THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF GOD IS ALREADY HERE, SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT? PART 1

The concept of a higher power, popularly called God, is millennia old. The idea is that there are phenomena in our manifest experience that cannot be explained on the basis of material, worldly causes alone; their explanation requires the causal intervention from God. This divine intervention is called downward causation.

This conjures up the picture of God as a mighty emperor sitting in a throne in heaven and doling out acts of downward causation—creation acts, miracle healing for devotees, judgement for the virtuous and sinners, and so forth. Yet support for this naïve, outdated picture is implicit in pop religions even today, Christianity is no exception.

Scientists take advantage of the naivete of God supporters pooh-poohing the notion above as philosophically untenable dualism. God dishing out downward causation is impossible because how does a nonmaterial God interact with matter? Two entities that have nothing in common cannot interact.

Serious scientists have also gone ahead in their attempt to show that the phenomena of the world can be understood without the God hypothesis. Their phenomenal success in this venture has prompted the following hypothesis: At the base level, there are the elementary particles of matter and their interactions. Elementary particles make up bigger conglomerates called atoms; atoms make still bigger conglomerates called molecules; molecules make cells, and some of these cells (the neurons) make up the conglomerate we call the brain; and the brain makes us and our ideas including that of God. In this model, cause rises upward from the elementary particles; all causes are due to “upward causation.”

The question is, does the upward causation model really explain us, our consciousness? The proponents of the Godless universe also posit that consciousness is an illusory ornamental epiphenomenon (secondary phenomenon) of the complex material box that we call the brain—as the liver secretes bile, so does the brain secrete consciousness. But this position obviously begs the question.

TO BE CONTINUED...