A theist, believing that morality is objective, might say that God both made the world and handed down the moral law. But does this mean that God could have made the world exactly as it is, only with a different moral law? In that case, the moral law would not follow from any non-moral facts of the world. But then, how would that be different from there being no objective moral law, and God capriciously decreeing an arbitrary moral law? Alternatively, if the moral law actually follows from non-moral facts about the world, then we don’t need the God hypothesis to discover the moral law.

Theists who reason from morality to God’s existence seem to suppose that God’s authorship or endorsement of a moral code would settle what is right and wrong. That would be true if we knew that God was all-good by standards independent of God’s say-so. But if we didn’t know this, we might judge God’s preferred moral law to be wrong and conclude that God is not all-good by such standards. Though it’s generally prudent to flatter the mighty, it’s only right to proclaim that even infinite might does not make right.

Morality Is a Natural Feature of Humans

Unlike grizzly bears, humans typically live in communities. Though often surprisingly stupid, humans are (at least in some narrow respects) less stupid than any other known animal. Many of them are capable, for example, of reading and understanding a book like this one, something which is way beyond any non-human animal that we know of.

Unlike many animals, humans are not strictly programmed to do specific things (such as build a nest); more than any other animal they are capable of learning, and what they learn is to a very large extent dependent on the conditions in which they find themselves. For instance, some groups of humans learn to be very aggressive and to kill other humans quite readily, while other groups learn to avoid physical conflict as far as they can. Humans have a fairly lengthy period of early dependency; in the years immediately following birth, they can’t survive without the help of grown-ups. Humans use language to communicate.

Given all these elementary facts about humans, there’s just no getting away from the emergence of some kind of morality. Human groups are characterized by a high degree of compliance with explicit rules, mixed with a varying but usually fairly limited amount of deviance from the rules. Punishments and rewards are features of every human group. Punishments and rewards, either actual or hypothetical, are often announced in words (sometimes, the punishments and rewards are nothing but the utterances of words).

I am certainly not here attempting to offer a ‘theory of the origin of morality’. (For example, I am saying nothing about the extent to which the specific moral rules that arise are due to genetic influences.) I’m merely pointing out that the emergence of some sort of morality is not at all surprising in human populations. Given the elementary conditions of human life, it’s what we would expect.

The Argument from Consciousness

Some people have claimed that the existence of consciousness among humans is evidence for the existence of God. Why would anyone think that?

These things exist: rocks, rainbows, stars, atoms, bolts of lightning, birds’ nests, magnetic fields, oceanic tides. Call these ‘physical’. These things also exist: thoughts, hopes, fears, imaginings, hunches, dreams, daydreams, recollections of past events, awareness of colors and smells, experience of pains and pleasures. Call these things ‘mental’.

The relation between the physical and the mental has always given philosophers a lot of trouble. We know that something mental can cause something physical: my intention to write this book (something in my mind) caused the manufacture of the physical object you now hold in your hands. Something physical can cause something mental: the fact that some people hold this book in their hands will cause them to become atheists. We also know that there’s a very intimate connection between mental events and physical events going on in people’s brains.

One obvious and natural conclusion is that mental events just are physical events. Having a daydream or remembering an appointment simply is a number of events going on in your brain. Quite a lot of philosophers favor this theory, sometimes called ‘mind-brain identity’ and sometimes called ‘materialism’. For several reasons I don’t need to go into here, other philosophers find this difficult to accept. The most popular alternative is dualism: the mental and the physical are two different realms which somehow interact with or accompany each other. However, most people who favor dualism would say that the mental only emerges when certain physical conditions exist.

So all materialists and many dualists would agree with the following two statements:

1. If a certain kind of arrangement of matter comes about, then mental events occur.

2. If mental events occur, then a certain kind of arrangement of matter has come about.

In saying “a certain kind of arrangement of matter”³⁵ we are thinking of a brain, though we don’t need to rule out other possibilities. Most philosophers today would accept both of these statements. Theists have to reject #2 (since God is a disembodied mind), but most theists would probably say that, except for spirit beings such as God and angels, #2 is correct, and probably most theists would accept #1. There is one strand of thinking among theists which says that a physical body is needed for human consciousness to exist—hence the need for a physical resurrection. Swinburne apparently takes the view that God miraculously intervenes to make #1 true in our world, and might conceivably have created another universe, with the same physical laws, in which #1 did not hold. But still, he does accept that #1 holds true in our universe (wherever non-human spirits are not involved).

The one thing that everyone accepts, including Swinburne, is that there is some kind of very close association between mental events and brain events. Yet on Swinburne’s account this is something of a puzzle, since God could just have easily have given a population of evolved animals consciousness without those animals having any particular brain events, or even brains at all. In fact, God could have given all the human faculties, plus telepathy, to a Gannymedean slime mold, as Dick did in Clans of the Alphane Moon. Swinburne’s theory is therefore messy and ad hoc—exactly what he says he doesn’t like about some other theories. Since in fact, in everything we observe, we find states of consciousness only in the presence of highly developed brains, the simplest and most straightforward theories are: 1. that states of consciousness just are states of certain highly developed brains or 2. that states of consciousness, while not themselves identical with any physical arrangement of matter, somehow spring into existence when matter is arranged in a certain way.

If the brain gives rise to consciousness, we are a long way from knowing how it does that. But this doesn’t mean that the theory that the brain produces consciousness is a bad theory. All the findings of brain science tend to show that consciousness is dependent on the existence of a brain that has not been seriously damaged. Nothing we observe suggests that some spirit independent of the brain is employing the brain as an instrument. It’s therefore quite reasonable to say that consciousness is made possible by brain activity, even though we don’t know how this works. It’s possible that future observations might clash with the theory that the brain gives rise to consciousness, and brain science might have to change direction, introducing spirit activity to explain what is observed. But so far people working in brain science have seen no need for this.

The Dependence of Mind on Brain Doesn’t Imply Physiological Determinism

Some people react to the suggestion that consciousness is caused by brain activity with incredulity. How can something as wonderful as a Beethoven string quartet or Einstein’s theory of relativity be produced by mere matter? But we could just as well ask, how can these things be produced by mere spirit? We don’t know very much about matter (except that it’s much more subtle and complex than it looks) and we know nothing about spirit, so why assume that sublime productions of the human mind are more likely to come from spirit than from matter?

The theory that consciousness is a product of the brain can also give rise to serious misunderstandings. Some people conclude that the mental events are illusory, and that physical events are ‘what’s really going on’. Or they conclude that the mental events, while real, are nothing more than effects of non-mental physical processes in the brain. Neither of these conclusions follows, and in my judgment they’re both utterly absurd. Caesar crossed the Rubicon because of certain thoughts going on in his mind. If these thoughts were identical with events in his brain, or if they were not identical with but were made possible by events in his brain, either way, this cannot mean that the events in his brain ‘really’ made him cross the Rubicon while the thoughts had no part to play. The theory that the brain gives rise to thoughts is compatible with the commonsense theory that thoughts help to determine the precise physical state of the brain, and help to determine our bodily behavior.³⁶

An Argument from Reason

Some theists have maintained that if there are no spirits then we can’t trust our own reasoning ability. C.S. Lewis repeated many times his assertion that if our thoughts are due to “chance atoms” then they cannot arrive at truth. Alvin Plantinga has put forward a more elaborate argument to this effect. Plantinga says that if Darwinian evolution and “metaphysical naturalism” (denial of the existence of spirits) are accepted, then we can’t rely on our own intellects. He quotes Darwin, who wondered, in a pessimistic passage in a letter to a friend, whether anyone would trust in “the convictions of a monkey’s mind.”

Plantinga argues that natural selection would favor behavior conducive to survival and reproduction, and this would not confer an advantage to holding true beliefs. Against the obvious point that an animal with true beliefs would be more likely to survive and reproduce than an animal with false beliefs, Plantinga imagines circumstances where false beliefs would do just as well. For example, Plantinga supposes a man running away from a tiger. He might be doing this, says Plantinga, not because he believes the tiger is a danger, but because he believes the tiger is a cuddly pussycat, and he wants to pet it, and also believes that running away is the best way to pet it.³⁷

Much of the criticism of Plantinga has argued that being able to arrive at true beliefs will be favored by natural selection. This is obviously true. Though one can construct rare instances where a conjunction of false beliefs would lead to the same behavior as much more accurate ones, or even cases where a highly inaccurate belief would by chance lead to success while a more accurate belief would lead to disaster, this will not be the case on the average and in the long run.

Plantinga’s statement of his argument insinuates that beyond such instances of knowing the truth, we have to know something more: some general thesis about the reliability of our intellects. Can I do better than random at deciding whether or not it’s true that I’m now being attacked by an elephant? Can I do better than random at deciding whether or not it’s true that I now have a spear penetrating my abdomen? Can I do better than random at deciding whether or not it’s true that I am now hungry? For practical purposes, all we have to do is make a lot of specific judgments of truth or falsity about particular circumstances. The reliability of our intellect is not something additional that we have to establish.

But these are all side issues. Plantinga assumes that naturalism and evolution mean that the mind can only do what it’s been selected for. But this is no part of Darwinism: the human mind can compose fugues or solve sudoku, just as the human body can tap-dance or do handstands, and I suggest that finding out the truth is more like these things: it does not have to have been selected for to be a real human accomplishment.

The whole basis of the argument is faulty: if my mind has been constructed by an omnipotent spirit, why should I place any more reliance on it than if had been formed by millions of years of natural selection? No reason is given, or could be given. The origin of the mind has precisely nothing to do with its reliability—that would be an example of the Genetic Fallacy.

As for the monkey’s judgment, if the monkey were deciding the truth or falsehood of whether that looming shape was another monkey or a leopard, whether that object in the water was a log or a crocodile, whether that branch six feet away could support a monkey’s weight, I would place quite a bit of trust in the convictions of the monkey’s mind.