Consciousness and Faith

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is a book that packs a lot of wisdom into a few short pages. One of the nuggets can be found on pages 108-109, in a section titled "Faith is anchored in what Jesus and the saints see."

This section occurs in the "What Does It Mean To Believe?" part of the pope's book, a discourse on how religious faith, like the faith we customarily place in those experts who inform us about otherwise unsuspected facts in the natural world, depends ultimately on what others see. Though I have never seen an electron, I take on faith that others have done so at least indirectly, as a result of doing experiments or pursuant to the working out of mathematical laws of nature which fall flat if electrons are not real.

Along these same lines, the pope points out that Christ has "seen" the Father, as had Abraham before him. Moses saw, not God's face, but at least "his back" (Exodus 33:23). The saints, both those who have been canonized and those who are hidden, have likewise "seen" God. Our Judeo-Christian faith — not to mention all of its theology — are firnly anchored in that sort of direct "seeing."

But, the pope says, the sort of "seeing" he is talking about, done by the few as the ultimate basis of faith for us in the multitudes, is one that can also be called "experience." For example, the pope says this about the "hidden" saints, those who have never been canonized by the Church, but are nonetheless saints:

There are always hidden saints, too, who receive in their communion with Jesus a ray of his splendor, a concrete and real experience of God. (p. 108)

Moreover,

Without this reference point, without the deep anchoring in such an experience [as that of the saints], [the theologian's] work becomes detached from reality ... it degenerates into an empty intellectual game ... . (p. 109)

In a series of recent posts, I have taken up the question of why our minds are conscious: why they have, as they do, the capacity for subjective experience. In particular, in I Am a Camera I said the human mind's consciousness exists to feed the immortal soul with the "qualia" of our subjective experiences. The soul (acting as a metaphysical "camera") records and carries those experiences of a lifetime into the afterlife, so that we can remain who we always were after we die.

Qualia: they are what philosophers of mind call, to take one example, the sensation or feeling of "redness" which we experience when we see a red tricycle. That particular "quale" (the singular of "qualia") is accordingly the answer to the question, what is it "like" to see something red?

Some philosophers of mind hold that consciousness and the qualia it houses are immaterial; they go beyond anything physical that is found in the brain or the body. If so, I argued, maybe we are conscious as an adjunct to the eternal life of an equally immaterial soul.


But the pope's book offers an even simpler religious explanation for consciousness: its presence in the human makeup is what enabled the patriarchs, the saints, and Jesus himself to "see" God, and thus to provide the rest of us with the anchor point for our faith!