There's a good article at Science & Spirit called "
Reasonable Doubt: Why naturalism might not be able to solve the problem of consciousness" by Anthony Matteo. The article gives a great overview of the problems that naturalism has in defining and understanding consciousness and all its attending factors, such as intentionality, free will, moral responsibility, etc. Of more importance is (1) whether reliable belief-forming faculties could ever be produced by evolution and (2) how, exactly, we could know whether they are reliable or not. Theists claim that the only way (or at least the most probable way) that our cognitive faculties could be ultimately reliable would be if God gave them to us. This would provide a way in which our cognitive faculties could be reliable
and with a way of knowing that they were reliable. The author points to C. S. Lewis' early version of this argument:
Lewis went on to assert that, as a rule, no thought can be valid if it can be fully explained as the result of non-rational causes. What Lewis has in mind here is that valid beliefs are the result of logical and inductive inferences based on arguments and evidence. At a phenomenological level, we experience these operations as mental processes that guide us in making intelligible sense of the world around us. In other words, the formation of valid beliefs seems intimately dependent on conscious, mental processes. We assiduously analyze the arguments, weigh the evidence, and on that critical basis come to decisions as to the explanatory worth of individual beliefs and more wide-ranging theories.
The mystery is how, on the purely naturalist or physicalist account to which evolutionary epistemology is committed, such mental causation producing valid inferences could have arisen. If we are committed a priori to an explanatory model in which mental causation is reducible to the physical causality of the brain, it is hard to see how processes such as logical inference and induction can have any true causal power in our intellectual reckonings. In this context, Lewis quoted British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true … and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”
Matteo points out that naturalists have a few responses. One is to say that our cognitive faculties are reliable because their reliability has adaptive value. Another is to simply admit the difficulties and expect a future answer from science. I find both of these problematic. Matteo highlights the difficulties with the first response, and I'd like to expand on the difficulties he sets forth for the second.
I think there's a self-evident problem with expecting science to solve this mystery at some unspecified future date by filling in the gaps in scientific knowledge about consciousness (call it the "future-theory-of-the-gaps"). The problem is this: the naturalist is a
physicalist. That is, she believes that all that ultimately exists in the world are physical entities: quarks, mountains, heat waves, Spaniards, etc. But consciousness is a non-physical entity. Think of your own experience of being conscious, of what is like to actually have a
mind. Your mind has no weight, no mass, no extension, no color, no smell, etc. It shares virtually no properties with other physical entities. How then could the physicalist scientific paradigm ever explain it? It seems the only options for the physicalist are to admit ignorance or to become an
eliminative materialist.
But of course there is always the theistic option. In the Christian view these problems do not exist, or at least they are severely minimized as to be inconsequential. The Christian sees human consciousness as being patterned after the ultimate conscious being, God Himself. Even though our minds have been damaged by sin, our belief-forming faculties are significantly reliable because they were made that way by the One whose belief-forming faculties are perfect and complete.
[HT:
The Prosblogion]
