Him. How could we expect to know how God didn't decide what is right and wrong, but is responsible for it? 

Expanding on that, I once had the disturbing thought that maybe, good and evil just can't exist, even with God. It's not scientifically proven. It's not self-verifying. It isn't necessary for science either. Science works, because the laws of logic are real and math is obviously real as well. 

When people think about the world mathematically, it can feel like, when they are counting things, they look like numbers. But with morality, we can't directly prove it exists(1). How do we know it's not just completely feelings based? How could it be anything other than a useful fiction? I would think of God's commands, if He just made them up, as "instrumental" should and should nots. He is the highest power and ultimate creator, but (as critics charge divine command theory), morals are arbitrary and not intrinsic. Either that, or they are higher than God. Both philosophers and scientists are human, and I have read before that concluding God can seem like an unsatisfying answer. Maybe we shouldn't jump to Him as the only source of morality.

But we can reason and believe in what we can know(2). If I said, perhaps decided to believe, "Right and wrong just are, and there is no further information needed," this could be paralleled by "People believing in right and wrong is just the way it is, but they were made to feel that way and it isn't really true." The first statement stems from the human moral sense, but the next renders the thought very unsatisfying. The passion justifies wanting to prove morality. (This is, after all, one of the reasons I wanted to believe in Christianity over atheism.) After all, one of the appeals of divine command theory, which I agreed with alongside other Christian and non-Christian students in a class discussion, is it makes knowing right and wrong easy! Ethical commands are very tangible in the text of God's word. We must go to Jesus.

Thus, human talk of moral fabric doesn't run deeper (rationally) than certain things are right because God is the morally perfect Being, with goodness intrinsic in His nature. We call a person "good" if they do right. But they don't make goodness, they just fit the definition. God's nature, however, somehow intrinsically defines it without being an arbitrary decision. It's basically, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!" 

What shouldn't be ignored is God made us with emotions to appreciate morals. We see things as injustice and try to right wrongs all the time, and how many of us have questioned the fabric of morality that is so darn important to our lives?  Because my belief in Jesus is based on evidence, which leads up to this God, I can really favor the ability to say things are right and wrong. Logic shows they exist. We can't fully explain morality, and we don't need to know.

Should we conclude God caused our minds?

It could be argued that perhaps, we can't conclude God created our intelligence, because it is outweighed by an otherwise lack of evidence for Him.

First and foremost, that's just debatable. I have argued from scientific evidence for God in physics in this blog, and mentioned biological arguments (I stick to the former). In my post on the possibility of miracles, it had to be included that miracles are by definition a rare event. 

Then, arguing God didn't cause intelligence would be like saying the Devil put evidence for evolution down to deceive us, or the multiverse just made it happen by chance that someone got the best hand in poker first draw 5 times in a row, or there are undiscovered laws of nature that create dinosaur bones which we haven't discovered yet.

God so fits our theistic origins (atheism was practically unheard of back during Bible times), and understanding that only our intelligence can create computers, which are artificially intelligent. (Here one could argue that we know life came from non-life without God, but that is also debatable. I refer you to the last post on the subject that dealt with this.) Intelligence does not come from non-intelligence. Going by what we do know, we can conclude God is the only reasonable cause for our mind. 

Think about it this way: will science ever explain that an Ostrich isn't an Ostrich, or does it have to explain why an Ostrich is? I don't know any specific details, but neuroscientists have studied our brain enough to never see our thoughts. Science will keep making mind-brain correlations, but correlation doesn't mean causation, and it definitely doesn't mean identification. To say that science will one day find an answer is like saying science will, not explain that our fellow person is an actual alien because the body would still be physical, but that other people are figments of our imagination.

If a scientist didn't have the knowledge of what our brain looks like or is like, and somehow got to see a live, working one, she or he wouldn't conclude it was conscious. They'd just think, no matter how in-depth they studied it, that this thing which weighs just two pounds was a very complex thing. Or consider an opposite illustration: watching TV shows which have the struggle between good and evil can provoke some type of thought that results in speaking to the TV, or wishing the good guy wins and the bad guy gets punished, as if they are real people with feelings. Some characters are loved, others hated. But everybody knows they are just animated pixels. 

"We don't know how biology made rationality, but it did." This statement sounds like one a religious believer might make, which would get him laughed out of the presence of the non-religious intellectuals. It is a matter of principle that our mind cannot come from the physical universe. (You can see the first part of this post for more details, besides why the mind-brain connection must be supernatural is also explained in the original post.) Or, consider the absurdity of being the other way around: "We don't know why there is so much evidence for evolution, but because of the argument for God from intelligence, we know He has some plan for why it is that way, and evolution is actually a myth!" The danger is in the ditches. (I'm not agreeing evolution can be proven.)

Or how about, "It just happened." I don't believe anything "just happens." The only existence we don't need a reasonable cause for is the Uncaused. Since reason is what we are restricted to using to understand reality, which we are exercising right now, there always must be a reasonable explanation. If what we can know says something isn't, we don't believe it or consider it an option.

Here I would like to think of what I have come to call "mere bluster." An example is something I heard in tenth grade: matter got so complex it made something that's not physical, and humans are so great we were able to make truth. This defies arguments I have made earlier, the best read being my original post.

As you might have realized, it's just a claim without evidence. If there is no explanation how it is right, why believe it? If both sides cannot explain why they are right and outweigh the other, because there just simply isn't enough information to come to a conclusion, then the objective rational route is agnosticism.

An unavoidable implication that absolutely needs to be addressed is the fact that us being intelligent spirits, as opposed from material bodies, seems to say we aren't here at all. We say someone or something is present with us in response to an external stimuli, usually seeing the subject in front of us. But with the immaterial, you can't see. Moreover, the Bible speaks of God and us being present on Earth. Is that an error?

That is like responding to passages which parallel talk of "the sun rose over the Earth." The Bible is God working through man, and uses everyday language. Is that statement true? Technically, no. But in a way it is completely and significantly true. 

It's like that with our mind. As I cited before, Acts 17:28 says "For in Him we live and move and have our being." We are here because of God's intimate supernatural power with the Earth. We are supernaturally here, we are spiritually here, we are here -- we just aren't physically here.

If an atheist would say this is crazy, because we obviously know as common sense we are here and physically present, two responses are in order. One would point out how the argument is from a matter of principle and can be discovered immediately (even without details of neuroscience), so it parallels the objection. Moreover, who says common sense has to be right? Common sense isn't as credible when it comes to philosophical issues as it is with just living in the world in general.

The other would be to point out how atheism says we are determined by reacting chemicals. So whose fault is it that they said something crazy? It also defies common sense to say we are determined by the natural processes of physics and chemistry. 

In the post that mentioned biological arguments for God, I also argued that. An example was the rampant belief in God or gods throughout history, despite the great suffering in the ancient world (raids, wars, slavery, etc.). Atheists say this is strong evidence against Him, some going so far as to say a good God is a wildly incorrect conclusion. I can't believe I just realized today that this so wonderfully fits alongside a quote from influential atheist Sam Harris.  He said, "Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious." (3) [Humorously, at first glance this looked to me like saying atheism isn't a worldview, it's just viewing the world and drawing the most reasonable conclusion. This is what intellectual Christians try to do.] Later in his book he wrote, "We stand dumbstruck by you -- by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God." (4)

I can't believe Sam Harris would claim to be an intellectual and think that we are determined by the very same processes which determined the vast majority of humans in history to believe in God. He refutes himself. You can't say we are determined by our chemical brain, and yet should rationally use our own free will to come to the true conclusion. 

Strikingly, some people have even gone so far to argue that our mind is an illusion. Really, all that exists is the physical universe -- there is no subjective mind about so many different things subject to the laws of logic, because this couldn't be identified with our brain. The first response I thought of a long time ago was, "Alright, how did this illusion come to be?" Because I knew that illusions really exist!

Now I have come to think about that more deeply. It is with our mind that we define and experience illusions. They do not exist independently of our false understanding. 

At this point, a person who thinks for him-or-her-self might be incessantly nagged, as I am. Where does atheism finally get off? But it is patently obvious that atheism never got on in the first place. 

Notes:

1. Even with an argument like if good and evil aren't real, how come isolated people in third-world countries have a conscience like ours, that doesn't directly prove morality. It goes into the matter of  God creating them that way.

2. One could also take lack of being willing to deny morality and ask, why does it exist? They would then present the logic that it only comes from God (He is the ultimate Creator who made the world with a purpose, He is the absolute judge between human opinions). This would make it easier. The moral argument goes 1. If morals exist, then God exists. 2. Morals exist. 3. Therefore God exists.

3. Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 51. Cited in Randy Alcorn, If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil (Eternal Perspective Ministries: 2009), 11.

4. Harris, Letter, 91. Cited in ibid., 11-12.