Acts 17:24-25 · NKJV
Does Consciousness Disprove Materialism?
0:59 Short
What does Acts 17:24-25 say?
Straight answer to the title, ten seconds in: no. Consciousness does not disprove materialism. Here's what it actually does.
There's something it is like to be you. Not just neurons firing — the redness of red, the feel of cold water. David Chalmers named this the "hard problem" in "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (Journal of Consciousness Studies 2:3, 1995): the easy problems are about what the brain does, and the hard problem is why any of that doing is accompanied by experience at all.
Serious materialists have serious replies, and the debate is wide open. What the hard problem does is put a genuine strain on the view that the physical story is the whole story — a strain that has kept some of the best philosophers in the field busy for thirty years without a settled resolution. That's worth something, and it isn't worth everything.
Consciousness on its own doesn't get you to God, and it certainly doesn't get you to the God of the New Testament. It's one line of evidence that converges with others. Anyone who tells you a single argument closes this case is selling you something.
Acts 17:24-25 (NKJV): "God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things."
Full episode: https://youtu.be/BAa1tVmLk7Q
Bible references
Scripture in this video is quoted from the NKJV.
Transcript (show)
One more argument. You the fact that you are aware right now. Philosopher David Chalmer's calls this the hard problem of consciousness. The problem of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or what it is like consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain. We have no such account.
We can measure the brain. We can map the neurons. We cannot explain why there is anything it is like to be you. Philosopher Thomas Nagel, himself an atheist, has argued for decades that no purely physical description will ever get you there. The theist explanation is not complicated.
Consciousness exists because it was made by a consciousness. Mind gives rise to
Transcript from the video's captions on YouTube.
