Consciousness

Naturalistic psychologists explain consciousness as a characteristic of the most highly evolved animals. A Christian worldview sees consciousness as part of our God-likeness and the vehicle of our relationships with God and others. Consciousness is a pre-requisite to free-will, and free-will is a pre-requisite to moral accountability. The principles of free-will and moral accountability are central to the Christian worldview. Without moral accountability, sin and salvation are meaningless. Without consciousness, humans are nothing more than very complex machine-like animals. Theories of consciousness that deny the “specialness” of human consciousness are incompatible with a Christian view of Mankind. 

Human consciousness is inextricably connected to brain activity. For the Christian studying consciousness, that means understanding our God-given self-awareness in the context of the complexities of the nervous system. You must balance the discoveries made in neuroscience with the supernatural component of human consciousness; they are not incompatible. Because our experience of consciousness is inherently subjective, consciousness, whatever it is, is not subject to the usual objective methods of natural science.

Modern evolutionary psychology, as you might guess, describes and explains consciousness solely in terms of brain activity. The consensus among modern psychologists is that all of mental life, including consciousness and emotions and choice and morality, are the products of brain activities. The naturalistic worldview presumes that consciousness must be nothing but the product of brain activity.

Psychologists struggle to define consciousness and to identify the mental structures and processes involved in it. To explain consciousness in terms of evolution, one must acknowledge that it exists, describe its structure and process in the nervous system, and describe how it enhances survival and reproduction.