Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

In the end I still think that the hard problem is a meaningful conceptual problem, but agree with Dennett that it is not a meaningful scientific problem.⁴² No one will ever get a grant to study whether you are a zombie or whether the same Captain Kirk walks on the deck of the Enterprise and the surface of Zakdorn. And I agree with several other philosophers that it may be futile to hope for a solution at all, precisely because it is a conceptual problem, or, more accurately, a problem with our concepts. As Thomas Nagel put it in his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” there may be “facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted forever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type.”⁴³ The philosopher Colin McGinn has run with this idea, arguing that there is a mismatch between our cognitive tools for explaining reality (namely chains of causes and effects, analysis into parts and their interactions, and modeling in mathematical equations) and the nature of the hard problem of consciousness, which is unintuitively holistic.⁴⁴ Our best science tells us that consciousness consists of a global workspace representing our current goals, memories, and surroundings, implemented in synchronized neural firing in fronto-parietal circuitry. But the last dollop in the theory—that it subjectively feels like something to be such circuitry—may have to be stipulated as a fact about reality where explanation stops. This should not be entirely surprising. As Ambrose Bierce noted in The Devil’s Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity.

Whatever we make of the hard problem of consciousness, positing an immaterial soul is of no help at all. For one thing, it tries to solve a mystery with an even bigger mystery. For another, it falsely predicts the existence of paranormal phenomena. Most damningly, a divinely granted consciousness does not meet the design specs for a locus of just deserts. Why would God have endowed a mobster with the ability to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, or a sexual predator with carnal pleasure? (If it’s to plant temptations for them to prove their morality by resisting, why should their victims be collateral damage?) Why would a merciful God be dissatisfied with robbing years of life from a cancer patient and add the gratuitous punishment of agonizing pain? Like the phenomena of physics, the phenomena of consciousness look exactly as you would expect if the laws of nature applied without regard to human welfare. If we want to enhance that welfare, we have to figure out how to do it ourselves.

And that brings us to the second problem with theistic morality. It’s not just that there is almost certainly no God to dictate and enforce moral precepts. It’s that even if there were a God, his divine decrees, as conveyed to us through religion, cannot be the source of morality. The explanation goes back to Plato’s Euthyphro, in which Socrates points out that if the gods have good reasons to deem certain acts moral, we can appeal to those reasons directly, skipping the middlemen. If they don’t, we should not take their dictates seriously. After all, thoughtful people can give reasons why they don’t kill, rape, or torture other than fear of eternal hellfire, and they would not suddenly become rapists and contract killers if they had reason to believe that God’s back was turned or if he told them it was OK.

Theistic moralists reply that the God of scripture, unlike the capricious deities of Greek mythology, is by his very nature incapable of issuing immoral commandments. But anyone who is familiar with scripture knows that this is not so. The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. All this was par for the course for Bronze and Iron Age civilizations. Today, of course, enlightened believers cherry-pick the humane injunctions while allegorizing, spin-doctoring, or ignoring the vicious ones, and that’s just the point: they read the Bible through the lens of Enlightenment humanism.