• In I Am a Camera I said the human mind's consciousness feeds the immortal soul with the "qualia" of our subjective experiences, which the soul (acting as a metaphysical "camera") records and carries into the afterlife.
• In Free Will and Divine Coherence I said "coherence within the universe of reason" describes God's true inner nature, which is why we find ourselves living in a rational, comprehensible universe of God's own creation. Then, alluding to the Incompleteness Theorem of the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, I went on to give reason to believe that we have free will in this rational, comprehensible world specifically because God had to choose between that option and having us be deterministic machines, mere robots with good skin.
Had we been deterministic robots, we would have either been somewhat less smart than we are, or else truly stupid. If the former, we would have lacked the ability to see the truth of (among other things) the "Gödelian sentence," the telltale proposition by means of which Kurt Gödel was able to distinguish between human intelligence and that of all producible formal systems of logic, as embodied by even the smartest machines.
If the latter, we would have had mental capabilities less than that of a simplistic formal system that can do no more than derive the basic laws of arithmetic.
Given that our Gödel-aware brains are not flummoxed by the "Gödelian sentence" G — "G [this proposition itself] is not provable within this formal system of logic" is a true statement, and we know it's true, yet the formal system itself is ineluctably blind to its truth — we had to be other than deterministic androids. Hence, we had to have free will!
• In To Reason Is Divine I said more about the idea that rational coherence constitutes God's inner nature, which is why "creative logos" characterizes God's activity in founding and sustaining our world, according to the Christian Bible. Pope Benedict XVI has made a point of emphasizing this aspect of Christian theology, as over against views which hold that God is so "other" than us that his will is not constrained by rationality, or anything else
Though the pope has implied that just such an anti-rational view of God's nature besets the religion of Islam, at least according some of its interpreters, he has also pointed out similar strains of anti-rationalism in Western Christian thought over the last few centuries. He believes we in the West need to get back to our patrimony of truth-seeking reason if our culture is to be able to "give an account of its political commitments and their moral foundations, to itself, or to those who would replace the free societies of the West with a very different pattern of human community, based on a very different idea of God — and, consequently, of the just society."
To which I can only add, "Hear, hear!"
• Finally, in Esse Est Percipi I championed a metaphysics, based in part on that of the early-18th-century philosopher and Church of Ireland bishop George Berkeley, which holds that "to exist is to be observed" — seen or perceived by an agent with a conscious mind.
I alluded to a real-world test that confirms a thought experiment dreamed up by quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler: which of two equiprobable paths a photon follows to this planet from a galaxy millions of light years distant is not determined until we train our attention on one path or the other!
While it is not universally agreed that the photon's arrival has to be observed by a conscious agent, as opposed to merely recorded by a non-sentient mechanism, there are physicists who believe the former. If they are right — and I like to think they are — then observational consciousness somehow produces material actuality.
Hopping back to the thought of Berkeley, I then hypothesized that the material reality of the universe is sustained in its existence by God's observational consciousness.
God, soul, afterlife, free will — all are longstanding topics of theological and philosophical inquiry. So, too, are questions of human consciousness — what it is, how it arises — and of mind in general — is it real, is it distinct from the physical, material world? In WAM, the World According to Me:
- God
- the soul
- the afterlife
- human free will
- human consciousness, and
- the actuality of mind, as distinct from matter
The four posts just mentioned show how these questions interlock together, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I could also have introduced into the puzzle picture the question of Darwinian evolution, which I also believe in. In fact, I believe that particular puzzle piece latches directly to the piece concerning human free will. If our lives are not determined by an ineluctable destiny, then neither is the life of the world. Our planet is free to evolve as it will.
Another puzzle piece would seem to be that which represents the lawfulness of the universe — i.e., the pervasiveness and reliability of the laws of nature which science discovers. Without that lawfulness, graceful evolution would have been impossible. The laws of nature themselves are evidence of a Creator who is rational to his core.
Thus, the tenets of WAM, the World According to Me.
My purpose in going to such lengths to sum up WAM as it stands at present is partly to delve into the subject of personal bias.
I clearly have a bias in favor of the sort of worldview WAM represents. Perhaps my sort of worldview is best characterized by what it isn't. It isn't religious fundamentalism, and it isn't anti-religious atheism. I'm biased against both of those.
By religious fundamentalism I mean the sort of "conservative" religious outlook that upholds creationism or "intelligent design," the literal inerrancy of the Bible, and a radically personal or individual style of faith that de-emphasizes collective reason and ecclesiastical teaching authority. I'm afraid I have to be upfront about this: I think many "evangelical" Christians are simply wrong in some of their foundational beliefs.
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| Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion |
Inflected into the realm of questions of consciousness and the separateness of mind and body, this materialist/physicalist worldview is argued for by Daniel Dennett, the noted philosopher of mind. In the area of more abstract philosophy, it is represented by the school of thought known as positivism.
I do not mean to imply that all these anti-religious thinkers and views are in total sync. There are positions which metaphysically assert that everything that exists has a physical property, for example, which others, such as that of philosopher A.J. Ayer, claim that metaphysics per se is bunk.
Still, all seem to have in common that there is, and can be, no God, no soul, no afterlife. If there is a mind apart from matter, it in some way arises out of matter. If consciousness is not an illusion, it is merely a side effect of the workings of our physical brains.
My WAM mindset asserts exactly the opposite on all these questions. That I am prone to such a worldview reflects, I am sure, the deep-seated biases of my particular style of temperament.
Oh, WAM is (I fully believe) an outlook that is eminently reasonable to support — now that I have managed to develop a rational way of accounting for and upholding its tenets. Not that my arguments to date are conclusive, or even complete. I imagine they establish at best a sort of sketchy, prima facie case for the World According to Me. Still, I humbly suggest that WAM — God, souls, consciousness, and all — is plausible because
- it explains the facts at hand
- it does so simply and elegantly
- it does so without disenfranchising vast areas of human experience
2. If true, that explanation is about as simple and elegant as any could be. There is a supernatural mind — God's — behind it all. God's conscious activity creates and sustains all material existence. The material world recapitulates the mind of God in the conscious minds of creatures who evolve in it freely, albeit according to the firm laws of nature, and who themselves have free will.
3. WAM accordingly carefully avoids disenfranchising empirical science, human reason, or longstanding religious beliefs. WAM is compatible with all three.
What WAM is not compatible with is, as I say, religious fundamentalism in it various guises and atheistic materialism in its various guises. Just as I am aware that WAM, despite the rational arguments I make for it, originates in the biases of my own particular style of temperament, I assume that the fundamentalists and the materialists have their own temperament styles whose biases lead their possessors toward worldviews that differ radically from each other, and from mine.
What I would like to be able to do — but see no way to accomplish at present — is to explain why those three basic styles of temperament exist and accordingly divide us as badly as they do.
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