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Layer 1 · the world is more than matter
Evidence 03

Consciousness resists naturalist reduction

The claim

The hard problem of consciousness — why there is something it is like to be you — has no traction in a purely physical ontology, despite a century of trying.

Eliminative materialism asks you to deny that you are conscious. Property dualism quietly admits the supernatural under another name. The cleanest hypothesis is that mind is fundamental, not derivative — and that we are made in the image of a Mind.

Evidential weight
David Bentley Hart
classical theist
b. 1965

Naturalism cannot explain the simplest fact about you.

There is no plausible mechanism by which arrangements of unconscious particles produce a perspective. Adding more particles, or arranging them more cleverly, does not bridge the gap. The gap is categorical.

Either consciousness is an illusion (in which case the illusion of consciousness is itself conscious — a contradiction), or matter has been mis-described as inert (panpsychism, which is theism's poor relation), or mind is prior.

The classical tradition has always said the third. We are now circling back to it from the other direction.

Citations The Experience of God (2013), ch. 4
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam