For many decades, creationism has been associated with opposition to the theory and fact of evolution. It has undergone many mutations, and the latest species to emerge is the Intelligent Design gambit (or it’s often called, “creationism in a cheap tuxedo”). Some of the central canards of ID are:
- The materialist theory of evolution is not enough to account for the forms of life on earth. How can “mere”, unthinking matter organise itself to produce [the diversity of life/something about information/something about irreducible complexity]?
- The only way to explain the missing step is to invoke the input from an Intelligent Designer.
- As a result, materialist biology is bankrupt and is due to be overturned any time now.
- Evolution is atheistic dogma and tries to suppress debate by censoring us brave critics.
These are of course complete rubbish and have been refuted trillions of times throughout the scientific, skeptical and atheist blogospheres. However, I have a prophecy to make. With legal setbacks (from the 2005 Dover trial and beyond), at some point the precedents will accumulate and creationists will look on to a new strategy beyond ID to advance their beliefs. I think creationist neuro-”science” and creationist claims about the brain and mind are the next major frontier after Intelligent Design. This idea’s not original, and indeed the Discovery Institute (the vehicle behind ID) has Michael Egnor whose specialty is making creationist claims about a mind. What I want to note is how easily the above canards of Intelligent Design are transformed into canards about the mind and brain:
- The materialist theory of mind is not enough to account for the human mind. How can “mere”, unthinking neurons organise themselves to produce [consciousness/subjective experience/free will]?
- The only way to explain the missing step is to invoke some nonmaterial consciousness (ie. a soul), created by an Intelligent Designer.
- As a result, materialist mind science is bankrupt and is due to be overturned any time now.
- Materialist brain science or philosophy of mind is atheistic dogma and tries to suppress debate by censoring us brave critics.
I think more and more creationists will follow Michael Egnor’s footsteps and go for these talking points more and more over the “pure” anti-evolution points listed above. One of the reasons is that arguing about minds, they have a large number of advantages over arguing about evolution.
- Compared to consciousness, evolution is relatively easy to understand. After only a bit of reading, you can visualise and get an intuitive grasp for most of the processes. With consciousness, the mind-body problem (or how it is that our brains, essentially made of trillions of non-conscious moronic robots, can have conscious experience) is something at the cutting edge of genuine debate in many academic fields.
- When you mention topics like subjective experience, feelings of (say) pain or love or the colour blue, our feeling of free will and that we’re in control of our actions, our introspection, memory and so forth — here, unfortunately even many scientifically minded people start to falter and speak of something “beyond” the “mere” atoms of our brain.
- Finally, as Dennett says, this is a murky field because everybody thinks they’re an expert on consciousness just because they’re conscious. This of course doesn’t follow — everyone digests food but that doesn’t make them an expert in the physiology of digestion. So it is the nature of theories of mind (and that they are constructed with the same organ that’s the object of study) that makes this an easy field for creationists to sow confusion.
We need to start getting prepared for this, to familiarise ourselves with the fallacies and misrepresentations of creationist and anti-materialist claims about the mind. At the moment, a very good percentage of those in the non-religious blogosphere (and many in the religious blogosphere too!) are equipped with dealing with anti-evolution fallacies. The same should happen for the brain.
I’m currently doing a grad diploma in the mind-body problem, philosophy of mind etc, so this is of considerable interest to me. This year, I hope to dedicate a lot more time to the project of discussing these as pre-emptions of future creationist claims. It’s a very heady topic — I’ll do my best to make as many crude analogies and fart jokes as I can for smoother reading. In the meantime, the main resource I can recommend for now is almost anything Dan Dennett including online papers and the book Consciousness Explained. As an example of an anti-materialist argument that will surely be made by more creationists, I suggest the Chinese Room Thought-Experiment, which I’ll discuss later, along with others.
Are there any particularly good resources on mind that you can recommend? Any particularly ridiculous creationist statements about mind? Or even interesting ones made by “regular” people? Please share them in the comments.
12 comments ↓
Arguments from incredulity, appeal to ignorance and ignoring all the information we have that tell us that “mere” matter can form life and “mere” neurons can explain consciousness.
Basic creationist nonsense. See no evidence, here no evidence and shout baseless crap ad nauseum.
The real problem here is not consciousness but free will.
On the topic of free will they have many supporters including many from the scientific and atheistic communities.
And everyone is a real expert on free will. And not only that, there are dozens of different types, from dualism to libertarian free will with all sorts of theories to support them, none of which make any logical sense and some even invoke quantum mechanics which the ID crowd would love as there are so few people that have a clue what they’re talking about when it comes to QM.
I don’t know if you got it from the tone of the last comment but there is no such thing as libertarian free will. The brain is a mere deterministic, or at best probabilistic, machine.
Lone Wolf — right, but the main the problem is that the same fallacies (when talking about consciousness) are also very common amongst non-creationists including scientists and atheists.
Keddaw — yep, some of the people who relate QM to free will in the scientific/rationalist community as well, are John Searle, (I think) Roger Penrose, David Deutch (although at least his version’s not too terrible) and the list goes on. And I definitely got that from your comment, I’m a 150% compatibilist
But more on that in another post…
I think your right that this will become the new battle ground for the creationists.
The following will be included in the battle ground: Chalmers Zombies, the ineffibility of qualia, Lucas’ argument (based of Godels incompleteness theorem), the concept of the soul and strong AI.
I think its the last of these that will prove to be most contentious in the coming century. As our understanding of the nervous system (and other parts of the body involved in the mind) gets better and our computers faster we will get ever more advanced AI. The creationist crowd will be keen on denying AI any form of rights as sentient beings but at some point AI will become sufficiently advanced that they will really deserve the same rights as humans.
This all depends of sufficient advances in computer power of course but its certainly consistent with current rates of progress (or even significantly lower rates in fact).
[...] the science-can-never-explain-consciousness-without-a-non-material-”essence” argument! The last bastion of creationism… Well I’m currently doing a grad diploma on that very topic, so more on the details of [...]
Could someone please explain ANY mechanism by which dead matter/energy can give rise a conscious being? It seems to me that if consciousness did not exist before the big bang, then it can’t exist now. More specifically, the question is “At what point does the re-arranging of matter and energy cause something to become self-aware?”
@Guywilliams100 Three words: abiogenesis and evolution.
Abiogenesis produces very simple organisms, though evolution (changes within populations over multiple generations with natural selection acting on those changes) they become more complex, multicellular and eventually develop a brain then through evolution the brain evolves become more complex, more powerful and consciousness develops.
Guy, not sure what you mean any mechanism since we don’t have a good theory of how consciousness comes about. But I find it interesting that you are incredulous that it could come about from matter/energy that’s “dead”, are you suggesting that consciousness can only be made out of something that’s fundamentally “alive”? If so, what would that look like and how does being alive help?
As for thinking it could not have come to exist after the big bang it seems like the argument from personal incredulity.
Lone Wolf, that gives the mechanisms by which we have the best reason to believe consciousness came about — but I believe the question focussed more on the how question, for which at the moment we don’t have a full answer. Of course consciousness had to come about through biological means (unless you think it’s supernatural) but at this stage we don’t know the exact details of how consciousness is built up, whether it was a by-product or selected for, or came about from some other factors and so on.
To Lone Wolf.
Thanks for the response. However, “abiogenesis” is simply a word. It is not a description of the mechanism by which a population of zero living organisms turns into a population of one or more living organism. After the “big bang” everything was superheated and dead. Without intelligent design, scientists have yet to explain how life itself arose.
It seems to me that consciousness coming from non-counsciousness doesn’t follow. If I reach into a bag with only coins in it, I shouldn’t expect to pull a frog out of it… because frogs are “qualitatively” different than coins. Likewise, if the only things that existed after the big bang were matter and energy, then I shouldn’t expect conscious life to follow from that. The universe cannot give what it didn’t have in the first place.
Unless someone can explain the mechanism by which life comes from non-life , intelligent design is the only plausible answer.
I don’t think this answers any of it, let me rephrase to be more explicit:
Do you have an explanation of consciousness that actually explains *how* it comes about in the way that you demand a theory to explain?
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